A Magic card can viewed as having two parts: functional and non-functional. The functional part of a card is what affects the gameplay: mana cost, card type, and rules text. The non-functional part is everything else: artwork, flavor text, name, or the aesthetics.
Players often evaluate cards based on functional properties only. A "good" card is a powerful card. This makes sense because most players play the game to win (myself included). However, sometimes I think it's interesting to evaluate cards from a game design perspective. From this viewpoint a "good" card generally means a "fun" card, since a game's purpose is to be fun. The functional properties of a card are extremely important for determining if a card is fun. It's not the artwork that makes people hate Stasis. However, I think aesthetics play an important, though more subtle, role in what makes a card "good" from a design perspective.
Another black removal comparison: Grasp of Darkness vs Victim of Night. Can you guess which one I like more? For this comparison I think the artwork is hands down in favor of Grasp. Looking at Victim... What, did he get mugged in a back alley? Or is he kneeling on a red mat? While "Victim of Night" isn't as bad a name as "Go for the Throat", I'd much prefer casting Grasp of Darkness. What's most interesting about this comparison, however, is the aesthetics of the rules text. This matters too. "Target creature gets -4/-4 until end of turn." Bam. Done. Elegant. Compare to (hold on let me look it up) "Destroy target non-Vampire, non-Werewolf, non-Zombie creature." Grasp of Darkness "consumes" four points of life from a creature. Victim of Night reads like an if-else block in a computer program. Calculating if I can make you a Victim of Night... are you a non-Vampire creature? Yes. Are you a non-Werewolf creature? Yes. Are you a non-Zombie creature? Yes. OK, then you're going to bleed on the wall.
Aesthetics matter, and it's good to talk about something that normally doesn't get a lot of attention. I act like I mathematically evaluate every card based on the functional properties, but you know what? I don't own any Go for the Throats and I never really thought about the ratio of artifact vs non-artifact creatures.
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