Something you’ve definitely noticed in recent memory using technology made by capitalism is that their user interfaces changes pretty often, whether big or small. People whine about them at first, especially when they’re in the A/B testing phase, then eventually everyone gets used to it and life goes on because who dares build the independent competitor that surely won’t do any evil.
Is Magic immune from this trend? Well, looking at the M15 frame, it functions pretty well at telling you what the card’s name, cost, color, ability, stats, types, artwork is, with just enough of the fantasy texture to remind you where you are. And the designers fortunately have agreed, hence why this card frame has stayed as is for 11 years so far. Well, maybe the bottom left of the card has one different line, and there’s a flavor bar and legend crown that got added for 7 years so far, but well we surely haven’t changed this design. If anything, one could argue we have stuck to this design for 22 years, because how big of a change is the M15 design from the Modern design? Just a smaller border with a tiny rounded corner, a thick bottom section for clearly readable collector information, a new header font and now you seems to have perfected a design, Planar Chaos frame stans not withstanding.
Back to the question actually, I would say no. Here’s the thing, instead of changing this frame, WotC have decided to build a giant hierarchy of alternative versions for their cards, in much of the same way many other card games have done to appeal to “collectors”. And it is in this hierarchy that new frame designs have been dominating, each one having more issues than the last. And with their “prestige”, they got flaunted around more and more, until a point where some cards just straight up skip the normal frame and start off with these designs. I just have to speak out now, the frog has boiled. It’s time to have a history dive through all of these designs to see how far we have come.
Once upon a time, we have these textless promos that tries to does the exact same thing as all the designs we’ll be looking at, just that one day WotC made a spell with four modes in this design and we all got scared ever since. Instead, we decided to make the typeline and text box transparent and it looks great. I feel these things are quite underrated and deserved better than in our timeline.
Here’s what I’m talking about. It’s certainly an interesting to apply the cylinder shape of the name bar to the artwork in that way, when the aspect ratio is so radically different. The pro is that the artist credit don’t get touched while the artwork gets to be ever so slightly taller, the con is that do you need to eat that much space in the four corners?
Around the same era actually, there’s a different incarnation that is just way more practical. It fixes almost all of my complains, the art is now a clean rectangle, typeline and rule texts exist again, this time using a shadow layer to be more readable against the artwork. The last problem is that the text still feels floaty like there are invisible boxes surrounding them, leaving these dead space that wishes to be pushed down. Being floaty also doesn’t bode well with the set symbol, which for our example card is placed wrongly but for others are just straight up missing.
Eventually, the floating boxes would be patched so that you just get a more literal transperanting of the typeline and text box. With that, look, we can finally return the set symbol. What an elegant design that eventually got killed because WotC got tired with all the different promos for different events they have for their LGSes so they merge everything into some lame promo packs. Well, dedicated promos did finally return eventually, but the text box is now full sized because Magic cards nowadays are stupid wordy and the ones that aren’t just feel even more sad for not having their flavor texts.
With the return of those promos, the textless cards also make a return from the dead, this time being the “higher tier” of these promos. Actually, this design first came about for convention promos, first on two iconic magecrafts like how they’re intended to be. Now, we expand the selection to creatures, some of which somehow managed to not kill the program because everyone just have Scryfall in their pocket now, unlike the late 2000s.
The design definitely can’t return to the four deeply rounded corners anymore. But the two bottom corners still have to follow the wonky curve the M15 frame have, something you will also notice with some basic lands. And for some reasons, these cards make the name box transparent too, unlike the aforementioned design.
These things went on to be used for a few early Secret Lairs, Theros Beyond Death’s showcase frame, maybe also the two bland Innistrad sets’ showcase frame for their commanders, and that’s unfortunately about it. We are about to meet the culprit.
You know the world of physical alters right, where people draw directly above the Magic card? The most basic kind of these alters are one that wants to extend the artwork. They decided that the name box is sacred, so don’t touch them. Then maybe keep the name line and stat box too. Then if you want a big alter, remove the text box. Which leaves the card frame and black border to be trampled over. How do I feel about that?
