Talk:Marker

Proposal: Split off a "Designation" page

I think there are enough "designations" that that section should be split to its own page, with a summary here mentioning the two main subcategories of designation (direct/not-just-a-marker vs only-indirect/just-a-marker mechanical relevance) and naming only the most highly-used examples — Saddled (most highly used as it turns out) and City's Blessing (the only player-specific one) for "just a marker" category, and Commander, Day/Night, Goaded, and Speed.

Note that a substantial majority of designations do not fall under "acts as a marker" clauses of the CR. Though to be fair, they actually DO act as markers as well; the CR only explicitly says "acts as a marker" for those designations that have no direct mechanical relevance and therefore can use the clarification of why they exist at all. So, I'm not saying these don't deserve to be mentioned as markers, just that it's more significant to talk about their roles as overall designations.

Relatedly, it seems very clear that when the CR says "this designation acts as a marker", it does not refer to what the lead sentence of this article defines a marker as - "a physical object used to represent anything that isn't a card". Indeed, the game rules do not require physical markers for any of these concepts, and for several of them a physical marker isn't even suggested or remotely necessary. So one reason a split might be beneficial is to separate the game mechanical concept of a "designation" from the physically obtainable products called "markers". This is an issue we sometimes struggle with, like when certain parts of the wiki imply "tokens" are the physically collectible token cards when in fact in-game tokens can be represented by any object at all, or even have multiple tokens represented by a single object like a die... I digress.

So yeah I might split this eventually but I'll look out for comments here before I do. - jerodast (talk) 08:22, 5 September 2025 (UTC)