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Magic Artist Steven Belledin is the man behind the look of such cards as Deathmark, Evolving Wilds, and most recently, Mikaeus, the Lunarch. I caught up with him as he met with a long line of fans. In between the glad-handing and card-signing, he answered a few questions about his art and his artistic process.


On Fans

(after my making a weak joke about him wearing out his wrist signing cards this weekend)

"That has actually happened to me once, but seriously, I consider getting to do this a real privelege. These people are so great, it's rewarding to get to talk to them."


On Transitions of Styles

I asked Steven if it was tough moving from the Science Fiction Nightmare of New Phyrexia to the traditional Gothic Horror of Innistrad.

"Actually quite the opposite. By the time the third set in a block rolls around, a few things have happened. On the good side of things, I'll have finally hit my stride when it comes to the look and feel of the block. I always feel like my best work comes in the third set. Early on, I'm still learning. The styleguides we're given are incredible, there's so much detail. On top of that, it isn't until after the first set is out that you get to see what all the other artists are doing, so that gives you the full context of things.

"On the other side, having spent so long in one world, I'm pretty eager to move on to the next thing. The worst thing that can happen to me artistically is getting bored. That can make the work really difficult. So I actually find moving to a new style refreshing. It's rarely a challenge for me.

"The biggest stylistic challenge I've faced so far was in Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. It wasn't just, you know, taking in all the information about the look and feel of the world. For those sets the style was so far from what Magic usually looks like. It was like learning whole new shapes for things."


On the Creative Process

All that talk about the evolution of his work across a block got me interested in just how he goes about things.

"I don't really have a set pattern of how I approach a painting. That's just how my brain is wired, I guess. I resist that kind of structure. I know some artists who have a rigorous structure, you know, first I do A, then I do B, then I do C, and that works great for them. I can't do it like that.

"For some pieces, there's something really specific you have to capture, and so you have to make sure all the details come out right. That can be pretty trying. For others, you're given a starting point and extrapolating from that, and that usually goes a lot better. Some of my favourite of my pieces have come from that, where I can just see exactly what I want to do. Surgical Extraction was like that. I read the description and I could practically see the finished painting. It's no wonder that it's my favorite. The ones where I try out tons of different sketches, those are the ones that are hardest from me, and usually the ones I finish last."


On Traditional vs Digital

"I don't think there's too much to be made of that. It's just a preference. The one thing is that Traditional feels a bit more time-intensive for me."


On Artistic Rivalry

"There's a little bit of that, but it's hardly serious. It's more like, you see someone's work and that inspires you to work harder. After the first set comes out, Wizards will send us a collection of the arts that they feel best represent the world, so you always want to be up there."


For a full look at Steven's Magic oeuvre click here.

Every tournament you’ll find players scrambling to find their last few cards, the unknown sideboard card, or the techy trace buster-buster in the form of Brooding Saurian.

This isn’t that kind of story. This is the kind of story where one man flies for an entire day across the country with 4,000 cards for two teams so that some of the biggest names in the game can actually play in the Pro Tour.

The man is Tristan Shaun Gregson. The players include Louis Scott Vargas, Conley Woods and Jon Finkel himself. And this is the story of the cross-country couriering that saved their tournament.

Team Channelfireball, which in addition to LSV and Woods also includes Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Player of the Year leader Owen Turtenwald and U.S. National team member David Ochoa, among others, spent the week prior to Grand Prix Pittsburgh holed up in the mountains of Pennsylvania testing Standard, M12 draft and Modern. But in doing so, they didn’t necessarily have access to all the Modern cards they would need for the Pro Tour.

Channelfireball the store, meanwhile, as part of their sponsorship deal with the players, has pledged to provide them with whatever cards they need for tournaments. The store let the players know that they had until Wednesday morning before the Pro Tour to request the cards they needed so they could be overnighted.

Unfortunately, they missed the night drop to ship the cards to Philadelphia by conventional means. To make matters worse, Channelfireball was also supposed to ship cards to a testing group that included its website’s Editor-in-Chief Zaim Beg, Jon Finkel and Zvi Mowshowitz.

To make matters even trickier, the two groups had different needs. To make things worse even beyond that (oh yes, worse), the teams needed full sets of multiple decks because they had not yet fully settled on deck lists or sideboards.

