I'm creating this post to help everyone properly word their cards or to make the text look good, because I see a lot of mistakes repeated over and over. The way text automatically grows or shrinks dynamically along with the difference in size between many small paragraphs versus a few large paragraphs makes a definitive guide impossible, so just use this as a basis to make your cards look good. Remember that attribution counts as a line of flavor text. The left column shows the number of lines of rules text (including reminder text), while the right column gives you the number of lines of flavor text that will look good (expressed as a range, because you have some wiggle room). These are aesthetic concerns, so they’re going to be subjective, but I put together a chart that might help give an indication of how many lines of flavor text to shoot for on any given card. On the other end of the spectrum, if you have too little flavor text, the card might feel empty, like something is missing. If you have too much flavor text, just like rules text, the card will feel cramped and the text itself might need to be shrunk. “Said” is invisible – the audience’s eyes will glide right over it – and the less attention your dialogue tags draw to themselves, the better. ![]() To echo common writing advice, default to using “said” instead of a fancier word in your dialogue tags. If you’re using dialogue tags, the period at the end of the sentence should be replaced by a comma, and the dialogue tag functions as part of that sentence (its first word isn’t capitalized and it needs a period at the end). This is rare on Magic cards because it’s clunky, but it’s a tool in your arsenal.Īs you can see, you can either not specify who is speaking which line, or you can add dialogue tags like “he said” or “she whispered.” Personally, I find the first option to be infinitely more appealing on Magic cards, but it isn’t always an option if the audience needs to know which character is saying which line.Īs per usual, the lines of dialogue should be in quotation marks and separated by soft line breaks. In dialogue, you are quoting multiple characters. In quotations, you are quoting a character in-universe, and you use the rule we laid out above. In narration, the flavor text is non-diegetic (it isn’t happening in-universe) and you don’t use quotation marks. There are three main types of flavor text: narration, quotation, and dialogue. ![]() Note that the character’s name in the attribution does not have to be the same name as they have on their card. In summary, you can press shift-Enter after the quotation mark, hit the hyphen key twice to insert an em dash, and then write the character’s name (without spaces). You can insert hyphens by pressing the – key, and can insert an em dash by pressing that key twice back-to-back (at least in MSE). You still use hyphens for hyphenated words (like non-dairy). In Magic, you use em dashes-like this-which do not have spaces. ![]() The dashes I use throughout this guide – like this – are en dashes, and as such they have spaces separating them from the surrounding words. An em dash is longer than an en dash, and an en dash is either slightly larger or the same size as a hyphen. In flavor text, you should always use soft line breaks.Īs for the dash before the name in the attribution, the dash used is an em dash (-), not an en dash (–) or a hyphen (-). Soft line breaks are also automatically inserted when text wraps. You can create a soft line break by holding Shift while you press Enter. You can create a hard line break by pressing Enter.Ī “soft” line break moves to the next line without creating a new paragraph, and as such leaves a much smaller space. It creates a whole separate paragraph, and leaves a visible space. We’ll go over this one step at a time.Ī “hard” line break is a line break like we see in rules text. ![]() There is a soft line break between the quotation and the attribution, and the attribution is preceded by an em dash. Please note how the attribution is structured. Essentially, if the flavor text isn’t being said in the art at that moment, it should have an attribution (there may be times you want to break from this, but that’s at your discretion and happens very rarely). Unless the speaker is a character featured prominently in the art, the quote should be attributed – the flavor text should say who is speaking. Remember, punctuation in a quote goes inside the quotation marks, as such: If the flavor text is someone speaking, the spoken segment should be placed in quotation marks.
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