Are you guys pulling that data from Oracle wording or actual printed card wording?
The data is oracle text. So some of the older cards that had keyword abilities spelled out (ie Vigilance) would have less words now than originally printed.
I don't think strictly looking Oracle would be a very good measure per se since the OP is complaining that cards are becoming too wordy. A number of older cards have had their actual word counts change because of Oracle and no other reason. I think you would get more relevant statistics if you use the actual printed wording of each set.
For example, Alpha and Beta show little change at about 2.75% and 1.83% increase in word count between printed and Oracle text respectively for the entire set. Weatherlight shows the largest change of at 21.88% more. Because Ice Age was mentioned, it has a 9.96% increase.
Portal and Portal: Second Age are at the bottom of the count showing a decrease in word count of ~23& and ~24% for the entire set. Nearly a quarter of the text discarded. I would bank this is due to the higher than usual reminder text present on these two sets. Antiquities is at the bottom as well with 11.3% fewer words in the Oracle compared to the printed cards. Conversely, Legends went up over 10.8% so age isn't strictly a factor.
On a nutshell, you're going to get different statistics if you look at the actual printed card since... well... that's what most people actually see when they play. Especially if they've been playing for any length of time.
I'm too tired to create a spreadsheet and a chart, I'll do that tomorrow if people are really interested in my results....
I don't think strictly looking Oracle would be a very good measure per se since the OP is complaining that cards are becoming too wordy. A number of older cards have had their actual word counts change because of Oracle and no other reason. I think you would get more relevant statistics if you use the actual printed wording of each set.
For example, Alpha and Beta show little change at about 2.75% and 1.83% increase in word count between printed and Oracle text respectively for the entire set. Weatherlight shows the largest change of at 21.88% more. Because Ice Age was mentioned, it has a 9.96% increase.
Portal and Portal: Second Age are at the bottom of the count showing a decrease in word count of ~23& and ~24% for the entire set. Nearly a quarter of the text discarded. I would bank this is due to the higher than usual reminder text present on these two sets. Antiquities is at the bottom as well with 11.3% fewer words in the Oracle compared to the printed cards. Conversely, Legends went up over 10.8% so age isn't strictly a factor.
On a nutshell, you're going to get different statistics if you look at the actual printed card since... well... that's what most people actually see when they play. Especially if they've been playing for any length of time.
I'm too tired to create a spreadsheet and a chart, I'll do that tomorrow if people are really interested in my results....
I'm interested man! Please post your results here. Just to be clear, you think that using the original printed text instead of oracle text may change the trend significantly? If that is the case, I can see it happening, but I find it unlikely. Maybe there is a greater chance of finding a trend if you 1) cut out the reminder text, not because it doesn't make the card wordy, but because it doesn't make it mechanically clunky (which was another of my points) and 2) take a look at the same graphic without core sets. Core sets were designed to be easier to digest, so they might be bringing the trend down.
In any case I don't think the changes would be that significant, but I'm curious about your results.
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I don't think strictly looking Oracle would be a very good measure per se since the OP is complaining that cards are becoming too wordy. A number of older cards have had their actual word counts change because of Oracle and no other reason. I think you would get more relevant statistics if you use the actual printed wording of each set.
For example, Alpha and Beta show little change at about 2.75% and 1.83% increase in word count between printed and Oracle text respectively for the entire set. Weatherlight shows the largest change of at 21.88% more. Because Ice Age was mentioned, it has a 9.96% increase.
Portal and Portal: Second Age are at the bottom of the count showing a decrease in word count of ~23& and ~24% for the entire set. Nearly a quarter of the text discarded. I would bank this is due to the higher than usual reminder text present on these two sets. Antiquities is at the bottom as well with 11.3% fewer words in the Oracle compared to the printed cards. Conversely, Legends went up over 10.8% so age isn't strictly a factor.
On a nutshell, you're going to get different statistics if you look at the actual printed card since... well... that's what most people actually see when they play. Especially if they've been playing for any length of time.
