Art Direction, Take Two

Is there a database somewhere that tells you which artists are commissioned for which cards?

This is clearly a rejected, yet recycled painting of Prying Blade, but art direction and gestalts dictate that this image is more focused on other things aside from the subject

This was also true for Rampaging Hippo and Defiant Greatmaw, and many others I've seen throughout the last decade. What's going on here?

On the other hand, I know fully well they aren't going to commission multiple artists to do the same card, as it runs afoul of their long-standing policy of paying as little as they possibly can for art. This hypothesis has a lot of possible evidence, but it's hearsay evidence, and it's ultimately unlikely due to the fact that Wizards are goddamn cheapskates. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that you may have noticed a lot of Eastern European nobodies creeping into the artist lists in the past several years. And on top of that, Wizards micromanage art descriptions way too much for this to happen in the first place... which is of course its own huge problem.

 

Pictured below is a section from an article on Wizards' official site detailing how the art direction process would work. It's taken from a post in 2002 showcasing the process that went into directing the illustration for Thomas M. Baxa's Havoc Demon.

Wow! That's simple indeed. He was given one short sentence to work with, and frankly, he didn't even follow it: I'm not sure I can rightly say that the Havoc Demon is shown flying in its art. But the results are wonderful all the same. You have a trained and professional artist who has an understanding of composition and focus, who produced an excellent and effective piece of work with a one-sentence prompt. The art all through the Odyssey block was wonderful, to be frank.

So with all these years of experience with which to grow, what does the art direction in Magic look like now?

Good heavens. This is the prompt given for the 2017 Masterpiece Series printing of Mind Twist, and frankly I probably didn't need to explain that since the picture is entirely laid out, line for line, in this description. There are three times as many headings for how the image is going to look, and six times as many sentences detailing what the 'action' has to portray. The hand of the artist is trapped in the meat grinder that is bad art direction, allowing virtually zero room for creativity. All of the game's art assets are now same-y and bland because no matter how many different artists they use, every picture is made by the same slack-jawed yokel.

So if Wizards has clamped down on art direction in the past 15 years, what does this mean? They're purposefully commissioning nearly identical pictures? Frankly, that's even worse. It's gotten to the point that the creative directors are so unimaginative and cautious that they're commissioning the same image multiple times, with only minor differences in angle and composition, without even realizing it!