Quote from MrTheNilbog »This is some of the most ingenious flavor I've ever seen. The name, art and mechanics brilliantly and efficiently convey the story of a bunch of idiots who summon a demon and get eaten for their troubles. Whatever your opinion on the card's playability, you have to admit that that's pretty cool.
This guy gets it.
Flavor has a huge impact on how we perceive and experience this game. While it's all well and good to have powerful cards with streamlined abilities and stats paired with some artwork of a fearsome monster, at the end of the day a huge part of our enjoyment comes from the stories we create in our heads as the cards interact with one another.
Cards like this are examples of the very best Magic has to offer in ludonarrative consonance — borrowing the video gaming term — and they have a much stronger effect on our connection to the game than I think we give them credit for. There exists some inexplicable mechanism that gives us a certain visceral enjoyment when casting a card with a name and art like Feaster of Fools, then watching its equally aptly-named abilities unfold within the game's rules. The very same mechanism is the one responsible for our intense dissatisfaction when observing a scenario in which a card like Silent Submersible gets chumped by a 1/1 Goblin with no abilities.
Stripping away all the art and colors and inventive names on each card, it's clear the skeletal structure of the game is still quite beautiful to behold in a systemic and mathematical sort of way. But without the contextualizing elements — flavor — to guide our imaginations and tether our wills to the outcome of each gameplay scenario, Magic doesn't live and breathe as it should. That's not to say most cards lack an adequate amount of flavor, far from it in fact! I mean to say that designing cards with an even greater focus on this phenomenon, the gratifying fusion of story and gameplay, would do wonders for enriching Magic's overall gameplay experience.
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