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In the past we tried several strategies to make it easier to tell who “owns” which spells on the stack. Color was one of the first we tried, but I found that not only did it not help make things clearer, it actually made spell clarity much much worse. Also color can be tough from an accessibility standpoint for colorblind folks
I definitely think you all are right that situations like in the one pictured clarity gets pretty bad and I think we can make improvements for sure. We built some tools like showing hover states, and of course Oracle’s Eye to help. Thanks for bringing this up! I’ll certainly keep a lookout and make sure our clarity bar doesn’t slip. I appreciate the feedback
Maybe hovering over a card would highlight all the spells affecting it, and vice versa; hovering over a spell would highlight all the cards it affects, and the highlight color changes based on who owns the spells, this way; we can track red lines to enemy spells, green or blue lines to our spells.
Thanks for the suggestion! An overall goal of giving more info to players on hover is one I totally agree with especially since top level info can get so dense and complicated. One tricky thing with hover (there's a lot!) is that it isn't as useful for touch based devices (especially smaller ones) since we have to bring up the hover card itself and often that card will be on top of the targeting lines.
In terms of highlights we actually really try to only use 2 highlight colors Blue and Gold. Blue being the standard highlight color which means something is playable and Gold being something is playable with a special effect. I imagine you're more talking about the color of the target wisp or trail. In those cases we've mostly stuck with Blue for a couple reasons: Color can be tricky for colorblind people. Color can be very hard to balance on the various playmats plus during Oracle's eye
In any case that's a whole bunch of blah blahs & excuses, when really you provided some great ideas. I appreciate it and promise to keep an eye out since game clarity is something I'm really passionate about!
Thank you for considering colourblind players
we try!
I did the work for anyone wondering. Jinx player uses Get Excited (deal 3 to anything) to bring Swain health low enough for Jinx quick attack to kill him and live. Then karma player responds with Death's Hand (deal 2 to enemy and 1 to nexus) and 2 are used because Karma is levelled up (she casts a copy of the spell you cast). So now 4 spell damage is hitting the Jinx which will kill her. The Jinx player then uses Unyielding Spirit (a unit can't take damage or die) on the Jinx to keep that bitch going. The Karma player says well f**k Heimer then and uses Death Mark (remove ephemeral (unit dies at end of round or when it deals damage) from an ally to grant it to an enemy) on the octopus asshole and gives ephemeral to heimer. At the same time the Karma player uses Concusive Palm (stun an enemy and summon a 3/2 prick) on the Jinx players elusive (ha you can't stop my attacks) fish. Again because karma is levelled up she copies both spells and casts them on the same targets. In the end on the Karma players side she stays at the same health but loses the Swain, the 3/3 shadow man and gains 2 3/2 pricks. The jinx player loses the heimer, the Ashe and 2 nexus health but gains an unkillable Jinx. At least I think that's what happened here!
Whoa!