Leveling & Card Art: Why new players intuitively expect card art evolution

WEN card art evolution?

Side-by-side comparison of cyptic's art at Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 compared to an alt evo skin.

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Hope everyone liked the latest episode from WEN network! If you didn't catch it, please see the previous HIVE post here.

This HIVE post explores a few of the points raised by Jake and Ivy in greater detail. Especially the point about card leveling and card art evolution. To be clear, this is not a new idea. Nor is it even a new topic for the community. I've personally heard mutiple new players ask "why doesn't character art evolve during leveling" and "wouldn't that be such a great idea." Honestly, I agree with those folks, 100%.

One reason that Splinterlands resonates with me, and a lot of us, is because we grew up in a generation raised on card battling games like Pokemon. The idea of leveling up your own personal monster to make it more powerful is already prebuilt into our brains. Like for example, everyone knows that Charmander starts as Charmander, then turns into Charmeleon, and then eventually into Charizard.

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Just like we intuitively know that progression, and just like we intuitively get the concept of leveling up, we also intuitively expect that the appearance of the character will evolve. Usually, looking more powerful as the character becomes more powerful. This doesn't just go back to Pokemon, but really like Jake says in the WEN animation epsiode "it's like Monsters 101" for a game like Splinterlands. So why don't we have this?

I'm not sure if there's a specific reason? Like really I'm asking, does anyone know? It seems like it would be a good thing to get the game more in line with the main stream and attract new players, but interested to hear what others think?

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If you didn't see today's new game updates yet, they included some fun Halloweem skins which, by the way, are AWESOME!!! But which also prove that changing the card art is not overly impossible for the team to do on a logistical level. Also, the cards always change slightly when leveling, like the stats and the level bar. So again, changing the appearacne of the card doesn't seem to be overly complicated on a logistical level (someone correct me if that's wrong, but that's at least how it appears to me).

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The only conclusion I can come to is that there's a bottleneck in being able to create enough images to give every character new art at every level. If that's true (maybe it's not, and if there's another reason, I'd love for someone who actually knows to explain it in the comments🙏) ... but if a bottleneck of artists is really the case, I would love to see the team call on some of the community to help.

Just as a quick test, I made the Cryptic card skins above pretty efficiently. Yes, I use photoshop AI features but more like jet fuel, not like a crutch. It just makes it all go so much faster and more efficiently. Like the cryptic skins above took a few hours to make instead of days.

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And if you watched the last epsiode, you saw Ivy did something similar for Ilthain which also took only a few hours, instead of days:

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Do people like this style? Are people firmly against the use of any AI at all for card art? Interested to know what people think. Personally I like this style and I think a lot of new players would also like it too. But that's just my perspective and we all know art is very subjective.