I'll walk you through each of the archetypes, their associated team, and their mechanical identity. [...]

White-Blue: The Guidelight Voyagers
White-blue is a slow, controlling archetype that builds up a board of artifact creatures to eventually overwhelm your opponent. It has artifact synergies that play well with Vehicles.

Blue-Black: The Speed Demons
Blue-black is a slow and steady bleeder deck where you gum up the board and use a variety of cards to slowly plink away at your opponent's life total.

Black-Red: The Endriders
Black-red is an aggressive beatdown deck that takes advantage of start your engines! and max speed to upgrade your attackers.

Red-Green: The Goblin Rocketeers
The red-green deck is a midrange deck that uses the exhaust mechanic to upgrade its creatures to impressive size.

Green-White: The Alacrian Quickbeasts
Green-white is another midrange deck that encourages you to play a lot of Vehicles and saddle with effects that will help boost them on their path to victory.

White-Black: The Champions of Amonkhet
White-black is an aggressive attrition deck, using start your engines! and max speed, which keeps up an endless army of attacking Zombies while whittling away your opponent's resources.

Blue-Red: The Keelhaulers
Blue-red is an aggressive deck that makes use of discard, mostly through cycling, to keep its card flow of attackers coming.

Black-Green: The Speedbrood
Black-green is a recursion-centric deck that focuses on filling up its graveyard and returning large threats to the battlefield.

Red-White: Cloudspire Racing Team
Red-white is an aggro deck that has extra synergy with Vehicles.

Green-Blue: The Aether Rangers
Green-blue is a ramp deck that builds up its mana to play large creatures and Vehicles. It also uses that mana on exhaust costs to overwhelm the opponent.

White-Blue Artifact Value
Blue-Black Artifact Bleeder
Black-Red Max Speed Aggro
Red-Green Exhaust Midrange
Green-White Vehicles and Mounts Midrange

White-Black Max Speed Attrition
Blue-Red Discard Aggro
Black-Green Graveyard
Red-White Vehicles and Mounts Aggro
Green-Blue Exhaust Ramp

The second piece I did for Bloomburrow was called Arthur, Marigold Knight.

My first instinct was to present him leading the charge as shown in the first sketch. It felt befitting the description and the character as I understood it. I've done similar compositions to this in the past however, and I wanted to explore more options. So, I looked to art history for inspiration. I found it in the form of Gericault's “The Charging Chasseur.” And so I sketched that version, as well.

Can't explain why I drew either vertically when the card compositions are horizontal, but it felt right at the time. After all, you can always add to them digitally, which I did before handing both sketches in.
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#stevenbelledin #sketches #inspiration #illustration #artprocess

Arthur, Marigold Knight

For Magic: the Gathering
Oil on hardboard, sixteen inches wide by twelve inches tall.
AD: Zack Stella

As I pointed out in yesterday's post, I found inspiration in Gericault's "The Charging Chasseur," which was nice as it pushed me in a direction I likely would not have gone on my own—both in terms of gesture and palette. But that's also true of the set itself, which required me to paint these adorable little critters in the first place. I'm frankly relieved and a little surprised that I was trusted to be a part of this set owing to how often I'm asked to paint things that are either directly horror or horror adjacent. In all reality, I think I've painted enough horror stuff to last a lifetime at this point. Minimally, I was very ready to paint cute animals when this piece came along.

#stevenbelledin #illustration #mouse #oilpainting #artwork