Said somebody ever, you know those Karlov Manor cards that have one little difference so that you can import an Arena list in for some puny rewards? Yeah, do it again. Well this time we actually admit it, as shown by the fact these now have different collectors numbers than the normal version. Would be handy to know if your braincell still knowing during the opening of these packs that the main set list ends at 271 or simpler just that most monocolor cards are among the first 200 cards normally, so they’d start with a 1 or 2. Just put the normal number then end with an a like you did with that Mana Crypt you cowards.
Actually tallying up the cards, there’s the 2 mythic boardwipe enchantments, 1 rare permanent (all creatures except red artifact) for each mono color, one black sorcery and the golgari typeline, one uncommon for each of jeskai, one uncommon signpost, one common room and one monke.
Addendum: Using some basic programming skill, I decide to calculate the difference between the two versions of the cards. Like literally how many pixels are different. I’ll let Scryfall crop the art, since the actual cards actual have extremely slight misalignment even through they’re literally the same frame, somehow. Assuming the base image is 626x457x3 = 858,246 comparables, here are the total of colors having difference. The MATLAB code is C = abs(A-B)>=16; sum(sum(sum(C))) if you’re curious, the first two step being importing the two images into A and B respectively.
Well, in all fairness, this is just counting the raw pixels and the human perception looking at these cards definitely doesn’t work that simply i.e. a monster center in the art is definitely eons more noticeable than whatever’s closer to the card frame. That could be another formula of its own, so another day’s work.
+ BIG RANK: 7.70% ± 0.48%
+ Medium rank: 3.56% ± 0.19%
+ Small rank: 2.6% ± 0.06%
+ smol rank: 1.47% ± 0.10%
+ I have to recheck: 0.84%
I would not be able to guess that name looking at these cards, I don’t know these actual tropes I just want the feel of goth. In all fairness, it’s the exact kind of coolness uniqueness a showcase frame should strive to be, colorful art style (unlike the last 2 horror planes which goes for less colors more often than not with their showcase frames), dual color cards actually being distinguishable, the scary thing actually breaks out of the frame, readable text and the black border is intact. With that being said, the frame colors leave a lot to be desired. I get that they’re meant to have this techy feel to them (like back in NEO), but in these spoiler images that doesn’t quite fell through. Why is white cards this piss yellow, I get that a lot of materials do have white as yellow, but not this yellow. Black is this bright purple that blends really hard with the red that seems magenta-ish, honestly looking forward to see a Rakdos card with the two sides. The one land with the frame is this orange color, you get the point, not as brown as I wished. The same argument can be said about Blue vs. Artifact, if you’ve seen that Outjerk Envelope.
Onto the card selection. It is honestly about as random as Bloomburrow’s woodland frame. As if it’s truly cowardly that they don’t just put this frame on every single card in the set. And unlike Bloomburrow, the concentration this time is even lower, as will be shown with the number of cards with only the extended frame left. Add more to the sheer randomness is that now some uncommons get the frame too, just a few, for some reason. Let’s, try to, break it down:
Overall, blue tallies to the least, artifacts tally to quite a few and there’s quite a bit of wasted text box that lacks flavor texts.
You know that one split card in the Outjerked bonus sheet that got a borderless frame? Well, now it’s back to vengeance. Just so you know, not cutting the left black border makes the split card really annoyingly asymmetrical. Maybe you would notice the asymmetry even in the normal versions, but now just look at the right of the card. And to remind of how wonky the rooms frame is, these borderless versions still keep the reminder text. I feel like for the kind of people who would use one of these cards, do they really need the reminder text? Well, I guess the type line has to stay starched along either way, so why not have more starchy stuff.
And as the tradition now with showcase frames, we continue to disregard commons and uncommons. Only the 5 mythics and 5 rares get this frmae. It’s like 13 more cards worth of effort, what is so hard about that? And also the 5 rooms in the precons. Now let’s rank them by how connected they are, i.e. how well they used the borderless space:
Completely seamless: Mythic B, R, Rare B (Bonus: OTP’s WBG)
Artful divide: Rare W, U, UR
Colorful divide: Mythic W, U
Black divide: Mythic G, Rare WU
And right of this will be the art distribution of these first 2 proper frames. They both share an artstyle so there’s certainly a fair amount of overlaps. Overlaps with anything else not so much.
| Lenka Šimečková | 2 | Scott Okumura | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ivan Shavrin | 8 | Alexandre Chaudret | 2 |
| Cacho Rubione | 7 | Toni Infante | 2 |
| Alexis Ziritt | 5 | Calder Moore | 1 |
| Bastien Grivet | 4 | Chun Lo | 1 |
| Scott Buoncristiano | 4 | Neo.G | 1 |
| SchmandrewART | 3 | Oliver Barrett | 1 |
Given that the above frame already covers some monsters, why does this has to exist? Oh, so that you get a more normal palatte of the creature’s reflection to a human’s glasses or a glossy knife, or something. It’s just 7 cards in the generic borderless frame, still leave the question as to why. Well I guess they aren’t enchantment creatures, which is why they do show up.
The selection turned out to be 3 mythics for each of Temur, 3 rares of each of Grixis, and 1 last Rakdos rare. White just plain and simply gets nothing. All of the rares have the monsters show up in a human’s glass (or the spy kind), and the mythics have more creative means, green obviously has it lamest in the trio with the aforementioned knife.