There is a change afoot. At first it's subtle and looks all upside
So very quickly; let me be clear - this is NOT a horrible situation where we all must weep because our beloved game has crossed the Rubicon and nothing will ever be pretty again.
This is however, quite clearly the solution that the most people in a committee who all had different concerns agreed upon, and the art department did its best to meet the specifications and constraints.
Just because everyone did a nice job and the end result is livable doesn't preclude critique and Vorthosian concerns. And because I didn't stop being me over the last year I have some readability and instructional concerns.
Lets look at the stated reasons why the changes are there - Here's the original article by Aaron Forsythe
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/281
There are five changes - A proprietary font, a holofoil stamp for rares and mythics, collector info at the bottom with the additional data for for rarity, set and language, decreased border size, and in some cases they will be adding designer credit.
Two of those are specifically anti-counterfeit measures.
A proprietary font after 20 years for a basically readable typeface means that somewhere there was a requirement to have control over being able to tell whether title text was generated in house or someone used a "close enough" font. There's not really an ego-boo reason for a proprietary font and the time/cost of developing one at this stage, for this business without a need. This is all conjecture on my part ; When I looked closely at the new font though I noticed it was more angular and had reduced serifs, so it's possible that it might have been developed for typographic consistency with the new computer-readable card data on the black background.
The other one is the holofoil stamp. The fact that it's only on the rares and mythics is the thing that leads me to the conclusion that counterfeiting to take advantage of the speculation market in standard season is a large enough problem that it required action at the production level.
On Twitter there were already some comments about the eternal format relevance:
The best thing about the new holofoil is that it will authenticate the most expensive and highly counterfeited #mtg cards, like Beta Power.
However, I submit that eternal format players have known and been dealing with counterfeiting issues from the point that the reserved list started spiking prices. Also, anyone who has a significant number of eternal staples for sale off the reserved list that isn't already known in the community for buying them up will be looked at with suspicion.
Additionally - the eternal proxy community is extremely vigilant about making sure "not for sale" is printed on the proxies and crediting the artists and denying WotC affiliation. Most of the alerts I've become aware of in counterfeiting sales on ebay have come through the proxy community.
Here's the thing, I think that the prices on popular standard cards are incredibly fashion driven, if it got played in a tournament deck that did well, or if a "celebrity" touts it publically in Standard the price shoots up.
I remember three weeks where Craterhoof Behomoth was a $16.00 card. Lets say it costs a good counterfeiter about a dollar in materials to create a good fake. Lets go further and say a smart organized counterfeiter would, at spoilers start working on computer printing files for all the uncommons/rares/mythics in a set. That's maybe a weekend to a week of startup time and you're set for capitalizing on the fashion of popular standard cards for the next two years. Fire up your 1$ per Craterhoof fakes - sell 300 of them in various international eBays - profit.
Not a lot of profit, but one thing people forget is that if you aren't US based $4,500 in profit is a LOT of money and even if you're here it pays for an entire semester of community college.
Now - understand - I'm not saying that is happening, but its an example of how incredibly easy and with incredibly low start up risk it is to do this as an individual ( and I guess I've pretty much prevented myself from ever selling non-holographic marked cards on eBay!) But there are many things that people who play the game are unaware of as economic realities involving the game elsewhere. Some of the kind of economies around the game are similar to the impact of shutting down MTGO for players who were able to make money in areas like Brazil by selling tickets
(If I have that right - I know way more about printing than I do about MtGO).
This means there might be a real incentive to be organized about counterfeit. * Usually when a company is having this sort of problem and are aware of it they fight it at the individual "pressing charges" level but they don't really advertise it if it's having impact. Suffice it to say that I think on demand counterfeiting would make more profit and risk less discovery in the Standard environment - Mint condition graded Power Nine are rare - the profit margin is to low and the discovery for producing any number of them is too high for them to be the primary target.
I support these changes to protect the game from counterfeiting since the speculation market has become akin to day-trading and Financial/Value magic is touted by the leading websites in the community.
* NOTE - this morning while I was working on this post Polish Tamales warned us all about this: http://polishtamales.tumblr.com/post/72642482887 - please specifically note the font as the tell.
The scannabilty and computer readability of the font may also create a quick check for counterfeiting. for Local Game Stores, sort of like the pen they use to check money. The fact that it has to be squinched up at the bottom of the black bottom will not give counterfeiters a lot of room for error. But there may be additional reasons besides counterfeiting for computer readable verification of collector information.
Computer Interactivity Wishlist
Wouldn't it be cool if you could scan your rares and mythics into Magic the Gathering Online? One of the biggest reasons people like me who play the paper game avoid the online game is the fact that I'm not really interested in paying for the same cards twice. I might pay for access ( and commons and uncommons) if I didn't also have to buy enough cards for whole decks that I can't play with outside the computer.
Collection management - there are already apps that let you scan you cards and it uses recognition software to let you add it to your collection management tool - this would speed things along - you might be able to just use your phone.
Computerize Deck Registration and Deck checks at large events.
A girl can dream.
OK - enough about the Why, lets talk design:
Wizards helped us out here by showing us a pre-existing common in the new frame that exists in the recent modern frame with the same art and everything:
When you look at them next to each other its easy see why there isn't a lot of outrage about the change. Other than gaining a pica or two of window space the top of the card is functionally the same.
