Magic New Art Reprints: Naturalize

Magic: The Gathering has five major card types: Creature, Enchantment, Instant, Sorcery, and Artifact... and Land, of course. Six major card types. Well, seven if you count Planeswalker, but there's six types that have the potential to NOT be busted and overpowered and disruptively transformative to the way the game is played. The first two cards I've profiled in this feature were a Sorcery (Stone Rain) and an Instant (Counterspell, formerly Interrupt), and while today's card is also an Instant, it deals with two of the other types. There are between 4,127 and 4,152 Enchantments and Artifacts combined in Magic's database (depending on whether you search maggiccards.info or the official gatherer.wizards.com), and for the low, low price of two mana, Naturalize can deal with... most of them.

TOP: Onslaught, Eighth Edition, Ninth Edition, Shards of Alara, Rise of the Eldrazi
BOTTOM: Innistrad, Gatecrash, Khans of Tarkir, Dragons of Tarkir, Rivals of Ixalan

While the card text on Naturalize is pretty explicit, there are some artifacts and enchantment out there (probably numbering in the 50's) that are protected from it by abilities such as Indestructible (can't be destroyed), Hexproof, or Shroud (can't be targeted), so while it's not a perfect spell, it is the very picture of efficiency. Interestingly enough, Naturalize wasn't the first card to have this exact same effect: it's actually a color-shifted version of the White card Disenchant, from the Limited set, which itself has nine unique-art versions, but we'll go over that in more detail next time. Naturalize didn't show up until the Onslaught expansion in 2002, nearly 10 years after Magic's debut, but Artifact/Enchantment removal has since become just as much of a hallmark of Green's strategy as White's.

Onslaught actually has a very compelling story justification for why one color of mana would gain access to an effect usually produced by another, which is reflected in the original art for Naturalize. The illustration by Ron Spears features a character called Kamahl, who originally appeared as a Red Barbarian in Odyssey, the previous block. But by the time Onslaught rolled around, events in the plot had caused him to change his color to Green and his class to Druid. (In fact, I think the destruction of his big-ass sword, as depicted in the artwork, was one of the reasons for the change.) I guess the message being that if circumstances can cause a person can alter their own color identity, the same can be true of effects on specific cards.

Naturalize's next two new-art reprints came in the next two consecutive core sets, Eighth and Ninth Editions, which were incidentally the last core sets to be printed with a white border. In fact, Naturalize would appear in NINE consecutive core sets, with seven of those printings featuring Tim Hildebrandt's art from Eighth Edition, while Jeff Miracola's more abstract Ninth Edition art would appear only once. The same is true for the Eighth Edition flavor text - a line by real world poet and playwright William Shakespeare, whose quotations have appeared on 25 cards throughout Magic's history. The Ninth Edition flavor text - a quote from Arcum Dagsson (remember him from the Ice Age printing of Stone Rain?) - would reappear in Tenth Edition, while all but one of the subsequent printings would feature quotes from the original Green planeswalker Garruk Wildspeaker.

Like Stone Rain before it, all of Naturalize's unique-art printings would come in actual expansion sets, rather than promotional giveaways or supplemental products. Its second expert level printing came in Shards of Alara, the first set of a block built around three-color combinations made up of one color and its two allied colors (read: adjacent) on the color wheel. I'm not sure exactly what kind of idol is getting ripped apart in Trevor Hairsine's art, nor is it clear what is causing those grasping vines to appear. The opposite is true in the art for Rise of Eldrazi, the third set in the Zendikar block, which introduced the titular extra-dimensional world-destroying beings that returned three years ago in Battle for Zendikar. Howard Lyon's art is the only version of Naturalize to show the mage who's actually casting the spell - in this case it's some dude with a ponytail throwing up the "Westside" gang sign to evaporate a Hedron.

It's appropriate that the Innistrad version of Naturalize features an overgrown coffin, since this set had a top-down design based on gothic horror (think vampires, werewolves, and zombies). Incidentally, Scott Chou's eerie art was repeated for the second Core Set printing of Naturalize to not feature Tim Hildebrandt's art, but the tomb inscription flavor text was replaced by the Garruk's quote from the previous version. Gatecrash was the second set in the Return to Ravnica block, the second Magic block to focus on the two-color Guilds. The version of Naturalize in this set doesn't depict any key story point, nor does the flavor text refer directly to any specific guild, but the use of Green mana means that Iveta must belong to either Gruul (Green/Red) or Simic (Green/Blue). The art by Daniel Ljunggren does however hearken back to the original Onslaught printing, in that we see a sword transforming into a harmless plant.

The next two new-art reprints of Naturalize are unique because they come from two different sets in the same block. Khans of Tarkir takes place on a plane where dragons used to exist in abundance, but the "sky tyrants" (as they're referred to in the flavor text) have gone extinct long ago. In the second set, Fate Reforged, planeswalker Sarkhan Vol somehow goes back in time and prevents the cataclysmic extinction event that destroyed all the dragons (also setting in motion the events of the aforementioned Battle for Zendikar). Then the third set, Dragons of Tarkir, returns to an alternate "present" where the dragons have flourished and unseated the humanoid khans as leaders of the plane. That's why James Paick's art from Khans features a decomposing dragon skull, while the same artist's illustration for Dragons shows a broken... device of some kind, representing the collapse of the non-dragon civilization.

The most recent new-art reprint of Naturalize comes from Magic's most recent set, Rivals of Ixalan, which was released just last month. This version's art by Simon Dominic has perhaps the funniest depiction of an artifact (equipment) getting destroyed: being smashed under the foot of a giant dinosaur. As a side note, every artwork to adorn a printing of Naturalize features a physical item, which are usually associated with artifacts, even though the card technically has more targets of the enchantment variety. But I will also concede that it's a lot harder to artistically render the destruction of an incorporeal magical effect...


According to my research, Stone Rain, Counterspell, and Naturalize are the only three cards in Magic's history with at least 10 unique pieces of art. There are four cards with nine unique-art printings each, but since three of them originate in the Limited set - which we've talked about in some detail now - next time I'm going to skip ahead to the first Land card to be profiled in this feature: Evolving Wilds.