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.

Don't Watch Jugglers

For at least a month I'd hit a bit of designer's block with Spacefleet. Nothing seemed to work the way I wanted it to and, though I wanted to playtest, I couldn't even get the base mechanics to work to even allow a simple proof of concept game.

Over the past couple days though I've made enormous leaps forward. The current incarnation has enough of a foundation to allow for successful playtesting. Interestingly, it's almost completely unrecognizable from my first (what I thought at the time was a) brilliant vision.