Over the past few years, Magic: The Gathering’s visual design has undergone some fairly radical changes. Where cards once came in one functional variant, now there are special treatments and alternate arts galore. This isn’t just because of Secret Lair anymore, either. Each new set contains several new art treatments, often more outrageous than the last. The latest instance of this trend is Edge of Eternities’ Stellar Sights Bonus Sheet, an addition that more than a few MTG players have a problem with.
Design decisions made on these cards indicate a shift in priorities for Wizards. No longer are legibility and functionality the most important elements of a Magic card. Now, visuals can, and do, come first. It’s a worrying extra step down a road we’ve been walking for a while now. When Mark Rosewater asked for the community’s feedback on this new style on Blogatog, the results were near-unanimously negative.
The Problem With MTG Stellar Sights
Ever since it was announced, the Stellar Sights Bonus Sheet has been a bit of a problem child. The cards spoiled for it have been deeply underwhelming for the most part. On top of that, the sheet’s lack of expansion symbol rubbed players the wrong way, too. The biggest issue with the sheet, however, is a pesky visual trick that it uses.
Every Stellar Sights card includes some kind of spacecraft, rendered on top of the text box. Some of these are relatively inconspicuous, like the ship by the card name on Contested War Zone. Others, however, actually obscure parts of the card’s rules text. Echoing Deeps is probably the worst offender, and the one that most players on Rosewater’s Blogatog post mentioned. Here, a purple satellite obscures a large chunk of the card, blocking out key aspects of its functionality.
Deeps isn’t an isolated example, either. Other Stellar Sights lands like Swarmyard, Endless Sands, and Celestial Colonnade, have similar problems. In a rare example of Magic: The Gathering community consensus, pretty much every response to Rosewater’s “What do you think of this?” question regarding them was negative.
For some, the problem was purely visual. Aside from covering up key parts of the card, many players just don’t like how the added spacecraft look. As Theroodinverse put it: “Not a fan. Mainly because I really dislike the spaceships. They look like plastic toys, or CGI effects.”
For the most part, however, the big issue was the obfuscation of game information. Cheesedurian2 put it concisely: “The tiny flying spaceships are atrocious. I don’t like it covering any text. I need to squint my eyes to know what the card does.”
An Ongoing Trend
For many, the above isn’t new. The game has been experimenting with out-there visual styles since the first Secret Lair drops back in 2019. This initiative has produced all kinds of visual oddities, from cards with barely legible text like the Ignoble Hierarch above, to cards with no text at all, like those in the Poker Faces drop. We’ve had so many cards in this genre at this point that players have even built whole “unreadable” decks out of them.
What’s changed more recently is that these kinds of cards have started bleeding into mainline sets. The Japan Showcase cards are a great example. These have shown up in a number of sets now, and some, like the Chandra above, have serious issues with legibility. The Headliner cards for the last couple of sets, Traveling Chocobo and Sothera, the Supervoid, even come in textless versions, eschewing functionality altogether.
Long-term, this is a significant problem for the health of the game. Magic is complex enough at a base level, but printing card variants like this adds an extra layer. Either players will need to have Scryfall on hand constantly to check effects, or they’ll need to commit them to memory. This legibility problem gets several degrees worse in Commander, too, where there are many more cards in play at any one time.
There’s an argument that players can simply choose not to play these versions of cards in their decks. The issue is that they can’t impose the same choice on their opponents. If you join a Commander pod and these cards show up, you’re out of luck. This problem has been partly self-correcting so far due to the high rarity of the cards involved, but Bonus Sheets like Stellar Sights make them much more common.
Fears For The Future
Unfortunately, the problem created by Stellar Sights today seems unlikely to disappear from MTG tomorrow. By this point, Wizards has made it very clear that it makes product decisions based largely on how said products perform sales-wise. This is why Universes Beyond is being pushed so hard right now: the players are voting with their wallets.
That we keep seeing more and more radical card styles, and in more sets, indicates that they’re being well-received overall. Until we see some serious pushback from players, I expect this trend to continue. In fact, it’ll probably get more outrageous over time. As Rosewater notes in his Stellar Sights post: “We are constantly experimenting with layouts. One of the boundaries is clearly functionality.”
The largely negative reaction to the post is striking, but at the end of the day, it’s only 60 comments on a relatively small blog. If the community at large is on board with Stellar Sights, then the next Bonus Sheet could be even more radical. Heck, it could be entirely textless given the direction things are going.
As always, only time will tell. Hopefully, Wizards takes the Blogatog feedback here to heart, mind you. Visual experimentation is important, but nothing should ever trump functionality. To signal the opposite concedes that Magic: The Gathering is becoming a game for collectors, not players, which is an outcome no fan of the game wants to see realized.
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