I'm too tired to create a spreadsheet and a chart, I'll do that tomorrow if people are really interested in my results....
I'm interested man! Please post your results here. Just to be clear, you think that using the original printed text instead of oracle text may change the trend significantly? If that is the case, I can see it happening, but I find it unlikely. Maybe there is a greater chance of finding a trend if you 1) cut out the reminder text, not because it doesn't make the card wordy, but because it doesn't make it mechanically clunky (which was another of my points) and 2) take a look at the same graphic without core sets. Core sets were designed to be easier to digest, so they might be bringing the trend down.
In any case I don't think the changes would be that significant, but I'm curious about your results.
I can post properly formated results when I get home.
I can parse and process the text any way I like. I just did a QAD program by looking for non-character boundries. This captures things like mana symbols as text and counts hyphenated words as two. It would just a few moments to parse them out seperately.
I included all three Portals because I was curious about how they were affected.
I parsed both the original card text and the oracle text using the same improved algorithm.
My previous post (about three up) blindly included reminder text. The new algorithm properly discards characters and words that are enclosed by both {} and (). This, I believe, removes both symbols and reminder text. I don't bother verifying if the text removed is intended to be text so if the card text has {}() anywhere, then everything between the two will be lost. This is obvious with the Dual Lands since the Oracle text condensed the entire text into a single reminder. Dumb but whatever. I didn't bother fussing with hyphens. If a word is hyphenated, it'll count it as two words.
It took me longer because I had an annoying bug where the parser was adding 1 to the word count if it discarded an entire block (such as reminder text). Took me near forever to figure out what was going on.
The numbers I came up with are rather revealing. Revised shrunk the most at nearly 22.7%, Exodus grew the most. What was surprising, even to me, was the total number of sets that increased. Not as many as I thought.
edit: fixed the cruddy formatting. It's a fixed width format.
Interesting topic. I've been playing since back when mirage came out and the only time I have noticed a real difference in card complexity and wordiness is between the core sets and the normal blocks. The core sets were always very noticeably simplified and lacking in complexity. Magic has always had some wordy and complex cards. I would say that the craziest cards, as in the ones I could not understand without reading through them multiple times, are generally limited to some of the really old sets.
Personally, I feel that there should be zero text in the rules box, only icons. Would be more visually interesting and also save WOTC some money on translation.
I included all three Portals because I was curious about how they were affected.
I parsed both the original card text and the oracle text using the same improved algorithm.
My previous post (about three up) blindly included reminder text. The new algorithm properly discards characters and words that are enclosed by both {} and (). This, I believe, removes both symbols and reminder text. I don't bother verifying if the text removed is intended to be text so if the card text has {}() anywhere, then everything between the two will be lost. This is obvious with the Dual Lands since the Oracle text condensed the entire text into a single reminder. Dumb but whatever. I didn't bother fussing with hyphens. If a word is hyphenated, it'll count it as two words.
It took me longer because I had an annoying bug where the parser was adding 1 to the word count if it discarded an entire block (such as reminder text). Took me near forever to figure out what was going on.
The numbers I came up with are rather revealing. Revised shrunk the most at nearly 22.7%, Exodus grew the most. What was surprising, even to me, was the total number of sets that increased. Not as many as I thought.
edit: fixed the cruddy formatting. It's a fixed width format.
Great work man, it got way easier to see once you fixed the formatting. It doesn't seem that it would affect the lack of trend though, since the changes are, as you said, minimal. Just out of curiosity, what language/program did you use to code the algorithm?
...so now the community's newest complaint is that there's too many words on cards? Is it too much effort to read all that text? Good grief....
I'm curious what makes people like you that have nothing to contribute to the topic come in here just to complain. In any case I made a justification in the beggining of my original post that I missed the simplicity I found in some sets and designs. Mostly I appreciated core sets for their clean design, and at least regarding them it appears that I was right, since they are a lot less wordy than other sets. However, I learned that the trend I was expecting to show up didn't exist. Meanwhile you came here to criticize something you barely gave time to understand. Good job.
