aminomancer
New member
I love this game, but the cards look terrible on my 4K monitor. Tiny card art made sense in the early 2000s when a 1080p monitor was a luxury, and most users had dialup connections. Nowadays, most users have at least 300mbps internet connections. This card art is only going to get more dated as time goes on. The problem isn't going to resolve on its own, it's just going to get worse and worse until the comparison between MTGA and MTGO is comically silly. And at that point, buying MTGO will have been a bad investment for Daybreak. We're arguably already there, and MTGO is basically mocked but its uber-dated UI is just grudgingly accepted because of its other virtues and the somewhat paradoxical charm of its UI. But as you know, it's in your fiduciary interest to keep up with Arena as much as possible.
The improvements you've made to the game have been excellent. More progress has been made in the last year than in the previous 10 years combined, especially on the backend from what I can tell. But it's not enough to keep this game alive. The game is just so ugly it honestly makes me sad to play. It makes me not want to buy cards because they look so much lamer than they look on Scryfall. Until the UI and art are improved, the game will remain basically just a tool for spikes to get in a ton of reps to practice for serious competitive play. That really restricts the game's audience.
It won't capture much of the Commander market, even if you implemented every card legal in EDH, because the game is vastly less visually appealing than something like Tabletop Simulator, which is $20 but costs nothing for cards and can support any card. Personally, I would rather play in MTGO because 1) it handles a lot of systems that you have to do manually in TTS, and 2) your collection actually means something in MTGO, where cards actually have value, and 3) matchmaking. But I would only play in MTGO if there were some serious visual improvements. Even if you resolved the giant EDH card deficit (which it seems like there's interest in), I and many other players would still prefer TTS simply because it feels better to play. It's more appealing to look at. Aesthetics really matter, they can't just be an afterthought. Especially in software, especially in video games of all things. The soul of the game is transmitted through its aesthetics.
One of the main reasons I keep coming back to the game is because I love the alternate card arts, especially the borderless ones that have been printed a lot recently. Collecting the borderless incarnations from MH2 was very satisfying for me. But actually playing with them has been a disappointment because they're so blurry and covered in JPEG artifacts.
I know there's a core audience who would still play MTGO even if the art was downscaled to like 200 pixels, which includes me. If you play eternal formats competitively, this game is just essential, and it would remain so even if there was no card art at all. But that's a relatively small audience. To actually expand to new audiences, the game needs to look better. It doesn't need to be 3D and have flashy animations like Arena does. I think a simpler, gimmick-free aesthetic is actually better. But simply increasing the image quality would not be that hard, would it? It's not like you'd have to rebuild the game from the ground up in a new engine.
It seems like the simplest thing would be to provide a DIY option. I know where the image files are contained. I just don't know how to programmatically replace all of them with higher resolution scans. In particular, I have no easy way of creating art clips, like those featured on planeswalkers and lots of alternate card arts. And all of my changes would be replaced on an update anyway. So it's very hard to DIY it right now. But presumably you have internal automation systems that could be run on the high res scans from Scryfall. I mention all this to point out that you don't even need to serve the images yourself. If the reason you haven't improved image quality is that you don't want the expense of doubling (or quadrupling, honestly) your throughput, then you could provide a means for users to fetch the images from a third party. Scryfall already has an API. If there was an automation system for generating the art clips and for mapping images from said third party to the correct file paths for MTGO, then that would be good enough. Of course, it would be better if there was just a setting in the client that controlled image resolution. I just mean we can compromise. I'm a software engineer, I would be willing to donate my own time if you're interested.
The improvements you've made to the game have been excellent. More progress has been made in the last year than in the previous 10 years combined, especially on the backend from what I can tell. But it's not enough to keep this game alive. The game is just so ugly it honestly makes me sad to play. It makes me not want to buy cards because they look so much lamer than they look on Scryfall. Until the UI and art are improved, the game will remain basically just a tool for spikes to get in a ton of reps to practice for serious competitive play. That really restricts the game's audience.
It won't capture much of the Commander market, even if you implemented every card legal in EDH, because the game is vastly less visually appealing than something like Tabletop Simulator, which is $20 but costs nothing for cards and can support any card. Personally, I would rather play in MTGO because 1) it handles a lot of systems that you have to do manually in TTS, and 2) your collection actually means something in MTGO, where cards actually have value, and 3) matchmaking. But I would only play in MTGO if there were some serious visual improvements. Even if you resolved the giant EDH card deficit (which it seems like there's interest in), I and many other players would still prefer TTS simply because it feels better to play. It's more appealing to look at. Aesthetics really matter, they can't just be an afterthought. Especially in software, especially in video games of all things. The soul of the game is transmitted through its aesthetics.
One of the main reasons I keep coming back to the game is because I love the alternate card arts, especially the borderless ones that have been printed a lot recently. Collecting the borderless incarnations from MH2 was very satisfying for me. But actually playing with them has been a disappointment because they're so blurry and covered in JPEG artifacts.
I know there's a core audience who would still play MTGO even if the art was downscaled to like 200 pixels, which includes me. If you play eternal formats competitively, this game is just essential, and it would remain so even if there was no card art at all. But that's a relatively small audience. To actually expand to new audiences, the game needs to look better. It doesn't need to be 3D and have flashy animations like Arena does. I think a simpler, gimmick-free aesthetic is actually better. But simply increasing the image quality would not be that hard, would it? It's not like you'd have to rebuild the game from the ground up in a new engine.
It seems like the simplest thing would be to provide a DIY option. I know where the image files are contained. I just don't know how to programmatically replace all of them with higher resolution scans. In particular, I have no easy way of creating art clips, like those featured on planeswalkers and lots of alternate card arts. And all of my changes would be replaced on an update anyway. So it's very hard to DIY it right now. But presumably you have internal automation systems that could be run on the high res scans from Scryfall. I mention all this to point out that you don't even need to serve the images yourself. If the reason you haven't improved image quality is that you don't want the expense of doubling (or quadrupling, honestly) your throughput, then you could provide a means for users to fetch the images from a third party. Scryfall already has an API. If there was an automation system for generating the art clips and for mapping images from said third party to the correct file paths for MTGO, then that would be good enough. Of course, it would be better if there was just a setting in the client that controlled image resolution. I just mean we can compromise. I'm a software engineer, I would be willing to donate my own time if you're interested.
