CIVIL pieces - Concept, Idea, Vision, Intrigue, Levity

So I'm Two; and I spend a lot of time reading. Thinking. Absorbing.

In this article, I will discuss a very vital and generalized topic, but specifically hone on it through the lens of Magic: The Gathering. I would like to write this less Magic-centric, but I'd struggle to elaborate should I do so.

Five principles that should guide your design for game components are:

-Concept. What is it embodying or doing? This can be lore-based or play-based or both.

-Idea. How does it represent or accomplish that?

-Vision. When in use, what purpose is this piece supposed to serve?

-Intrigue. While in play, do its effects do something that creates interest?

-Levity. While in play, are one or more players unable to have fun; does the piece generate fun?

Yes I did spend a lot of work finding synonyms to make it make an acronym shut up.

Before I begin my long form explanations, I feel it necessary to clarify that these five elements are far from the only things to consider - just what I feel are the most important ones. A few others (Magic-centered) include:

-Its wordiness - Does the game piece take a lot of text to explain, is it difficult to parse?
-Overall gameplay patterns - Does it do something that's not good for the game?
-Its complexity - Is it hard to play with?
-Knowledge of - Does simply knowing this exists change the game?
-Whether it does something for the game - Does the card matter?
-If the element is for players - See Lesson 12 of 20 years 20 lessons.
-How abusable it is - See Pipsqueak's article about the Lion's Eye Quotient.
-Also please see Mark's One with One with Nothing and When Cards go Bad 
--Rhystic Studies' Best Worst Card, Spice8Rack's Why does MTG print bad cards ... 
--There's a lot on this train; especially with better knowledge than I.

These principles - if not applicable - are indicative of a likely issue with the card.

For example, if you don't know what a card's intentions are, it's not possible to see what elements of it are important to it. If you're willing to readjust every element of your design, then no part of it was important or vital, and in my eyes this means it is somewhat doomed to fail - Because depending on who you show it to, they will tell you wildly different things about the card. Having a "must" gives you a direct feel for what isn't a must, and what can be discarded to craft a better game piece.

Similarly to cards without concepts, ideas, or clear visions; cards with no intrigue are difficult to justify. I'm going to point to every vanilla creature, as well as Disenchant, Divination, Murder, Shock, or Giant Growth.

The primary thing that makes these cards interesting has nothing to do with these cards. They're still good cards, because their intrigue is in their play dynamism. They define interaction for four of these colors. It's what that color is good at doing, and I choose them specifically because most of them are not actually good, but teeter into usable.

As players, the thing that makes Divination interesting is that it gives you a clear baseline to compare every card draw in the game against. There's a huge number of cards with "Draw two cards", and the comparison to make for many is their speed - Many are able to be performed as instants, but have some other cost with that upside, such as discarding a card or requiring two payments of two mana, or costing a significant amount more to cast. Others boast a different upside, such as scry 4 before drawing or having a secondary option on them for more power by way of choices; or drawing three cards but requiring you to discard a specific type of card or two cards.

To serve as our even more exhaustive guinea pig for the day, I have somewhat-randomly chosen to look at monocolor cards with a mana value of 4 from Theros Beyond Death. If you don't know Magic's basic rules I'm sure someone else can better explain them.

There's unfortunately 42 of them and means a fair amount of context to chomp through!

In Theros, a central theme of the world overall is that Enchantments, as a card type, matter, via primarily Constellation ("Whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield under your control"); and Devotion - the number of colored mana pips across mana costs of permanents you control - matter.

As a result of these two things, sets that are in Theros have an increased number of Enchantment cards, to better serve both of these mechanical aspects of their design. Let's go through our five points for these two cards, reordered to match that thought process.

Vision: Theros is about enchantments and devotion. We need to have ways for players to both have high numbers of enchantments, and to scale their devotion.

Concept: Enchantments that serve a function often given to other card types. This way, they won't be missing essential effects.

Idea: We staple traditional color effects from sorcery cards ("Discard cards", "Deal damage") as enter the battlefield abilities of enchantments. They can't, however, just be dead on the board.

Intrigue: So we make them into Auras, ones with an actual boon. This makes them more removable, more able to be interacted with (creatures are naturally the most interactive type in the game). That means that, despite being boring on the field, there's still a natural level of appeal owing to them being stapled to a creature. You can also flicker them, since they're permanents, to get the higher-value aspect repeatedly. It also means they have a requirement to be cast, as well.

Levity: As a general concept, these cards aren't particularly exciting by themselves. But they're not boring and they're not anti-fun, which is what matters a lot more because they have some level of natural gameplay. As specific cards, they're no worse than these effects - relatively standard ones - go. I don't know anyone who likes getting their hand discarded, but I know lots of people who think that the game's health is improved by the existence of hand attack and who don't particularly mind it.

Not absolutely perfect. But there is something for all five categories (and some others; but I'm trying to not take all your time).

Concept: The Nyxborn of Theros are existences born from the minds of gods, things created of the domain of the gods intermixed with ideas, dreams, or otherwise.

Idea: The Nyx's thematic is paralleled as the Enchantment type and the existence of star textures in the creature's art, particularly where shadows belong.

Vision: The Nyxborn's mechanical identity exists to further inflate the number of Enchantments on Theros, improving the availability of them for Constellation triggers.

