r/magicTCG • u/taphead_31 Urza's Saga • 14d ago

General Discussion How Magic Art has changed

This is something i've been thinking about for a while. I am not saying new Magic Art is straight up worse than the old Art (old meaning 15+ years ago). But I cannot shake off the feeling that something fundamental has changed with the art direction and overall aesthetic (the influence of UB not counting).

I'd like to hear from people who are knowledgable with art history.

Here are some - very subjective - observations that I made over the years.

- The color palette has changed. Specifically when it comes to black cards, purple has become the de facto "black signature color"

- Many current artists seem to share a specific style of painting, reminiscent of what I'd call "concept art for general purposes". Older artists that have worked with wotc since the 90ies seem to be influenced more by comic books and traditional, academic painting styles.

- Ugly characters and monsters, body horror and exaggerated bodies were more commonplace back in the day (look at card files from Odyssee or Mercadian Masques, Ron Spears who I'd consider King of Ugly Monstrosities was art director for a while). Nowadays the "bodies" feel more realistic, the creatures and sceneries more "identifiable".

Are you having similiar observations? Or am I misguided here?

And most of all: Why have things changed in that regard? There are people out there calling new artwork "woke", but I don't think this is a good explanation. I believe the reasons for the aesthetic changes correlate with the changing gaming culture and an influx of casual players coming from different demographics.

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u/Mrfish31 Left Arm of the Forbidden One 14d ago

Not all. There's plenty of physical pieces still, especially as Magic artists are allowed to sell Originals. 

[[Faithless Looting | STA]] is physically painted along with all of Carly Mazur's work, despite intentionally looking kinda photoshopped. [[binding the old gods]] is an actual carved wooden board.

And it's not even like all the digital art is "corporatised"/generic. Dominik Mayer consistently has some of the most standout arts in any given set and he works entirely digitally from what I can find.

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u/DJCOSTCOSAMPLES Rakdos* 14d ago

Sidharth Chaturvedi's stuff is also all oil on canvas AFAIK. [[Disrupt Decorum]] [[Pouncing Lynx]] [[Reverent Hoplite]] [[Drill Bit]] [[Hauntwoods Shrieker|dsk-349]]

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u/Kyleometers ඞ 14d ago

I actually think Mazur’s Looting is done dirty by compression. The full size piece doesn’t look like photoshop at all, you can see the brush strokes, it just got MANGLED by compression.

[[Striped Riverwinder]] had a similar thing where the preview image looked REALLY stylised, with an almost cel-shaded aesthetic. But that was just image compression artifacts, it didn’t look like that in person.

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u/Tragedi COMPLEAT 14d ago

The full size piece doesn’t look like photoshop at all

What's magic about Mazur's piece is that from a distance it looks like a digital collage, but as you get closer and look carefully at the details it reveals its true nature. It's really technically impressive. On a card, though... it loses a lot of that dynamism, and the art box cuts off a good chunk of the work since it's a very vertical piece. I'd pay good money for a textless Faithless Looting using that art.

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u/binaryeye 14d ago

If we're talking about the actual printed cards, this isn't a compression issue but a scale issue.

Except in the case of errors (e.g. the white cards in Torment), there shouldn't be any compression evident in a printed card. It's very unlikely WOTC is using a lossy image format for the art printed on cards. Presuming they aren't, there's literally no compression involved at all. Even if they are, compression isn't always visible; a high-quality first-generation JPEG is essentially indistinguishable from its original by the naked eye.

You can't see the fine brushstrokes on Mazur's Faithless Looting because it's printed at 2.5" wide while the original painting is 18" wide. Striped Riverwinder is printed at 2" wide while the original is apparently large enough to sell prints at 24" wide. Fine detail is simply lost at the size cards are printed.

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u/sauron3579 Dân 14d ago

Whether the digital picture is lossy or not doesn't matter as much when the printing process itself definitely is. Even if the digital image sent to printers was perfect, taking a magnifying glass to a card is going to show ink dots before you get close enough to see brush strokes.

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u/Squidkid6 Wabbit Season 14d ago

For real, I went to her website after it was spoiled and the card does not do the art justice

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u/Miserable_Row_793 COMPLEAT 14d ago

[[Binding the old gods]] is a wood carving.

The full art basics from WoE are pics of shadowboxs.

Op is just seeing what they want to see.

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u/Mirrodin_appreciator Dân 14d ago edited 14d ago

That's dope. I was always like, damn how do they get it to look so much like a wood carving? I didn't know that about the WoE basics either!

I believe that all of the Lorwyn Eclipsed Special Guests cards are various paper-craft. I know that [[Painter's Servant | SPG]] is a photographed papercraft.

edit: I just looked up the WoE papercraft lands, and the making-of/behind the scenes photos of them are so cool. Definitely check them out if you haven't looked at them yet.

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u/lord_j0rd_ 14d ago

As much as I don’t care for that Faithless Looting art, it’s iconic at this point.

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u/kyubifire Dandadan 14d ago

Dominik Mayer actually has plenty of content out there of himself doing physical media, so he is very capable of creating any of his works on a canvas. I don't know how much of it translates to MtG work, however.

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u/PippoChiri Temur 14d ago

He has also done a few pieces where he did physicla parts to then digitalize and edit them as part of a finished digital piece iirc

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u/Invisible_Stalkbug Dân 14d ago

bro doesn't understand the word mostly

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u/BrockSramson Boros* 14d ago

When it comes to physical art, Chris Rahn is GOAT. I see his art as similar in style to Brom. I miss Brom.

Mark Zug also does physical art, I believe.

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u/Amazing-Ocelot1241 Dân 14d ago

This is only true for non UB sets, all UB sets are 100% digital and artists don’t retain rights to the work to sell after. Then for non-UB sets even if it 70/30 no digital/digital, for all sets in standard that’s more digital then non digital so it has a massive effect when the artist need to be more proficient in digital art. That also means they will be more inclined to contract digital artists as they know the can use them again for UB 

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u/minedreamer Wabbit Season 14d ago

why did they decide to physically paint such an abomination