Artwork by XVII Creative Endeavors LLC.
I commissioned these two playmats as gifts for two of my best mates that I play EDH with. It was the three of us that started our local group and due to a change in my life I couldn’t play with them as often as we used to. Initially I envisioned these as Christmas presents but it didn’t work out that way due to a few factors. I decided to share them here despite not having anything to do with my deck because they both include Avacyn in some way and the artwork is awesome.
Me and my mate that this playmat was for, we love our cars and we have been mates since we were teenagers in school, so I wanted to combine all of that with MtG. The premise for the playmat was to use a photo of our cars as a reference and add MtG elements, namely Avacyn and Vorel of the Hull Clade (it was my mate’s first EDH Commander, and his only deck for a long time). Initially I thought adding the characters as they are represented on MtG cards but when it came to XVII sending me sketches we decided modern clothing would fit with the cars better. The names on the reg plates are names we gave to the cars. The text in the background is a combination of lyrics from 2Pac and Wiz Khalifa songs.
This playmat is a visual representation of a long running joke in our playgroup. When we first started playing with this mate and didn’t know his deck well yet, there was a game where the fourth player was winning and our mate said “I got this boys, just tap your lands”. We had no reason to be suspicious so we did so, only for him to proceed by playing Mana Geyser and then Torment of Hellfire, killing us all! This stuck in our memory and we always have a laugh about it. My mate’s favourite character is Nicol Bolas but the commander of his Grixis deck is Kess, so I wanted them to be shown working together and casting those two spells. To tie it with our playgroup there are two shadows in front of them, of Avacyn and Atraxa which represent our favourite decks.
Both of the playmats have foil elements, which was not what I originally envisioned but as XVII was sending me progress updates I thought it would be a cool addition.
Facebook page: XVII Creative Endeavors LLC