I give them this, this is more frame design effort than Final Fantasy. But unlike that set, this time it clearly seems like the bonus sheet has eaten a lot of the art budget so we don’t get many of these showcase cards.
There’s a single panorama in this set, it’s 3x3, made of 7 commanders, one creature and one land, it has the only uncommon showcases of this set (commons won’t have anything), none of the cards have flavor text, the gold land kept the glowing text box through this time it doesn’t stand out all that well, and the fun part is that the two DFCs will connect by their back sides, so their front sides from a different panorama, even though you can’t just flip them to get it when they’re in the big panorama.
| Set | B | R | G | C | M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPM-M | 1* | 1* | 2 | |||
| SPM-R | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |
| SPM-U | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||
| Total | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 9 |
Color balance wise, rare’s pair is Izzet, uncommon’s pairs are Selesnya and Azorius. So black has only one appearance, while red and white absolutely dominates at four, and green and blue follows with three.
Look at this frame design that plays really really well into the cartoonish art style, this thing I forgot to mention above. Granted, white text on a relatively light opaque color is certainly a choice, it isn’t a bad one. Also ever noticed the circle logo in the background of the textbox, how it actually reaches all the way to the typeline unlike most usual watermarks?
| Set | W | R | G | Al | E | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPM-M | 1* | 1* | 1* | 3 | ||
| SPM-R | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 7 | |
| Total | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 10 |
Onto the card selection, we realize this frame is focused on the spider heroes, especially a very cherry picked selection of such. Once again, only a single black card is in, and it’s Dimir, the other two allied pairs have green and the other two enemy pairs have red. So, despite having five color pairs, there’s the most infuriating kind of color imbalance present, and the tripled color this time is red, and you have two of the Naya pairs to convert to evil. Which is the crux of the problem, evil, they don’t have to use these strings. All In all, red leads with 6, followed by Selesnya at 5 each and almost last is blue with just 4, that sounds just as infuriating.
It must have been a while since showcase cards brought in a different font. And with rose tinted glasses, suddenly those things look way nicer and have more personality than they really are, after all they should have caused headaches to anyone actually playing with these things. Well one of their strengths is that they don’t use a hideous outline because there’s an actual text box supporting them.
The font of these things are what seems to be actually used on the comics, so they’re ALL CAPS and really dense and really short, so honestly not the most practical thing. Emphasize the short part because the boxes containing them feels way too big for these texts. Turns out, they are the same thickness as a normal typeline, if you count from the outer edges. Usually that’s necessarily for a pinline to represent the card’s colors. But this time it’s just a black line par for a comic, so now the space inside gets to be as thick as they are.
Frankly the font’s awkwardness is best shown in the fact that most lines of these cards’ rule text can’t use the entire line, and even then due to their small sizes there’s a bunch of dead space makes the lack of flavor text abundantly clear. And then you got the statbox giving those numbers absolutely ginormous size, which really puts in question all of these small texts.
So that’s a long rant about text sizes, time to also get into shapes. So, a normal Magic card uses this funny cylinder shape for its name line, typeline and statline so that 1. They can stretch the text out that bit more than if they stuck to a square and 2. They can match up the cylinders and the art box and text box in a really pleasant formation, with no distance between any of them. These things spit in the face of that design choice completely, now they’re just a bunch of rectangles with very tiny rounded corners. And with that, the nameline and typeline stretches out like a sore thumb compared to the text box they don’t touch anymore.
Oh, there’s more. The fact that they have to do a diamond top shape cut for the oval stamp, a massive one in fact, yuck. Imagine if we still stuck with the old UB stamp, this would look even more pathetic. And the DFC marks, what used to squish the left side to be an arrow is now just a hideously big square housing hideously big triangles. The bottom mark however cuts off the left arrow, yet keeps the right arrow? All this nonsense and there’s also no legend crowns whatsoever.
Overall, I’m not too sure what artistic statements is being made from these horrible proportions choices of texts and shapes. Like would actual comic artists accept these?
So the heroes already got their frame, this time it’s the villain’s turn right? Not quite, there’s two allied pairs women who breaks this rule (guess what color they share), and they have the shortest text of all these cards. And black also have one odd sorcery, through I suffice it does provide creatures. And once again, it’s obvious to say these cards selection are cherry picked.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | Al | E | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPM-M | 1* | 2* | 1 | 4 | ||||
| SPM-R | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 10 |
| Total | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 14 |
To finally answer that thing I asked you to guess, the mythic is Dimir, so that along with the rares the missing allied pair is Gruul, in place of it is its opposite pair, Orzhov. So White is the correct answer.
And actually, among this frame’s set is a variant that fixes a few of my criticisms. It’s the cycle of rare Sagas, this time having the chapters’ boxes be shrunk to be in line with how they should actually appear in a comic. And for that, it looks way better, especially with how it also gives each chapter its own image, once again more like an actual comic, certainly contrasts with how Magic tends to want its Sagas to look like.