Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #916: Card Frames

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about using different card frames as a design tool and get into the history of card frames that changed for mechanical reasons.

I'm pulling on my driveway. Actually pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so let me explain what's going on, why I'm actually driving to work. So, we finally have shifted from an at-home to a hybrid. So, we're going to be at home, I think, on Mondays and Fridays, always, for now, and be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for now, and then Wednesdays varies from week to week. So we're kind of in the office two and a half days a week.

But what that means for all you is I'm actually driving to work at least two times a week. So my current plan is I will do some actual drive-to-works while I'm driving to work. But because I'm not driving enough, and I know the interviews have been kind of popular, I think what I want to try to do is do my non-interviews as my drive to works and my interviews as my drive from works from home. It's my current plan. But anyway, we shall see. But for now, for now, at least a couple days a week, I am in fact driving to work. So I will talk. I will do drive to work, we'll drive

to work as it was meant to be. Okay, so today I want to talk about card frames. So I want to talk a little bit about when and how and why we do card frames and then just talk about some stories of ones we've done, why we did them so basically, when the game began back in Alpha, Jesper Mirfors who was the first art director, and Chris Rush, who was in charge of graphic design initially, decided that they figured out what a Magic card would look like. And for quite a while, I mean, there were little tiny tweaks here and there, but pretty

much that's what a Magic card looked like. Now, obviously, there have been a couple sort of changes to the base frame. In 8th edition, we made a change. In in m15 we made a second change so there have been small changes to sort of the general look of the general frame that's not really what I'm talking about today what I'm talking about today is when we choose to make a frame that doesn't look like a normal magic frame because there are game design reasons for it. That there's a reason we need to make a different frame. Now, I don't know if I'll have time to talk. I mean, there is a lot of external frames, bonus frames, masterpieces. There's a lot of frames for fun.

Not really my topic today. My topic today is when we choose to make frames that are different for functionality reasons. we choose to make frames that are different for functionality reasons. Okay, so what I believe is the very first sort of major frame change happened back in Invasion. So the quick version of the story was Unglued came out. In fact, I guess if you really want to say, the very first frame change was in Unglued. We had a card called BFM

for Big Furry Monster, and it was a card so big that it didn't fit on one card, and so it had to have two cards. So I guess when you get right down to it, unglued, the wacky set was the first one that said, okay, I have a cool thing to do mechanically, and I'm going to change the way the magic cards look to accomplish this. So anyway, what happens is I make that unglued one, very popular. So in unglued two, a set that never ended up coming out, I decided to make the reverse of it.

And so instead of having one card so big that two cards, it takes two cards to make it, what if cards were small so two cards could fit on one card was the idea. That was my sort of the, visually the opposite. So that set got put on hay, this never got made, but I really thought the cards, the little split cards, were really cool. And so what happened was when I was working on Invasion with Bill Rose and Mike Elliott, Bill was the lead of the set, the lead designer, I went to Bill and I said, hey Bill, we're making a multicolor set. I had this

really cool mechanic that I think would complement it, because my suggestion was the split cards are two ally colors, so it's a red card and a green card. Bill really thought of the cool idea and put it in the file. And for those that know, nobody else, I think Richard liked them, but pretty much no one other than Bill and I and Richard thought they were a good idea. And there was a giant fight to make them. One of the big strikes against it for people was, from the very beginning, I had pitched it as, it's two tiny cards on a card. That is how I envisioned it for Unglue 2.

And the reason I wanted to do that, once again, this is sort of today's topic, is I didn't want to do it just to do it. It wasn't for novelty's sake. It's like, if I show you a card with two little cards on it and i say what do you think this does i think that the answer is oh i guess i can cast one of them um and so the reason we did split cards the way we did was we thought it was visually a very compelling way to convey something now could we have done a normal looking magic card that said, you know, here's one of two costs, and if you do this cost, it's that? Like, could we have done it?

Maybe. Maybe. I mean, there's ways to have done a split card that looked like a normal magic card. It would have been weird, and the templating would have been odd. But I mean, was it doable? Yeah, it's possible to do. But why didn't we do that? Because the frame we had just did such a better job of conveying to the audience what it was, you know. I mean, I'm not saying there's not novelty. I'm not saying they didn't look cool. They did. But a big reason for a frame is not just, oh, they look cool. We could constantly be changing frames. Oh, this looks cool.

And I mean, on some level, Bluestar Fawn and Secret Lair is us messing around with that. But that's not really what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is when design goes, you know what? Changing the card frame allows us to do something that either we couldn't do normally or be very hard for the audience to play. You know, can we change the frame to make something that is easier to understand? And I think split cards, like one of the interesting things was we did in fact figure out how split cards would look without it and it just looked way worse and was harder to understand. You know,

like it, it, not only did you lose sort of the novelty of the look of it, but you lost the functionality of it. And that when we did it in a normal thing, like it was very hard. I remember there was a second ability because we had to put one mana cost in the upper end corner and the second one had to be in the tools deck. It just didn't have, it didn't carry what it did. It just didn't have, it didn't carry what it did. Okay, so there are, once again, my goal today is to talk about frames that we changed for mechanical reasons. There are frame changes, there are frame changes we have done, something like, you know, like legendary creatures.

We've adapted them so people can recognize it. I mean, there's a little bit of functionality so you understand it's a legendary creature. But there also is a little panache

in making them stand out. Okay, so the next time we did a frame I think was Planeswalkers. Now, Planeswalkers are a little bit different. They're a new card type, I guess. But we needed to accomplish something, and the traditional-looking magic frame,

as you think of it, just didn't work. And so we said, well, let's optimize for what the card is. What does the card want to do? Oh, the card wants to have a certain number of loyalty abilities. And you have to know how much loyalty it takes. And you have to know how much loyalty the creature has. And so a lot of the planes were, like, stayed true to sort of the heart of a magic card. The name and the mana cost are in the same place.

We had to shift around a few things to sort of make it work but in general, you know, we did keep the general ethos you know, the general sense of what a magic card is in making the Planeswalkers but the other big thing we did in trying to figure that out was we said, you know what, these are different and not only are they different in sort of layout, but like in needs. Like these are grandiose characters. These are our big characters. What if we did full length art of the character? You know and so we made the frame so it was see through so that you could see that.

And that was something where it really helped sell. So sometimes the frame is purely mechanical and there's a lot about a Planeswalker that was mechanical. We had to convey how you got your loyalty, how you spent your loyalty. And if you notice, for example, there's little arrows that sort of go up and down subtly. But we also wanted to convey a flavor of it. The legendary change had a little bit of, can you recognize this? But also

we want it to seem grandiose. Planeswalkers, we wanted to show off the idea that you can show them standing up, the fullness of the character. It felt kind of cool and different. I'm not sure these are chronological. These I haven't written down. The next big frame that I remember us tackling is the colorless frame. So the colorless frame was we had done, I think it's Rise of the Eldrazi, I'm not sure. So anyway, we had something that wasn't a color

and we wanted to make them feel different. So we ended up doing this thing where, like the Planeswalkers, they're full frame. And that was something sort of to give them a different look. We didn't want colorless to feel like a sixth color. I know a lot of times there's confusion about it anyway. So we wanted the frame to look different. So we did a similar thing we did with the Planeswalkers, where you can see the image through the frame to give them a little sort of different feel.

thing we did with Planeswalkers where you can see the image through the frame to give them a little sort of different feel. And it also allows us to sort of, we want to make sure that one of the functionalities is how do you tell that this is colors versus being off white or something. And the see-through frame just made it very different. Now another thing to keep in mind is when we make a frame okay so my next example is Devoid

so Devoid is an example where we wanted to convey two different things to you the cards were colorless in matter they were colorless in a set that cared about colorlessness but at the same time they had mana in them the colored mana that required you to cast them and so that was an interesting chance, like how do we capture

both things, how do we say hey I am colored you might want to put me in a red deck because I require red mana but I'm not a normal red card, on the battlefield I am a colorless thing, so we played around with the text the card name box was more color than the text box was. So, in your hand, the part you can see in your hand was a little more colored. But on the battlefield, the majority of it is more washed out, so it reads more as colorless. Okay, next up is miracles. So,

miracle was an example of, here's something that we need you to notice when you're drawing it, right? We need, the moment you draw, you right away understand something. Because there was, like, you had to do something before you put it in your hand. So when you drew it, you had to notice something right away. So we did a different frame. And this is an example where we're just trying to observe something. Like, the point of the frame, it's not that the magic frame as normal couldn't handle miracles.

I mean, it was more of, we're asking you to recognize something at a time that's unnormal, you know, at that time was not a normal thing you did. So that's an example of using a frame as a way to sort of, as an aid to help the players sort of recognize something. That, you know, the miracles look different. So when you draw them, you're like, oh, this is a miracle. That you knew right away that it was a miracle.

