Game designers have long recognized that visuals affect player experience. But how deeply do art and style shape perceptions of game balance and strength?
A new study by Leonie Kallabis, Timo Bertram, and Florian Rupp explores this question using the popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering as a testbed.
When the art style influences the perceived card strength
The paper, “Deceptive Game Design? Investigating the Impact of Visual Card Style on Player Perception”, presented at the 2025 IEEE Conference on Games, examines whether card artwork can influence how players judge the strength of a card, even when the card descriptions are identical.
Why This Matters
Visual design is more than decoration — it communicates information. In collectible card games, players continuously evaluate the strength of cards to build decks and plan strategies. If card art biases these judgments, it can have implications for:
- Game balance: visual cues could alter strategic decisions
- Design ethics: to what extent should visuals influence player expectations
- AI-assisted content: what happens when generative models create both text and art
Understanding these effects helps designers create more informed, fair, and transparent game experiences.
Study Design
The researchers conducted a single-blind survey with experienced Magic players. Cards had identical mechanics but differed in visual style:
- Cute and harmless: stylized characters, round shapes, bright colors
- Heroic and mighty: realistic proportions, strong postures, bold visuals
- No image: a baseline with no artwork
Large language models generated the card texts, and a text-to-image model produced matching artwork. Participants evaluated 15 cards, rating how strong they expected each card to be in gameplay.
Key Findings
Overall Perception
Across all participants, there was no statistically significant influence of visual style on perceived card strength. Heroic cards were judged slightly higher on average than cute ones, but the difference was not meaningful at a statistical level.
Card-Specific Effects
Analysis of individual cards revealed some nuances:
- About half of the cards showed small but consistent shifts in perceived strength depending on style
- A few cards displayed moderate perceived differences when comparing stylized art to no image
- One card showed a statistically significant difference: participants rated it stronger when no artwork was shown
Individual Differences
While there was no clear group-wide trend, individual players differed in how style influenced perception. Some favored cute cards, while others preferred heroic aesthetics. These personal biases roughly balanced out at the group level.
Additional Observations
- AI-generated cards occasionally violated game rules or resembled existing cards too closely, highlighting current limitations of generative models
- Even experienced players varied in their strength assessments of cards without any artwork, demonstrating the subjectivity of card evaluation
Limitations and Future Directions
The authors note several limitations:
- The participant group was mostly experienced and male, which may not represent the wider gaming community
- The study used a survey setting rather than active competitive gameplay
Future research could include more diverse participants and examine other genres or mechanics to assess visual bias effects more broadly.
Conclusion
The study suggests that visual style alone does not strongly influence player perception on average. However, personal biases and card-specific effects do exist so that there are indeed players that perceive one card style consistently stronger than another one. For game designers and AI researchers, visuals remain an important factor—not only for aesthetics but also for how players interpret underlying mechanics.
Lastly, understanding how visuals shape player decision-making is increasingly important in a world where AI can generate both game mechanics and artwork.