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I think we should draw a distinction between "wordy" and "has lots of words". As Jay pointed out earlier, cards are a lot easier to parse now.
Let's look at your example of Birthing Hulk. How do we make this card have less words on it? Well, we could take out the reminder text on Devoid, but reminder text isn't bad. We could take out the description of Eldrazi scions, but then people need to start remembering the stats and characteristics of every token. We could take off the "Diamond means colorless mana", but there are tons of dumb LONG TIME players who couldn't get their heads around it, so I think the reminder is necessary.
So then we just have the option of making the card weaker. Take away it's regeneration or make it not spit out tokens, etc. But then people just complain about it being a worse card. Note that most people's attempts to clean up cards is to take away restrictions , i.e. make the card more powerful. Which I think is part of where the complaint is really coming from.
We can look at Hearthstone for a game where the text boxes are all very short. The problem is, a lot of cards don't "work" as printed. I can hand new cards to people who know the rules of the game and they won't always be able to tell me what they do.
Let's look at your example of Birthing Hulk. How do we make this card have less words on it?
Some possibilities come to mind:
1) Devoid can become an icon.
2) Regenerate can become an icon.
3) "When Birthing Hulk enters the battlefield" can become an icon.
4) "put two 1/1 colorless Eldrazi Scion creature tokens onto the battlefield. They have "Sacrifice this creature: Add Colorless to your mana pool." can be shortened to:
"[2] Token (Creature - Eldrazi Scion - 1/1 - Sacrifice: add <> to your mana pool)"
The basic idea is that keywords and major concepts like ETB can become icons and where it isn't absolutely necessary for a card to refer to itself, it can be omitted. ETB's are one such area. When a card ETB's it is obvious what card is ETB'ing, no need to refer to the card name. When a card can only Regenerate itself, again no need to refer to it by name. As to #4 above, it should be possible to remove words where the meaning can be implied. "Sacrifice this creature" can be reduced to "Sacrifice". "creature" is redundant because it doesn't matter to the ability that the card is a creature. "this" is also redundant because if not referring specifically to some other card, the only thing that can be sacrificed is the card itself.
I'm guessing only icons are doable as far as the suggestion goes, the rest are likely necessary from a rules standpoint for whatever reason. Though I don't know that icons would be a good long term solution.
1) Devoid can become an icon.
2) Regenerate can become an icon.
3) "When Birthing Hulk enters the battlefield" can become an icon.
4) "put two 1/1 colorless Eldrazi Scion creature tokens onto the battlefield. They have "Sacrifice this creature: Add Colorless to your mana pool." can be shortened to:
"[2] Token (Creature - Eldrazi Scion - 1/1 - Sacrifice: add <> to your mana pool)"
The basic idea is that keywords and major concepts like ETB can become icons and where it isn't absolutely necessary for a card to refer to itself, it can be omitted. ETB's are one such area. When a card ETB's it is obvious what card is ETB'ing, no need to refer to the card name. When a card can only Regenerate itself, again no need to refer to it by name. As to #4 above, it should be possible to remove words where the meaning can be implied. "Sacrifice this creature" can be reduced to "Sacrifice". "creature" is redundant because it doesn't matter to the ability that the card is a creature. "this" is also redundant because if not referring specifically to some other card, the only thing that can be sacrificed is the card itself.
Icons fall under the same problem as the "remember all of the different tokens" problem. As another game example, I played a miniature game called Hero Clix that my friend had and everything was represented by icons. We had to look them all up on the internet as we played, which made the game much harder to play.
In addition, your suggestions of shorthand for different things makes the card look a lot clunkier than the current. Also, people already have enough trouble with the rules as is ("Can this sacrifice itself?", etc.) already, so I think replacing "Sacrifice this creature" with "Sacrifice" would confuse people more.
I included all three Portals because I was curious about how they were affected.
I parsed both the original card text and the oracle text using the same improved algorithm.
My previous post (about three up) blindly included reminder text. The new algorithm properly discards characters and words that are enclosed by both {} and (). This, I believe, removes both symbols and reminder text. I don't bother verifying if the text removed is intended to be text so if the card text has {}() anywhere, then everything between the two will be lost. This is obvious with the Dual Lands since the Oracle text condensed the entire text into a single reminder. Dumb but whatever. I didn't bother fussing with hyphens. If a word is hyphenated, it'll count it as two words.
It took me longer because I had an annoying bug where the parser was adding 1 to the word count if it discarded an entire block (such as reminder text). Took me near forever to figure out what was going on.
The numbers I came up with are rather revealing. Revised shrunk the most at nearly 22.7%, Exodus grew the most. What was surprising, even to me, was the total number of sets that increased. Not as many as I thought.
edit: fixed the cruddy formatting. It's a fixed width format.
Great work man, it got way easier to see once you fixed the formatting. It doesn't seem that it would affect the lack of trend though, since the changes are, as you said, minimal. Just out of curiosity, what language/program did you use to code the algorithm?
I used Perl 5.20 because of the insanely flexible RegEx engine. The actual RegEx(simplified for your viewing pleasure) is
scalar (grep { $_ ne '' } $text=~ /[\(\{][^\{\}\(\)]*[\)\}]|\b(\w+)\b/g);
I could probably make it far more elegant, like removing the possibly redundent \b's, but I wasn't really in the mood.
Let's look at your example of Birthing Hulk. How do we make this card have less words on it?
Some possibilities come to mind:
1) Devoid can become an icon.
2) Regenerate can become an icon.
3) "When Birthing Hulk enters the battlefield" can become an icon.
4) "put two 1/1 colorless Eldrazi Scion creature tokens onto the battlefield. They have "Sacrifice this creature: Add Colorless to your mana pool." can be shortened to:
"[2] Token (Creature - Eldrazi Scion - 1/1 - Sacrifice: add <> to your mana pool)"
The basic idea is that keywords and major concepts like ETB can become icons and where it isn't absolutely necessary for a card to refer to itself, it can be omitted. ETB's are one such area. When a card ETB's it is obvious what card is ETB'ing, no need to refer to the card name. When a card can only Regenerate itself, again no need to refer to it by name. As to #4 above, it should be possible to remove words where the meaning can be implied. "Sacrifice this creature" can be reduced to "Sacrifice". "creature" is redundant because it doesn't matter to the ability that the card is a creature. "this" is also redundant because if not referring specifically to some other card, the only thing that can be sacrificed is the card itself.
Try studying UI sometime, you'll change your tune.
Sacrifice X is literally a requirement set down by other cards. If you include Sacrifice X on other cards, and not on Birthing Hulk then you've introduced inconsistency into the text, something WotC has been striving to reduce for some time.
More importantly, the more your text looks like code, the more likely you're going to scare away new people and, quite possibly, annoy existing ones. Not everyone can process and understand information that's been condensed so much that much of the information has to be inferred, such as in your example for Birthing Hulk. Toss in icons for keywords and you're just making the whole thing a mess.
And quite honestly, I for one, do not want to carry around a list of rarely used icons just so I can remember what they do. Nor do I want to spend time trying to infer information that should be on the face of the card anyways. I already spend enough time using my phone for rule verification and Oracle text.
What WotC is clearly doing is using the color background of a card much more.
Mechanics get special background colors, like Miracle has a specific effect on the cards and Devoid cards are much more pale, they have a distinct look.
hybrid mana cards have a very distinct color scheme aswell, at least the 2 color versions (sad they didnt do the hybrid mana color scheme for 3+ colors, but oh well).
The "Symbol" thing was tried in the past aswell and it is a bad solution, as people have to understand what a symbol means, and if they do, they probably understand what the card is doing without reading the card at all.
Newbie players dont know the symbols and its just a cluster of unknown symbols that doesnt help at all.
The computer game uses a lot of symbols and most of them are completly worthless.
The nice animation for "flying" creatures however is very intuitive and does its job excellent.
