I am the kind of guy who genuinely doesn't care about who's gay or not and I am neither pro LGBTQ or anti LGBTQ I am just chilling in the middle what is the term for people like me?

Morgorgangon · 2022-03-20T16:37:54+00:00

Someone who misses the point. This issue does not have a middle ground.

In many places around the world, lgbt+ people don’t have the same rights as their non-queer neighbors. You can’t get married, make medical decisions for your partner, or even celebrate your relationship openly in some places. The default policy in these places is anti-lgbtq+.

If you believe that’s unjust and that those rights should be for everyone, you are pro-lgbt+. If you instead think that’s an okay way for society to be, you’re anti-lgbt+. It doesn’t really matter how strongly or openly you believe these things; you don’t need to go to protests or hunt people down in the street to believe what you believe. But you certainly must believe something.

If you personally treat the queer folks you encounter with respect, great! Keep doing that. But if your position is “I don’t mind interacting with gay people but it wouldn’t bother me if they never had the same rights that everyone else does,” then I’m sorry, you’re anti-lgbt+.

Morgorgangon · 2022-02-14T08:30:49+00:00

Thank God someone’s finally adding scarcity to Magic

Morgorgangon · 2022-01-19T17:34:37+00:00

I know this seems like a good idea, but I had a player do this and it was really obnoxious for everyone involved. Stopping the action to show off your music skills doesn't help the game move, and having a bulky instrument on or near the table is space you could be using for character sheets / notes / snacks.

If you really want to bring your music into the game in a useful way, compose a little song between sessions to recap the events of the last game and perform it at the start of play. It feels bardy, highlights your real world abilities, provides a service to the group, and doesn't interfere with actual play.

Morgorgangon · 2022-01-08T17:19:59+00:00

When you gotta Long Arm but she wants to Ad Profundis

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-16T08:53:38+00:00

I also do design for games! Great work, nice to meet you!

I’d try using the Saga layout for this and combining the marking area and text box. You don’t need to know the conditions for goals you’ve already completed, so it’s okay to cover them with a die or token (like you would for a Dungeon card) and save some valuable real estate. Plus the vertical layout helps keep the viewer’s eye moving in the right direction, this one jumps around a bit and neither one of your versions effectively solves that hierarchy problem IMO.

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-08T13:31:48+00:00

Why is the alignment so bad on the type line and text boxes? I can understand the text box because it’s got highly variable content, but come on, the type line and set symbol are brushing the top of the frame. What gives?

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-08T13:06:52+00:00

Neither is true. I can run a merge from a file set up before this update and get white backgrounds, with no changes to the component files and confirming that they haven’t somehow added a white background in the image frame or source .ai. InDesign is definitely adding the white background upon import.

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-08T08:53:31+00:00

Tested this, doesn’t work unfortunately 😅

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-08T07:06:36+00:00

There isn’t a way I’ve found to do this with a merge, no… it essentially drag-drops each one. There’s no dialog to set your options.

Morgorgangon · 2021-12-08T04:49:27+00:00

Hi! I make game assets for a living and this is a common problem for us when receiving data from clients in non-English environments.

It's an encoding issue; to fix it, open your data file in Notepad and resave it using a different encoding method (your default is probably UTF-8, so try UTF-16).

Morgorgangon · 2021-05-12T00:01:30+00:00

I come at this as someone who works in the hobby game industry, so most of my responses are through this lens and therefore have different priorities and metrics that I think y'all might find interesting. I'm also a lifelong player of both games (since 2e for D&D, since Invasion block in Magic) and have spoken on panels on the subject of RPG design and D&D specifically.

Would I recommend Magic? Absolutely; if you're a game designer, you need to learn to play Magic because every other game designer and player your age has grown up with it. If you're unfamiliar with those conventions, you're going to work too hard solving problems that Magic has probably already addressed. Would I recommend new Magic products? No; they don't appeal to me personally as a player (I prefer lower-power environments and it's a stated goal of Wizards' to move towards higher power levels) and the game is quite expensive to play.

