Deceptive Game Design? Investigating the Impact of Visual Card Style on Player Perception

The visual style of game elements considerably contributes to the overall experience. Aesthetics influence player appeal, while the abilities of game pieces define their in-game functionality. In this paper, we investigate how the visual style of collectible cards influences the players' perception of the card's actual strength in the game. Using the popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering, we conduct a single-blind survey study that examines how players perceive the strength of AI-generated cards that are shown in two contrasting visual styles: cute and harmless, or heroic and mighty. Our analysis reveals that some participants are influenced by a card's visual appearance when judging its in-game strength. Overall, differences in style perception are normally distributed around a neutral center, but individual participants vary in both directions: some generally perceive the cute style to be stronger, whereas others believe that the heroic style is better.