Are MtG Cards Ugly?

Do you think the card art has ever put people off from playing the game?

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No.

You're ugly.

They have that generic modern fantasy look that bores me to tears. I definitely don't want to actually buy the cards because of that.

At least pokemon does cute things with claymation and wildly different art styles.

yeah I really feel that the entirety of a magic card is heinously generic

You're generic.

Magic is the only TCG that was ever aesthetically pleasing to look at.

How is the artwork in the OP's card in any shape or form "generic modern fantasy"? Hyper realism isn't modern fantasy.

It is a miracle that this got printed.

Also this card feels late 2000s.

the OP art is not hyper realism, get real

It's just a guy on a horse. If someone just showed you the artwork in a big array of card art, you'd never be able to pick it out.
Magic has very few eye catching, unique and immediately noticeable art.
You stick this thing on someone's deviantart and it's just there. You don't think to yourself "oh that's a magic card", just just think, "oh generic fantasy art"

Post good art from other tcg's, if they're so great.

and for a long time for most time, the quality has been above average by miles ahead compared to other TCGs.

I can tell you are underage because the first sign of quality you are looking for is eye catching snowflakey uniqueness instead of actual quality.

They're just going to post Pikachu to prove their point.

*blocks your path*

Seb is basically the only currently active good artist for magic, and is far from the norm for magic art these days.
If I were trying to get into magic these days I would look at the cards and think "I don't want to play a game that they clearly don't care enough about making it look good that they would be willing to print this generic garbage fantasy novel tier digital art on their cards."

this

why are they so fucking ugly all the time? who's gonna tell these people hyper realism doesn't look good on tiny cards

Define good.

This BEWD art is only good because of nostalgia. The filename is right, it's more of an "iconic" art than a "good" one

So... ugly...

better looking cards in comparison

the humanoid cards seem to be the biggest offenders of bad looking art

Yeah man
Hyper-realism sucks

Bring back the old mtg art, right guys?

All five are pretty good, some are just better than others but that boils down to personal preference

I didn't notice the "smile" on Censor until now, it ruins the art a bit since can't unsee it

Some of the earlier cards have some questionable artwork, and others look pretty generic, but I think some cards look pretty great.

Eh

This is just the norm for mtg

A lot of forgettable art, quite a lot of memorable art too though.

Also Theros basics were fucking nice.

It varies. I think a lot of the cards like the fetchlands and original shocklands look great, and especially the cards from Mirrodin to around Return to Ravnica look great.

No

...

Daily

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reminder

In what sort of generic fantasy do you have shit like this going down?

It's a real shame they didn't make full art lands for ravnica

God that card is fucking hideous.

>"Fuck guys our art sucks shit these days, what do we do?"
>"How about we copy EA and just make everything blue and orange?"
And thus the Invocations were born.

this sort of 'epic!!!!!!!!' bullshit happens in 95% of DnD games

at this point I would be surprised if we don't make the transition to all land being full art soon

In that case I wouldnt call most D&D campaigns generic fantasy. if they pull shit like this then its a lol xd so randumb adventure. The point I was trying to make was that there are recent cards that dont fit under the veil of generic fantasy. That said, the card is just fucking hilarious.

I would say the average quality of magic art has probably gone up, but the art variety has decreased significantly which makes the art feel much more boring. Land art is still absolutely beautiful and there are a few absolute gems every set

I don't think the art is so offensive that people would stop playing because of it, but I can understand when people don't play a card because it is ugly.

My OCPD reigns supreme when it comes to MTG and aesthetics:

If an art piece is too deviant from the dominant style in a non-competitive deck or cube, I refrain from using the card.

I do not mix card borders. I do not mix text formatting such as "Comes into play / Enters the Battlefield" or "Put a token / Create a token". I do not mix lands or cards that have the (1) symbol with others that have the () symbol (this was particularly triggering when wizards made this change mid-block). I do not mix keyworded abilities like Fear, Menace, Reach, or Vigilance with old cards that have them pre-keyworded.
Foils are forbidden unless legendary / planeswalker. Full art lands are okay, but only if ALL of them are full art. No promos, no masterworks, no invocations, those get immediately sold.

It depends what you consider quality to be. Hyper realistic pseudo-photographs are ugly as sin to me. What's the point of art if it's just a photograph? is a great example of it. It's basically a photo slapped into a card frame. Look at that ugly brown gradient on the left had side, clashing horribly with the light blue card frame. Then there's the muscle definition which is completely pointless. Did those creases in the left armpit REALLY need to be there? You can't even see them in real life, they're tiny. Then look at . It actually looks like a painted picture. You've got a dark figure with some highlights of colour popping out, no hideous gradients to clash with the colour of the frame which I believe was gold. Hell this card didn't even see play but the art was super nice.

