I was aware that Mitos y Leyendas' Genesis sets were generally disliked, and I was informed that this is where the game tried to very heavily take from MTG, losing its identity in the process. But up until today I had not actually seen cards from this era (I stopped playing right around the release of Guerrero Jaguar, which is still firmly in Second Block, before the Genesis sets dropped and the first run of the game sank with them).
So now, ladies, gentlement, everyone in between and beyond, I get to be angry about card layout design in Mitos y Leyendas: Genesis Era, and why it makes me mad
So, Mitos y Leyendas was born out of a sticker album developed by a company that mostly made sticker albums. This led them to a bunch of unique decisions: the game was remarkably simple since the original target audience was kids and teenagers. They opted for a simplified mana system and turned the cards remaining on your deck into the one way of winning. The game, coming from a sticker album, had full arts from the get-go and as such opted to present cards with the full art and the name on the side, which was unusual at the time.
This design language would stick with the game for very long, staying all the way until the Vikingos set in February 2009. But then the Three sets from Genesis happened and... just.. look at this.
... this is just a bootleg MTG card lol.
They split Strength into Power and Toughness, expanded the rules textbox and formatted it like MTG does. They added the type and subtype on top of the rules text box, and the rarity is also there. Flavor text now lives below the rules text and is in cursive.
Like, sure, the old designn of cards in this game has its own issues, and I won't pretend they weren't a thing, but like... the cards are distinct? I've seen few card games whose cards look quite like this. And it wasn't just the visual design: as the split of Strength into Attack and Defense stats show, the game went hard into copying more of MyL. It had its own color pie system, it even moved the draw step from at the of the turn to at the beginning before main phase, like MtG does. The desperation was palpable, and sadly they decided to drop a lot of what made this game unique. The failure of these sets, the 2008 economic recession, the failure of the live action movie and so many other factors led to this era being cut short, as Salo, the owner of the game, filled for bankruptcy in 2010.
The game would return in 2014, and it survives and thrives uup to this day. And to nobody's surprise, current cards look like the old cards. I appreciate this. What i lov of this game is not what makes it like MTG. If I wnated to play MTG, I'd just play that. What I love about it is what sets it apart, what gave it its very own identity. And I'm glad the current era of the game, while adopting some more modern conventions, was able to retain what made this lil game memorable and unique.