Okay, yeah, so this list is not chronological, I'm realizing as I'm going through it. Next, let me talk flip cards. So flip cards were in Champs of Kamigawa block. We had this idea of cards with two states. And the way we're going to represent two states is that you could flip them in either direction. So there was a card in one direction and then 180 degrees, you flip it upside down, there's a second card. And we did the art so that if you look at one way, you see one thing.

Another way, you see another thing. And the idea there was we were trying to understand how to do a dual state card. And in order to do that, we needed to sort of have two cards on one card. Now, we couldn't use the split card technology because you needed to know what was the dominant card. And so we had to literally flip it. That's why they they call flip cards. Now that's a good example, by the way, of us having a new frame. I think both flip cards and Aftermath, which was Mechanic and

Amonkhet, is a good example where we changed the card frames from a functional, for a functional reason. Like we changed flip cards because we wanted you to have a sense of what is where, and we wanted two states. We changed aftermath. Aftermath were basically split cards, but the way they worked was, one of them you cast from your hand, and one of them you cast from your graveyard. So they were like, I guess, a cross between split cards and flashback cards. But we wanted you to be aware in your graveyard what was castable. So we altered one of them so in your graveyard you could rotate them

so you could see this is what's castable in your graveyard and not cause confusion. But, well, both flip cards and the Amiket Aftermath cards did... I'll add one more to that. A level up was from Rise of the Eldrazi. At the same time we did Colorless Cards. We did a mechanic called Level Up. And in it, you can spend mana to raise levels.

And at different levels, your power toughness changes and what abilities you have change. And so we made a text box that was sort of three-layered so that there was three different text boxes for you. And the... Well, that would be an interesting story for Level Up in a second. But Miracles, not Miracles, sorry. Flip Cards and Aftermath Cards and Level Up all had an interesting problem in that they were aesthetically unpleasing to the audience. That the feedback we got was, yeah, I get what you're doing. I get why you're doing this. But man,

it wasn't pleasing. And even the flip cards were functionally problematic. Like one of the big problems was if I tap it and attack, well, did I tap to the right? Did I tap to the left? Which state is that card in? Because players don't uniformly tap in the same direction. So it was hard to track. Now, in the case of flip cards, eventually we would get to double-faced cards, where you have two different faces,

one on the front and one in the back. And even there, I mean, those look more like a normal frame, although obviously there's a card on the back. But even then, there is symbology and little things we do to make you recognize that it's a double-faced card so that you know that you flip it over. Oh, a quick story on level ups. This is a fun story here. One of the challenges in making an alternate frame is making it such that the audience will use it intuitively. So one of the interesting stories about Level Up was I think originally when we did Level Up, you leveled, you went, was it went up or down? I forget. I'm trying to remember which order

we ended up on Level Up. I think what we did originally on Level Up is you went up. Is that right? Or is that how we ended up doing it? I forget how we did it. We did it one direction and every time people were playing they were doing it the opposite direction, so we flipped it. So it's an example of you need to playtest your theme so the audience can play it and sort of get a sense of

how it works. Okay, another example of a change that's not a big change, but kind of like Miracles was enchantment creatures in Theros block. And since we used them in Kamigawa, so what we did there is we made sort of a nix pattern, so

it was important, enchantment creatures mattered, enchantments mattered, we wanted to recognize when something was an enchantment creature. For example, if something's an artifact creature, we, in fact, there's an artifact frame, and when we made colored artifacts, we made color artifact frames. Now, those look a little more like normal magic, although, you know, clearly there's a texture to understand it's an artifact and it's colorless.

I'm not colorless, I'm colored. But enchantment creatures, there really was nothing, like enchantments all looked the same. So we made this frame as a reminder, as a visual tool. And like I said, when we're trying to decide whether or not to do a frame, one of the things we always ask ourselves is, is there a functional need? Can we just do a normal frame?