Most art on Magic cards these days is fucking terrible. Wizards needs to stop hiring bad photographers and start hiring artists.

Nils Hamm is still working

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>If an art piece is too deviant from the dominant style in a non-competitive deck or cube, I refrain from using the card.

Sadly this is far from uncommon and probably led to the whole magic having a fairly unified art style these day thing.

I kinda liked the old days when there were all sorts of different artists and art styles.

What's wrong with this?

As do I, it was far superior.

>better looking cards
>the scorpion literally has a logo on its face

Most mtg cards look like what most people would think if you said the words D&D which isn't bad but it's boring.

Occasionally we get some nice looking cards when they don't go hyper realistic or dude posing on generic mono background.

My favorite TCG art style is probably late Egypt YuGiOh, early GX cards. They had a distinctive anime aesthetic (bold curves, solid colors, heavy 2d style etc) but they weren't really 'anime anime'. You can look at all boosters from like 2005-2007 and they all look great.
Now all their art is literally anime characters playing dragons or spellcasters. It's pretty disgusting and completely took me out of the game, coupled with the newer broken mechanics.

a good example of these are the Ancient Gear archetypes and Six Samurais if you care to look.

That was about the uh

gravekeepers?

They all looks really nice. I know what era you're on about I think.

This card. THIS card. It's just a guy getting stabbed slightly-off frame over a noisy background. It looks like shitty promotional art that never made the cut cropped into the shape of a card by an editor with no artistic skill. How the fuck is this Exsanguinate? Of all the cards, this one replaced Consume Spirit or Drain Life as a black finisher, as it hits multiple targets, doesn't have shit clauses, and also can take more than black mana. It's a fucking travesty this card looks so shit. It's fucking Carl Critchlow, too. The guy who did Balthor, and Arcbound Ravager, Darksteel Colossus. How can someone shit the bed so hard?

yeah GKs all had pretty great art
all the Structure Decks from like 2006 which had each a tribal theme were also ygo's peak when it came to art.

honestly some of the xyz space themed cards looked pretty sick, yugioh has a bad problem of its art being super big fuck monster thing or anime girl every other card now though.

The claymation/ different art style idea is cool, imagine water color style cards, or hell go hyper realistic with it, see the fur close up on a beast or something crazy.

Actually, yes. I loved old mtg art. It had a lot of variety and character to it. Say what you will, but people like Foglio had an iconic style.

Seb, man. Seb

Bearer of overwhelming truths is also amazing

Some art is really fucking good but still looks meh on a little card.
And I disagree that they are sameish, Seb, rk post, Nielsen, Walker have very distinct art style. Artworks being streamlined is a fairly recent trend

Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff also has an iconic art style, but that doesn't make it any less abominable.

In this case, I mean iconic in a positive way. People like Foglio had a style that really captured the variety that Magic used to have. It felt like a game that a group of friends designed and drew up themselves. It had character in the art and you could usually see how the art went with the card.

Ye, it looks like they reused art commisioned for something else, like a murder effect.

Recent sets speaking, I really like the Glorybringer.

why is this scorpion working for bolas

I'd put this on my wall and show it to people, telling them how cool it is without feeling pretentious.

I'm usually fine with them unless they're obviously traced uncanny bullshit like most planeswalker are (since it apparently makes them cooler to some people) or ridiculous chara design like pic related.
Seriously, how does this fucking bullshit of a horse even eat? Does the guy who drew this even understood what he was drawing? You can just put spikes on something "to make it cooler" without understanding how the things can move with them.
How does it eat, why does it need such tusks? Can its neck withstand him charging some foe? Jesus Christ it looks so fucking retarded.

I don't get what you guys have against this art in particular. It looks more illustrative than most, wich is a pretty good point to me. Same reason why i liked the four original Oath arts.

Top left is pretty good. The rest stand between average and mediocre.

American AWSUM fantasy were EPIC shit and randomness must happen every footstep.
I like the punching bullshit theme with Surrak though. Guess I'm a tartuffe.

Problem is the art doesn't get enough space. Too much border/embellishment around the art. Full Art MTG cards all look awesome. Like the semi-transparent Gameday promos, Unglued lands, et al.

>At least pokemon does cute things with claymation and wildly different art styles.
Get out.

It isn't. They just plaster fucking logos everywhere. Just look at the original Innistrad block and Avacyn's collar.

Probably and/or he got two much shit asked at the same time and had to bungle this one.
Another fine exemple of a good artist producing some horrible shit is James Zapata with pic related.
Everything looks amateurish. The wings anatomy and perspective, the acid spray. The guy work fast, i doubt he spent more than one (or two hours but once again it would surprise me) on this crap.
Here are other exemple of his work.
cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/000/256/295/large/james-zapata-atthedaysedge-jameszapata.jpg?1443927547
cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/051/330/large/james-zapata-shewolf.jpg?1443927319
cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/000/383/308/large/james-zapata-dorf-final.jpg?1443927506

This is not bad art. This is bad presentation. The designers and design directors need to be replaced.

