Artwork by Alberto S. Ballesteros Illustration.
When I decided to completely foil out and alter my deck I was stuck on deciding which basic lands to use. Since the deck only includes few basic lands (compared to most of my other EDH decks at least) I thought about full art foils or some of the older Un-sets, but I wanted something unique that I haven't seen used before. Initially I have settled on golden-bordered basic lands with signatures from the World Championship Decks. However, I ran into the problem that even online stores like MtG Cardmarket had a rather limited supply, so even though they not expensive I struggled to buy enough of the specific versions I wanted.
Then one day I saw custom MtG tokens offered by Alberto. I really liked his art style, especially the tokens for keeping track of the mana pool. His artwork is digital and he prints the tokens, which gave me an idea. I have approached Alberto with the request for a landscape panorama that could be then separated and printed as Plains and Mountain basic lands. I wanted to give him creative freedom and I had no specific landscape in mind anyway, my only requirement was to incorporate the Collar of Avacyn somehow. Alberto delivered that and more. He even included Archangel Avacyn on the Plains part, which I love.
In addition to the standard basic lands I asked for a snow-covered version of the artwork, in case I decided to play snow-covered lands for whatever reason. On the printed cards the name "snow-covered" was added just to avoid any confusion during games. We also talked about adding mana symbols of some sort onto the printed cards but decided against it to show as much of the artwork as possible.
The printed cards are perfect size to match MtG cards and don't stand out at all when sleeved. I don't normally use proxy cards in my decks but since these are basic lands I made an exception. It was the only way to have truly unique basic lands that are all matching. Personally I like the basic lands in my EDH decks to be the same. If I ordered these as hand-drawn alters, not only it would likely be boring for the artists to do so much repetitive work but it would also limit me to always keeping the number of basic lands the same or use fewer in the deck. This way I have more copies than I need and I am free to change the number of basic lands as the deck requires.
Facebook page: Alberto S. Ballesteros Illustration
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