No, I don’t mean to tell you to stop doing that. That would be like saying you should stop making all memes or share them period. I tell you because corporations listens to these kinds of things and when they do it themselves, it tends to stop being fun.
Actually, the planeswalkers were the first to get this design. Remember these things, the mythic editions of the three Ravnica sets ending the Bolas Arc? For $250 you got a (literal) draft box of 24 packs where 8 of them got seeded these borderless planeswalkers in, and the serial number at the back of the pack literally names which planeswalker the pack has. Surely no one will sell these things loose right?
Back to the frame itself, how is this frame design? It’s a very cut out the frame and black border and leave the boxes as is. And now suddenly you kinda think the shapes of these things doesn’t look all that great. And where’s the legend crown, you ask once again. Also to note is that the bottom of these cards have a subtle darkened gradient so that the information can be easier to read. This is something important to note.
These things turned out to not be offensive enough to warrant putting some in every set that have planeswalkers going forward. Maybe with a little change like mono black’s name and typeline being white text on deeper black, but that’s it.
Finally onto the infamous thing I want to talk about, these things. It’s pretty recently I finally realized this Women’s Day Secret Lair is the actual origin of these things, not some sets that came out later.
Instead of leaving the boxes intact, they’re now changed to this solid color glossy finish that to be honest, I don’t like that much. It feels like Magic as succumbed to the flat design trend and has lost all of what little fantasy textures the card frames had. Especially with the text box, what used to be white have to now carry the burden of the card’s colors. Which tends to look horrible, especially on these gold cards where this color tells me nothing. Through I do tolerate the fact that dual colored cards can have a hybrid text box, which is actually handy, but I guess hybrid purists would complain because the two would look exactly the same. The solutions turned out to have the inner name and typeline and stat boxes be gold.
Now onto a hot take of mine, of why the black border is important. The reason is simple: All of these elements on the card frame: the name box, the typeline, the textbox, they’re at the locations they are and at the sizes they are is because of the fact that they live in a black border. These things don’t straight up touch the black border or is so far distanced that you wonder how wasteful the card size is, it’s the right amount, a nice symmetrical balanced amount that makes your eye happy. Now merge those things with the artwork and suddenly the distance is a lot larger, especially on these normal cards without the legend crown, things feel a lot more wrong now.
I mean, the alternative is to stretch these boxes out ever so slightly so they don’t match normal cards. But then, you’re gonna run up against a different problem: Rounded corners. Frame designs before M15 straight up didn’t have any, aligning the frame right at the origin point to draw the rounded corners from. And then M15 shrunk the black border by having a small rounded corner for the frame, still aligning with the outer corner. This is a very petty problem but I like small rounded corners and not big ones, like I don’t know, the one the iPhones have and therefore every smartphone company copies from. Why? Because if you do stretch out these frames, what would happens when they run up against this rounded corner? Do they bend into a funny shape like the planeswalkers’ frame? I would hate that for sure.
And now let’s get to the bottom of the card. So, the intention of the M15 frame is that above the thick bottom border, there’s a big curve of two rounded corners of who know how big. These things would be covered by the squared off text box and the black border, which looks really nice because to human eyes, the remaining part of the curve would basically approximate to a diagonal line. Granted, there have been cards right before these (silver bordered and textless promos) that expose more of this curve so the illusion loses. But this design is where this curved got probably the most exposed to us all. And honestly, it just doesn’t look that good this way.
Am I the only one that has this problem?
That’s already infuriating if we’re talking a perfectly centered card. But imagine, you’re in real life, where Magic is notorious for being a lottery of which factory your cards came from, (if it’s Japan the pack would have pull tab and be reversed but the cards would be nice, but if it’s America, run), maybe you should account for when these cards would come out off centered. Suddenly the curve looks even worse and it’s even easier to notice. Granted, this stuff do happens with black bordered cards but well, you got that black border so you don’t notice as much.