Where to Look: Card Layout Quandries

The layout of a card is incredibly important to players new and old. How much thought goes into these initial decisions? How much is random choice and how much is optimization?

Above we have a typical magic card. The first thing a player notices is the picture, covering up the top half of the card. Then, a new player will usually look to the card name, where an experienced one might look first to the mana cost in the top right or its stats in the bottom right. Those stats are then compared to certain base stats we've become accustomed to and you get a gut feeling for the strength of the card on a whole. Meanwhile, the newer player is reading the name and then skipping the mana cost to look at the text.

New players take the card as a whole, where experienced ones understand that you don't need to look at the flavor text, set symbol, or artist name, and only rarely the card type. That information is there when they need it, but it's not immediately relevant.



The name, cost, and stats of a creature are the most important bits and so get the prime real estate on the card. That is, the corners. You don't need to search for them.

The text is usually all one size, which can be a bit of a disadvantage if you want to emphasize one bit over another, but usually that's fine. Sometimes costs can be found in the text line which also seems weird at first, but since there's so little on any one card to take in (max of 5 places to look for the experienced player) that's usually not a problem as long as it's just the occasional card.

But why these locations? To answer that, let's look a more typical card.

Here we only have two bits of information: number and suit. It can be found in the center of the card in some stylized manner, but for the experienced player you only need to ever look one place: top left corner. And why is that? Because, as you can see, when a right-handed player fans his cards in his hand he will always see the relevant information for each card he holds. Anything in the top left, bottom right, and to some extent the bottom left will be covered up.

How does this fare in Magic?

Surprisingly the Google image search for Magic cards held in a hand are pretty poor, but I finally stumbled upon this typical image.

As you can see, the card name for most cards is visible. In addition you get a small slice of the upper left corner which happens to contain the picture and the first bit of the type. You can never see the cost or P/T when held like this.

At first this seemed weird to me. Wouldn't the player rather read the text in his hand than the picture? Thus, wouldn't the picture be better served at the bottom? However, after some thought I realized that the picture ties the whole thing together. It's the first part you see and its also the most recognizable bit. Anyone who plays a control deck will immediately recognize the sight of Cryptic Command or Oblivion Ring, if not by exactly the picture then by the rough color scheme caught at a glance. You only read the text while the card is being used or while the deck is being built, not usually mid-game when deciding what to do because by then you mostly have it memorized (as much as it matters).

So we have determined that pictures need to go near the top, preferably on the left. The name should also hold this choice real estate. Now we are left with the cost and the stats.

Stats are only found on creatures and only matter when in play. Thus, they can stay where they are. The particular station doesn't matter, but it needs to be near the bottom since other more important things can be found on the top.

But the cost. Costs are important while the card is in your hand. In fact, they're almost always only important there. Costs need to muscle their way into this upper-left quadrant somewhere.

Text and other relevant information can go wherever it pleases as long as it remains consistent on a card to card basis. Netrunner fails at this. Each card has a watermark which indicates what would translate in magic to be its color alignment. It can always be found in the bottom left corner of the card. However, Ice cards for corporations are printed horizontally. Their watermark is also in the lower left corner. This means when thumbing through a deck you have to awkwardly check two corners at once (since lower left turned sideways is the lower right)

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as I've reached a point in Spacefleet where I know the information that needs to go on each card. I want to not mimic Magic as much as possible, but I also don't want to miss out on any layout options that are actually more natural just because I wanted to be different. Overall my cards tend to have a few more stats, but are otherwise remarkably similar.

I've also been considering running the pictures as comic-strip styles, both thematically and with the use of speech bubbles over flavor text awkwardly shoehorned into the same area as rules text. More effort, but I think it would help to distinguish them at a glance a lot and would allow them to be more visually appealing to incoming players.