MTG: Argyr Tidal Spinner (2025)
Spider-spider
The original art and preliminary studies shown here are available for sale. The links were posted up first for paid subscribers and now for free subscribers, and later will be made publicly available elsewhere.
-The original art for Argyr, Tidal Spinner is available here
-The preliminary study is sold
Show a large diving bell spider catching a fish underwater. Ok, there’s your challenge. A few questions need be asked. First, what are diving bell spiders? I wasn’t familiar with them, so I went about first and did some research which is part of how illustrators end up being some of the most eclectic people you know, full of random facts and weird deep dives.
Ok, so your average diving bell spider is predictably small. So how do we make him look big?
The, “Catching a fish,” part here is a big piece of this. If that fish registers as small, like a guppy or something, your spider will likewise look small. So I kinda made up a longer, more sinewy fish, the kind where small long ones don’t bend like that. While I was really taken by composition #4 above (you can see I starred it), I continued working and ended up with another which was a combination of the angle of #4 (viewed from below towards the surface of the water) and #6, which was also starred. I increased the size of the fish after thinking about the above, and continued. The lilypads were also key. They are a bit distant, but if this were a tiny spider, the pads would likely look quite a bit bigger still. I’m viewing this spider as maybe a foot or so long, not massive but certainly larger than you’d want to encounter.
You can see in the study above the assignment name, “Webster Warden.” I find that interesting, now, although I’ve said many times that name changes are more common than not. The assignment for this digital-only set, Through the Omenpaths, came with a hard to articulate description of what it was, and I was never quite clear on its goals. It turns out, as most players now know, that these cards are the digital equivalents to cards in the recent Marvel’s Spider-Man set, because I guess they couldn’t secure rights for the Marvel license for video games? Something like that. So they swapped out trademarks, renamed things, but the rules are identical to their paper counterparts.
You’ll note the legs are glowing blue. Firstly, that’s so the card is more visually tied to the blue card this would be in the end. Second, it’s because this game is called Magic, and so it’s always nice to have something that feels, well, like Magic. Lastly, it is so your eye looks first at the legs wrapping the fish: you look at the action being taken moments before taking in the spider itself, or the scene.
I asked around and it turns out this card is the digital analog to, “Spider-Byte, Web Warden,” which calls back to the earlier name of this. The Spider-Man cards pull heavily from the Spiderverse world of multiple Spider-people, and Spider-Byte is just one of many, though admittedly not one I’m familiar with.
Shared with permission from WOTC
TM and © Wizards of the Coast