Post by kefke on Jan 6, 2019 13:21:43 GMT
As I try to get my team to work on our group project (which is like herding cats), I've been making various "proof of concept" cards. I've actually posted a few around on the boards here. One of the things to come out of this, however, was the realization that whatever form it eventually takes, our set would probably need a few reprints of real cards. So, I mocked a few up. When I did, I realized that I wanted to make it abundantly clear that my cards were not real cards. From interactions with my friends, I already knew that things like small print and a unique expansion symbol can be missed. I wanted something obvious.
The one that people have probably seen before is the purple border on the card. Borders already have some rules-significance, in that silver border cards immediately communicate the card comes from a joke set, and isn't legal in most formats, so I thought having a special "custom card" border colour would be a good tell. I wish I could say that this was some brilliant stroke inspired by purple-rarity cards being a special rarity. The truth is, I just played around with colours for a while, and the dark purple border ended up looking the best.
I started thinking that wasn't enough, though. So I added a second indicator, that I thought would be more noticeable.
...yeah. I put the word "Proxy" in the type line. Proxies are placeholders for real cards, so I figured that indicating a card was a proxy would mean it of course couldn't be a real card. Then I worried that it would be taken as a rules element, and to head off any questions of "What does the Proxy subtype do?" I made the text italic and parenthetical - like reminder text. My hope was that would make it clear that this was clarification, not rules. Since proxies are stand-ins for real cards, I only added this to reprints of real cards, though. It felt like calling a card that doesn't exist a proxy would be going too far.
When I got on these forums, though, I found that most people don't go to such lengths to distinguish their cards from the real thing. So here's my questions.
The one that people have probably seen before is the purple border on the card. Borders already have some rules-significance, in that silver border cards immediately communicate the card comes from a joke set, and isn't legal in most formats, so I thought having a special "custom card" border colour would be a good tell. I wish I could say that this was some brilliant stroke inspired by purple-rarity cards being a special rarity. The truth is, I just played around with colours for a while, and the dark purple border ended up looking the best.
I started thinking that wasn't enough, though. So I added a second indicator, that I thought would be more noticeable.
...yeah. I put the word "Proxy" in the type line. Proxies are placeholders for real cards, so I figured that indicating a card was a proxy would mean it of course couldn't be a real card. Then I worried that it would be taken as a rules element, and to head off any questions of "What does the Proxy subtype do?" I made the text italic and parenthetical - like reminder text. My hope was that would make it clear that this was clarification, not rules. Since proxies are stand-ins for real cards, I only added this to reprints of real cards, though. It felt like calling a card that doesn't exist a proxy would be going too far.
When I got on these forums, though, I found that most people don't go to such lengths to distinguish their cards from the real thing. So here's my questions.
- Am I going overboard/being too paranoid?
- Is any of this a good idea?
- Do purple borders look good? (Because I've actually grown to like them.)
- Does having reminder text in the type line "work" from a mechanical standpoint - and if not, what specifically makes it not work, and what are the mechanical implications of it being there?
- Is there anything else I could do to ensure our set doesn't get mistaken for official cards?