On this episode, we were inspired by Bloomburrow’s revision of “enters the battlefield” into “enters”. Shortening commonly-used rules text is like catnip for designers. It’s no wonder, either. So many cards look cleaner with that changed.
Tim was also inspired by MonoWhiteBorder’s recent design challenge submission which omitted two parts from the usual library search rules text.
Do you notice on first read that “reveal it” and “then shuffle” aren’t on there?
We even talked about other revisions. Could you automatically require “reveal it” when searching the library by default? Errata Demonic Tutor and other secret searches to specifically say so?
From there we talked about other basic pieces of rules text. Like “enters”, which always means “enters the battlefield”, what other things could change? How about cases where the owner is always obvious?
Original:
Shortened:
Moving from there, we talked about rules changes that might make the text clearer rather than just shorter. There’s always some ambiguity between “beginning of the next step” and “end of turn”. They aren’t the same place in the turn; can we do anything to clear that up?
Original:
“temporarily”
“for now” (bonus foreboding points on this one!)
Next we talked about alternatives to flicker/blink rules text. A temporary word we tried was “sparkle”, but just imagine some other nice word there:
Original:
With “sparkle” placeholder word:
“Once a turn” is always awkward on clauses that also start with “whenever”. It’s not “whenever” if it’s only once!
Original:
Prefix:
Ability word style:
Related to that, “if you do” is an awkward sentence structure. We couldn’t quite crack this one, but made a few attempts.
Original:
Some variations:
We’ve seen Discover recently, as well as more cards that “tunnel” through the library until they hit a certain kind of card. Surprisingly, the part of this that is easiest to trim is the end rather than the beginning!
Original:
With tucking:
With “find”:
Granting flashback is becoming more common and we wondered what we could do to integrate it more into cards. There are various ideas here, like defaulting to the card’s MC.
Original:
Condensed:
With “same as MC” default:
Not strictly flashback, but related. Like “finality counters”, we’ve seen cases where cards exile any spells they cast so it’s not repeatable. Here are some attempts.
Original:
“final cast”:
“with finality”:
There are some other big ideas out there, like how to convey sorcery speed, colorwashing, fetchlands, and more. What’s your pet template change?