Also the tombstone symbol tried to tell players that the card with it had an ability that works from the graveyard, to make it easier to see your graveyard and just by its name see the tombstone symbol, as cards text is usually not visible in the graveyard (as you stack the cards).
However, thats also something that wasnt worth the effort. People just didnt notice that small symbol or couldnt understand what it means, until someone told them, at which point you could probably tell by the cards NAME that id did something from the graveyard.
So these symbol things are ment to help newbies, but just add more confusion for them, so they have no real purpose and distract from the text even more, which is also unpleasent side-effect.
I admit that at first icons would cause a problem, but over time, if the icons are well designed, people will remember what each icon means. Symbols stick in the memory better that words.
I admit that at first icons would cause a problem, but over time, if the icons are well designed, people will remember what each icon means. Symbols stick in the memory better that words.
So what happens in 5 years when a brand new player picks up a card with a Devoid icon on it and has no idea how the card works? Icons could possibly work for evergreen keywords (though I think that is a bad idea), but there is noway that having them for block mechanics would ever work.
I admit that at first icons would cause a problem, but over time, if the icons are well designed, people will remember what each icon means. Symbols stick in the memory better that words.
No they wouldn't. Even to this day, correct UI design specifies descriptive text reminder on mouse over on computer UI. This is something that can't be done on paper cards, period. Even if experienced players "get it" what about the new ones?
Second, the game is ever changing so creation of said symbols would literally require years of testing to get right for every symbol. That means a ton of real world user testing by people who has never seen said symbols. WotC already admittedly screwed it up with because they plumb forgot about the color blind players. I feel bad for the players with degrading vision having to look at . The portal symbols were just downright screwed up. Those symbols need to be obvious and I can guarantee WotC will get it wrong a few times. Imagine the errata on symbols or the Oracle searches involved. You already have to do convoluted searches such as {R} to search for mana symbols.
I admit that at first icons would cause a problem, but over time, if the icons are well designed, people will remember what each icon means. Symbols stick in the memory better that words.
Others have already gone over why it's an issue. This is not a solution for making cards less wordy. And part of the point of reminder text is so that people don't have to commit words or symbols to memory. Evergreen keywords and rare exceptions with block mechanics are where they tend to drop reminding people, or at least that's the stated intent. Making more things for people to remember, whether it's symbols or words, isn't a good solution. And I already know from trying to get others into the game that it's a big issue for newer people. I can only imagine how much more complicated it might be if they were symbols, especially when they aren't easy to depict like Flying. Something like Lifelink or Vigilance would be rather tricky to convey, let alone something like Prowess, which would make it that much harder to remember.
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I don't think strictly looking Oracle would be a very good measure per se since the OP is complaining that cards are becoming too wordy. A number of older cards have had their actual word counts change because of Oracle and no other reason. I think you would get more relevant statistics if you use the actual printed wording of each set.
For example, Alpha and Beta show little change at about 2.75% and 1.83% increase in word count between printed and Oracle text respectively for the entire set. Weatherlight shows the largest change of at 21.88% more. Because Ice Age was mentioned, it has a 9.96% increase.
Portal and Portal: Second Age are at the bottom of the count showing a decrease in word count of ~23& and ~24% for the entire set. Nearly a quarter of the text discarded. I would bank this is due to the higher than usual reminder text present on these two sets. Antiquities is at the bottom as well with 11.3% fewer words in the Oracle compared to the printed cards. Conversely, Legends went up over 10.8% so age isn't strictly a factor.
On a nutshell, you're going to get different statistics if you look at the actual printed card since... well... that's what most people actually see when they play. Especially if they've been playing for any length of time.
I'm too tired to create a spreadsheet and a chart, I'll do that tomorrow if people are really interested in my results....
In any case I don't think the changes would be that significant, but I'm curious about your results.
Read my other stories as well (some ongoing):
Reaper King (a horror story), Kaalia of the Vast (an origin story), Sequels for Innistrad (Alternative sequels for Inn), Grey Areas (Odric's fanfic), Royal Succession (goblins),The Tracker's Message (eldrazi on Innistrad) and Ugin and his Eye (the end of OGW).
