The Miller Mills Again

 He's back!

For the alternate art version of Varragoth, Bloodsky Sire, they brought back Ian Miller to do the illustration. For anyone keeping track, we haven't seen this classic fantasy artist's work on a Magic card since Weatherlight - that is, 1997. They haven't touched this guy in nearly a quarter of a century. Why not? Who were they making room for - another Eastern European schmuck named "Igor"? Regardless, it's a joy to see his art on a card again, and it feels damn fine to be vindicated by the fact that the piece is so killer. Hopefully we get more appearances put in by classic artists... if only they weren't all on promotional products!

Booster Shot

I had thought maybe I was just a grumpy old man, that I had outdated tastes, that I was needlessly afraid of change. Well, Wizards went and vindicated my stance without even realizing it. They have showed us their hand, admitted their mistakes, lifted the curtain to reveal the empty-headed self-sabotage beneath.

All this in a charming majenta package.

If you haven't seen the recent article, there's a new type of booster pack available that is guaranteed to have rarer and more valuable cards contained within... for a commensurately higher price, of course. This isn't a lousy idea on its face: if you want more rares and foils, you pay more money to guarantee getting something. $25 feels like an awful lot to risk getting a dollar-rare and a bunch of trash commons and uncommons, even in foil, which leads to the same bad-feelings I got from the various Modern Masters boosters and their variants. Nonetheless, I get the more-valuable-content-versus-higher-price dynamic.

What sticks with me is the unveiling of the new 'showcase frames.'



What we have here on the left is the 'normal' version of the card, which you'll see in regular packs. The one on the right features a 'showcase frame,' and from what I understand, you can only expect to find it in the new Collector's Boosters.
So a promo has a different look, so what? That's nothing new. But now that spoilers have started rolling out, there's a real trend of more "fairy tale-esque" art amongst the showcase versions of the cards. Primarily, this means more hand-drawn, fantasy-appropriate art, sometimes by older artists who work in traditional media.
See the problem? The "AAA Hollywood" design of art direction I've been griping about for years is had in regular packs, but the alternate frames with more traditional fantasy art can only be had by one method: buying the new, more expensive collector's pack. They're actually admitting that the old art direction has been deemed more desirable. They're admitting that the actual fantasy art is what people want in a fantasy game, so they're... charging more for it.
Fantasy art design is actually being held hostage behind more expensive packaging, and it's up to the players to pay up or settle for a more dreary-looking world. This isn't just taking things in an unpleasant direction, it's turning cozy immersion into paid DLC, in a move that somehow is even more greedy than the usual price gouging for limited print runs.

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.

 

Predator 2: The Death of a Premise

So, now this is happening.

Anyone getting tanked up to make a moral judgment about this criticism should consider that the auteurs of this harlequin fetus have a job in paradise creating entertainment products to sell at a markup. Their asses are covered, their motivations a mixture of personal creative ambition and company direction, and like any object d’art put forth for our consumption, and to consume our hard-earned dollars, it is the fairest of games. Fairer, indeed, than Magic itself.

It was with the weariness of a weathered pack animal that I slumped upon seeing the M14 Sliver reboot. It is not just that it’s unnecessary, ill-advised, implicitly insulting. It’s that creativity has found no purchase on the dull edifice of this undertaking. It precedes M14 like a corpse floating headlong down the Nile, fly-blown and crocodile-bitten, leaving us to wonder what homogenized horrors may yet come.

Slivers with male and female characteristics? (Can sexualization be far behind? Is the Sarah Kerrigan of Slivers on the horizon? Or is one Glissa enough?)

Sliver generals, ranks within the collective? Slivers in clothing?

A menacing Sliver planeswalker dropping one-liners on token-generation Sorceries?

“You’re about to get a bad case of... the hives.”

The mind reels and rebels.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the admission that this doesn’t matter. A set is no museum exhibit but a collection of mass-produced game pieces, and if the rooks and pawns carry the benzine stink of the industrial process, they will still play readily enough. The art itself is expertly done. In a year, nobody will care. We are just here to get on the record, you and I, that we may one day link back to this combined outcry of voices, having suffered for too lengthy an interval the release of sneering, talking slivers that look like Donkey Kong. Today is our Independence Day.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, look at this piece of shit: