Setting: R&D’s Secret Lair.

(An EXECUTIVE and INTERN are seated at a table. Enter DAN BROWN via teleportation.)

EXECUTIVE: Thank you for joining us, Mr. Brown. Now then, as promised…one minute of your time, one million dollars. What’s the theme for our next Magic: The Gathering set?

DAN BROWN (after several seconds of thought): It’s The Da Vinci Code.

EXECUTIVE: We try to avoid real-world references in Magic. Any other ideas, Mr. Brown?

DAN BROWN (after several more seconds of thought): Try Angels & Demons.

INTERN: We have a Duel Decks set…

EXECUTIVE (giving INTERN the Death’s Caress treatment): It’s perfect, Mr. Brown. Thank you for your time.

***

The full spoiler is out, the Prereleases have happened, and you can shop Avacyn Restored to your heart’s content. While the rest of the StarCityGames.com writers are serving up a cruise ship buffet of tech, I’m the pastry chef warning you about the cheap lemon bars and serving you a seven-layer Magic flavor cake instead. One big slice, coming right up!

Hits

Overall art for the set: I’ve seen the public comments over and over: the art is amazing, Wizards has outdone itself, and so on. I can’t ignore the popular sentiment, no matter how much I may disagree with it. Now that I have access to the entire set, I feel better about it than I did in the early going when I was staring at the host of Photoshop Angels in the previews and whispering, “Is that all we get?” Fortunately, there’s a lot more to the set than just the Dan Brown special (but see misses below).

Defang: I’m surprised that particular word hadn’t been used before as a card title, so kudos to whoever thought it up; it has a literal application here, but it’s metaphorical enough that it could appear in a core set without any problems. There’s also a bit of “secret horror” built into the premise of Defang: depending on how recently the Vampire-in-chains fed, the countdown to starvation could be anywhere from one month to one day, and I doubt all that “exercise” is going to do the defanged Vampire any favors…

Human Frailty: The most iconic “creature kill” artworks make their marks with simple but brutally effective compositions; there’s nothing fancy about Ron Spencer’s art for Terror, for instance, but it’s immediately eye-catching and delivers its meaning with a punch. Jeremy Jarvis and his Deathmark give another good, if slightly fancier example with the “blood snowflake.” Human Frailty is 2012’s entry in the simple-but-brutal sweepstakes: boot meet skull. You can pick apart certain points of composition if you want to (what’s with the shadow at upper right?), but its overall effectiveness can’t be denied.

Angel of Jubilation: I’m already a Terese Nielsen fan, but this asymmetric composition is stunning. She doesn’t look like any of the other Angels in the set, yet she clearly is “of” them—this isn’t an artwork that’s out-of-place in Avacyn Restored. I’m curious who made the choice to have most of the art space be “wing,” but the call was right here.

Often, Angels don’t get their “scaling” due the way Primeval Titan or other large creatures will, but the Angel of Jubilation with her one wing outstretched gives an impression of majesty and power. Look closely enough and there’s a “sexy Angel” to be had (this is the same artist who created the female Elvish Ranger), but it’s a nice bonus rather than the whole point of the piece.

Sam Wolfe Connelly’s Magic debut: He’s the hot young speculative fiction illustrator of the season, scoring plenty of accolades and putting together quite the portfolio. His top pieces come across as “a really good bad dream.” He does his best work in black-and-white—I bet you never imagined the Dr. Seuss character Fox in Socks quite like this—but he can add limited colors to make a perfectly fine Magic illustration. I don’t know how well he’ll fit with the current Magic aesthetic, but I hope he finds his niche and lasts. I’ll be watching for him in the future.

The basic land switcheroo: Avacyn Restored’s basic lands do a “night-and-day” transformation from their Innistrad versions, as shown in this Magic Arcana. Some transformations are more radical (and more successful) than others and there are a surprising number of human and animal figures in these landscapes, but the overall effect hits the mark.

