Thankfully this boring frame won’t have to carry all that much burden unlike a certain race set taking places on 3 different planes therefore none wanted to put their frame in. Just 16 cards have this frame, divided between 3 cycles and 1 planeswalker, how simple.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | 2M | 3M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TDM-M | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| TDM-R | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Total | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 16 |
Honestly this artist’s best card is the one in the Eldraine adventure frame. This borderless planeswalker frame sucks, it ruins so many artstyles, including this one. Like imagine if that squarey pattern at the bottom of this artwork actually was incorporated into the making of the frame. Also aren’t both of this set’s planeswalkers got a different showcase version, is this even necessary?
These are about what you expect, they get the new text box from the fetches, they have normal art which one artist does two of them and three other artists do the rest, the flavor text are shorter except the Sultai one which gets to exist over surveil’s reminder text. What else do I have to say, other than the fact that the black land is oddly bright, hard to imagine it’s a black land.
I bet there’s already some Magic artworks referencing tabletop games being played in universe. These are probably the most obvious try at that. Each Siege instead of showing real life footage of the siege, shows many hands on a board moving figurines on a map to simulate the siege. It’s an unproven theory that playing these simulations makes you more informed decisions in a real fight. To which I’ll let you imagine the rules to these wargames.
Last fun fact: The Simic board is circle, the Golgari board is I guess some oval shape, the Orzhov board is a big soild rectangle with glowy borders, the Izzet board is a map probably with worn sides, and the Boros board is a scroll so it has to be narrow on one way.
Appendix: So turns out someone on the internet really figured out how to truly look at these things.
| Clan | Normal | Wargame |
|---|---|---|
| People of the leftward clan will come to people on the land of the rightward clan, who has the taller buildings, to invade them. (Reading the card, the clan printed on the top choice is rightward aka “defending” clan, while the bottom choice represents the leftward aka “attacking” clan.) | Those very same clans use their preferred form of board and paper to plan out these invasions. | |
| Maybe I should have been clued in by either the hands of the planners or the figures on the board tied to the receiving clan. | ||
| Abzan | Houses on elephants | Glowing lines because spirits glow too |
| Jeskai | Roofs with a lot of layers and reaching out | - Used a scroll |
Apologizes for having a really butchered version of the style guide here. I wrote this myself, looking at the pictures without any deeper research really.
Overall, maybe those land names in the name structure does tie to one of the clans after all. I kinda thought of that seeing the word “steppe” of the Orzhov siege, but finally it made sense. Glacier only exists in Temur it might have been the second clue.
And also you should notice how the enemy gainlands might just show the aftermath of these sieges. You might not quite see how ruined the Izzet land is specifically, but it might be more clear with the others. And now you wonder how would the allied lands be represented in a rare enchantment allied pairs cycle.
These things existed for longer than the generic borderless, just I remind you. And it really took this long for them to finally get a proper showcase frame, let’s say 5 years. Well technically there’s the sketch Urza’s Saga in MH2 and the lazy LotR scrolls, I would be truly insane to review that set if I ever do it I’m telling you. Reality has more in line with sets like NEO, MOM and LCI (I’ll count that one UB card here) where while the creature side can be whatever fancy thing it can be, while the Saga side’s frame remains completely unchanged. The art does change and it suddenly feels really strange. And MOM even does this on its serialized cards, just to show how well these premium customers were treated. Well I guess you don’t always activate that Saga part so just pretend it’s like a token. While NEO has the opposite problem, where I guess the showcase frame would now be basically a jumpscare. Allegedly on Arena a theoretical “extended Saga” frame actually exists, it just blacks out the frame. I guess that would be horrible, but well the whole extended frame never feels that respectful to this game really.
What is the solution now? The name and type box are about what you expect, the “bookmark” that the chapter hexagons sit on is gone, the reminder text obviously is gone too, and now you notice something strange. The line between the chapters and the art is just black, which turns out is just how the normal cards do it. Obviously the line at the right is gone, and the arts seem to do a good job at taking advantage of this fact.
Onto the art themselves, there’s one artist who does two of the expensive Sagas and the three cheaper ones (mana wise) are each done by a different artists. Each of the art, allegedly went for the normal artstyle to represent the actual event happenings instead of in universe retellings, have a formation of either the khan or the dragon on top, the other thing in the middle and the clan’s army in the bottom. Or in Jeskai’s case I don’t quite see it. Meanwhile with the normal art sagas I feel I’m stupid enough to only see the khan character really, the dragons aren’t even guarganteed, and overall not sure how well both versions represent chapters.
