4 Through the Ages

Probably ranking this one along with the BRO Retro Artifacts for the lamest bonus sheet names honestly. But well, you look at the cards and you kinda see why, you’re gonna be just lost for words of meaning for any of these things. Like eventually, you might just prefer the more boring box toppers of LTR than any of this. Which well, they sell in the Secret Lairs this time, even with some chance to get a design mistake reskinned as a FF character.

4.1 The worst frame

So, first off, let’s get to the elephant to the room, the horrific frame of these things, or even the lack of. This has been a very glaring trend in Magic lately, where a surprising amount of showcase frames started to omit things, like the background of the art, or the opacity of the text boxes, or the background color even. And now we have reached the pinnacle, no more card frames, all the text and mana symbols just float with these dumb thick text outlines like the anime cards, the set symbol is even completely gone (even though on the website they mocked up one). And also the curve at the bottom of the text box, usually it’s an eyesore, but now it’s just straighten and it’s just as much of an eyesore this way. At which point I just propose don’t make borderless cards period, now the proportions of text spacing and indent is even more pronounced how stupid they are.

You heard how bad this frame is, but well we can go deeper about how uniquely awful things are. First off, the original card name is now pushed to the left instead of the middle, because I guess not having a name box is gonna make stuffs like that happen. The text box now have to follow right from the typeline, which means they’re often way higher up than they should be. Granted, given the lack of a P/T box those stats got pushed up too and the UB stamp which needs a small outline too. But like this is the one time where you can totally push down the texts, there is no card frame logistics in the way. And not like you even have flavor texts to justify any of this pushing up.

Obviously, the legend crown? Forget about it. Any indication of a card’s color? Forget about that too. What are these abominations. Cool card types like planeswalkers or sagas? Let those stay with universe within I guess, it’s the better solution truly.

The actual reason for the set’s name is probably the fact that these cards have artworks of concept arts from some famous FF artists’ book. Honestly have they or even their managers look at these cards and think what a brutal mess of text have trampled their artworks? I don’t think you would write in your concept art book with such a thick outline, period at such a center place the text is literally on the charcter’s sword and not even aligned to the sword. Overall, I’m feeling this has to make sense to those finding Balan Wonderworld a good game, it was from the same publisher I think.

Also have you noticed how the collectors’ numbers are actually sorted so that all of the Amano cards are first before every other artist? Apparently it might be because of the unique artist copyright on the bottom left of these cards, so maybe I can take that into account if I want to think about reworking the MTG card frame. But well second reason is that they want to obfuscate the horrific color imbalance of this set, with the frame already not giving any hint to the cards’ colors already. We’ll rant about that soon.

4.2 The most random choices

Previous bonus sheets had clear mechanical reasons for cards to belong in, which I feel is the right way to come about it really. Granted we got pretty close to looseness with “prowess that do crimes” but well this time we’ll reach the Vorthosal conclusion. Which is: A lot will be commanders, but occasionally there are other things too.

First off, the commanders. These will have the most boring backgrounds because you know, sketches of characters need to put the focus on the characters not the place they live in, per say. You may remember one previous set of reimagining characters in a new context, I’ll nickname them “Bloomburrow’s fursonas” if you forgot. They stuck to a rule where they only can put a Bird in to have the art be a Bird, so no reimagining Thalia as any of the animals really. They managed to make fursonas of the planeswalkers because you know, the planeswalkers don’t have creature types, races or classes. Which eventually makes sense for the players but makes for boringness for me, but well the latter is also due to the art. Now throw that rule out of the window, and we got a Human with Dwarf in the typeline (FF does has Dwarves just you know), a Human is a Monkey and some other nonsense we’ll find out later on.

Secondly we got the other things, which have more interesting backgrounds since in a way, they’re more concept arts for vibes in the game more than just the specific characters. Which often have a habit of having things at the bottom of the artwork, so maybe that’s the way to justify the text being pushed way up. And now we got a new dilemma, a City is a Wall creature, in the same set where civilized lands got their type of Town, a banner for an MMO expansion showing a character roster is… a Brainstorm, a kiss scene is a Rhystic Study, and some other nonsense, like actual pixel art gameplay is put on this lack of card frame, which is hideously unfitting period.

Thirdly we get the worst offenders, early 3D graphics. I dunno about you but when there’s not even a Secret Lair wanting to do this “artstyle”, you might smell how bad this artstyle truly is, like I would even say as far as it’s harmful to the eye to see lowres images. It seems like 8, 9 and 10 are the games doing this crap. One could really say it’s for nostalgia goggles, but well then why don’t you put the old MTG frame on this right? The other conspiracy theory going around is that this crap is to save on licensing fees for the arts, knowing all well the set could totally pay for it either way. That probably checks out with how this bonus sheet turned out.

And with that level of shame, now you understand why these cards are only one in three pull rate in play boosters instead of the usual flat one per booster. At which point, the chance of opening one uncommon from this bonus sheet would be actually rarer than a rare from the main set, so is it even an uncommon anymore? Another reason not to put the set symbol in.

4.3 Two to the power of six

There were three different bonus sheets with 63 cards each, then there were two bonus sheets with 65 cards each. They divided that in this formation: 15 mythics, 30 rares and 18-20 uncommons. Which maps pretty well to color balance, whenever they have to do that, which is not when there’s just 18 uncommons or when the whole things are artifacts or when the main set isn’t themed around enemy pairs.

This time, we got something weirder. 15 mythics, same as normal right? 32 rares, now that’s weirder. Lastly 17 uncommons, so I gotta assume they convert uncommons slots to rare slots on a 1 U -> 2 R ratio. So it totals to 64, right in the middle. It would be such a nice number, if only Magic has just four colors, then it actually it wouldn’t be very nice since it would have just 6 color pairs and what do you do with the last two slots? Colorless?

Well, 64 is two to the power of six, what does that mean? You see, there are 16 Final Fantasy games, and if we were to give each game 4 cards, that would total to 64, simple at that. Thing is, as you’ve seen the rarity distribution, only the rare is divisible by 16. The other, instead of just not, do so by being just 1 away from being able to, which I consider the worst crime really. So that must mean the different games get different rarity sets, oh right, that’s how they’ll be biased, and you won’t even notice this time because there’s no set symbol on the card frames.

4.4 Normal set skeleton review things

Here’s how the colors are distributed in this bonus sheet. While the uncommons have proven its slightly normalness, the rares and mythicsh ave frankly achieved new levels of chaos. There’s a lot of stars in that table because well, buckle up, there’s a lot of imbalance here.

One form of imbalance is in whether a card is a commander or not. Which this set draw the line at the 3 quarters squared mark, pretty specific I know.