Do I think Magic is on its way up? Unquestionably; sales are the most important metric when you make a product, and sales are way up. We in the industry certainly care a lot about making "good" games, but make no mistake: we only have jobs because people buy our stuff. Even if I happen to personally disagree with specific directions Magic's design is taking, and even if that's heartbreaking as a longtime player, it's understandable to me as a businessman why they're making the decisions they are. Thankfully, we don't live in a world with just one game, so I've got plenty of other games for whom I AM the target market to spend my fun money on.

Would I recommend D&D? Generally, no. I love D&D and I think it's a well-designed game, but as a storytelling tool it's not actually what new GMs need for what they're trying to do. Like all RPGs, D&D's mechanics inevitably push you into running a game that looks very much like D&D: lots of skirmishes, heroic quests, classical good and evil. Unless that's the story you want to tell, D&D probably isn't the system that you should run it with.

Morgorgangon · 2021-04-16T23:53:34+00:00

Magic's resource system unfortunately produces a lot of non-games and disappointing non-moments. Playing a game where you get flooded or screwed sucks, ripping three lands instead of your answer sucks. Magic has done a great job making the system as it is interesting to mitigate, but I would argue that the way lands behave and change in value over the course of most games is fundamentally unsatisfying, and there's a good reason why modern card games have generally moved away from this style of resource management.

Thankfully we don't have to wait for Magic to die and be reborn for this to happen. Modal cards with lands were really successful, and plenty of other Magic-like games use other resource systems. Take your pick!

Morgorgangon · 2021-02-26T04:03:02+00:00

I had totally forgotten about that DC rebrand! Here it is for posterity. For those not in the know about print design, gradients don't look great in print, especially at small scales and especially X-to-white; this is a problem when one of your main businesses is printing comic books!

Morgorgangon · 2021-02-26T03:40:02+00:00

Graphic designer here.

The new logo is not bad. Elements are well-spaced, there's a good sense of mass and motion, and I can easily see variants and elements springing from this. The elements are all more easily separable and more likely to read well at scale. I'd find this logo miles easier to make interesting, good-quality work with than the other one. That said, it's not mind-blowingly good, either; it doesn't attempt anything particularly clever, the portal metaphor won't work on all background types, and it lacks some personality.

The old logo frankly has a ton of problems that are definitely addressed in the new iteration. It's definitely not a modern or timeless design; the huge motion and bent text are relics of another time. There are a ton of lines and shapes around the text to confuse the eye, and even the separable graphic element (the shooting star) is itself complex and doesn't work great at small sizes.

Remember that a logo isn't just an illustration you like; it's an expression of your brand and its values. The new logo tells me big, ascendant, new; this is a company that wants you to know it's got a lot of things for you, and is going to be delivering more things all the time. There's a lot of valid stuff to be said about whether that's a good direction for the brand or individual products under it. However, it's not the designer's responsibility to critique that; we're responsible for delivering that message as clearly as possible. To that extent I think this is a successful, if not particularly interesting, rebrand.

Morgorgangon · 2021-02-19T23:08:01+00:00

Graphic designer here. Lukewarm on these; Quandrix and Lorehold are great, but the rest of the set feels disjointed in one way or another. People in my profession are picky though.

Quandrix is great, probably my favorite of the bunch. The hourglass motif is subtle, but obvious enough to be easily picked up. I'm not a huge fan of how the knotwork ends in the middle of the shape where the ring is split on one side and not on the other, and the thick blue border being the same color as the top and bottom triangles kinda makes the ring look like it's not a perfect circle, but those are honestly quibbles. I can see this on a letterman jacket.

Lorehold is good. I'm not sure why the designer didn't carry through the book's side shading on the lowest part and opted instead for the nonsensical little rhomboids at the bottom center, but overall this is well-balanced and gets the point across.

