Nine of them have faces

Until today every entity in this game was a line drawing. Good ones, I think, but drawings. Nine cards now carry painted artwork.

Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth and Yeb among the twelve. Nyarlathotep and two of the three Empyreans, Darkness and The Nameless Mist. Azathoth, which nothing reveals yet. And the Heretic, which is the first painted card that is not one of the Pantheon at all.

It is tinted, not pasted

The obvious way to put a painting on a card is to put a painting on a card. That would have been wrong here, because this game has eleven skins and a card has to belong to whichever one you are wearing.

So the artwork arrives as grey on transparency, and the card paints it in the skin’s own ink through the master’s alpha, then multiplies by the master’s own brightness. Colour comes from the skin. Modelling comes from the painting. The same file is bone on black in Original and black on cream in Woodcut, and I did not have to draw it twice.

Everything else on the card stays live: the rank, the Force mark, the name plate, the selection lift, the chains on a bound card and the egg on an incubating one. The painting supplies the creature and nothing else. It is not a flattened picture of a card, it is a card with a creature in it.

The card became an opening

One thing changed for every card in the game, painted or not. The frame used to be lit from the upper left by two soft gradients, which read as gloss on a printed surface. Against a painting it read as something worse: a lighter rectangle inset from the edge, so the art looked like a picture laid on the card rather than the card holding a creature.

The lighting was the fault, not the frame. A corner highlight says gloss. An even one says aperture. It is an even inset ring now, measured in the card’s own type size rather than pixels, which is why small cards no longer look far more vignetted than large ones. Nobody could say why they did. That was the reason.

What it cost to learn

Three of the masters did not match the specification, and each one taught the pipeline something rather than getting a patch of its own.

A master with no transparency is a scene, not a cut-out, and masking it by its own alpha yields a framed rectangle fighting the card’s edge. Alpha comes from brightness instead when that happens.

A creature whose densest part is not fully opaque prints faint. One arrived at seventy-seven percent of the skin’s ink and looked it. The build now lifts every master so its darkest point is full ink, which is a floor rather than a treatment: it cannot add contrast that is not there.

And aspect is measured against the specification rather than against filling the slot, because a master narrower than the card expects draws narrow and shows the frame either side.

The pipeline prunes its own output, too. Nyarlathotep moved from a Herald’s chair to an Empyrean’s, and the old file stayed behind, referenced by nothing, shipping in every deploy. An orphan is not an error anywhere, so nothing would ever have reported it.