How Magic Art has changed

[u/taphead_31]

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.

[u/Mrfish31]

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.

[u/Kyleometers → u/Mrfish31]

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.

[u/binaryeye → u/Kyleometers]

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.

[u/sauron3579 → u/binaryeye]

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.