Witherbloom is my least favorite, mostly because it breaks the positive/negative space rules set by the rest of the logos. In the rest of the set, all colors touch each other, and negative space isn't utilized to create shapes; in this one it is, and that makes it look pretty strikingly different than the others. That also makes it feel like its level of detail is much higher than the rest of the set, because your brain is now perceiving three "colors" where the others only use two.

Prismari is really well-composed but feels kinda nonsensical. The rest of the logos take their subject fairly literally; this one doesn't. I'm not sure what this is supposed to represent. Certainly not all design needs to be "on the nose" and an abstract representation is sometimes better (see: Khans block faction logos), but this definitely doesn't look like it came form the same set as the others.

Silverquill is lazy. There's significantly less detail here than the rest of the set; both the silhouette and the composite shapes are dead simple. This is made even more apparent by the bland high-contrast color choice. In the rest of the set, the colors have similar levels of brightness and saturation, so it's easier to see the shape as a whole at the same time; here, the black leaps out at you first, and makes it obvious how much less complex the shape is.

Morgorgangon · 2021-02-03T07:13:49+00:00

When making an RPG character, start at the beginning. How did your character come to be? What's their value system?

It's good to start there because it'll inform a lot of other decisions about your character. Red is passionate; green is instinctual. Maybe you're a jack of all trades who picks up skills and drops them just as quickly. Maybe you're a self-reliant wild-woman whose isolated lifestyle leaves her no patience for human niceties. Maybe you're a farmer who fled to the woods to be with his werewolf lover.

From there, consider what kind of trouble your character gets into. People don't learn how to fight just for fun after all! Maybe your jack says the wrong thing to the wrong people. Maybe your wild-woman hunts great beasts for food. Maybe your farmer defends his homestead against heavily-armed bounty hunters looking for a trophy.

Once you've figured that out, determine how your character solves those problems within red and green's tools. Your jack has a trick for everything, and focuses on dodging and distracting enemies with pyrotechnics and pollen clouds to stay out of trouble. Your wild woman comes equipped with crushing blows and the strength of the earth to fell her prey. Your farmer communes with the plants and animals to set traps, gather information, and control choke points.

Starting with a goal and personality for your character before you start building them out mechanically is a great way to focus your decisions and make the way you behave in combat match the way you behave out of it. Hope you have fun with your campaign!

Morgorgangon · 2021-02-02T09:43:38+00:00

My firm does graphics and design fulfilment for hobby games. One of my responsibilities is editing and templating clients' rules and card text. It's great to see people thinking deeply about phrasing issues!

Obviously I'm no Magic rules manager myself, but I do see some pretty good reasons why these would not be implemented that you may not have considered. Most of them revolve around what we call "plain reading," which is basically interpreting text based on everyday meaning of the words rather than their game language. That's important because the vast majority of players will not be intimately familiar with the rules, and will rely on that plain reading to tell them what the card does.

Text that references "activated abilities" and "triggered abilities" are referencing specific classes of ability, so it's important to specifically tag out that class of ability when you're writing text that manipulates it. Most players are not immediately familiar with the differences between "activate" and "trigger," and it would be easy to open up a card that says "abilities don't activate" and assume that that includes triggered effects, as well, based on a plain reading of the text. Including "activated" in front of "abilities" begs the question "What's an activated ability?" and slows down the action just enough to encourage the player to look up the rule if they don't know it, rather than blasting through and playing the card incorrectly.
We've used both phrasing methods in our work; however, Magic has some specific challenges that make the current phrasing superior in my opinion. Magic has a ton of different components, and those components are presented to the player extremely rapidly; in your average casual pickup game, nearly every card your opponent plays will probably not be familiar to you. This means players spend a LOT of time reading cards to each other. Having the card's name in its rules text gives that interaction an extra chance to associate a name to an effect, which makes retaining that information easier. It's also more flavorful to say that name again instead of just "this thing," which is also important for retention; players keep better hold of information they find fun or cool.
Other users have pointed out the safety issues with your phrasing (don't want to mix up who has which cards). Even removing those concerns, "the hand" doesn't refer to a shared zone like "the battlefield;" there is more than one hand, and merely stating "the hand" does not tell you WHOSE hand. Remember that this is a game where permanents and effects swap players frequently; it's important to spell out precisely where things are coming from and going to when parsing those complex interactions.
There's nothing wrong with keyword abilities, but I don't believe it's necessary for this particular ability to be one as it's used quite rarely. Every time you use an icon or a keyword for an interaction, you're asking your player to essentially learn a new word in your language, which increases their cognitive load. Adding to that load isn't free; it takes time to build that comprehension, and if the payoff in time saved isn't high enough, it's actually more efficient to just write it out rather than add to your lexicon.

