Playtest concluded, thoughts on design and card text

Designers' Diary new entry:

www.vekn.net/index.php/designers-diary/219-playtest-concluded-thoughts-on-design-and-card-text

Over the course of this project, I've noticed a handful of ways in which card text length can get to be too much. At the start of a card's design, you can have a whizzbang awesome idea that overreaches.

Sometimes it's a card that you think should be stronger than normal, established costs (blood costs, capacity/title/discipline restrictions), so you add on restrictions to bring the card in line.

Alternately, you don't want it to have one effect that is outside the normal accepted bounds, so you try to give it multiple normal effects and then the card is doing too much. Sometimes you want to represent the canon faithfully, and get caught up adding in more of the source material than is necessary.

Cards can also be overdesigned, where you add in restrictions to cover unforseen problems, or try too hard to fit the card into a niche. While true generally, but in that last case in particular, there are times when you find yourself talking about a card too much or trying too hard to make it work. You can take a break from it and come back to it a day, a week, a month later when you get a burst of inspiration, but often it's the case that if you're talking for too long about a card, it probably wasn't going to work in the first place and it's best to walk away from it.

I think all of us in the Design Team have fallen into those traps at one point or another, and it's good to be reminded that sometimes less is more. The playtesters have been doing a great job of reminding us. Wink

Mark Rosewater of Wizards of the Coast has a rather famous article on the subject from several years ago, and they're good words to design by:

www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr68

In other news, Round Four of playtesting ends today, and we'll have the final playtest report from our Playtest Coordinator, Hugh Angseesing, soon afterwards. We'll spend some time making final tuning, tweaks, and decisions, as well as giving it a thorough proofread and text templating check. This will be happening as the remaining artwork is completed and submitted. Once that's done, we'll get started with the sneak previews!

- Ben Peal and the V:EKN Design Team