MTG: Mountain | Brushland (2023)
Wherein I was able to write off my purchase of Final Fantasy X
Mountain
I illustrated the basic lands Island way back in the Tempest expansion, and since then have not had the opportunity to do any others. As I had been doing a lot of dual lands in recent years though, I was thrilled to get to add another color through illustrating a Mountain card.
Doing a basic land within a themed world carries more restrictions than back in Magic's early days when you'd just paint some mountains. Since those days, the lands are heavily themed and sometimes hardly landscapes at all!
The mountain here was to be Mt. Ordeals from FFIV. I played this game as a port to the GameBoy Advance in the mid 00's and by 2023, didn't remember it very well. I was to translate this pixel-based spire to a more realized scene. I also watched playthroughs of the DS remake, which did some work in translating the pixel work into primitive polygons. Combining these I constructed this scene, attempting to place the paths and bridges one traverses at the very top, within the illustration. In the game, the save points are these glowing runic circles on the ground. I had them in my original sketch but we decided to remove them here.
I do hope to do a full cycle of lands eventually, as it would mean being able to play with a deck of all my own cards. I haven't done a ton of red cards, however, so this isn't as useful for me as as Islands or Plains might be! But every little bit helps, you could do a Blue deck with a splash of Gallegos Red now. Wouldn't be a very good deck, but could be fun!
Brushland
I've done a number of these dual lands over the years, and a couple of them more than once, though like with basic lands I'm hoping to do a full set of all combinations eventually!
Brushland being a repeat of an earlier card in the vein of Final Fantasy was great. It was to be a scene from within The Calm Lands of Final Fantasy X, which are just perfect for the card.
As it turned out, I was actually playing through FFX as this assignment came in! I have an ongoing first-time playthrough of the series which I began in the 00's, and in the cases of 7-10, opted to do so on original hardware. This made it a snap to wander about and look at details and such of the area. And being asked to illustrate something I was actively playing was a wild coincidence that will probably never happen again!
It was a little bit funny as an assignment though, since in many ways this was like doing a plein air painting of a digital landscape that doesn't exist. Except with pixels versus paint, which the original is rendered as pixels too, so I'm not sure how this all works now. I don't think this is an actual place you can stand and see, rather I took a few of the features of the landscape and incorporated them into the view to give the overall impression of the locale.
As a Universes Beyond product, I am unable to show process images or preliminary studies.