To the right is the artist distribution. The emoji corresponds to which type of card the artist did. The artist in bold will crossing over with a further frame.
| ♟️ | Clint Lockwood | 2 | 📖 | Flavio Greco Paglia | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🗻 | Constantin Marin | 2 | 👑 | Jeremy Wilson | 1 |
| ♟️ | Francesca Baerald | 2 | 📖 | Justyna Dura | 1 |
| 📖 | Miklós Ligeti | 2 | 📖 | Lie Setiawan | 1 |
| ♟️ | Raymond Bonilla | 1 | 🗻 | Marco Gorlei | 1 |
| 🗻 | 1 | 🗻 | Marina Ortega Lorente | 1 |
Good thing we don’t use that horrible frame MOM had. Let’s just make a new one, to if nothing else, feels a bit more optimistic about the dragons. They don’t completely take over the plane with their boring allied pairs now, they’re just a thing that kinda still really matters.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | C | 2M | 3M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TDM-M | 2 | 2 | 5 | 9 | |||||
| TDM-R | 1 | 2 | 2 | 5 | |||||
| TDM-U | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 15 | |
| TDM-C | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 | ||
| Total | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 10 | 35 |
I think the best comparison for this frame is Midnight Hunt’s equinox frame, one also very focused on the goth comic feel with its intense line art detail, but well now the text boxes are opaque with a lot lighter color and the dragon frame doesn’t leave much black border left, I think there’s a little bit of black border on the top. One great thing about this frame is that the omens look a lot better, the name box has actual room to breathe, there isn’t the weird double line at the bottom left. One big issue is that the dragons are so intensely detailed I guess there isn’t much room left to make a legend crown version, so there isn’t one. And a nitpick, why is the middle top not covered, so it turns out the name box is that thick?
Actual card selections wise, it’s all the Dragons and Dragon synergy pieces, with the sole exception of the Exhale cycle (those let you behold a Dragon). So that means for the most part, very color balanced cycles. But then there’s obviously the two red mythics, the sole 5 color enchantment, Sarkhan, weirdly only the red one out of the rare dragon cycle, a blue creature and four colorless cards, something to note that the land among them uses the same gold frame as the multicolored cards, so we’ll never know what a normal land in this frame would be. And the dragons in the precons obviously don’t get this frame, neither does any Secret Lair. That really sucks, not gonna lie.
To the right is the artist distribution. Given the nature of this unique art style, these people don’t cross over with the other frames. The artist who actually did this frame will get bold because she’s cool.
| Dibujante Nocturno | 5 | Cabrol | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jarel Threat | 5 | DZO | 3 |
| Rafal Wechterowicz | 5 | Massiveface | 2 |
| Dan Mumford | 4 | Michael Walsh | 2 |
| Justine Jones | 4 | WolfSkullJack | 2 |
If you ever remember original Tarkir’s marketing materials, they had this ink brush feel to them, for lack of better vocabulary on my part, frankly you’re best off just look at how the clan symbols are, that’s the feeling.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | 3M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TDM-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 10 | 14 | |
| TDM-R | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 15 | 36 |
| Total | 5 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 6 | 25 | 50 |
Thing is, those marketing materials used a white background that isn’t one soild color because they have just as much of that ink brush feel, so to make the whole image elegant and nice on the eyes. Ever wanted a card frame in that style? Now you get it, or do you?
Probably the most jarring thing about this frame is the soild black background without any of the usual boxes. Suddenly the holo stamp just floats, the dead space feels deader, the power and toughness box kind of hard to find, the legend crown is missing, the black border is obviously gone too. I could call this a lazy, nonsensical, under-thought out design. Or I can just see an Arena bug not being able to render some supposed layers of this frame so this is the uncanny thing that’s left of it. That makes sense given how the fonts didn’t get changed at all.
Now onto the background of the art. These are tied to each of the 5 clans, through not necessary being their literal symbol, just a pattern that makes sense for their flavor, apparently. I may take some effort to figure out exactly what these patterns are, I have a way. The one good thing about them is that they provide a relatively elegant way of representing the three different colors of a three colored card, thing is it’s elegant because it’s subtle, it isn’t part of any very visible box borders that actually helps you during a game. And also it displays the color in the wrong order, probably so that a clan’s primary color is in the middle. Wasn’t KTK the set to move us away from listing wedge colors like this? And the bigger problem is they keep this three color gradient even on the mono colored cards as well, so good luck figuring which color any of them are.
On these backgrounds are the actual artwork, which obviously can’t feature any background landscape elements, just the character and any spirits or gear important to them. They can reach all the way to the top of the card, as in also the white card name, through they don’t trample over that. The art style is normal frankly, about what you expect from normal cards just that obviously now the background is missing so it feels more like those marketing materials than actual cards. Which is where the patterns inspiration came from really, but still. Hey at least these don’t trample the type box below.
Last two obvious facts, there isn’t any flavor texts and none of the precon cards get this frame. The actual card selections are frankly just anything that would otherwise get the dreaded extended frame, so hooray that feels like more effort. Which gives a turns out that all these rares and mythics either falls into the Khans side or the Dragons side or Elspeth. There isn’t such thing as “guildless” in Ravnica or the five allied pairs archertypes in New Capenna. Unfortunately, that would mean none of the commons or uncommons get this frame, they don’t have to deal with the oval stamp. So this is the one thing New Capenna probably wins over, in addition to keeping the black border.
I brought my take to somewhere on the internet and I certainly got laughed out of the room for it. Apparently the black background makes the card more clean and it was done on the ancient SDCC planeswalker cards. Apparently things will pop out in foil since thank god the black background don’t get the foil. Apparently adding any text boxes would make this frame really messy. Apparently it isn’t as bad as I’ve ranted about. Let’s see how these stuff compresses down in Arena, that might be the true test. But well, this trend for backgroundless frames missing boxes is kind of alarming, it started with Duskmourn and may culminate in the next UB set.