At the risk of putting people off,Magic: The Gatheringis one of the most complicated games in the world. With tens of thousands of cards, hundreds of mechanics, and a rulebook longer than most novels, even just learning how to play can be tough. At the highest levels, even the pros struggle to track a table of cards moving about, and nobody expects anyone to know what every card does.
Instead of forcing everyone to learn everything, Magic gets by thanks to clever templating and a clean design refined over 30 years to convey information to you mid-game. Once you know a few key phrases, every single card reminds you of the rules as you go. However, Wizards has developed a rather nasty habit of completely disregarding this, and printing cards that no human ever born would be able to parse.
Unreadable cards have always been a thing in Magic. Perhaps the most infamous example of this are the textless promo cards, like Terminate, Damnation, and the well-known Cryptic Command. They’ve long been the butt of jokes, especially the latter, which requires you to remember four different effects if you want to play a textless version of it.
Over time, though, we’ve seen the rise of a second kind of unreadable card: ones where the text is on it, but good luck making any of it out. The most recent example of this comes in the Secret Lair Secretversary 2023 Superdrop, and its Tales of the Time Stoppers series. The cards are gorgeous, with stunning illustrations by Micha Huigen evoking early 20th century art complete with high contrast and thick outlines.
Unfortunately, all that drip crushes out the text box, reducing it to an afterthought nestled away in some spare empty space. In some cases, this just makes the card tough to read across a table, but in others it could negatively impact the game in a more serious way.
Take Time Stop itself, for instance. It only gives a tiny corner of the card to its effect – ending the turn – and completely forgoes the important reminder text on what “end the turn” means. It’s not a common effect, and just by looking at this, you wouldn’t know “ending the turn” at instant speed skips the end step and exiles everything in the stack, removes all damage, and makes someone discard down to hand size there and then. Why make things even harder for no reason?
Secret Lair is easily the biggest offender of this. In the last few drops alone, we’ve had tough-to-read toxic fungal art in Calling All Hydras and Buggin’ Out; the utterly illegible death metal posters of Keep Partying Hard, Shred Harder; and the punk posters of Legendary Flyers (Not That Kind)
Even The Lord of the Rings didn’t get out unscathed, with the debut of the Band Poster showcase treatment in its special edition rerelease earlier this month. That gives us some of the worst, most unreadable cards ever printed, like Arwen, Mortal Queen; Radagast The Brown; and Spiteful Banditry.
It’s not that this art is bad. They’re all full of artistic skill and passion, and for collectors they serve their purpose. But Magic is a game, and these aren’t posters, they’re cards. They weren’t produced with the medium of tabletop cards in mind, and it makes playing with them a misery.
Quick, tell me what this card does without looking it up.
If you’re the one playing them, you’ll almost certainly have to read out what a card does multiple times, or risk having other players put their grubby mitts on your fancy deck. If you’re playing against them, you’ll feel pressured into repeatedly asking for clarification on what they do, and more often than not, will have to just trust that your opponent isn’t misreading or maliciously misrepresenting what it does. Magic players aren’t known for their willingness to read cards as it is, and this makes it nearly impossible even if they wanted to.
If you really want to play with these cards, it would be good to include a standard printing of it in your deck box for other people to refer to if needed. I already do this with any foreign-language cards or alters I run, for example.
Lots of criticisms around showcase frames and Secret Lair boil down to people not liking the dilution of Magic’s cohesive style. We like specific frames for specific card types, and every card shouldlooklike a Magic card. I don’t agree with that – part of the delight of Secret Lair is finding new ways to present the card information, while stepping away from the digital painterly style most cards are illustrated with these days.
The real concern should be cognitive load. Magic is already a tricky game to learn, follow, and play. It requires your full attention at the best of times, and by turning it into a vomit of multicoloured cards with fonts so tiny or so stylised they’re a mess of squiggles isn’t doing anything to help that. Readability and accessibility should be paramount to any TCG, and right now, Magic is fumbling it in the gaudiest, flashiest way possible.
