I Cannot Cease Laughing at This ‘Avatar: The Final Airbender’ Card for ‘Magic: The Gathering’

A sample has start to emerge over the course of the latest “Universes Beyond” sets for Magic: The Gathering, the place a bonus sheet of alternate artwork playing cards gives the sport an opportunity to reprint some basic playing cards below the banner of… properly, reusing a bunch of artwork from the sequence the set represents. Final Fantasy‘s “Via the Ages” bonus sheet leveraged all the things from field artwork to basic Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshitaka Amano artwork. Spider-Man‘s “Marvel Universe” grabbed iconic comics artwork from a long time of basic tales.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, with its set out subsequent month, goes to be no totally different, with “Supply Materials”, a large 61-card bonus sheet that provides a reprint impressed by each and every episode of The Final Airbender, tying a nonetheless from each episode to a basic card. Aside from one huge distinction:

None of these previous bonus sheets had a hilarious huge face filling a card body to stare you down.

Enter Avatar‘s reprint of “Merciless Tutor”. It’s attention-grabbing from a Magic perspective, as Merciless Tutor is a really previous card that has very hardly ever been reprinted in Magic‘s historical past—the Avatar set is just the fourth such printing of the cardboard. Nevertheless it’s additionally attention-grabbing as a result of Wizards of the Coast determined that the fourth-ever “Merciless Tutor” print ought to simply be Fireplace Lord Ozai’s huge grinning face.

On the one hand, it does make sense. Ozai is certainly a personality who makes use of ache to impart data—bear in mind when he gave Zuko his face burn as a baby, telling him, “You’ll study respect, and struggling shall be your trainer.” And the second the screenshot is from, “Sozin’s Comet, Half 1: The Phoenix King”, is suitably flavorful for that. It’s a scene from the four-parter that ends The Final Airbender the place, in flashback, Ozai delivers his plan to make use of the titular comet to energise firebending skills so he can flip the Earth Kingdom to ash, taking a short second of defiance from Zuko (and leaning into Azula’s depravity) to concoct, properly, a lesson from a merciless tutor.

On the opposite… the cardboard is simply actually, laughably bizarre. It’s a grainy screenshot from a 4:3 side ratio present minimize right down to the scale of a Magic card, and all that’s left is a blown-up crop of Ozai’s smirking face. It’s such a weird shot, when the episode the cardboard represents has loads of different choices to make use of for a picture of Ozai. Think about drawing your hand and getting flashbanged by the enormous face of grinning Mark Hamill simply obvious again up at you. It nearly appears to be like like a meme proxy card somebody printed themselves, fairly than one thing that may exist in an official Magic set.

These sorts of bonus sheets in “Universes Past” have already confirmed to be a little bit of a sticking level amongst Magic followers already displeased at simply how much crossover material is coming into the sport in the mean time—playing cards that actually want reprints find yourself getting a remedy that doesn’t leverage one of many true joys of Magic: having the ability to get new art work for playing cards. Reuse of already-available belongings like Spider-Man comics, Last Fantasy field artwork, or on this case, screenshots from episodes of a TV present robs you of getting that, even when the broader units they’re part of are nonetheless chock full of recent authentic artwork past them.

However there may be simply nonetheless one thing very, very humorous about one shit-eating grin amongst lots of Ozai’s making its strategy to Magic like this.

The Avatar: The Final Airbender set for Magic: The Gathering releases November 21—and you’ll head on over to Wizards of the Coast’s official site to see extra of the newly revealed Avatar playing cards.

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