Mad Prophet: Dear Wizards flavor text writers: remember all those puns and jokes that didn’t work? I forgive you. “Five-legged shrew” is almost as funny as “chainsaw weasel.”

Misses

The swerve to the Angels & Demons theme: The cracking of the Helvault turned out to be a weird mix of nonevent and deus ex machina. Avacyn’s restoration was a mere byproduct of Liliana’s hunt for Griselbrand? That fatal wound turned out not so fatal after all? After all the Demons get released, the Angels stop their self-pity party and get back to work?

On one level, the premise was set up correctly—that Avacyn is gone inspires the question of what happens when she returns—but establishing two new tribes in the block (Angels and Demons) largely at the expense of the old (Humans gain, but almost every other group loses out) only repeats the mistake made with Allies in Zendikar block. The flavor and mechanics of the first two sets were well integrated, but the mixture separated in Avacyn Restored. Thanks a lot, Dan Brown.

 

Soulbond: Surely I’m not the only World of Warcraft player who’s going to be reading (and saying) this ability as “soulbound” at every turn? Part of game design is knowing what else is out there. Honestly, I’m surprised that a keyword one letter off from another game’s term for a key concept made it through.

The art for Gisela, Blade of Goldnight:Does someone want to explain to me how the lighting works? There are huge rays of light shining from behind her, yet her face and…features are lit up perfectly from an unknown source. I may grumble about how staring at Sigarda, Host of Herons makes my head hurt, but at least the play of light and shadow makes some sense. Gisela’s lighting just doesn’t make sense to me at all.

Restoration Angel: Who dressed her? This Alice in Wonderland freak-frock manages to be impossibly long and impossibly short at the same time, like a mullet dress turned up to eleven. No wonder the guy in the illustration is averting his eyes. It’s just embarrassing.

Sorin in Avacyn Restored: The ancient Vampire planeswalker who has the most incentive to spring Avacyn from the Helvault isn’t even there when it happens. Instead, he’s…preaching to his kindred? When he knows he’s not welcome? He’s like the distant cousin who “renounces the ties of this earth” but decides to rejoin the family just in time for Christmas dinner, insists on saying grace his way, and later harangues you about how you’re going to hell because you were baptized in the name of the Holy Ghost and “ghosts are evil” all while you’re trying to carve the ham. Like the distant cousin, Sorin in Avacyn Restored could stand to hear about The Mote and the Beam, because there’s more than a little self-righteousness and hypocrisy going on…

Griselbrand’s flavor text: Most cards are lucky to get one or two lines for flavor text, so I understand the temptation to fill up the space when it’s there. Sometimes, though, it just doesn’t work. Thalia as a flavor text character can’t decide if she’s wordy or pithy, but Griselbrand didn’t need anything more than, “The price of Avacyn’s freedom.”

The art for Triumph of Ferocity: I don’t even have to state my personal opinion on this one (though devoted readers surely will guess). In a weird way, it’s a testament to how good a job Wizards has done overall that the Triumph of Ferocity art inspired a backlash instead of a “that’s Magic” shrug. I just hope the backlash, the backlash to the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash to the backlash don’t cause Magic art to “play it safe” to excess; not taking risks is a risk in itself, and reasoned judgment will serve the game better than censoriousness.

Hit And Miss

The art of Descendants’ Path: This art defines “right card, wrong set.” It strikes a chord, has an intensely personal and bittersweet story behind it, and neither the original art nor the working sketch remains available just a couple of days after being put up for sale. Yet what is the link to the world of Innistrad? The “ancestors” are dressed in clothes too late for Innistrad and their hairstyles are all wrong for the world.

In the freeform world of Magic 2013, this would be the art of the set. Some may still have that opinion for Avacyn Restored, but even if it is the best art in the set, the art is not of the set. Descendant’s Path is a beautiful, jarring, amazing misfit—and likely the Avacyn Restored card that will be remembered most a decade from now.

Bittersweet isn’t a bad flavor at all.

As always, thanks for reading.

— JDB

@jdbeety on Twitter