Hi all! First pardon what might be a long and wanky post. Feel free to scroll down to see the cards! BUT. Since there was generally positive response to my last mtg related project, I thought I would share another! A set of alt art proxies to kickstart anyone down the long and winding rode of Vintage...
My friends and I were recently talking about how one of the barriers to getting new people into Vintage is that it doesn't feel very epic writing Black Lotus on a Plains. But if people have awesome art proxies, they might be more likely to give vintage a whirl! This is also true for those of us who enjoy playing Vintage, but who also may prefer to play with proxies to reduce wear on high dollar cards.
What follows are a set of playtest cards that I recently printed using an online company, after joking around with one of my playgroup about Vintage Masterpieces, made with ACTUAL masterpieces. I'd tried some similar public domain shenanigans before (and posted here in another thread), so I thought, why not! Some time on ye olde google, some time in photoshop and voila!
These are printed in foil (Cause hey! Why not!), and are a mix of "future shifted" title-and-cost-only, full art cards, along with some "past shifted" cards to have some fun with the old card frame and funny rules text, even if (obviously) we use the oracle text for all proxies. Anyway. On to the cards!
First. The Power Nine, with a little help from Alphonse Mucha's iconic Art Nouveau images. Though I did tweak his masterful Zodiac just a Little bit for a little more mtg flare on Black Lotus.
Also, threw in Opal. You know. For kicks.
The three blue spells are all from a Massive installation called The Slav Epic. As you'll see, this set of proxies has a very Eastern Euro vibe, which as a Russian speaker makes me quite happy!
I pulled in several other crucial pieces with the amazing art of William Blake. Good old mysticism.
Can't have a vintage set without some duals and fetches. I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to add text, especially to fetches, but the stunning landscapes of Nicholas Roerich, who spent a lot of time in Central Asia, was just too good in most cases and I just enjoyed looking at it.
Then, the past shifted cards.
(That is actually a a portrait of Napoleon holding the Scepter of Charles V, which is one of the French crown jewels, but I was having a hard time finding classical paintings with sweet magical looking staves and scepters!)
(Okay. Not a classical masterpiece. But still. A masterpiece in its own right!)
These last are for a particular subset of white border lovers and haters. I know for many of us who came of age at the turn of Unlimited to Revised, the white border holds a special place in our hearts. Especially if you were in a small town where you might have opened some Unlimited and Revised, but product support for antiquities and Arabian Nights was not exactly plentiful. So I liked the idea of printing some of our format staples, imagining what they might have been like coming out of a pack of Revised. So for all you whippersnappers out there who think White Border is for suckers...well...get off my lawn!
I'm not exactly sure if that's a halo or if his staff is glowing, but that skull is amazing! I'm totally a Roerich fanboy now!
Gotta love some random 18th century Arabian Imagery. Guy with a Wheelbarrow, meet Guy with a Rug...I love the original Wall of Text, but I thought, surely in Revised, they'd have tried to fix it a little...
And last but not least...
Anyhow! Hope you all enjoyed these.