The increase in the usable card real estate didn't improve the textbox typography - where the flavor text is better in the M13 version and it reduces the prominence of the artist in the credits on the collector section. I don't feel that is a net positive.
On Twitter I said this:
@MTGDiversity @JackieL33 @mtgaaron It looks exactly like the best decision made by a committee within constraints.
— Adrienne Reynolds (@DreamtimeDrinne) January 6, 2014
and it was interpreted as a slam against the design team - but I'm a grown woman who works on those kind of teams and I meant it. I don't for a minute think it's the best design, but I'm willing to bet at least two other designs were submitted to a committee that included a rep from game design, a rep from Organized Play, a corporate/operations rep, whoever is in charge of print production, whoever their current rules/savant historian is and people who are working with the anti-counterfeiting and people working on the future computer compatibility expansion plans that went into having the change made in the first place. That won't even count actual playtesters or focus groups who had the new cards mixed in with the old cards who gave in their two cents.
That's only if they were following standard corporate best practices for such a significant change to the core product and were careful about following a lot of their own design practices that they've made public.
So what do you notice about that list of committee sign offs or inputs?
Did you guess?
There are funtionally no artists/graphic designers on the sign off committe.
The artists won't be the ones with the sign off, they're the ones presenting the options based on the specifications developed by all those stakeholders. They are a part of the committee but if they are producing the product, they aren't the ones who are really "on" the committee. They can propose, guide and react but they aren't going to have any kind of veto authority.
I'm sure there is a super stakeholder that is bigger in authority than the committee - or a smaller team of super stakeholders that get final sign off and probably also have the power to say - "decide by x time or we will" because there are printing to market constraints - they have to get out as soon as possible. Marketing has to deal with prepping it's very vocal user base for the change. OP has to be prepared for the massive amount of questions they are going to field when card frames literally became the delineator for a format and they are changing card frames within two years of the format happening, just when the format is becoming popular.
You can see those concerns being addressed by the prominent pez-box tablet that holds power and toughness, you can see Melvin types wanting to keep the upper card as close to the old (modern) frame as possible. The end result is a little like a 3-d alter - where you cut out the old frame and set it on top of a different border - it's not bad, but it is darker. and you can tell that it was a compromise not because it's bad, but because it is inelegant. To keep the familiar, you compromised the visual balance of the card.
Additionally, even though the amount of black is reduced by narrowing the side borders the heavy black on the bottom makes the whole card seem darker - and given how little light is in in current art direction that's going to add to the grimdark depressing nature of a lot of the current look/feel. I hope new art direction takes that into account.
I''m also worried that by reducing the color that is a card's color identity in the border there will be an impulse to counteract that by being more monochromatic in the art for the cards themselves which is already a big problem creating a sameness in red and green card art.
Aaron Forsythe confronted the limitations of the heavy black bottom himself in the introduction of the new frame
"Making the bottom of each card black to accommodate this information was not an easy decision, and may be the most disconcerting part of this frame update, but it was done with the best of intentions. "
Because he is not an artist ( to my knowledge for all I know he's got a secret stash of masterwork oil paintings he works on between sets) he's identifying something that he knows is a bit "off" but not "bad" and it's the lack of symmetry of the curve.
When I started working on this post I thought that what I really would have preferred was a pattern change fade to a solid black, but studying the card frames I realized that what I really wanted was a more consistent design symmetry that would allow for the greatest flexibility in card art, because with this new frame being asymmetric some art might not work well as a "whole card". Once again it won't look bad, because this isn't a bad design, it's just not necessarily the best solution, it's the best agreed upon one.
If I dealt with the typography on the bottom for visual balance I'd probably waste another day - there are lots of options and I'm also sure that the designers and art director tried a bunch - but for now I'll just share a version of something I'm sure was looked at - which is having the curve be consistent on the top and the bottom.
If I were doing this for real instead of a quick point, I would probably increase the Card Title Box. By having the curve at the top and the bottom and actually reducing the red in the border, it makes the red for the border pop and in my personal opinion makes the color identity more clearly red. The symmetry will also make the hologram when it comes in feel less like another "bottom heavy"add on and balances the newly decreased font on the credits line.
Now while I like this better - if I were a betting person, I'll bet some version of this, and one with a fade down the side to black were three simultaneous submissions for the committee to choose from. And I'd bet that the reason the bottom-only curve was developed was at committee request, because they wanted to keep the tops the same and they were worried about acceptance by the community. Because we're not quiet when they do something too far from head-canon. I would even go so far as to say someone made the argument that changing the top would be too hard to explain when looking at the Modern Format.
And I'm willing to bet that people who work on the design team had something that was a real change - that I can't imagine, that they liked waay better and it got shot down. None of the sign-offs was thinking about long term impact on the art direction or the basics of design. They would just keep adding constraints and making changes and the design team would be trying to keep the changes in specification scope.
That's really hard. They did a good job, they know it's less than elegant. and we'll never see the alternate designs submitted.
I respect the work - I'll miss symmetry though and hope I'm wrong about the unconscious push that will affect readability and originality.
I'm impressed with your analysis. Are you planning a series on the Born of Gods art? I'm disappointed with a lot of it, and I'm curious what your thoughts are.
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