Card art not matching characters

[ElNogal]

As I recently saw on Reddit, there are some users including me, which don't understand why you mix up character art on each characters cards. I mean, Sal haas many cards with Rook/Smith in the art, and I think this makes the game less consisten, as it doesn't really feel like you're playing a character if the art is all mixed up with the others. I think you should try to do some changes with this because it feels really weird to be playing cards that refer to a character you're not playing. I'll add a screenshot with the reddit post:

(reddit link:

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[pacovf]

I assume the reason is so that there is more variety in the art for each character. Kinda hard to make 60 card arts of Sal kicking / slashing / punching stuff that look distinct enough. Easier if you can shake it up by putting other characters in it.

[simonex93]

[ElNogal]

I'm sorry but I don't understand why it should be any difficult, you don't need to draw whole Sal's body or face to make a card, you can just draw anything but not other characters lol. For me it ruins a bit the immersion tbh. It's not that difficult to change the art of cards and in many other Deckbuilders characters dont have art mixed between them (Slay the Spire) just on Common Cards. Character Specific Cards should have Character Specirfic Art accordingly, but idk I won't stop playing Griftlands because of this or anything, but I think its a concept worth pointing out so Klei staff knows about it.

[pacovf]

For what it's worth, I am not enamoured with PCs appearing in the card art for others. I understand where you're coming from, this has been brought up before. But Griftlands already suffers from kinda same-y card art, so I would rather not make that issue worse by forcing all Sal cards where Rook/Smith appear to show Sal instead.

I went back to look at StS cards to see why the card art there is more distinct. I think it's because of two reasons:

- StS deck archetypes are thematic. Ironclad can master his blade, or make use blood/demonic magic, or become an unmovable tank, etc. These are all distinct concepts that can be represented very differently from each other. In Griftlands, Sal can have a bleed deck, or a combo deck, or a discard deck, etc. But they don't correspond to anything tangible, like say using her daggers vs brawling with her fists vs boosting her servomotors vs whatever. All the decks involve the same sort of thematic actions (mostly swinging her daggers).
- StS card art is a lot more abstract, even accounting for the abstractness of the theme. Even two cards with the same concept (e.g. swinging a blade) can look very different, because the art doesn't necessarily show the act itself. Griftlands card art is more "grounded". There's only so many ways to show a dagger slash... or people talking to each other. I do think they drove themselves against a wall on this point. We're starting to see some more abstract art in Smith's cards, probably because of this very issue.

Ultimately I don't see them changing the art of ~50% of their cards at this point of development. But one can dream!

[minespatch]

3 minutes ago, pacovf said:

Sal cards where Rook/Smith appear to show Sal instead.

But Seed of Doubt doesn't feature either character.

[pacovf]

Many many cards show NPCs, often as the target of an action by the PC (but not always). This is also the case in StS card art, for whatever that’s worth. I assumed that wasn’t part of the problem.

EDIT: or was your point that the cards with art showing other PCs could be changed to show NPCs as the targets instead? That would be fine with me.

[ElNogal]

yeah that thing would be fine, just not show the other main characters, it could show maybe pistols/daggers, other NPCs, whatever, but not Rook/Smith. It's not like you need to actually draw something representative of Sal on every other card, just make them inspired on her or on what the card is telling.

[TaschDraws]

I can see what you mean about getting thrown off by having character-specific cards but the art is of alternate characters, it could definitely be communicating stuff incorrectly or be confusing for new players. I was slightly confused too lol!

But I know I personally love the variation and wouldn't want the cards to be strictly one character only either -- I feel like the end result would likely make things look way too samey or sterile across the board. (I know it worked for Slay the Spire, but they have comparatively less cards at play and the world-building is a little less critical imo -- not that that's a bad thing, just that it seems like less of a factor in the gameplay).

So if the main issue is that it's not clear which character the card belongs to, what about a different solution? Like a unique border, badge, or icon or something to clarify that? Nothing that would clutter the card of course, but there's a fair amount of real estate at the bottom of most cards for something subtle...

[minespatch]

10 hours ago, TaschDraws said:

Like a unique border, badge, or icon or something to clarify that?

I could see color coded borders(but it'll probably mess with the type of negotiation and battle card colors).

[TaschDraws]

4 hours ago, minespatch said:

I could see color coded borders(but it'll probably mess with the type of negotiation and battle card colors).

Yeah maybe more of a symbol/pattern based thing so as to not have conflicting colors on the cards? Honestly I was kind of mocking an idea up for this last night so I'll have to go find it

[TaschDraws]

Okay so just to be clear this is not me fixing the cards or anything lmao - I'm no UI expert, this is purely an exercise for my own practice and kinda helps explain what I meant better than text can. (I am just slapping bevels everywhere with my gremlin hands though so don't look too closely at the details lmao).

[Mockup]

Spoiler

(In this example: A hammer alternating in a sneaky pattern on the bottom of the card to show it's Smith's).

Literally all this is trying to demonstrate is the fact that you can have something subtle indicating the character, and doesn't have to involve A. Restricting all the art to 1 player character only, or B. Trying to color code it and having it clash with the type of card, or C. Cluttering the card with huge symbols/labels. There's obviously way more approaches than mine but hope this reads well enough for the gist!

So if new players consistently have issues, then the devs may address it in a similar way...Though I do mean similar in the loosest sense of the word lol, I spent an hour at most in Photoshop on this when I was bored vs. what these guys can do like you've SEEN the obscene magic the UI artists have already wrought I've never thought a menu looked delicious before.

TLDR: if it came down to actually changing the cards, there's tons of ways to do it without limiting the art and we'll be in great hands regardless.

But also at the end of the day? Idk if it's really needed, because there's never any moment where gameplay requires us to keep track of who a card technically belongs to. And if there's no reason that we have to know whose card it is at all times, why not have some variety in the visuals? Helps the world feel bigger to me. <3 Eh that's just my rambly two cents thank you for coming to my TED talk and please don't hesitate to disagree with me haha