Lenticular Design

Over the last few years, I've used a term called "lenticular design." Each time I've used it, I promised that one day I would write an article all about it, explaining what exactly it is and how design uses it to make Magic a better game. Well, today is that day. If you like articles that dig deep into the nitty-gritty of design, you're in luck, because today I'm going to illuminate a very interesting but somewhat complex concept. Enjoy!

It Depends on How You Look at It

So, a few years back, we realized that the number of new players were dropping off. This is a pretty scary thing to realize because it's the first sign that a business is in its decline. Retention of your current audience is crucial, but people will always leave, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the product itself, and in order to maintain the playerbase, you have to add new blood.

Thran Lens | Art by L.A. Williams

We spent a lot of time solving this problem and the answer to it is what we now call New World Order. You can read here for the full rundown, but the short version is we decided to cap the level of complexity at common because beginning players on average buy fewer boosters and thus a great percentage of cards that are relevant to them are common. By making the threshold for complexity at common lower, we were simplifying the game for beginners, and thus lowering the barrier to entry, while still keeping the more advanced cards in the game.

While working on New World Order, I started to look at game design differently. I began to ask myself what impact each individual card was having on each type of player. There are a number of different filters I started looking through (a topic for a different article), one of which was complexity. I asked myself with each card, "How complex is this card?" While answering this question, I stumbled on a new concept.

I think when most people look at complexity, they think of it as a scale. They deduce how complicated it is in general and then they place it at the appropriate spot. What I realized was that complexity, that is how complex a particular card is for a player to comprehend, varied from person to person. If you showed the same card to a number of players, the complexity value would not be the same. Now, I know what you're thinking. Of course, complexity would change. The more advanced players would find cards less complex because they have a better grasp of the game fundamentals.

That was expected. What was less expected was the discovery of the following phenomenon: Some cards were more complex to advanced players and less complex to beginners. What? How is that possible? The key is that some complexity is hidden, because it requires certain knowledge to even be aware of it. It turns out that some cards appear on their surface to be very simple, but once you understand more about how to use them, they become more complex.

I dubbed these cards—ones where they were simple to the beginner but more advanced to the experienced player—lenticular cards. The term comes from a technique, sometimes used on trading cards, where multiple images are stuck on a card with a system that allows you to see different pictures as you tilt the card.

The example I first used when I introduced the concept of lenticular cards to all of you was Black Cat. To a beginner, Black Cat is a two-mana 1/1 creature that has a nice surprise when it dies (the opponent discards a card). To the experienced player, though, the card is all about the death trigger. The threat of the death trigger influences how the card is played, something the beginner is oblivious to as he or she doesn't yet think about causality of play decisions. (I'll get to this in a minute.)

So that is what a lenticular card is. This leads us to the next issue, which is how do we identify what elements cannot be seen by beginners?

The Complex Games

To understand this, we must first identify where the complexity lies in the game. As I have explained before, I believe Magic has three different types of complexity:

Comprehension Complexity

This first type of complexity has to do with understanding what a card does. Put simply, can you comprehend the function of the card once you've read it? What does it do? There are a bunch of different ways comprehension complexity can rear its ugly head.

First, a card can use vocabulary that's not understood. A good example here is Grip of Chaos from Scourge:

While advanced players are well aware of the stack, it's not a concept that the majority of Magic players clearly understand. The reason we tend avoid using the term in rules text any more is because our testing showed that it continually confused players. I often talk about how we have to be careful with how much vocabulary the game uses because it's one of the biggest barriers to entry. When language gets in the way, it can make a card very hard to comprehend. (This is, by the way, why we began using reminder text on basic creature keywords in core sets.)

Second, it can have text that is hard to process. Dead Ringers from Apocalypse is a perfect example:

What does Dead Ringers do, exactly? If you have two creatures in play, one white-blue and one blue-red, and I cast Dead Ringers, will it destroy them both? The easiest way to identify this type of complexity is to see how many times a player has to read something to understand it. If the answer is more than once, the card has some comprehension complexity issues.

