SotM cards reimagined

I did something a while back and kept forgetting to post about it, but I've remembered so that's what I'm doing now.  I sat down to see, if I were going to design the next generation of SotM card, how would I do it.  I tried to start as fresh as possible, keeping only the essentials of what I thought the card needs to tell the player, and being flexible about everything else.  I'm fully aware that many of you think that the current cards are the pinnacle of card design and cannot be improved upon, and also that icons and keywords are like kryptonite to you, so I expect many (most) of you to hate the mockups I've made.  But I figured I'd share anyway in case there was an interesting discussion to be had.

To be clear - I have no illusions that any of these ideas will be adopted by future official card redesigns.  GtG has already made it extremely clear that they love overly wordy cards and hate icons and keywords.  These are my own musings alone and represent nothing else.

For my part, I think the changes will feel strange to anyone who's learned the game in its current form but would feel just as normal as anything else to a new player (my attack formulas are no stranger than Tactics attack grids are), and after just a game or two, these changes would feel normal to a current player as well.

You can check them out here.

I think these are awesome Spiff. The visual layout is very eye catching. Strong work.

If you were to improve upon them further, the only thing that really stands out as unintuitive, for me, would be how it conveys dealing damage and damage type. Take Bunkers External Combustion. Just from looking at it, if I were a new player, It would be tough to tell that the Bunker --> Himself: 2F represented dealing yourself 2 fire damage. 

I think you did this as more of a function of space constraints than anything, but maybe theres a way to make that clearer?

Either way, thanks for sharing more of your stuff!

I'm not a huge fan of full art cards because of how much gets covered up by text, but these are cool to see, at least. Nice work.

I do like the format of these. I have no problem with the existing cards, but a lot of people have a problem with how wordy they are. This seems like it would get around that problem.

I wouldn't presume to tell you how to go about designing one of your projects, but I do have a question about the text boxes containing the card text. You made a point of specifying the justification of the text boxes based on what the card does. But a lot of cards have enough text that it will just go across the whole card, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having it justified one way or the other. Maybe you would want to set a limit on how far across the card the text box can go? That way you could always tell by looking at the justification. I know this is minor and nitpicky, but I guess I'm asking "why make that distinction at all if it is not always distinct?" Some powers will be right justified, but a lot will essentially be center justified since the text goes across the whole card.

Anyways, like I said, I do really like the design. Take my thoughts for what they are worth, which admittedly is not a whole helluva lot. Thanks for all the work you do and make available to the public for these great games!

I would expect that the attack formulas would be explained in the rulebook, so it should be clear in most cases what's going on, but I agree that there may be cases where special care needs to be taken to make it clear.

Effects with lots of text will cause those text boxes to be longer vertically but the width of the text boxes is fixed, so no matter how much text is in a box, it should still be possible to justify them left or right.  The only boxes which stretch across the whole cards are the ones where I'm doing that on purpose, not because of how much text is in the box.

Having said that however, I'm not actually sure that the justification of the boxes is a keeper of an idea.  Does sliding the boxes 1/8th of an inch left or right actually give the user that much useful information?  I'm not sure.  I don't think that Recharge Mode (everything left-justified) is any less readable than Auxiliary Power Source (a mix of justifications), and it may actually be worse, so perhaps that's an optimization which doesn't really add any value.

Ok, I see what you are going for now. I would tend to agree that the whole justification of the text boxes really isn't necessary. The symbols for each type of trigger are pretty self explanatory. I would think that people would refer to that symbol more quickly than to what side of the card the text box is on. And having all types of justifications makes it look busier than it needs to be tbh. In my opinion, the example with everything left justified is a cleaner presentation which looks nicer.

Agreed that different justifications looks weird. You’d presumably have icons for all of attack±1, defense±1. Is there some way to make the attack text look more like an attack, with some sort of fist or sword?

At first, I tried to make the attack formulas look very graphical, like the attack grids in Tactics, but there were a lot of problems with that (the graphics took up extra space, they didn't wrap easily line-to-line like text does, etc.)  So then I looked for ASCII characters I could insert in the text to do exactly what dpt is asking about - making the attack formula stand out more prominently and look more attack-ey.  I also experimented with colors to call them out.

In the end, I didn't find anything that helped more than it hurt.  Most of the solutions I tried (red starburst characters before each attack formula for example, or bracketing the formulas in colored { or [ or |) ended up making it look more busy.  I think you're right that there's surely a better way to represent the attacks while still keeping things simple, but I haven't found that way yet.

Creating a custom fist or sword icon as a font so that it can be inserted inline with the text is a good idea.

I love full bleeds and would love a full bleed card set of SoTM some day in the far future.

The main problem I have with your forumal of attacks is that if you forget, you'll have to reference the rule book. I'm not a fan of referencing rulebooks past the first play through except for unique situations. Having to reference it multiple times during games would be a bit offputting.

But thats a pet peeve, because I have a bad memory. These are otherwise awesome!

I like the overall design.  Then again, hindsite is 20/20 :-).

One of the more fustrating aspects of SotM is the start and end of turn text embedded with the other text.  I like that you call it out separately and with icons.  I would assume that end of turn actions on the same card would appear after a start of turn box.

I would rather see icons for damage type in place of letters.  I agree it might be hard to design an easily readable icon, but I would constantly confuse Projectile (P) with Psycic (PS).  Once the icons were standardized though it would just be a matter of matching across cards.

For damage dealt, have you thought about larger icons (like the shield) along the side of the card with plus or minus values with color inidcating if it's directed towards the card owner or away?  They could be paired with a damage type icon.

Ben

Yep, that was my thought too, to have something like the shield (probably a little red explosion) to indicate damage modifiers, how much, and to/by whom.

Ah... Here I thought you were doing something where the cards had new art.

Personally, I prefer text to symbols; easier to learn, easier to teach, and requires less memorization.

I like the explosion concept.  It indicates damaging force.  Maybe a combination of shield and explosion.  Something like this.

Ben