If the Jumpstart theory were to hold true, then maybe the fact that we have just this few showcase cards does make a bit of sense. Which also makes the fact that none of these will be having any flavor text (unless otherwise noted) more sad.

4.1 Generic vertical frame

There’re two subsets of cards to note here, each are individually very small so these totals to frankly not a lot.

One is the cycle of DFC Sagas. There are two different artists dividing the cards into the genders of the characters, it makes sense this time. One artist takes on the Grixis men and the other takes on the Selesnya women, both have artstyles that get me say this take for the hundredth time: wow the generic vertical frame ruins these. It really have been 2 sets in a row that didn’t have Sagas use this frame?

The other subset is way looser. Here are five cards where the people on them do some battle poses. Not the four on the big chase cards we’ll be looking at soon, these are different. So different in fact we’re talking just two commanders and three creatures based spells. Three of them are done by the same artist, therefore they have some respective nation symbols in their backgrounds, the other two aren’t. What are these things trying to say about this set, being this loose and random? I guess you got the red mythic having foretell, that surely brings parity with the original Kaldheim cycle right? How about the other four.

So, here are all the artists in charge. The double artist is actually brand new to this Magic set and is already getting a generic vertical Secret Lair card too.

4.2 Generic vertical scenes

That feature from LTR finally came back in a big (not as big) swing this time. There are three scenes of increasing sizes from 2x2, 2x3 to 3x3, reflecting the three arcs of the story I think.

The first and smallest scene is pretty focused on the age old conflict of red versus blue, granted our DFC is in Azorius. The second scene grows in complexity, where red takes the north, black takes the east with 3 different totally evil pairs, Bant takes the south for the good. The last and largest scene sees three of the elements ascensions, the fire one is among a big red southeast staircase, where the two south ends are tricolors, the center is Rakdos, and the DFC is at the very north.

Each scene has one DFC card to deal with by coming up with a solution on how to fit that card in. The smallest scene wants you to fit that card’s back side, with the front side just being a zoomed view. The second does something very… digital card game, where the back side is literally the same pose but some parts light up, makes sense if a keyword turns on but here the card changes a lot so doesn’t make sense anymore. The third scene does that idea much better, the background is the same so it still fits, but the character has a totally distinct pose, and still glows as well.

4.3 Field notes art style

Remember Bloomburrow using this frame for its big natural forces? This design is back now, generic vertical frame and all. It still isn’t a good fit. Something else I also notice with these is that they feels a fair bit less dense than the ones in Bloomburrow, like there’s more blank space between the main colored pieces and sketches of the sides.

This time, the selection isn’t just limited to creatures, but also artifacts, and obviously none of these have the kind of sectionwide obvious importance that the calamity beasts have in Bloomburrow. Which unfortunately has left insane leeway for some color imbalance. That also leaves a lot of leeway for what kind of things get here, be it a commander, a normal creature, or an artifact.

For a quick overview because any more thorough I’ll explode, in the mythic slots commanders are one for each Esper color plus one colorless, in rare that’s one for each nongreen color because that got a Simic card instead which is the only gold card of this bunch. It’s frankly too ironic that red’s only card is a pair of Dragons, because its Bloomburrow calamity beast was… a dragon too.

Lastly, we get some artist distribution. Of these, the two triple artists use notable bright paper I feel.

4.4 Elemental frame

It’s another one of this Bloomburrow line of frame designs that is borderless and defines its colors by the two thick sides of the text box. Unlike Bloomburrow however, the top of the card just has the colors in two small pieces, and they don’t grow into a full legend crown for the commanders, so how infuriating. Most importantly, despite the fact that the text box is opaque old paper, the nation symbols weirdly need their own circle on top of the typeline. This is a great solution, if the text box is actually transparent so that you can’t put a normal watermark there.

And here’s the best part, for an IP heavily defined by its 4 nations, here we have 6 different symbols. The 5th one is basically the neutral one, shaped to be 90 degrees symmetrical, and honestly I don’t think this is the best symbol for being “neutral”. The best one is to just take the circle and that protruding area away. The 6th symbol is essentially the Air symbol but now only having two swirls instead of three, which turns out to be related to the important character. When are we modifying the other 3 symbols? All of this confusion also made me thought for a second that the side frames are unique per nation, but turns out it’s unique per color, like a normal Magic card frame.

Unfortunately, that’s all I can really praise about this frame. Because it’s quite underused in this grand scheme of things. For the draft set at least, there’re more chase avenues to get this frame, something most showcase frames can only dream of.

Also, did you know NotC’s website lied about this frame’s card counts? It said that there are 5 mythics in the draft set that uses this frame, while in reality there’s just three. That put my hopes up too highly for like at least a cycle. Oh well, in reality, we get something really chaotic.

At mythic, there are three cards of different elements, different card types but ultimately two of them both have red. This makes white and black lacks a card. At rare, here’s a quick table of card types to expect, at least for the monocoloreds. If I had to fill in the color balance, I would want an instant and a sorcery split between white and blue. And then you look at the actual set and both color only have one sorcery each.