You can beat around the bush all you want, but at the end of the day, it doesn't change the fact that my eight year-old nephew draws better than both of the Foglios and the fact that they don't do card art anymore is something to be celebrated.

the borders look far less garish in person.

Having seen an invocation at my local prerelease... I do have to agree. I thought they'd be hideous, flashy things, but the card has this super-matte finish that I kinda actually like. If only they didn't foil the art so hard, they might actually look alright.

ironic.jpg

Not sure if it's the case with the invocations, but they are definitely using a new foiling method that allows them to put varying levels of foiling on different parts of the art.

The full-art amonkhet lands look fucking amazing in foil, drawing out detail differently in various parts of the art. Also got one invocation (Pact of Negation) and the foiling in that one isn't very glaring.

Which one did you see?

That's great fucking art. I really like that.

Some time around... Innistrad I want to say the art became a generic CGI fest that makes me weep for the art direction (or lack thereof) of old.

Oh no, blocks that are, creatively, religion-oriented have religious symbols everywhere.
It's like people don't plaster crosses everywhere to show that HEY THEY BELIEVE. Oh wait.

On a fucking wild scorpion, really?

The people who would be put off by modern Magic art are the same people who wouldn't play to begin with.

Magic art is generic fantasy. Very DnD, a little WoW (Azorious shoulder armor), and generally what you'd expect from "fantasy". Older art can be lower quality, but also has grotesque green tree elves and tentacle head wizards. More interesting, but probably a turnoff for people who want Legolas elves and sexy humans.

That being said, give Magic anime or Adventure Time art and you'd lose a good number of players who don't like those styles for whatever reasons.

My favorite block for art is the Shadowmoor set, since you get really colorful horror, and some more painting-like pictures instead.

ITT: people who don't know what hyperrealism means

Nicol Bolas works in mysterious ways

tree elves and tentacle wizards were basically just latter Onslaught block though - EVERYTHING in that block started mutating

>Do you think the card art has ever put people off from playing the game?

What, like playing Magic at all? No. That's stupid. That's retarded to even think about. There's like thirty thousand or so different card pictures in the game from hundreds of different artists, you'd have to be fucked in the head if you hated all of them.

Now, if card art makes people not play some specific individual cards, or specific versions of them, that's a more sane question, and the answer is yes. Sometimes an individual card just looks so much like shit that people will give up whatever gameplay advantage it has to not have to look at it. That's why it's important to have multiple different art versions for key cards, so that people have a choice.

Shut the fuck up you dumb bitch.

Nah, he's right. Leave, and take your salt with you.

You're so naive and full of shit. Obviously the marketing department mandates the use of symbols in each setting to promote brand identity.

>Problem is the art doesn't get enough space.

There's no way to give the art much space, the art is stuck there on a card and the card's dimensions can never change.

The problem is that modern MTG artists are instructed to draw as if the art is going to be poster-sized, but it's going to end up on a tiny little square of cardboard instead. All the detail vanishes. Look at Censor there, to pick a random example. It doesn't look like anything. Not because its badly drawn, but because it's so tiny.

A lot of the old artwork ends up working much better in practice, because those guys were aware that the end result was going to be 1.5 inches by 2 inches, not 1.5 feet by 2 feet, and everything they wanted to be actually visible had to be exaggerated as fuck.

>There's no way to give the art much space
All cards should be the size of the commander oversized cards, and full art

Yeah, they'd certainly be pretty then. They'd also be impossible to play with.

Huh

someone needs to outline this shit without the tusks. the damned horse has man-face, it even has a goddamned beard. also, it has the body of a bologna. these artists really have to stop re-imagining animals if they have no concept of how they're put together.

hell, the damned thing looks like it has to be hand-fed lest it succumb to starvation. they took a horse and turned it in to a pug.

Johanness Voss is my favorite out of hte current artists

Are people in this thread joking? Magic art in the last 5 years ranges from solid if uninspired, to great. A lot of these posts seem like they're coming from people turning their noses up so far they can't see the horizon.

My friends who play Yugioh think MtG has ugly looking art. Ironic, I know, considering Yugioh art is literally designed to look like generic Japanese grade schooler card game art because of the source of the show. They just say it because they are literal weebs though, they hate anything made in the West.

Yu gi oh is hyper overdesigned digimon shit. Magic is dull art sometimes, but it's well made. There is decent Japanese art, but not a lot of it is in yu gi oh.

the foglios were abominable

you could have mentioned drew tucker or something instead of that fucking trash

>how to cherry pick and lose friends

Topan freeblade was fucking great.
Solid art, solid card. Origins MVP.