What set does three distinct showcase frames for very clear subsets of cards? What a based thing to be. Nowadays, we got our messes too, but thing is we haven’t quite captured the deliberation of these cards.

6.1. Generic vertical: Planeswalkers, Dragons, Channel lands

Let’s talk planeswalkers first. The two women are done by the same artist and you can certainly tell for their most pronounced black outlines, especially on white fabric. Kaito, meanwhile, got the most anime glow of the bunch, making him looks stronger than he really is. Tezzeret has his hair blending with the light center and no longer has a jacket. I give them all this, these new artworks does give me new feelings and are very distinct from the originals, while still being somewhat aware that they are still living in the generic frame.

And then we get the Dragon Spirits also getting this frame, this is quite the tradition with these early showcases sets. Just a reminder, there are six of them, five in the mythic cycle and one actually 5 colors at rare. Generally, these artworks aim for a closer look at the dragons so you see more of their actual face than just the snake form. For me through, obviously the card frame still jumps out, like don’t this very set have a frame more fitting for these artworks?

Lastly, we get the channel lands. These pieces are probably going to be as elegant as anime arts get, I feel. The Naya trio is focused on showing a dense city, which works in Red’s crucible favor and against Green’s big tree favor. The other two does feel a lot more normal: focused natural landscapes that have a fair share of realism to them.

6.2. Fighters’ frames

Continuing from the Innistrad block’s effort at expressing every kindred as best as they can, each of the Japanese fighters get a frame to call their own here. For the Ninjas, we get a very sharp frame with shuriken shaped reinforcements to the sides of the text box and the corners of artworks. There’s a very spikey legend crown available, and even a simple version for then normal cards. There’s ample room to communicate a card’s colors, even on gold cards. (there’s only Dimir here, they have a whole text box for the gradient) For the Samurais, we have ropes to tie the frame together instead of shurikens, and with that the legend crown looks more like an actual crown with curves and all.

And then we run into a problem. The artifacts can paint the two name and type boxes and side ridges gray in Ninjas or even brighter in Samurais, but how about the enchantments? You usually expect some stars in the frame, right? Well, the sides of the artwork is freed, the top is very minimal, so you really don’t have much space to do that. Not like they would look nice against the sharp tone of the frame. So it’s decided that there’s nothing to distinguish these enchantment creatures from the fray. This is a problem with the whole showcase suite in this set, it might be small in 2 Ninjas here but you will certainly see way more very soon.

Problems typical to the era still prevails, like no flavor text on cards clearly having the space, but well a few French vanillas does redeem themselves by centering the keywords, four Ninjas to be exact.

Here’s the card selection tables for both frames, left is Ninjas and right is Samurais. It’s pretty infuriating that the Ninja side can’t sneak a red card in so we see which tone to shift the frame to, especially considering how Ninjas are Rogues and off ZNR’s logic, Rogues would be tertiary in red instead of white. But well, if you talk about balance, ironically it’s the Samurai that needed that last card to balance things out. Could we call the prowesses in?

6.3. Soft glow frame

Unlike the two frames for the fighters, this one focuses on the cyberpunk tone of this plane. The name box is the top of a Torii gate lighten up. The typeline and text box are surrounded by some fancy lights and have quite the amount of transparency. Artifacts would replace all the lights with brighter cyan-white, while enchantments still have no ways to distinguish. The legend crown is just some ropes on the top with the bottom two poles of the name box lighten up a little bit.

Card selections wise, it’s certainly something I applaud to give every rare and mythic a showcase version, regardless of their mechanics or flavors. Well, I mean, that’s the goal, the execution here is that we give everything that aren’t those two fighter types this design.

I have some irk points about the soft glow selections:

For one, It’s about the two Ps, Phyrexian and Planeswalkers. So, Tezzeret gets a card here, in addition to his borderless card. Jin-Gitaxias also gets a card here, in addition to his Phyrexian language card. What does that leave? Tamiyo. She is a Phyrexian, so she gets that Phyrexian language card, she is a planeswalker, so she gets her borderless card. How came she not get a third version here? Is this an important question? Yes, because the Phyrexian language card reused the normal artwork. Therefore, she never gets her 3rd artwork and as a Planeswalker who isn’t around in the lore anymore, how come anyone let this happen?

The other one, the Saga TDFCs are here. Great, right? Not quite, think about how they’re done? The back side is the correct frame, great. Then you flip back to the front face, and… it’s literally the normal frame. Sure, the artwork is different, but considering that I have to rely on the set total in the bottom left being missing to know these are the fancy versions, that’s just wrong. Is it that much effort to ask for a special Saga frame for this set, and then maybe you can also put it on the lower rarity cards too?

Now onto the artists selection, let’s tally up everything from the draft set to the future times these card frames were reused.

There’s a reason why I didn’t wrote about these in each frame’s sections: This is very scattershot.