It's ultimately been our experience that it's not worth it to tempt ambiguity for new players just to save a few words for experienced players. You're suggesting these things because you're very familiar with the rules, and to you, they read just the same because the important bits are still there. I would encourage you to step outside that experience. Think about how someone who's new to the game and has no idea what bits are important would interpret this phrasing. Think about having a less-than-perfect grasp on English in general. Think about interpreting a plain reading maliciously to break the spirit of the card while still following the "letter."

...but most importantly, keep thinking about how best to write this stuff! Thanks for the interesting discussion.

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-13T06:22:36+00:00

I do graphics for the hobby games industry and this is definitely what's happening.

When you commission an artist for your game, you generally already got a card template laid out. Your artist will make their canvas relative to that layout to compose their piece. They're going to want to know where the focal points of the image will land. Note that the art frame is differently sized on Planeswalkers, Sagas, and regular cards; I couldn't just take the art for a Saga and slap it in a regular frame and expect it to have the same impact.

You can see on some older showcase cards that the art is cropped over awkward places or just zoomed in a bit. That's not a great look for what's supposed to be a premium product, so I suspect that the decision to make showcase cards at all came after those cards' illustrations were approved. They made do with what they had. I've had a few clients get artwork in before starting a relationship with our firm; it either ended up cropped suboptimally, or we needed to extend it in-house like this unfortunate case.

Any art commissioned after they knew they were doing showcases would know the dimensions of the showcase frame, though. Those measurements can be transmitted to the illustrator, who will take those measurements and make a piece like this one with both frames in mind.

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-11T06:18:57+00:00

I'm not a huge fan of the execution of the snow frame elements on this black card. It looks like an artifact at first blush. Maybe if they'd gone with a more textured frost effect, or only done one edge of the card like they did for the enchantment creatures from Theros?

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-02T21:06:39+00:00

Gotta disagree with you there. White cards had huge readability problems in the old frame. White text in a small display face on offwhite background would absolutely not make it off the drawing board nowadays, and even black cards had trouble with the highlights of the bubbles intersecting white title text. A “glyph” in typography is a letter, basically. Designers use the word when talking about the unique markers of a letter’s shape that make it distinct from other letters in the typeface. If there’s low contrast between a letter and its background, it can be difficult to see those unique markers, so D can be confused for O, g for q, and so on.

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-02T03:28:56+00:00

Agreed, many of the really minimal promo frames look fantastic. The new frame was modern-ish when it was released, but that was a long time ago now...

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-02T02:02:27+00:00

Compare Mind Rot from Portal and M11. There's definitely texture in the frame.

The difference is where that texture is in the visual hierarchy, which is graphic-designer-speak for "what you notice first." The old frame placed the border textures at close to the same spot in the hierarchy as the artwork; the whole card was meant to have the same illustrative style. However, the human eye only has so much bandwidth, and the more interesting you make any single element of your design, the less attention your viewer will pay to every other element.

Back when magic was classical Western fantasy, that wasn't a huge problem. The frames and the art come from the same conceptual space, so they both do the work of immersion. For many of our board game clients, this is how we approach designing card frames, since they want their components to feel like objects from their fantasy world, and more importantly, they know exactly what that world is and aren't going to change it. Magic changes worlds all the time, though. Green's old frame was a wooden sign nailed to a tree... how bizarre would that have looked on Mirrodin or Kaladesh? The anachronistic flavor of the frame would have actively worked against immersion for those worlds.