We tend not to do new frames for novelty purposes. We tend to do them because there's a functional reason that you need the normal frame. We tend not to do new frames for novelty purposes. We tend to do them because there's a functional reason that you need the new frame. And enchantment creatures are a good example in that it's something you might not notice. You care about them. It's a lot easier to notice a normal enchantment because they're not sort of in the middle of combat

and tapping and have equipment or auras on them. Where a level of creature is a little harder to tell that. I mean, like for example, Theros had bestowed creatures specifically. So anyway, that is a good example of us trying to make something to recognize so you understand it. Okay, next up, sagas. So sagas were an interesting case where we knew we wanted to do something new. We knew that it was a different kind of thing. And the functionality, so the interesting thing about that, so when we first did sagas,

I think the original idea that we had come across was that it would look kind of like a board game. And there would be this track that ran through the card that you would advance on. And then there would be iconography that tells you what effect it was when you hit that. So it turned out that the idea that like I think early on we're like oh there's six or seven and you know on the second and third and fifth turn something happened. It turned out that we needed to condense it and basically what we learned is look something just needs to happen every turn. It's not worth it to have turns where nothing happens. And so the interesting thing is so James Arnold, the person who did the frames at the time, had this challenge of, okay, how do we do this?

But one of the things we realized that came from the iconography version of it was sometimes we wanted to do the same effect more than once. And what we found was usually those were concurrent. Meaning usually if you wanted to do something, you would do them on chapters next to each other. And so the idea that James came up with is, well, what if we do a vertical track and then there's little chapters and it gives numbers to represent the chapter. So if you want to do the same effect on two different turns, you just put two chapters there.

So chapter one and two are this effect. And that'll allow us to, like, one of the things we're always worried about when making frames is you have to think about where to put the text and how to fit the text on and can the card communicate the things it needs to communicate?

And so that's a good example where, you know, James found this neat technology. And the other nice thing about chapters, like one of the things about sagas was we were trying to convey storytelling, right? This represented a story. You're hearing a story. And so all that sort of allowed the texture that went into it reinforced that this was a story. Now, interestingly, once he went vertical, that meant we had an interesting art decision.

Okay, well, what can we do with the vertical art? meant, we had an interesting art decision of, okay, well, what can we do with vertical art? And then, as a separate group, one of the things that we've come up with in Dominaria, the main sagas, is this concept of, well, what if the art on the saga represents storytelling, but rather than normal magic art, what if we, and the reason we did this originally was because Dominaria itself was about history, so we thought it was really cool if we showed you the history of Dominaria on sagas, which is why we made sagas, through the way that Dominarians themselves would read the story.

So is it stained glass? It was really neat to sort of see it through the art of the world telling stories. And then that was so compelling, that's just become how we do it now, right? So when we do sagas, we really look into how, you know, in the source material that we're at, like Nian Dynasty can do, how did the Japanese, you know, visually tell stories? When we were in Kaltime, how did the Norse do it? You know, when, so wherever we are, we can sort of look and say, oh, well, what, look at the world we're doing, the inspiration from a world, and like, how can we tell stories in this regard? And so it's a lot of fun, you know, that sagas sometimes have been blueprints or have been

certain styles of art or sculpture. It's just been really neat. So it's a good example where we embodied what we wanted to be, and the frame change not only let us functionally do something that would be hard to do not but um and the other thing about by the way that's nice because of the sagas is if you have a counter you know a die or or a penny or whatever you can sort of keep track of where you are you can keep track of what chapter you're on um so there's like functionality to that um but the side is are a great example of making a new frame that really carries a lot of

weight and work and does a lot of cool things. Okay, next up, vehicles. So we invented vehicles in Kaladesh. And the idea of vehicles was that we knew that, so they were a new artifact subtype, that we knew that, so they were a new artifact subtype. But we knew that they were going to be confusing in that they were kind of creatures and kind of not. So they're artifacts that turn into creatures, but they're not always creatures. So if we just put a power of toughness on them, they would just be like artifact creatures

and you would think you could attack all the time. So the frame change there was like, we need to communicate that these aren't just creatures. And then the nice thing about the frame changes is when, once you're saying, okay, we need to communicate something different, also we have our dedicated artists that make the frames are then able to say, well, how can I communicate this quality? Okay, what is the vehicle? Well, how can I communicate? Not just do I have, you know, not just is the frame different for the sake of recognizing it's different,

but I also get to reinforce the theme. That's something it does really well. Okay, another example of sort of using frames to do something that would be hard otherwise was host and augment. I talked about unglued at the beginning of this, and I really didn't get into the unsets, but the unsets really have messed around in different space. Like when I talked about DFCs, I didn't even talk about meld, which are DFCs that on the back create a large car that you piece together, which essentially is sort of blackboarder magic

doing BFM. We figured out a way to do it, and so that is a sense of frames doing something that has a clueless factor, but, you know, something that's above and beyond. Two cards becoming one. So Host Audit was interesting in that I wanted this idea of a card, but then I can attach a separate card to it, and it changes the nature of the card. And by using the frame that we used, so the way it works is the host looks like a normal magic card. It's got a little metal bar. It's got a little something on it that tells you it's different. But it does look more or less like a normal magic card.

