[awithrow]

Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.

[johtso]

I agree, I find so much of the art of modern magic cards completely uninspiring. They all look the same. Old magic cards had an element of the strange and the quirky. Sometimes the designs bordered on naive. Hand painted illustrations had a distinctly human touch. And the illustrations were punchy and had contrast. You knew exactly what a card was from a distance. A lot of the modern art is just polished, air brushed fantasy cliche. Muddy. Too much detail. A distinct lack of the surreal or abstract. Too thematically consistent.

Just compare an old set to a modern set: 1995 https://scryfall.com/sets/4ed 2024 https://scryfall.com/sets/mkm

An abstract oil painting https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/104/stasis An unsettling watercolour https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/181/cave-people

Sometimes less is more! Realism is boring.

[rendaw]

My favorite thing about the cards is they were little windows into a deep and mysterious world, hinted at further by the mechanics of the cards.

I thought it was just nostalgia, but looking at the sets you linked the 1995 one (I'd never seen) excites me while the 2024 does nothing... it could almost be AI. It's not just the same faces, but the same framing, same expressions, same "grand fantasy architecture", same MMO-esque magical swirls and sparkles, etc.

The abstract pieces weren't just whimsy, they felt like they could be based on vastly different local traditions or culture, history, or come from different time periods.

[schrectacular]

Note also that all those old cards were done on physical media, whereas today almost all the cards are done digitally. So the modern cards are much more _detailed_. Check out the Jesper Ewing cards like Frantic Scapegoat. He's notable for creating real paintings. To me they capture a bit of the old feel.

[tommit]

Minor correction: Jesper Ejsing

[sshine]

They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now.

A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like.

But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.

[sebastos]

I was going to write something similar: if I had been in creative control back in 1993, I definitely would have fallen for the trap of thinking that I was making things better by forcing the artwork to have a homogeneous, consistent feel to it. In retrospect, the idiosyncratic uniqueness of each card made it like a little piece of art that you could own. As a young kid, that made it so cool! I think a lot of young kids only bought a relatively small batch of cards and never even played the game much. I remember owning a scant few cards but that made me treasure my favorites that much more.

[scruple]

Nostalgia or not, I let myself get sucked back into MtG in 2021, after discovering the unofficial format Premodern [0], and a major component of that is the artwork on the cards in those sets with the black border. I'm sure it really is just nostalgia but I truly enjoy playing games in that format and looking at the artwork, especially cards which I've never really seen before because they weren't meta back in the day or cards that are just infrequent or that I'd forgotten.

[0]: https://premodernmagic.com/

[freediver]

Thanks for the link. Do you play it offline only?

[scruple]

I do, I have a small group of friends in SoCal that I play with a couple of times a month.

There's a thriving scene in Madison, Wisconsin and NYC, and abroad in Europe where the format originated.

[random42_]

D&D artwork was something else back then. I remember spending hours and hours just looking at it.

For anybody interested, there is a documentary about the history of the art in D&D: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8888186/ It’s quite interesting.