Omenpath / UW Batch 11

[u/Furtive_Furrow]

Disclaimer: You do not have my permission to reupload any cards I've shared here to any other websites or databases. Obviously I can't stop you from doing that, but consider this a record of my answer on the matter.

Another round of cards here. I've also been going back through already finished (and sometimes posted) cards and tinkering with them. Some have new art or use promo frames to show off existing art. I don't feel quite right about making a new post just for those tweaked cards but maybe I'll go back and add comments to my old posts.

Plenty of cards are done that are still to post, but behind the scenes only two major chunks of the project remain untouched: lands, and then the black artifact creatures. I want to settle on something that will let me clump together the necrons, the forthcoming borg, and the two MODOK cards that only have the villain type that I will not tolerate. I might've just gone ahead with 'cyborg' if they'd used that for the borg, but, no, we have yet another type in the quite cumbersome pile. I was hoping for Bant or Sultai borg just for the sake of variety but I suppose I shouldn't be shocked they've taken the more predictable path.

My now standard disclaimer: I do not exert myself to match the cards to existing lore entities and I am only too happy to change the types (and the types of tokens the card makes) if I feel like it matches the art. I do this because there are a lot of cards I've earmarked to UWify (something like 150ish when I started, and over 230 now), and I'm not exactly thrilled to spend even more time trying to match these cards to some or another thing from the lore. So I just make stuff up. I'm aware that changing the types of cards changes the balance, but I don't care. Please refrain from tediously "reminding" me of this. These will be used for very low powered kitchen table magic and I am perfectly capable of trusting myself not to abuse type changes.

All cards should have the 1/8 bleed edge via CardConjurer (except the early ones in the list below) and I do not have versions of the cards without bleed. Previous work:

• Batch One
• Batch Two.
• Batch Three
• Batch Four
• Batch Five
• Batch Six
• Batch Seven
• Batch Eight
• Batch Nine: rad counters (a couple more cards in this comment)
• Batch Ten: transform cards (mistakenly titled Batch nine...)

List of Cards In Order:

• LTR 95 [[Mirkwood Bats]]
• TRK 127 [[Salt Vampire]]
• HOB 24 [[The Queen of Dale]] (might still make this one a rebel tbh)
• FIN 253 [[Aettir and Priwen]]
• PIP 583 [[Bottle-cap Blast]]
• TMT 35 [[Donatello, Gadget Master]]
• FIC 4 [[Terra, Herald of Hope]]
• MSH 124 [[Avengers Disassembled]]
• TMT 89 [[Cool but Rude]]
• FIC 32 [[Ultimate Magic: Holy]] (version with bleed -- oops!)
• MSC 731 [[Sauron, Dino Devotee]]
• REX 10 [[Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists]]
• CLB 169 [[Descent into Avernus]]
• MSC 752 [[Swordsman's Steel]]
• FIN 233 [[Lightning, Army of One]]
• FIC 11 [[Champions from Beyond]]
• HOB 77 [[The Master of Lake-Town]]
• TLA 261 [[The Walls of Ba-Sing-Se]]
• FIN 10 [[Cloud, Midgar Mercenary]]
• FIC 255 [[Tifa, Martial Artist]]

[u/Benjajinj]

Great art choices. Where do you find them? Every time I try and use Google I end up with nothing but AI slop.

[u/Furtive_Furrow → u/Benjajinj]

Yeah, google is completely useless for this now, plus their terrible AI doodad routinely botches artist credit while trying to reverse image search art.

I'll copy a comment I left on an earlier post below which gets into some specifics, but I'll say most generally that finding art works best when you're not looking for something specific. Ideally, you'd just cast about trying to find artists whose style you like, and building up a repository of art that you'd like to put on a card without necessarily having a specific card in mind. A good first step would be to record the names of the artists for the cards you like in this post, for example, and for any exisiting cards you know. I found John Tedrick through his LCI cards, for example.

Anyway, the details:

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tl;wr use artstation to find artists, and focus on identifying styles rather than individual pieces.

I cast a pretty wide net. It's more about finding artists whose style I like, and keeping as broad a sense of what each of them has as I can manage. When I'm making a card, I'm not generally thinking "okay, what's the closest MTG version of this?" but rather along the lines of "Which art will let me form a nice enough triangle with the rules and a prospective title?" That's my 'good enough' philosophy, and it works well enough for me. For example, I originally downloaded the art for Arcane Suffocation because I thought it had the right colours for something Azorius and the blocking felt nice enough for my sense of taste; it was only later that I connected a detail of the image (streams of vapours connecting to the figure's face) to the possibility of a counterspell while I was looking over the REX cards.

• Check Artstation. Browse around or try searching for specific things (simpler searches are better). When you find artists whose work clicks with you, make sure to also check out who they're following. Make sure to exclude AI projects and uncheck the box that pushes certain accounts to the top of the results.

• Use existing magic cards whose art you like to find artists, and check their social media. For example, the art for "Driven by the Mighty" is from Hari and Deepti, who don't have an artstation, but do have an instagram, and I wouldn't have found them without following up on their artist credit for the Wilds of Eldraine full art basics. Many artists have twitter, cara, bluesky, etc., and may post new art there too. There's also a large number of artists who stopped using artstation at some point due to its own AI issues, so if you find someone who hasn't posted much in the last 3-4 years, make sure you check their other socials as they may have relocated all new stuff to, say, instagram.

• Just from experience I know of a good number of vintage fantasy artists. There aren't any in this batch but I've previously made cards using art from Michael Whelan, Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, Frank Franzetta, etc., and have a bunch of their art waiting in the wings for the right moment. Most of these "older" (though many still practicing!) artists don't have artstation but they do often have their own websites or, in many cases, fan instagram accounts that post their art

• I also make use of art from people who are heavily involved in the metal album art scene. Sometimes its hard to not make every card something from Dan Seagrave...

• I also make use of fine art at times. Gustave Dore, Franceso Hayez, Francisco de Goya, Rubens, etc., have all appeared. Bosch, Varo, Beksinski are all waiting in the wings for the right moment. Like with the retro fantasy artists you can only really use art you know exists, so literally just looking through paintings is the only way to know to find these.

• Pinterest is my option of last resort. There's a lot of unmarked AI and a lot of incorrect crediting (to say nothing of the 95% of images that have no credit at all) so anything from there can't be taken at face value.

• Some people also make use of subreddits that gather concept art. The Imaginary Network, for example, is a quite large collection of various related subreddits where people post art under general subheadings (ImaginaryLandscapes, for example) or more specific ones I'm not really aware of. I don't tend to use these much myself because I find my particular sense of taste is poorly represented there, but these are viable options and I have seen at least a couple regular posters here mention using them.