Something you’ll notice with this Standard year is that WotC tried their hardest to design lots of different showcase designs so that every card gets a chance on the fun, even planeswalkers that used to be stuck in the generic design. Unfortunately, I don’t think this experiment has quite panned out considering how nowadays we just go back to one new design per set and a bunch of generic vertical, or hell there’s a mainline set that straight up skips the new design.

6.1. Generic veritcal: Planeswalkers & Slow lands

This is one of those unfortunate generic vertical sets where the planeswalkers don’t get any special artstyles. You may see why soon, but is that a good excuse? Let’s compare them one by one:

• Kaya: Probably the biggest downgrade of the VOW trio, going from a distinguishable archer to this person holding two daggers that blends right into the background.
• Wrenn: You get a darker artwork so the woman’s eyes glow more and there’s a bonus pumpkin. What else is unique here?
• Arlinn: I won’t comment about the back side. The front side is quite the downgrade, going from fancy leather clothes with two wolves to a church dress with just a small wolf.
• Teferi: Probably the best upgrade of the MID trio (which isn’t saying much), considering the darker tone, an actual moon cycle surrounding him that stands out over just a ring. Never realized both normal versions are done by the same artist.
• Sorin: He surely got to go outside and have some curvier hair. Great shading work for that goth feel. Admittedly, the original variant may convey the androgynous vampire better.
• Chandra: This version finally lives up to her title of having a fancy dress. Ultimately, it kinda puts the normal person to far more shame of its cheap flat dress.

My takeaway is that VOW generally have the better artworks, but none of these will ultimately be able top anything from the first two blocks really.

Slow lands wise, you still get relatively normal artworks and the giant cheap opaque text box with zero flavor texts. Artists in this cycle include one taking on three of the MID half with both red cards among them, another going for one land in each set overlapping in white, and another going for the two blue lands in VOW. What else can I say when this cycle goes for either really dark place with just moonlight, or really bright place because look we can produce white mana?

6.2. Monochrome commanders

Basically, imagine the full art promo frame I really like but put through a monochrome filter so the default textures is still here, just that you need to glean the card color solely through the pinline and legend crown, thankfully we don’t have any tricolor cards here. Ultimately, given that effort on the frame, this design wasn’t used for the next time Innistrad showcase designs were called for. It’s still a lot better than whatever seems worthy enough for its own booster pack we’ll be talking about in an even further section.

Every commander from the two draft sets are eligible if they haven’t got the two designs I’ll be talking about soon. The stipulation is that once again, they can’t have flavor text even though the typeline won’t collapse. Thalia is probably the most obvious case, and also things like disturb. Also, let me reiterate “draft set” because none of the commander set characters are here, how unfortunate.

Art wise, which is the monochrome element of this design, generally feature hand-drawn pieces of the characters being quite close up, or well occasionally you can get full body shots. In door backgrounds are quite rare, seen in the zombie creating couple and frankly you’re more likely to see a giant moon.

6.3. Equinox frame

Let me get this out of my system: There are Werewolves in VOW that won’t get this frame, and there are Vampires in MID that won’t get their frame either. The logic gate here is that you gotta be the featured kindred and be in the featured set, because I guess you can’t find a more clever way to distribute the other set’s deserving cards. Or by then, you could argue that “so you monkey paw also want a Spirit frame and a Zombie frame right?”

Let’s look at this frame design, done by someone who really likes intense black outlines, it’s quite the detailed artwork all by itself. Which still manages to communicate the cards’ colors clearly, even having vines instead of normally straight pinlines for exact colors of gold cards (they don’t look like hybrid this time), and even a clever sun and moon instead of the typical DFC circle marks. The three boxes on the card are ever so slightly transparent, which in Selesnya’s case is so bright the two colors blend together compared to a color like Red, or in Black’s case where we still insist to use black text for some reasons, the back side only colors the name and typeline white.

The one drawback I do have to admit is that the legend crown isn’t here. Could the solution be to have not a lot of leaves up there on the normal cards?

Card selections wise, you got the Werewolves, you obviously expect that. But well, the lore, there is another kind of human this set is about, the coven witches. So let’s add them in. All 6 of them. For context, there 16 cards with the keyword coven in this set, which would be better at leveling the playing field with the furries.

Well, the best part is that we do have a planeswalker among this subset: Arlinn. The front side has the coolest right claw and the back side has the most hair, what more could you ask? That’s a good segway into the artists distribution. Taking into account cards using this frame from sets after this one, we have this table. It’s surely a very specified art style here, being an action comic style that really shows the danger of these monsters. Granted, the top appearing artist isn’t as typical black outline comics as the other ones, going for more oil painting instead.

6.4. Vampire fang frame

You definitely expect some elegance from the vampires, and a less adventurous frame design reflects that pretty well. It’s one solidly built frame with gold accents throughout and fangs at the corners, the two long boxes going for normal rounded corners instead of the typical cylinder, and the stat box gets a soild protecting frame, and everything has a bit of realistic shadows. The gold cards still use hybrid sides, the legend crown did returns here and the DFC marks return to their typical circles, which jarringly looks very flat against the realistic looking rest of the card.

Card selections wise, it’s certainly crazy to see quadruple the mythic counts here. One of them is our planeswalker, Sorin, who get a much more androgynous outfit and hairstyle than even his normal version. One downside however to this selection is that we can’t have a single green card to know what tone to shift to. Because we ain’t putting any of the other kindreds in this frame.