Magic: The Gallery
(523 Card Cube)
Magic: The Gallery
Cube ID
Art by Richard WrightArt by Richard Wright
523 Card Vintage Cube5 followers
Designed by possumgrape
Owned
$12,290
Buy
$12,052
Purchase
Mana Pool$14422.23
Magic: The Gallery is my celebration of art, flavor text, card frames, mechanics, art history and tournament history that all complement each other.

The above cards aren't mere game pieces to me. They reference high art & low art, blend mechanics & flavor seamlessly, fuse frames & flavor text into gorgeous masterworks we're lucky enough to play with sometimes.

This cube is probably the least beginner friendly thing possible. There's inherent difficulty in drafting this cube while reading through so much variation in fonts, font sizing, text locations, languages, old mechanics (...banding...), textless cards, etc.

Plus this cube has a power band wider than the Gobi Desert. This is (mostly) by design. I'm including many cards with zero pedigree that I think exemplify beautiful art and card design while also not ignoring cards with tournament highlights. A few even have the gold border to emphasize just how cool tournament Magic is, from Worlds to FNM.

Basic lands are crucial for Magic's aesthetic and I've tried to include many of the most beautiful and unique. I break singleton and leave cycles incomplete when I want to. I up the pack size to 20 during drafting.

The explosion in Secret Lair drops, alternate art, unique foiling, serialized cards, showcase frames, and card treatments deserves a comment. I fully admit there may be a higher percentage of those cards represented here due to the intentional artistic flair from those releases. That said, a card's inclusion in any of those products doesn't make it interesting to me by default, nor does having a lot going on within the frame. Same applies to old cards too. The selections are by my taste alone (hence the preponderance of white borders, chiaroscuro, first-person perspective, loose brushwork, Adventure frames etc.)

Additionally, there's no way my cute cube can resolve the massive question of separating the art from the artist. All I'll say is that I have zero online reach, would reconsider my influence if I ever did, and that Magic: The Gallery isn't in paper (and would only ever be proxied) so there's zero financial benefit to any artist.

I've left out Planes and silver bordered cards thus far but there are some gems in those places too, despite the annoyance of tilting your head to see the panoramas of Planeschase here on CubeCobra. May do the same with art cards later.

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