Intrigue: The Nyxborn are "enchantment creatures", interesting due to the things this allows them to interact with - But not particularly interesting on their own merit as a base concept. In the previous visit to Theros, they all had enchantment-like statics, but here Wizards allows even vanilla creatures to be Nyxborn. However, they're given extra intrigue by all being double-pipped to interact with Devotion better.

Levity: These serve as enabler cards. These are the cards that the player will be excited to draw because they're the cards that turn on their engine; that allow them to put their pieces together. However, on their own merit, they're more vulnerable than usual creatures.

All of these are grouped by being - to an extent - payoffs for an idea.

Triton Waverider, Arena Trickster, and Nylea's Huntmaster are pretty explicit. They just tell you what you want to be doing, which deck wants to pick them up. They're not going to have much intrigue from their abilities, but they will create dynamic play owing to their abilities creating tension - Do you capitalize on this or that?

There's a lot of potential conceptual spaces: For instance, Inspire Awe could have been born of "A reward for playing enchantment creatures and auras", or "A Theros-themed fog effect" and very easily get to the conclusion of the final card. 

Each of those possible bases have multiple ways for ideation to go. Arena Trickster can be born of a combat trick based archetype, or a more general "play instants and cards with flash"; and could have evolved from many sources: Scrying, a your-upkeep trigger, a pinging reward, or otherwise. Voracious Typhon serves clearly as a game-closing piece, with a prohibitive mana cost to prevent its early arrival; or perhaps it was born as a recurring threat and developed into needing to be stronger at closing things.

And all of these payoffs do have a unified purpose: They're all able to close out a game with high damage and Inspire Awe even doubles as protecting you directly.

They all don't have the strongest of interesting moments, but they all have content to them, they do not erode options to nothingness, they're able to be pre-empted or reactively ruined.

And because of those, they're enjoyable. They create inevitability which prevents usually boring stalling, they can suddenly punch through but also be played around. They reward you for doing the thing that  your deck wants to do, and seeing your game plan work is enjoyable; and having a game plan to be disrupted brings enjoyment to the opponent because they can see what must be done more clearly.

I can't think of anything in particular to write for these five cards as meaningful things.

All five of these cards primarily serve to be basic things that you need to have access to in your colors, being answers to opponent's cards. Venomous Hierophant here has a small extra piece in that it serves as a way to fuel Escape as well. Because their concept is so centered on play, and their effects are so tried-and-true, there's little to observe.

Conceptually, they fill a role as primarily removal but as a blocker in Hierophant's case, and their idea for actualizing that is with one of a variety of well-proven effects. The intended purpose for them is therefore also clear: To be good at that job, in relation to the format's limited. A format -- in this case, limited -- having answers makes the game not devolve into "Who has the biggest stick", which is both the point of intrigue and levity: They're interesting because they prevent the game from becoming boring, and the game being boring is definitely going to stop people from having fun.

So that's 16 of the 42 cards in the pool here. Personally I'd recommend stewing on that a minute or two, and rhetorically asking yourself these questions about a few cards you like or that you've designed, to help the idea digest in your mind; but maybe it suits you better to read on.

So, to summarize what you ought to have learned at this point:

A game piece needs to have a solid core of what it is about, and a translation of that idea into a game effect. It needs to have a clear purpose to be played, it needs to not be too complicated to burden the mind all on its own, and it must be enjoyable and not for just the user.

These questions are not organized by priority. They can be reorganized to better suit your game design principles. Particularly, in fact, a majority of common cards in Magic suffer a comparatively low amount of intrigue. This is because a large amount of Magic's intrigue is not from an individual card, but the interplay of cards. Cards that have large draw on their own are often called build-around cards, which I believe nicely establishes their whole purpose. They are to draw you into doing something, figure out how to protect them, and how to enable them. They ask you to do something for them, instead of saying that they will do something for you.

Commons are the cards that you use in service of the cooler cards. To let those cards shine and be fanciful. They don't have to be independently interesting - Which, in turn, means that the uncommons and rares do have some burden to be that way. There's ten commons, three uncommons, and one rare in a card pack; so the combination of needing the average card to be well answerable for draft players, and Wizards' need to sell packs combine together to both alleviate the necessity of a deck being filled with answers, while allowing a power difference across the rarities which creates some interest on its own.

Uncommons and rares - and any game where all the pieces are of the same rarity - have a much stronger ask. They need to have more intrigue on their own. They need to do a better job of selling an idea, a principle that you can play around with through the game.

But they don't actually have to. Don't fall into a trap that something has to be interesting or something has to not be interesting. There are dozens of incredibly interesting commons and horridly dull rares. There are hundreds of games with equal rarity game pieces where the intrigue highly varies across them. What matters in both cases is that there is a purpose for them to be that way.

Do you see why these would be a problem at lower rarities for draft? If there were multiples of them ending up in a deck, due to the necessity of them being answered?

All seven of these cards can take over a game if put down at the right time or with incredibly small amounts of support, and all have no sentences - just keywords. Their rarity serves a purpose, and it isn't their intrinsic complexity or wordiness.

Now, nominally, I'd like to say "let's get back to Theros".

But I spent a month on various small rewrites of just what's up here, and frankly this article is too long already.

So to recap, each card needs to meet a checklist of ideals, to make sure that the card has a purpose in the set, either establishing some lore or enabling play patterns, and does not actively go against either. It has to not remove fun when in effect, and it does something interesting.

Purposeful, exciting, representative, fair, elementary, captivating, and thought-provoking all at once, maybe not. But at the least, if not perfect, a game's pieces need be civil.