Enter Tristan Shaun Gregson, best known for his videos with LSV and Humphrey (a plant).

The store’s owner asked Gregson if he could fly to Philadelphia with two separate boxes of about 2,000 cards each to hand deliver them to some of the best players ever to play the game.

Ten hours, $1,100, and one very tired Gregson later, and both teams had their cards.

“The responses I got varied from ‘Thanks, hi’ to ‘Where are my cards?” Gregson said, laughing, and “’You don’t snore, do you?’”

Inquiring minds who noted the price tag might ask, “Isn’t it just easier to get the cards on site?"

The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes, but…

You see, at the professional level, information can be just as valuable, if not more, and having to pick up all the cards they needed for their decks at the tournament site would have tipped the teams hand more than they were comfortable.  While the team was willing to do so if they had to, Gregson said that protecting the player’s information was part of the promise they made, so they followed through.

Interestingly, most of the team switched decks about 48 hours before the event and hadn’t settled on most of its sideboard cards even the night before. That made the gigantic pile of cards Gregson brought even more important.

Oh, and the part of the team that stayed true to their original choice, which turned out to by Pyromancer’s Swath? None other than Conley Woods and Matt Nass, who players known for riding a little on the side of rogue.

Still, Gregson, despite a full day of traveling, despite transporting 4,000 (heavy) cards all the way from California to Philadelphia and despite having to share a bed with LSV (“Never again” he said), he said, if they had to, they would do it again.

“It was worth it, that’s the kind of thing we do,” he said.

Modern has opened up a whole world of new interactions and crazy situations that might look a little strange if you just happen to walk by a match. See if you can figure out how players pulled off these feats:

A) Casually flipping through their library, one card at a time looking for just the perfect card to leave on top, all while gaining as much life as they'd like.

B) Attacking for 11 poison on turn two without casting a single creature.

C) Attacking for 1,000,001 with a single creature on turn 3

D) One of the Eldrazi unable to attack an opponent with no cards in hand, no land untapped and no creatures on the board

E) Grapeshots that deal three damage per copy

Answers below...

A) 

Sacrifice Kitchen Finks to Viscera Seer, Scry the card to the top or bottom, gain two life when the Finks comes back, and Melira keeps the counter from being placed on the Finks. Repeat until your library is where you would like it your life total is as high as you choose.

B)

Activate Inkmoth Nexus, Exile Progenitus to Blazing Shoal, attack. No repeat necessary.

C)

Play a Heritage Druid, tap Nettle Sentinel, and a one-mana elf (like Llanowar Elves) for mana using the Druid's ability with the Curio trigger on the stack, return the Heritage Druid to your hand from the Curio and recast it, untapping the Nettle Sentinel and returning the one-mana elf. Recast the one mana elf and start the loop over agian, but with one extra green mana. Use all the mana to make Ezuri very, very angry, and attack with your giant Nettle Sentinel

D) 

Remember this? Tezzeret players certainly do. It also doesn't matter how many Pestermite tokens you have, they aren't attacking an empty-handed Bridge player.

E) 

Once made briefly popular as part of the "Aussie Storm" deck, a few pros whose names you  might recognize have been seen cutting a swath through the first round of Philadelphia.

We're here in Philadelphia for the third Magic Weekend of the year and the debut of the Modern format at the Pro Tour. Wth cards stretching back to Eighth Edition and the first Mirrodin block, this should be a wide-open playground for deck designers and deck tuners. Magic Online Daily Events over the past week have given a glimpse inside the format, but you can always expect a few top pros to break out entirely new decks for the big show.

But Modern is only half the story this weekend. The pros will also be battling through two Magic 2012 booster drafts before we make it to the Top 8 cut on Saturday. As far as players to keep an eye out for, how about a name from Magic's past plus a name from its present ... Hall of Famer Jon Finkel has been preparing for the PT as earnestly as any since his win at Kuala Lumpur, and 2008 Player of the Year Yuuta Watanabe is coming off a run of summer Grand Prix finishes (second, first, first) that this game has rarely seen.

Check back here all week for inside information and fun stories from the floor of Magic Weekend Philadelphia.