But then the augments sort of go on top of the host and overwrite half the card. And they literally sit on the card, and the stuff that they overlap, they overwrite. So that was one of the cool things of how host and augment work was the visualness told you what the new card was. Then when things got covered up, it was no longer that thing. And when things were on top, that was part of that. And so conveying that was something that really allowed the frame to sort of have a lot of functionality. Likewise, for example, in the same set we did contraptions, right? And so contraptions... now contraptions

were, you know, a very different Magic card than that. It had a different back, you know, it was a sort of different deck, if you will. And so we were freer to do whatever we wanted with them. I think contraptions were artifacts, so we needed them to have an artifact-ness to them. But we really were able to make a new frame, and because of what we were able to do, we did a full frame. And for those that don't realize, all the contraptions are 3x3 pieces of art. So for each of the factions, there's nine contraptions. And if you put them together, they make a larger

picture that each has a giant contraption that matches each of the five factions. So in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, we made classes. So classes took some of the technology from sagas, sort of flipped them. The art style, I guess, the left instead of the right. But use a similar saying, hey, we want to grow with time. How do we mark that?

Oh, sagas do that well. Can we do a tweak on the saga frame? So that's an example of using iconography. And that's something we also try to do. If we do something and a frame conveys something, if we're trying to do something new, we're aware of what technology we have to convey things. So like sagas really sort of set the bar for something

that classes were able to then make use of. And that understanding how sagas work made it easier to understand how classes work. Other things we did uh we snow for example uh

snow is a lot like what we did with sort of the enchantment creatures and theros we wanted to recognize when something was snow so we made a snow frame to reinforce that

um and then um the other big thing is uh tokens and emblems um we started other big thing is, uh, tokens and emblems. Um, we started,

like I said, Unglued, started making tokens, uh, and that we wanted to make sure that the tokens don't read as normal cards, but as tokens. And so, tokens are done so they have a, you know, we want them to look magic card-ish. Um, but they definitely, the art ratios are different.

Specifically so when you see it, that you understand on the battlefield that it is a token. You know, at the end of your game, you know that this doesn't go in your deck. And, you know, tokens react differently to certain things, like Unsummoned effects. So just making sure that you can differentiate. I think the key sort of lesson today is R&D has become, like, in the early days, like, when I tried to do this, like, nobody stopped me on Glued because it was the wacky set. But when I was trying to do split cards early on, there was a lot of resistance. And I think over time, what people come to realize is, look, we have a lot of cards to make.

And, you know, sometimes there's neat things we can do that will fit on a card but aren't easy to do with the normal card frame and that we want to be careful when and how like we don't want to do you know we want card frames to be there because they need to be there and there's a function for them but it is a tool that r&d sort of accepts that once upon a time we were much more maybe not me i wasn't sensitive but, but R&D as a whole was a little more hesitant about. And I really think that what has happened is that we've come to embrace it as an important sort of tool in our toolbox. And so today, hopefully, just sort of running through things and talking about

the general philosophy and how and why we do things. But I am now, by the way, I am actually at work. I am at Wizards of the Coast. So just so you guys understand that for two years, since March of 2020, we started working at home. I did swing by the office a couple times like pick up stuff like print up a file or something

and there was one day I came last year and I reported a podcast where I needed to come and set up my desk we had moved desks and stuff although I didn't actually move but I had to set up my desk I was at a play test

but we are now back in the office, and so, uh, um, it's weird, it's, you know, you get very used to things, so I got very used to working at home, uh, I'm, I'm, I assume I'll get used back to being in the office, but, uh, anyway, it is fun, it is fun to do a drive-thru work where I'm actually driving to work, um, you know, normally, by the way, when I do it at home, I tend to stop, like, at 30 minutes, I stop. And here, like,

I realized I got to the office at 28 minutes, and I'm like, wait, wait, it's under 30 minutes. Although, I guess me explaining that will end up being 30 minutes. Anyway, guys,

I hope you enjoyed today's talk. I really think frames are a cool thing, and hopefully I, I don't know, illuminated some stuff for you today. But anyway, I am now at

Wizards of the Coast. So we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Okay, well, see you all next time. Bye-bye.