The Forces are drawn

Forty of the fifty four cards are not entities. They are numbers, and what they carry is a Force: Blood, Dream, Swarm, Void. Until now those were the four marks you have seen on every deck of cards you have ever held, with the world done to them lightly.

They are drawn now.

Every one keeps its suit’s silhouette, and that is not a style choice I am free to make. Suit is the fastest read on a card. You scan eight of them in about a second, and a misread suit is a misplay rather than a cosmetic complaint. So each is the outline you already know, with something growing on it.

A bound Force wears chains, and the Void does not

When an entity denies a Force, the card in your hand says so. It has said so for a while, but it said it with an overlay laid on top of the mark. Now the binding is drawn into the artwork itself.

Blood and Swarm, bound.

Blood, Dream and Swarm get chains, because those three lose the power outright. The Void gets an egg, because the Void does not.

That distinction is the whole reason these are two drawings rather than one. Wards you play into an entity that denies the Void keep accumulating the entire time, and the moment a Heretic breaks the domain the whole banked total goes live at once. Chains would tell you to stop playing Void into the Ancient of Void, which is exactly backwards. It is the biggest swing in the game.

So: chains say held. An egg says waiting.

Where the drawing stops and the mark takes over

At the size a card sits in another player’s lane, the artwork turns to mush and the plain mark is still unmistakable. So below that size the drawing stands down and the mark comes back.

That is the deck’s own principle rather than a special case. As art loses legibility, the interface takes over identification. The name plate already works this way, and the small index in the card’s corner has always kept the plain mark for the same reason: at that size a drawing is noise, and the corner is what you fan a hand by.

What it took to get the shapes right

Two mistakes, both mine, both worth writing down because the second one hid behind the first.

I scaled the artwork past the box it sits in, which does not enlarge anything. It selects which parts of a square box paint, so it cut the point off every heart, diamond and spade and they read as square blocks. Fixing the shape did not fix the size, because the box I had put them in is the box for the little suit mark, and a correctly shaped smudge is still a smudge. They live in the card’s art frame now, which is where the Heretic already lived and for exactly this reason.

And the artwork arrived with a thin border drawn around it. Four pixels, in a file a thousand across, and invisible until you look at the transparency with the low end stretched. The build crops to the edge of the drawing, so the border was the edge: it set the shape of every card and printed as a rectangle around every suit. The build finds it and crops inside it now, per edge, because two of the eight have artwork running right to the boundary and must not be trimmed on a guess.