4.1. Generic vertical: Scenes, silhouette artstyle

Once again, we get three different scenes worth of cherry picked cards, the exact same amount as TLA’s draft set even. It will makes as much sense as one scene for each time Aang gained a color.

To be specific, the first scene is the smallest one, about the four turtles being small and cute in their home eating pizza. The rat teacher is mostly in the blue one’s bounds.

The second scene is the biggest one, how infuriating, aiming to show a large cast of characters. Where a few times, the character the card is named after is just the right half to make room for many others. This is a wise place for some team ups, the GRN formation minus Boros to be exact so that each main character got one appearance and two villain pairs are shown.

The last scene have the rare turtles fighting the common Orzhov hybrid and the uncommon Shredder. Not the most balanced of fights but I digress.

Meanwhile, the mythics skip these scenes entirely and go for a different artstyle, one minimalistic one. It puts most of the color as the background, give the cityscape a little shade, and the character as much of it as possible, just living a few strokes here and there, especially their eyes. Or in the big robot’s case, an entire face in another lower layer.

Here’s the artist distribution table, also having a rarity to signify which scene or design they have taken part in.

4.2. Sewer frame

It’s quite a fun design, featuring a lot of dense pipes on the two sides, the nameline, typeline and stat box are actual cylinders carrying liquid now, the font on those boxes are changed to this CAPS LOCK comic font that actually managed to balance between function and fun.

One problem, the stones on the top is the same purplish tower on all the cards, which seems to have denied a legend crom from existing. Also, the two sides of the bottom of the card have the same terrible green waste. Lastly, the text box has quite the elaborate imagine of pipes and a big center filter I think, which is certainly a bold choice over the relatively simple textures the average showcase frames opt for. It’s still the normal font there, just in white and with no outline or shadow.

Cards selection wise, obviously it’s cherry picked nonsense, there’s only two normal creatures here and they’re both mythics. But at least, the full set of 11 techniques are here, so does the 10 hybrid rare commanders. I guess the mythic commanders already got covered in mist, but some of the scene cards still double dip here too.

Here’s the artists distribution table, where you can definitely see a big domination of an artist that certainly can draw a smile on these turtles, and overall everyone leans to the cartoon style that plays well with the card frame’s heavy use of black outlines. There’s still some grittiness to be found admittedly, think of how April’s curly orange hair or a rhino’s mouth is drawn.

4.3. Pixel art frame

To reinforce the arcade game flavor of the commander precon, they finally got an unique design to call their own. How based. Only until you look at what it actually looks like and… it feels like Marvel’s comic frame once again. The nameline oddly pushes down the mana cost just a little bit, text is oddly small on the typeline, also all the containers are really wide compared to our normal Magic cards, that’s I think the first time borderless cards finally realize they can do that. There’s no legend crown too, and most importantly why is these boxes drawn primarily in white and just have a shadow layer of the card’s actual color?

Art wise, this is obviously the main attraction. You get a quality piece in the center, with a little sprite version in the top left of the text box, which is very cool. You don’t get any background however, just a slanted thick stripe (the precon box has four lines like this too) of a color fitting to the character’s clothes but not the card’s colors, so that along with the frame not helping. All things considered, it’s all done by the same artist for all 15 cards.

Which one? First off, all the mythic commanders are here, so that April can look coherent with the turtles. At rare, it’s wonkier. The only three cards not being commanders are two green prowesses and one colorless robot. The rest includes the partner pair and two of how many characters.

4.4. Anime cards

We did managed to escape these in the last two UB sets, maybe three because in FIN the cards just resorted to use the generic vertical frame. Not anymore.

The six rares are the four main characters (they already got a scene version) and two characters out of how many I also don’t remember. The four mythics are one big event not getting the previous designs, the big villain, it and the alter ego on a team up and the big robot. Overall, a very blue selection with not much green to note.

The rare main character quad says a lot about this subset. Three of them tries to look rad and strong, and here comes the green one being oversimplified eating pizza on top of ramen.

4.5. Chase signature cards

Our four main characters are now drawn in gritty monochrome with some dense cityscape in the Boros background or brick wall in Simic background, so good luck distinguishing one from another with no context. The frame is now thick gold and still retains the text box so that the artist can sign their name in along with a drawing according to the character directly on the text.

Personally, I still think meeting the actual artist to see them sign your card with their art with a real pen is still the more fulfilling option. Which is probably why we don’t do this on our sacred real Magic cards until now (emphasize “real”, because art cards).