Just look at this:
I can post properly formated results when I get home.
I can parse and process the text any way I like. I just did a QAD program by looking for non-character boundries. This captures things like mana symbols as text and counts hyphenated words as two. It would just a few moments to parse them out seperately.
Enjoy.
I included all three Portals because I was curious about how they were affected.
I parsed both the original card text and the oracle text using the same improved algorithm.
My previous post (about three up) blindly included reminder text. The new algorithm properly discards characters and words that are enclosed by both {} and (). This, I believe, removes both symbols and reminder text. I don't bother verifying if the text removed is intended to be text so if the card text has {}() anywhere, then everything between the two will be lost. This is obvious with the Dual Lands since the Oracle text condensed the entire text into a single reminder. Dumb but whatever. I didn't bother fussing with hyphens. If a word is hyphenated, it'll count it as two words.
It took me longer because I had an annoying bug where the parser was adding 1 to the word count if it discarded an entire block (such as reminder text). Took me near forever to figure out what was going on.
The numbers I came up with are rather revealing. Revised shrunk the most at nearly 22.7%, Exodus grew the most. What was surprising, even to me, was the total number of sets that increased. Not as many as I thought.
edit: fixed the cruddy formatting. It's a fixed width format.
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"People most likely to cry "troll" are those who can't fathom holding a position for reasons unrelated to how they want to be perceived"
Read my other stories as well (some ongoing):
Reaper King (a horror story), Kaalia of the Vast (an origin story), Sequels for Innistrad (Alternative sequels for Inn), Grey Areas (Odric's fanfic), Royal Succession (goblins),The Tracker's Message (eldrazi on Innistrad) and Ugin and his Eye (the end of OGW).
Let's look at your example of Birthing Hulk. How do we make this card have less words on it? Well, we could take out the reminder text on Devoid, but reminder text isn't bad. We could take out the description of Eldrazi scions, but then people need to start remembering the stats and characteristics of every token. We could take off the "Diamond means colorless mana", but there are tons of dumb LONG TIME players who couldn't get their heads around it, so I think the reminder is necessary.
So then we just have the option of making the card weaker. Take away it's regeneration or make it not spit out tokens, etc. But then people just complain about it being a worse card. Note that most people's attempts to clean up cards is to take away restrictions , i.e. make the card more powerful. Which I think is part of where the complaint is really coming from.
We can look at Hearthstone for a game where the text boxes are all very short. The problem is, a lot of cards don't "work" as printed. I can hand new cards to people who know the rules of the game and they won't always be able to tell me what they do.
Some possibilities come to mind:
1) Devoid can become an icon.
2) Regenerate can become an icon.
3) "When Birthing Hulk enters the battlefield" can become an icon.
4) "put two 1/1 colorless Eldrazi Scion creature tokens onto the battlefield. They have "Sacrifice this creature: Add Colorless to your mana pool." can be shortened to:
"[2] Token (Creature - Eldrazi Scion - 1/1 - Sacrifice: add <> to your mana pool)"
The basic idea is that keywords and major concepts like ETB can become icons and where it isn't absolutely necessary for a card to refer to itself, it can be omitted. ETB's are one such area. When a card ETB's it is obvious what card is ETB'ing, no need to refer to the card name. When a card can only Regenerate itself, again no need to refer to it by name. As to #4 above, it should be possible to remove words where the meaning can be implied. "Sacrifice this creature" can be reduced to "Sacrifice". "creature" is redundant because it doesn't matter to the ability that the card is a creature. "this" is also redundant because if not referring specifically to some other card, the only thing that can be sacrificed is the card itself.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
Icons fall under the same problem as the "remember all of the different tokens" problem. As another game example, I played a miniature game called Hero Clix that my friend had and everything was represented by icons. We had to look them all up on the internet as we played, which made the game much harder to play.