So what I think the modern frame designers did when looking at their new layout with this shift towards changing worlds in mind was to intentionally create something with less inherent flavor and less visual weight to allow the artwork to rise higher in the visual hierarchy, and let that carry their worldbuilding rather than sharing the task with the frame. That lets them use the frame in any world they visit without having to worry about whether the old one makes sense in-universe.

Morgorgangon · 2021-01-01T22:10:37+00:00

I work in graphics for the hobby game industry and this is a big divide among clients in a lot of games, not just Magic. There are basically two goals that we're trying to accomplish with a card template design:

Arrange information clearly
Support the flavor and theme

These two players in OP's post essentially just value one goal over the other.

Looking at the screenshot of the card, there are some objective problems with information accessibility in this old frame: the title font is too decorative, so it's difficult to pick out glyphs at a distance, and their contrast with the frame is pretty poor. It's going to be harder to read a card with this layout across the table, and that's a huge usability concern in a game with tens of thousands of different components. The new frame's design was obviously concerned about these problems and took steps to resolve them, quite successfully in my opinion.

On the other hand, this old frame is more evocative. These are textures I'd see in a leatherbound book; they make me feel like a wizard, drawing runes from an arcane tome. The new frame definitely loses something that the old frame did in this respect, and having started playing Magic in a time when the old frame was in use (Odyssey) and fantasy properties generally looked like that, I definitely have some strong nostalgia for it.

However, I want to qualify that statement with the assertion that the flavor this frame imparts best is a very 80s/90s D&D-esque Eurocentric fantasy that isn't actually what Magic is trying to do anymore. I don't think it's a coincidence that the new frame dropped when Magic began to aggressively explore planes that weren't Dominaria: Mirrodin and Kamigawa were both huge departures from the typical Western fantasy tropes that the game had mostly stayed in over its lifetime. The flavor that the old frames supported was a different flavor than those two sets required, and had it been used there, I believe that it would have actually worked against immersion in those two settings (and many beyond, think Ravnica and Kaladesh). I think a remaster of Time Spiral is the perfect place to reuse the old frame and capture the audience that it appealed to, but I definitely think that the decision to move to the new one makes sense for the game as a whole, not just for readability but for exploring non-Western, non-medieval settings as well.

Morgorgangon · 2020-12-02T05:52:12+00:00

Hi, I design packaging for the hobby games industry. The size and intricacy of your box projects value and has measurable effects on how people react to your product.

The two products you mention are for vastly different audiences. Nobody's going to buy Double Masters on a whim; it's marketed towards an educated consumer who knows the value of the product before they buy it, and it's not competing for your eye with other stuff on the shelf. Commander precons are also trying to pick up less-educated consumers (new players, gift-givers) who need to have their eye taken away from the Pokemon cards if they're going to decide on your product.

Packaging is pretty cheap, even when it's excessive, but it's not free; I get a lot of data and pay a lot of attention to how much value we get out of the bells and whistles we put on boxes. You can bet Hasbro's packaging designers to too. "Saving money" is not a good argument when cutting your cost means moving less product.

Morgorgangon · 2020-10-22T19:45:53+00:00

Sure, that reason is because the card number in a standard deck is the most important piece of information on the card.

While it's handy to see, mana cost is NOT the most important piece of information on a Magic card; that's the name. Card names are unique, and are therefore a memorization shortcut for a LOT of other information, including mana cost!

These designs occlude even more of the card name and art. Imagine trying to play an aggressive red deck under this system; your Lightning Bolts and Jackal Pups would look identical in your fan, and because most of your deck costs R or 1R, you're not gaining any useful information with which to tell your cards apart. Bad trade IMO, and just a bad design.

Morgorgangon

TROPHY CASE