[mxwsn]

Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire.

Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.

[awithrow]

Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.

[johtso]

I agree, I find so much of the art of modern magic cards completely uninspiring. They all look the same. Old magic cards had an element of the strange and the quirky. Sometimes the designs bordered on naive. Hand painted illustrations had a distinctly human touch. And the illustrations were punchy and had contrast. You knew exactly what a card was from a distance. A lot of the modern art is just polished, air brushed fantasy cliche. Muddy. Too much detail. A distinct lack of the surreal or abstract. Too thematically consistent.

Just compare an old set to a modern set: 1995 https://scryfall.com/sets/4ed 2024 https://scryfall.com/sets/mkm

An abstract oil painting https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/104/stasis An unsettling watercolour https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/181/cave-people

Sometimes less is more! Realism is boring.

[rendaw]

My favorite thing about the cards is they were little windows into a deep and mysterious world, hinted at further by the mechanics of the cards.

I thought it was just nostalgia, but looking at the sets you linked the 1995 one (I'd never seen) excites me while the 2024 does nothing... it could almost be AI. It's not just the same faces, but the same framing, same expressions, same "grand fantasy architecture", same MMO-esque magical swirls and sparkles, etc.

The abstract pieces weren't just whimsy, they felt like they could be based on vastly different local traditions or culture, history, or come from different time periods.

[schrectacular]

Note also that all those old cards were done on physical media, whereas today almost all the cards are done digitally. So the modern cards are much more _detailed_. Check out the Jesper Ewing cards like Frantic Scapegoat. He's notable for creating real paintings. To me they capture a bit of the old feel.

[tommit]

Minor correction: Jesper Ejsing

[sshine]

They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now.

A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like.

But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.

[sebastos]

I was going to write something similar: if I had been in creative control back in 1993, I definitely would have fallen for the trap of thinking that I was making things better by forcing the artwork to have a homogeneous, consistent feel to it. In retrospect, the idiosyncratic uniqueness of each card made it like a little piece of art that you could own. As a young kid, that made it so cool! I think a lot of young kids only bought a relatively small batch of cards and never even played the game much. I remember owning a scant few cards but that made me treasure my favorites that much more.

[scruple]

Nostalgia or not, I let myself get sucked back into MtG in 2021, after discovering the unofficial format Premodern [0], and a major component of that is the artwork on the cards in those sets with the black border. I'm sure it really is just nostalgia but I truly enjoy playing games in that format and looking at the artwork, especially cards which I've never really seen before because they weren't meta back in the day or cards that are just infrequent or that I'd forgotten.

[0]: https://premodernmagic.com/

[freediver]

Thanks for the link. Do you play it offline only?

[scruple]

I do, I have a small group of friends in SoCal that I play with a couple of times a month.

There's a thriving scene in Madison, Wisconsin and NYC, and abroad in Europe where the format originated.

[random42_]

D&D artwork was something else back then. I remember spending hours and hours just looking at it.

For anybody interested, there is a documentary about the history of the art in D&D: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8888186/ It’s quite interesting.

[orlp]

A very recent game that also captures this in a unique way is Balatro.

The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.

[mxwsn]

Thanks for the recommendation! Balatro is quite fun

[hobs]

And I will never be unsad about dominion.isotropic.org shutting down with its dead simple and fast dominion implementation, they promised to take it down if the company ever did its own thing and they did and you had to buy every expansion and it generally sucked.

[dccoolgai]

I was a big player on isotropic too. (I played Innovation after they shut down Dominion which was also fun).

The one at dominion.games really isn't too bad - not as good as isotropic IMHO but not bad either.

[yownie]

Big fan of Innovation here too, I'd recommend the version over on boardgamearena atm it's excellent.

[Dwedit]

There's two Dominion Online games now, one from Temple Gates Games where you buy expansions, and the other one from ShuffleIt which is subscription-based.

At least the Temple Gates version honors past purchases made on Making Fun dominion, even if they came from a Humble Bundle.

[barbariangrunge]

Board game companies make so little money, don’t begrudge them for asking for money in exchange for completely optional content

[hobs]

I begrudge no one their money, I would have paid 100 dollars for the good version of dominion, but I wont pay for a clearly inferior product that pushes out the good one, ever.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

So it seems like it went wrong when greed took iver and now there are so many cards that it doesn't make sense.

I love all the 3 games you mentioned, but not mtg because card packs should be illegal from my perspective (I know it's a me problem). they can say whatever they want, it is legal gambling

[gklitz]

I quite like magic the gathering online for this purpose. You can’t trade cards, so the gambling and trading aspect go away. And you get wild cards in packs so it’s easier to craft the specific decks you want. Also the rapid cycle of releases just feels more fitting here. I’la be away for some months now and again and come back to an entirely new challenge of cards and decks. I also paying is optional, you get enough resources just playing regularly that you join events and play drafts regularly. But you can also just pay to have enough to only play events if you feel like regular games become boring.

[indigochill]

Just a point here, you're talking about MTG Arena, which is the new online game. There's a much older game still called MTG Online which preserves the gambling aspect, where you buy packs and event entries for real money as well as trade cards with other users (and through a number of legitimate third parties, even buy and sell singles for real money). They even go one step further: if you can collect all the digital cards of a set while they have physical product available, you can exchange the digital set for a factory-sealed physical print run of the set (https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/redemption).

I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

It is still expensive, but yes, that way makes sense.

The accessibility of the game is poor in terms of rules, to properly play mtg you need to know a lot of cards (the rules are mostly on the cards).

I have been looking forward purchasing a deck of proxies to play with a friend of mine.

[dccoolgai]

Dominion is such an amazing game - the complexity that can arise from such a dead simple set of core rules is awesome.

It tends to break down with more than 4 or 5 players - I wish there was a version of it for larger groups to play online.

[yownie]

Do you know about www.dominion.games ?

[dccoolgai]

yeah, I have a subscription there - you can jerry-rig it so 5 or more people can play on that (by creating the table with slots and not having players wait to join) but the game itself gets a little unwieldy with more people