Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I want to talk about something that may seem as a necessity for card games, and that is keywords.

A keyword is any word that is used to shortcut a game mechanic from having a long block of text.

For example, in Magic the keyword of vigilance used to be worded as “Does not tap when attacking” or Attacking doesn’t cause CARDNAME to tap” until the set Champions of Kamigawa where vigilance was introduced.

Now there are plenty of reasons why keywords exist, in fact a lot of people think that there are there should be more keywords, but there are reasons why keywords aren’t always the answer.

What Counts as a Keyword?

Now a keyword is an interesting bit of language, especially because depending on the game what counts as a keyword is dependent on how it is written on a card.

In Magic, haste, trample, flying, and first strike are keyword abilities while Landfall, Sweep, and Metalcraft are ability words. Why? Well keywords have strict rules associated with the word while ability words have a common function, but not the same result.

For example, a creature with lifelink will always gain life when that creature deals damage, no matter what. If a creature has a Landfall ability, then the result of that ability will more often than not be different, just the action to trigger it remains the same.

If it will always result in the same effect if it’s on any other card, then it is a keyword, where if the same action triggers a different effect then it is an ability.

Now this is a quirk of Magic design and a lot of other games have simplified this to just focusing on keywords.

Why Keyword?

Now there is a perfectly logical reason why keywords have become so prevalent to card games, and that is to streamline card text.

If you have an ability that will always be in your game and is easy enough for a new player to understand, then you use a keyword to help a player understand what you are going for.

For example, the most iconic keyword in all of Magic is flying, which is incredibly easy for a new player to understand. A creature is flying, so creatures that can’t fly or reach it can’t block it.

It’s also helpful if a keyword is generic, so that when you print new cards in the future you don’t have to make a new word that means the same thing to fit with the theme of a set.

In Lorcana the keyword Evasive is their generic term for characters that can’t be challenged unless the Challenger has Evasive as well, and it can fit for any character they attach it to.

It can even be flavorful within the universe of the game, for example Star Wars: Unlimited has a keyword called Ambush, which means that the unit can attack an enemy unit immediately.

This is in flavor for the game because it is meant to signify a unit coming and ambushing an enemy unit when they are least expecting it, and it generic enough sounding within the universe that any unit could potentially have the ability in future expansions.

While Yu-Gi-Oh! does not have a lot of keywords, there are still a couple like piercing and excavate that helps shorten the text of cards, which is a common meme with the game.

“Yu-Gi-Oh! needs more keywords because each card is a novel!” is a sentiment that some players of the game make, and while I do agree with the reason as to why keywords are necessary. It shortens card text and makes it easier to streamline a rule set.

However, keywords are not always the answer.

Why do we not use Keywords in some cases?

The primary reason to not use keywords is that it can be a lot to offload onto new players of the game.

While a Starter product should have keywords defined via a rules text reminder on the card, especially if they are ones that will be commonly used in a game, there are times when a player sees a keyword that doesn’t have one and is confused.

The classic Magic example of this is banding, where the actual rules text for what banding does is a literal paragraph rather than a short sentence. There are specific interactions in how banding works, what creatures are part of a band, and how damage is assigned.

While banding is more of a meme because of how long it’s been since a format legal card has been printed with the ability it doesn’t come up often. What will come up more often are things like protection, which has specific things that it can protect like targeted removal but things that it doesn’t protect from like board wipes.

Unblockable was a keyword for a little while, but was changed to can’t be blocked because, according to Wizards of the Coast, there are a variety of ways that a creature cannot be blocked that it cannot be defined by just a keyword.

While Flesh and Blood is pretty good about having reminder text on their keywords, some of them are not very intuitive when you look at them.

For example there are cards with Stealth, which doesn’t do anything but there are some cards that affect cards with Stealth, so it’s more of a tag than an ability. A new player will not likely know that and that can lead to confusion on why Stealth doesn’t do anything inherently.

Even in Yu-Gi-Oh!, a game with a scant few keywords, confused me when I first saw the word excavate on a card. It just means reveal the top X cards of your deck and if it fulfills a condition for it to do an action, and if it doesn’t fulfill the condition it is returned to the deck in the manner specified on the card.

Keyword Bloat

The other major reason to not use keywords is dependent on how long your game has gone on, and that is keyword bloat.

Magic is notorious for this because it’s a 30 year old game, and in order to sell a set you need to have new mechanics and keywords to sell a set or simplify language, which means that you have a ton of keywords.

It isn’t reasonable that every player know every keyword, especially if some of them are variants of other keywords.

“Everything is kicker” is a joke in Magic because there are many mechanics that function like the kicker keyword, which means that an extra effect occurs if more mana is used to cast that card.

There are technical differences between the kicker-likes, for example Overload changes from a single potential target to each potential target, Offspring creates a token copy of the creature except it’s a 1/1, and Buyback puts the card back into your hand after resolution, but they boil down to the same base idea of the mechanic of paying more mana to get a better effect.

In Conclusion

Keywords are a necessary function, but they can cause some confusion for newer players.

Every set can be someone’s first set, so when designing a game keep that in mind. If your game is all keywords that have no reminder text, then a new player is going to have to ask what each and every one of those keywords mean, which slows down the game.

Of course some of them will be obvious as the game goes on, but at the beginning, making sure your players know what the cards do is a necessity for getting people to play and like your game.

But don’t be afraid of having too many keywords, because having no keywords can lead to really long cards that can also intimidate players.

As with anything in card game design, there is a delicate balance in what to keyword and what not to keyword.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual