i think that revealing hands is one of those things that custom card designers often put on cards bc it seems like a minor upside. but it's secretly one of the most damaging things you can do as a designer.
often times when we evaluate what cards to put in a deck, we think about ideas like potential upside / downside, expected value, variance, etc. however, that idea can be applied to design too
so lets look at the upside of magic the gatherings system of hidden hands in general. hidden hands lead to bluffing, surprise, a complex system of possibilities we can imagine as a sort of "probability field". there's guesses upon guesses upon guesses, anything could happen. planning in magic is fundamentally interesting because we rarely know the contents of an opponent's hand for sure. if you revealed every single bit of hidden information in magic, the game would become trivial. so it's what makes the game tick on a fundamental level
the downside of the hidden information is? sometimes for new people it's difficult to reason about the hand, which leads to thoughts like like "my opponent counterspelled me once this turn, therefore they can counterspell me on everything forever". but a 1 shot hand reveal won't be there at the right time to help with that very often?
i have to ask, is hand revealing fun? what's the upside to you? as far as i can tell, it's all downside here.
because the downside is rather harmful to the basic thing that makes magic fun. a definition for fun i like a good bit is "pleasure with surprises", and surprises can come from many angles. most games use hidden information in some form or another. some games (chess, go) have a state space so complex that the interplay of that system is too difficult to store in one's head.
though, famously chess champion bobby fischer thought that this was a lacking in chess too. but magic is not even remotely such a game, most of the time. so, if you remove surprise, and don't add anything in return, it's very harmful
i think if you are revealing a hand, you better be doing something damn
important with that as a designer. it isn't always a problem to do so.
but it should be something you use carefully and highly intentionally. imo, it's a prized resource, not a tiny upside to be put on a card draw spell.
