When you start to crack boosters from the upcoming MTG Avatar the Last Airbender set, you'll have a chance of opening rare Partner Source Material cards alongside your basic pack contents. There will be 61 of these cards, one for each episode of the show, which reprint classic MTG cards with art from original Avatar animation cells. This bonus card sheet is part of Wizards of the Coast's 'Booster Fun' initiative designed to drive collectors into a frenzy - which makes it a bit puzzling that the first preview cards WotC has revealed are flat out pig ugly.
During an early press preview, WotC showed off some of the Partner Source Material Cards: Eladamri's Call, Heroic Intervention, Mystic Remora, Dark Depths, and the $45 Cruel Tutor.
While these are likely the cream of the crop, it's a good start to a reprint lineup. These are staple MTG cards for Commander, but they lose a lot of their power in limited formats. If the rest of the bonus sheet is like this, it will provide needed reprints without unbalancing draft and sealed games with extra bomb rares.
But man alive, are they ugly. Avatar is a great looking cartoon with iconic characters and some truly epic action scenes, but animation cells are not designed to be rendered on static playing cards. The resolution is low, the color grading is off, and the framing varies between mediocre and awful.
These, presumably, were the very best bits of art that WotC could find. At best they look competent and boring. At worst, they're this grainy closeup of Fire Lord Ozai's face. This is the face of my sleep paralysis demon.
Some cards have variant names to better match the Avatar setting. So Dark Depths - a land that enters with 10 ice counters on it, and which is replaced by an Avatar creature token if all the ice is ever removed - is being printed as 'The Boy in the Iceberg'. Superficially, that's a great gameplay match for how Aang enters the story.
But this is a mechanically identical reprint, so after you remove all the ice counters from The Boy in the Iceberg, you don't create a friendly little pacifist called Aang: you create a 20/20 flying indestructible token creature called Marit Lage. I would watch Marit Lage: The Last Airbender, but I think it would have a pretty different tone to Avatar.
'One card for every episode' feels like a good hook for luring in collectors - but I'm not sure it was really needed. The basic Avatar MTG set is already stuffed with beloved characters. And if I know one thing from following the market for the most expensive Pokémon cards - where prices are driven almost entirely by the collector's market and not the competitive scene - it's that the prettiest cards command the highest prices.
Non-foil versions of the Partner Source Material cards will be available in Play boosters and Collector boosters, while traditional foils will be available only in Collector boosters. Check out our guide to the MTG release schedule to make sure you don't miss the launch!
What do you think - am I being too harsh on these cards? Is there a particular piece of goofy animation you want to see captured on a Magic card? Can you think of a better idea for the Avatar bonus sheet? Come and share your thoughts in the Wargamer Discord community.