On Wednesday, Wizards of the Coast revealed the deck list for the upcoming Reality Fracture Commander deck, Reality Reforged, and its powerful new commander, a four color variant of Jace Beleren called Jace, Multiverse Architect. Immediately, fans began to notice that the card’s art, illustrated by Volkan Baga, had key motifs that were suspiciously similar to the popular sorcery card Breach the Multiverse, illustrated by Liiga Smilshkalne. But, on Friday, Baga and Wizards of the Coast provided Wargamer with a joint statement saying the new art is a “direct, intentional call back”, but not a copy-and-paste job.
In these pictures I’ve mapped the art for Realmbreaker (the abstract energy pattern floating around Jace, Reality Architect) onto the same design in Breach the Multiverse, and there is a very clear resemblance between them.
If you want to try this for yourself, you can use the free graphic design software GIMP. Import a copy of the art for Breach the Multiverse and a picture of Jace, Reality Architect as two separate layers, with Jace on top. Set Jace’s opacity to around 50% so you can see Breach the Multiverse underneath. I found it helpful to delete the parts of Jace’s layer that weren’t the Realmbreaker energy pattern so their shapes were a lot more obvious.
By rotating, rescaling, and repositioning Jace (but not actually warping or reshaping the fundamental image), you can quickly show that the shapes for each part of his Realmbreaker design map precisely onto the corresponding part on the earlier card.
It’s not a one to one match – particularly, if you rescale Jace to get the bottom of the design to match, the top will be out of scale, and visa versa. And the card as a whole is almost entirely different except for this motif. Here’s the joint statement from Wizards of the Coast and Volkan Baga on how the art was created:
“We’ve seen some of the discussion around the art of Jace, Multiverse Architect by Volkan Baga and Breach the Multiverse by Liiga Smilshkalne and wanted to make a few things clear.
First, the art direction given to Volkan was to directly reference this piece into the art. Much of the visual storytelling in Reality Fracture centers on Jace utilizing or incorporating powerful magic he has learned from events he has experienced. This was a direct, intentional call back to that moment to indicate that, in his efforts to rid the multiverse of Phyrexia, Jace had become the very thing he sought to eradicate.
Second, Volkan created this piece traditionally, from a first sketch done by hand up through the final painted version.
Finally, Magic has long created visual callbacks in its art to evoke connection through its shared multiverse. This has spurred some additional internal conversations about how we communicate those callbacks to artists who create iconic pieces, but it is very important to us to create a shared world that feels unified. This includes use of symbols, characters, and important moments throughout art.
We’ve been in contact with both artists and appreciate measured discussions around these important topics.”
If you’re interested in “measured discussions about important topics”, you’ll find a warm welcome in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