Third, the text can require too many things to process. A classic example of this problem was the suspend mechanic from Time Spiral.

Suspend had multiple costs, dealt with another zone, required the tracking of counters, and took place over many turns. All of it added up to create something that overwhelmed many less-experienced players.

Fourth, the text can be perfectly clear but because the card seems to be doing something you would never want to do, some players will be confused. The classic example of this is the card One with Nothing from Saviors of Kamigawa:

One with Nothing has but three words of rules text, yet baffles a lot of players. Why? Because it's instructing players to do something they don't understand why they would want to do. What happens is that players read the text and because they don't understand how it would be used, they assume they are misunderstanding something and thus convince themselves they don't understand it even though they comprehend the words.

In each case, the less-experienced player reads the rules text and is stopped because he or she cannot grasp what he or she is supposed to do with the card.

Board Complexity

This type of complexity is about how the cards interact with one another once they are on the battlefield. It's not that each card is hard to understand in isolation, the comprehension complexity on them often is low, but rather it's hard to understand how they all interact together. The classic example of this was Lorwyn and Morningtide, where the cards created this elaborate interconnectivity that made it hard for players to figure out what was possible on the board. It was very common for less-experienced players to walk into "on the board" tricks because they simply weren't able to track all of the possible connections between the cards.

Board complexity tends to boil down to several categories:

First is the subset of cards that affect other permanents on the battlefield. A classic example of this type of board complexity card that many players don't think of as being complex is Prodigal Pyromancer (and his predecessor, Prodigal Sorcerer)

The reason Prodigal Pyromancer creates board complexity is because in combat he has the potential to change the math of any fight. Because players don't know where he'll be used, they have to take in account each and every case he may be used, which makes the math significantly harder. For advanced players, who have learned how to shorthand the combat, adding in the additional factor is much easier and, thus, to many, doesn't seem like a big deal. (It happens to be a big enough deal that we no longer do the card at common. There's more reasons than just that one, but that reason alone is probably enough for the shift.)

Second is the subset of cards that are affected by other permanents on the battlefield. An example of this type of card is Wayfaring Temple from Return to Ravnica.

This type of card can be hard to track because it requires you to always be aware of other cards on the battlefield. For instance, attacking with Wayfaring Temple can get complicated when you attack with other creatures and have to factor in the Wayfaring Temple's power and toughness after combat has happened.

This type of complexity seems benign on the surface, because each card in isolation can often seem harmless enough, but as the battlefield fills with more and more of them they can quickly become very hard to track.

Strategic Complexity

This last category is about how the cards are maximized through proper play. Magic is a game with a lot of decisions. Some cards are complex not because they are hard to understand or complex in combination but simply because they offer the player so many options. As an example, let's look at Fact or Fiction, originally from Invasion:

This card is very powerful, but only in the hands of a player who knows how to correctly use it. Not only do you have to properly split the cards, but you have to be able to both judge the environment and your opponent to make sure you are valuing each card correctly.

This category is the broadest, in that there are many different ways for cards to be strategically complex. In addition, cards change values based on which formats they are played in, meaning that a card might be strategically complex in one format and less so in another.

I bring up these three types of complexities because they will become very important in a second as I start explaining the basic rules we've learned about lenticular design.

The Basic Rules of Lenticular Design

With the setup out of the way, let's start talking details. Here is what we've learned so far about lenticular design.

Distorting Lens | Art by Glen Angus

A quick aside. I am going to start talking about what beginners do and don't see. This is not me belittling newer players. The motive behind lenticular design is that we want to find ways to add complexity to enhance the game for the more-experienced players without increasing the difficulty for the less-experienced ones. We very much value newer players. Our attention to lenticular design is us trying to make both ends of the spectrum happy at the same time.

Rule #1—Some Complexities are Invisible to Inexperienced Players

When trying to understand what matters to less-experienced players, the following appears to be true:

Comprehension Complexity Board Complexity Strategic Complexity