Edit 3/08/2024: In May 2023, I made a daily habit of pressing the Random button on Scryfall and writing a tiny post about whichever card popped up. I kept this up for eight whole days and posted the first few entries here. Now that this blog has a slightly broader focus than writing about random Magic cards, I’ve decided to consolidate these into one post. I also added the remaining three entries that were stuck on my phone. This was fun, and I might do it again sometime.
#1: A-Warm Welcome
Why does this card depict one (1) butler in its art, yet generate two (2) Citizen tokens? Well, the original card created only one token—and if you’re playing in paper or a paper-faithful digital format, it still does. But the Arena-only errata has created a mild flavor miss.
Welcome. I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up, and I don’t know what’s on the menu.
#2: Timin, Youthful Geist
I quite like the “partner with” mechanic. It neatly sidesteps partner’s power creep problem by restricting the pool of available partners to one. More importantly, the pair-ups usually have a fun energy to them: wizard twins wielding fire and ice, a demon-angel couple, half of a D&D party, and so on.
Unfortunately, the lore for Timin and Rhoda does not tickle my fancy. If Rhoda was just a random person who befriended the tormented ghost of a murdered child, I’d be in. But their being a cathar really sours me on the affair; I find Innistrad’s pious unforgivably boring when they aren’t oppressing people or getting eaten.
Besides which, a cathar-geist team-up isn’t even unlikely: Innistrad’s spirits help humans all the time! Making the spirit blue instead of white is, sure, a small variation on the standard template. But it would have been sexier—maybe even enough to overcome the Church’s boring factor—to see a cathar teaming up with a werewolf, a vampire, a ghoulcaller, a demon-worshipping cultist, a frog, or just about any other monster.
#3: Man-o’-War
Man-o’-War resides in the Hall of Cards that Are Also Entire Categories of Cards. Just as every one-mana 2/1 is a Savannah Lions and every adhesive bandage is a Band-Aid, every creature that bounces another creature when it enters the battle is a Man-o’-War.
I had the chance to play with a flying Man-o’-War during the last week of SIR draft, and it did not disappoint. Eking out a victory by the skin of my teeth with tempo plays and incidental damage is my ideal game of Magic.
#4: Su-Chi
A four-mana 4/4 that generates four mana is perfectly on theme for our fourth randomly generated card.
It’s also our first card on the Reserved List, clocking in at $100 on the secondary market despite seeing very little play.1 Incidentally, Magic is what taught me that market economics are real. It’s hard to deny that cards are priced higher when more people want them or when (as here) fewer copies exist.
#5: Pearled Unicorn
Get a load of this relic. Over-costed and under-statted. Nested quotes, poorly formatted, cribbed from a real book. And best of all, the art isn’t up to snuff—not bad, per se, just not something you’d ever see on a real card these days.2
The artist, Cornelius Brudi, illustrated nine Magic cards between 1993 and 1995: two for the game’s debut, one for Revised Edition,3 and six for the Ice Age expansion. All nine share the same painterly style as Pearled Unicorn. My friend Eli knows a lot more about illustration than me, and they describe Brudi’s style as such (lightly edited):
“Painterly” sounds accurate to me, yeah. The brushstrokes are way more prominent, with large areas of relatively flat color that I’d describe as being more hard-edged—not always, there’s definitely blending, but (for instance) the clouds are super defined on the Wanderlust card. When the colors do mix more smoothly it’s within those areas, like the sky in the Mercenaries card or snow in the Goat and Wolverine paintings.
Newer cards, based on some cursory trawling of the Phyrexia set, blend and/or blur colors together for a more photorealistic style. Contrast and detail level are the biggest differences imo; even in relatively simple cards like Forgehammer Centurion and Duelist of Deep Faith, there’s some degree of background detail to ground the scene (Brudi’s Goat, Unicorn, and Cleric are much flatter portraits). Said detail is also much more meticulous; every joint on the little guys in Paladin of Predation is articulated, whereas the background Mercenaries disappear in the trees.
Probably the most TL;DR way I’d describe the difference is that Brudi’s art is more organic. It’s not graphic-design-logo flat, but there’s a lot less “every single hair must be finely rendered”-type detailing. (Contrast is also generally lower/less clear from a distance, although I’d probably chalk some of that up to age.) Reminds me of an old book cover illustration; the newer art is more shiny and realistic, but at the loss of “oh yeah, an actual human person painted this.”
Thanks, Eli.
The consistency of the photorealistic art style is plausibly important for things like “branding” and “immersive gameplay,” but an actual human person painted Pearled Unicorn, and it shows, and it’s pretty.
#6: Blessed Wine
“Draw a card at the beginning of the next upkeep” is a weird, old, bad design tool that confuses new players and creates tracking issues. Thankfully, it’s been retired, and now we get cards like Revitalize instead.
#7: Thunder Drake
Hell yeah, look at that goddamn dragon that’s also a stormcloud. God I love fantasy.
#8: Alter Reality
Today I learned that every card in Odyssey block with flashback has a headstone icon to the left of its name, presumably to make tracking easier. This is pretty neat and, honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they’d kept it up—not just for flashback, but for any abilities that function in the graveyard.
EDHREC shows it in 0.026% of Commander decks and MTGGoldfish in zero decks that aren’t Commander decks.
Except in a Secret Lair.
The card was Plateau. It was the only original dual land to get new art for Revised Edition—and thus the only dual land in Revised Edition that was misattributed to the original artist (Drew Tucker) instead of the new one (Cornelius Brudi). Perhaps as a result, it’s the only card illustrated by Brudi that’s absent from his portfolio.