Once again, it’s time to temper expectations after that bonus sheet. You can’t have both like that JRPG series.
Wow I was so fond of the frameless Tarkir cards that they came back so quickly.
| Rarity | W | U | B | R | G | M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EOE-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | |
| EOE-R | 5 | 5 | |||||
| Total | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 10 |
This “frame” combines the harsh white text on black backgrounds I hate on the Tarkir cards with the weird text spacings of the bonus sheet. All in the name of giving the artwork basically a square window that a character can see a landscape through.
There are exactly two cycles of cards that get this “frame”. One are the mythic Planets, which is a character of the respective color looking at their planet’s ground. These really puts in context when not to shrink the text box, and bonus point for the fact that there’s no opacity change between the tiers at all, probably because of the really cramped text spacing. The other are the shockland, which is much shorter, short enough for some flavor text.
One problem, given that the lack of card frame means that way of displaying card colors is basically gone (do you really stare at the mana symbols?), can these artworks help? Personally, I’d say no. One color is easily represented by the landscape, then the other is represented by… the person looking and the window frame that person will get out of. Which is surprisingly dark.
One respectable thing of this “frame” is that each artist fully takes on one cycle. But given how boring these things turned out, I’m not too sure if this is the right call. I would gladly take either of the bonus sheet frame if some more fun artworks get made instead of these.
A giant circle is surely an upgrade from a soild color, I give them that. Oh, you actually get a dash of a spaceship’s trail too, wow so much detail, so much depth.
| Rarity | W | U | B | R | G | RW | CM | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EOE-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |||
| EOE-R | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 12 |
| Total | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 16 |
Looking at the card selection, I have to assume they started with the character roster, obviously discounting all the uncommon signposts. So that’s 10 cards, you can look at the aforementioned section on exact distribution. Then they realized maybe that’s too few cards, so let’s add in a “cycle” of warps. Do note, if you add the void black cards in, there’re probably two cycles of the mechanic, one probably at one devotion and another at two devotion, and looking at this showcase set they chose the two devotions except the red one is one devotion, granted one of the character is a part of the one devotion warpers. And also there’s a Simic card erroneously given the legend crown. It has landfall instead of warp.
Appendix: Something you may finally realize about the flavor texts of some of the main characters, they follow a sentence structure of “Beyond the the edge of <something negative feeling> lies eternal <something to overcome that>.” Some of, it’s important because two of the main characters are just way too wordy for those flavor texts. Which certainly very sucks, since now we’re stuck with a purely Mardu set of flavor texts.
Remember when LCI had a group of really loose cards all using the generic borderless frame? This is that now once again.
| Rarity | W | U | B | R | G | M | C | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EOE-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||||
| EOE-R | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 11 |
| Total | 2 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 14 |
At mythic, there are three cards, one for each of Jeskai, one is a warper the other two just not. I gotta complement these finally that they got new flavor texts.
At rare there are more cards, one for each monocolor except red getting three. Two of the warpers are here, both two devotions, and yes, that mean that blue got a duplicate, yikes. Black has the arch charm member here, which really puts to shame Green’s Karlov Manor one, that still haven’t gotten any showcase versions (Blue got in OTP). There are three of the color pair cards, all of RTR guilds that appeared as Kaldheim pathways. And lastly there’s the colorless land that “luckily” didn’t get that dull “frame” the colored lands got.
It has been two full sets since these things’ last appearance. Like that was back in Aetherdrift.
| Rarity | W | U | B | R | G | BR | C | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EOE-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | |||
| EOE-R | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | |||
| Total | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 10 |
Once again, incredibly random selections. The only sense of balance is in a cycle of monocolored cards, even then you look deeper and obviously it goes wrong. White and blue got two warper women, yeah the intention is very clear with these. Then you got black with its black hole and suddenly I have questions, because this looks surprisingly dull. Red and green has something, then the one ogold card is the Rakdos boardwipe. Last four cards are all colorless, one warper eldrazi, two legendary artifacts and one land that so prominently has Tezzeret I’m not sure whether you can see this as a land out of context.
Five of these started as rare, the other five started as mythic, about what you expect.
This time it’s textless. It just has a cool font for the centered bottom name and the simple art and that’s it. And then I look at the card and I’m not too sure of how deserved this stature is to it. This is the black hole that is the center of this system, sure, story wise that’s kinda important. Then you look at the actual card and just think “wow that’s wordy as fuck, is this a top down design that only makes sense if I know the story?” It’s just not a good candidate to be the textless cards you do remember how it worked.