The Problem With Whippoorwill
Trigger warning: this article talks about Magic cards.
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about cards. Which ones are best, which ones are terrible, how they interact, and so on. From reading all this, you’d think the most important thing on the card is the text box. Well, you’d be dead wrong.
The most important thing on the card is the art. And L5R has an art direction problem. The quality of the art has almost never been better, but the art and the mechanics are starting to drift apart, and that’s a very bad place to be.
The Problem with Whippoorwill
Maybe some of you play Magic. Maybe some of you are already familiar with the card Whippoorwill. It’s an unplayable card from an unplayable era. What it does doesn’t even matter. What it doesn’t do matters.
Just look at the picture. It won’t hurt you.
Here’s the thing about this card – it doesn’t have flying. In Magic, flying is a mechanic. It doesn’t matter what it does. But you look at this card. It’s a bird in flight. IN FLIGHT. And it doesn’t have flying. Players just assumed it did. By M:tG’s design team’s own admission, it was a huge mistake. If art comes back and it doesn’t depict a mechanic (or depicts the wrong one), they change the card. It really is that important.
The art is the most important thing on the card. People know there is a flying mechanic. They see a bird in flight. They assume the bird has flying.
The card art and the mechanics of the card need to align, or else it creates an actual negative play experience. Yes, I just dropped the NPE bomb.
Negative Play Experiences
Here’s what a negative play experience is for me – not knowing what the heck my cards do. I’ve been playing L5R for a very long time, and I know as well as anyone it’s hard to miss traits. They added bold typeface to try to correct the problem, but the bold isn’t very bold, and it doesn’t matter. Why not? Because the words aren’t the most important thing on the card. THE ART IS!
In the past, this wasn’t so much of a problem because mechanics were (for the most part) tightly contained within their home faction. You saw a purple border, it was cavalry. If design printed a purple border without cav, people would put it into their decks just assuming it had cav, and when their friends pointed it out, they had a negative play experience.
When you saw a guy with a green border, you assumed he had naval. When he didn’t and you played him in your raid deck, you got really upset and had a negative play experience.
And so on.
Aligning the Art to the Mechanics
Times have changed. Part of the impetus of the cavalry change (I assume) was to allow design to splash the trait to different clans. You don’t need every guy in your deck to be cav to get full benefit. Same goes for naval. So those get splashed around, which is great! The problem is the art hasn’t changed to match.
Perfect example- before writing this article I had NO IDEA Shigemitsu was cav
Look at these 4 cards. Does anything about their art say “I am cavalry”? Quite the opposite. Shungo is crouching on a mountain, in terrain that seems impassable to horses. Gensai is IN A TREE. Nozomi looks like a shugenja. And Shigemitsu is KILLING PEOPLE ON HORSES.
As L5R players, we have to take in a lot of information. Abilities are complicated, and there are a lot of traits. We want flavor on the cards, which adds more visual information. Design understands this. Why else would they have removed the clan traits? We can communicate that information via the mons and the colors of the cards. We should be able help the players out with the art, too.
How can we help? It’s simple. Give cav guys horses, or a magic carpet, or a wave or cloud or something they can ride. They don’t have to be riding it, just put it in the art, and make it clear it’s the personality’s horse (no, those horses in the tornado don’t count).
Put naval guys by the water.
Give guys with a ranged attack a bow. Guys with melee attacks should have big wicked looking weapons.
Duelists should have a sakura tree.
It’s all so simple!
But Jesse, that’s stupid
No, you’re stupid
Alright, seriously, I know people think it’s kind of silly. I always looked at Doji Mitsuru’s art and said, “gee, that’s literal”. But you know what? I never forgot she had naval, because she was on a boat. It doesn’t matter if it’s stupid. It matters that it clearly communicates what the card is and does. If she didn’t have naval, now THAT would have been stupid.
Look, a 4 chi crane duelist! Remember those?
I also realize that L5R is a game put together on a shoestring budget, held together mostly by love and loyalty in equal proportions. Sometimes design really wants to print a Crane guy with cavalry who can turn naval, but the slot was originally for a Crane shugenja, and they already ordered the art. What should they do then, smarty pants?
Easy, print a Shugenja. If the art comes back and there’s no horse, just take the cav trait off the guy. If the art comes back and there is a horse, raise his gold by 10 or whatever the “cav tax” is and give him the trait. It’s what Magic does. It’s a concession to the fact that the art is the most important thing on the card.
Unicorn Shugenja have been especially bad. None of these guys seem like they’d be cavalry. It makes me just assume guys like Chizura and Alani have cav, by virtue of being a Shugenja. But that makes me a stupid idiot, obviously.
Basically, I’m suggesting that the world would keep spinning if all the guys pictured didn’t have cav. If it’s so urgently important that they have the trait, the art director needs to crack some skulls and get the art the cards are supposed to have.
The Most Important Thing on the Card
I’ve been saying that line over and over again. It should be self evidently true. If it weren’t, we’d all just be playing with slips of paper. But anyone who has playtested that way can tell you it’s a miserable experience. All the cards blend together. It’s impossible to make the snap judgements you need to, because everything blends together.
Guess what happens when the card art doesn’t reflect what the card does?
Be honest, we’ve all made these mistakes. L5R is a ridiculously complicated game. I’m amazed it’s survived as long as it has. The team that produces it should be doing everything in their power to let us parse the cards at a glance. Ignoring art’s role in doing that is just foolish.
Agreed, randomly passing out traits to cards that lack the proper art is super annoying. And for crying out loud, this is l5r, if the art comes back wrong and you want a cav guy there, just can the freaking art, one guy from a clan and family is pretty much the same as any other, just create a backlog of personality art.
Not sure if l5r keeps much or any of a backlog, so I can imagine a universe where they need to use the art. Changing a card to suit the art though is simplicity itself. Add or remove keywords as needed. Considering the design of cards and the relatively low value of any keyword, it is unlikely that a major imbalance will occur by properly aligning the art.
All the unicorn shugenja you listed do look like shugenja except Kalsang’s art which was just poorly cropped. I think you meant to say “cavalry” because their art shows no indication of that.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. My bad!
Surprised there was no mention of the original Moto Tsume, who did not have Cav despite being on horseback, and the original Oni no Tsuburu, who had Cav despite being Jabba the Hutt.
Those are great classic examples. There’s a good example of a non-cav guy on a horse in Ivory (Ide Mutsuken).
Going back, the Onisu are great examples. Apparently kicking garden gnomes makes you mobile? The Tsuno’s art never looked particularly “cavalry” either.
But really, those cards are all from a much different time. L5R’s art has never been better now, so I feel more comfortable criticizing it’s art direction.
There was always a theory back in my playgroup in the olden days that somehow Oni no Tsuburu, Shikibu no Oni, and Moto Tsume’s art was somehow swapped, as mechanically you’d look at Tsume and think that he should be doing what Tsuburu was doing, and Tsuburu should be the guy that needs to eat people a la Shikibu.
Still not sure how true that is, if at all, but it made a weird kind of sense.
It’s easier to forgive the old sets because it was such a weird new time. I mean, we had two completely different cards with the exact same name (Hida Yakamo). Some of those past foibles are “Horiuchi coming out of a typo” charming, but seeing such things in current l5r is just head scratching.
“Duelists should have a Sakura tree.” Best thing I’ve read since Thanksgiving.
Mirumoto Nokkai
Why is this guy not Kensai?!
The minute I read the title of this article, I knew exactly what it was going to be about. This means a) I’m really old, and b) that’s a great choice for a title.