In addition, your suggestions of shorthand for different things makes the card look a lot clunkier than the current. Also, people already have enough trouble with the rules as is ("Can this sacrifice itself?", etc.) already, so I think replacing "Sacrifice this creature" with "Sacrifice" would confuse people more.
I used Perl 5.20 because of the insanely flexible RegEx engine. The actual RegEx(simplified for your viewing pleasure) is
I could probably make it far more elegant, like removing the possibly redundent \b's, but I wasn't really in the mood.
Try studying UI sometime, you'll change your tune.
Sacrifice X is literally a requirement set down by other cards. If you include Sacrifice X on other cards, and not on Birthing Hulk then you've introduced inconsistency into the text, something WotC has been striving to reduce for some time.
More importantly, the more your text looks like code, the more likely you're going to scare away new people and, quite possibly, annoy existing ones. Not everyone can process and understand information that's been condensed so much that much of the information has to be inferred, such as in your example for Birthing Hulk. Toss in icons for keywords and you're just making the whole thing a mess.
And quite honestly, I for one, do not want to carry around a list of rarely used icons just so I can remember what they do. Nor do I want to spend time trying to infer information that should be on the face of the card anyways. I already spend enough time using my phone for rule verification and Oracle text.
Mechanics get special background colors, like Miracle has a specific effect on the cards and Devoid cards are much more pale, they have a distinct look.
hybrid mana cards have a very distinct color scheme aswell, at least the 2 color versions (sad they didnt do the hybrid mana color scheme for 3+ colors, but oh well).
The "Symbol" thing was tried in the past aswell and it is a bad solution, as people have to understand what a symbol means, and if they do, they probably understand what the card is doing without reading the card at all.
Newbie players dont know the symbols and its just a cluster of unknown symbols that doesnt help at all.
The computer game uses a lot of symbols and most of them are completly worthless.
The nice animation for "flying" creatures however is very intuitive and does its job excellent.
Also the tombstone symbol tried to tell players that the card with it had an ability that works from the graveyard, to make it easier to see your graveyard and just by its name see the tombstone symbol, as cards text is usually not visible in the graveyard (as you stack the cards).
However, thats also something that wasnt worth the effort. People just didnt notice that small symbol or couldnt understand what it means, until someone told them, at which point you could probably tell by the cards NAME that id did something from the graveyard.
So these symbol things are ment to help newbies, but just add more confusion for them, so they have no real purpose and distract from the text even more, which is also unpleasent side-effect.
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So what happens in 5 years when a brand new player picks up a card with a Devoid icon on it and has no idea how the card works? Icons could possibly work for evergreen keywords (though I think that is a bad idea), but there is noway that having them for block mechanics would ever work.
No they wouldn't. Even to this day, correct UI design specifies descriptive text reminder on mouse over on computer UI. This is something that can't be done on paper cards, period. Even if experienced players "get it" what about the new ones?
Second, the game is ever changing so creation of said symbols would literally require years of testing to get right for every symbol. That means a ton of real world user testing by people who has never seen said symbols. WotC already admittedly screwed it up with because they plumb forgot about the color blind players. I feel bad for the players with degrading vision having to look at . The portal symbols were just downright screwed up. Those symbols need to be obvious and I can guarantee WotC will get it wrong a few times. Imagine the errata on symbols or the Oracle searches involved. You already have to do convoluted searches such as {R} to search for mana symbols.
Others have already gone over why it's an issue. This is not a solution for making cards less wordy. And part of the point of reminder text is so that people don't have to commit words or symbols to memory. Evergreen keywords and rare exceptions with block mechanics are where they tend to drop reminding people, or at least that's the stated intent. Making more things for people to remember, whether it's symbols or words, isn't a good solution. And I already know from trying to get others into the game that it's a big issue for newer people. I can only imagine how much more complicated it might be if they were symbols, especially when they aren't easy to depict like Flying. Something like Lifelink or Vigilance would be rather tricky to convey, let alone something like Prowess, which would make it that much harder to remember.