After making my Eldraine LoRA, I realized that there was an early Magic: The Gathering set with a clear, distinct, artstyle. Years ago, it was Chinese In the early days of Magic, Wizards tried to make simple sets for teaching new players. After the first two failed for boring and uninteresting cards and (in the first) proprietary terminology that defeated the entire point of the set they went in a wildly different direction: Rather than take place in a fantasy world of the game’s creation, Portal Three Kingdoms was set in Historical China in the 200s (or, at least, the heavily mythologized version from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms epic from the 1300s) with the Sorcery type representing famous scenes and tactics instead of spells. This off the wall yet strangely captivating setting was paired with sometimes actually useful/interesting cards making for one of the game’s most fascinating sets… that they barely printed in English. As part of the set’s attempt to introduce the game to Asian markets, all art was done by Asian artists in a really neat quasi-historical style that blends realistic designs with the gravitas of an epic. High data quantity means I blew a lot of buzz making this, . Also
Tag: P_T_K
Helps: traditional media, painting (medium) (like last on, this isn't trained with it, but it does help)
Checkpoint: PerfectDeliberate? (please offer suggestions for anything better. Non-anime/cartoon is outside my normal wheelhouse so I don't know checkpoint options for it, and unlike Eldraine this one kinda makes the style a bit too realistic. Base illustrious captures the style well but draws terribly.)
Color: Optionally, use one (or more?) of W_C, U_C, B_C, R_C, or G_C for color identity (the set’s only colorless cards are lands, and there are no multicolored cards).
Lands: Lands are tagged “scenery, landscape” and their respective type of “plain” (note the tag lacks the s), “island”, “swamp”, “mountain”, or “forest”.
Used a lot: Asian, Chinese clothes, Chinese armor (unsurprisingly, all humans in the set set in 200s China are, in fact, Chinese wearing Chinese clothes)
Made with 179 art crops (I dropped Deception because the faces are so silly).