Plains - Magic Basic Lands Reprints

Last year, I did a deep dive into an aspect of Magic: the Gathering that has always fascinated me: new art reprints. If you don't want to click the link and read my previous post(s), the general idea is that I covered the top five cards (in terms of frequency) that have been reprinted with a piece of artwork that's different from its original printing. When I say "cards" above, I'm referring to spells and nonbasic lands; while Basic Land is the card type that has the most new art reprints, with four to five different versions of each appearing in many sets, they're also fundamentally different from any other card in Magic, given that a player can have as many as they want in their decks. What's more, each basic land type (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest) features many pieces of art that appear in multiple sets, sort of the opposite of a new art reprint. Considering this distinction, it's much more interesting to look at which lands' art pieces have been reprinted the most amount of times. At least that's what I kept telling myself when I put together the database from which the following excerpt has been taken:

The above image is a list of every Basic Land - Plains that has had its artwork reprinted more than once. Plains is a good place to start, not just because white mana sits at the top of the color wheel, but because the leader - or rather, co-leaders - in Plains art reprints is the smallest among all basic land types, appearing in seven sets beyond their original printings. The earlier of the two aforementioned original printings was Invasion, a very important set in Magic's history, it being the culmination of the iconic Weatherlight Saga. John Avon's art for Plains #331, depicting a low angle shot of a field of wheat, conjures up images from the film Gladiator. However I imagine this is merely a coincidence, since the Ridley Scott-helmed Best Picture winner was released just five months before Invasion's print run, which means the artwork must have been commissioned long before that. Magic 2010 (released in 2009, like new car models) was the first ever Core Set to include new art printings of basic lands, but it wasn't until four years later that we got a Core Set Plains with real sticking power. Plains #233 from M14 features art by Andreas Rocha, which does a great job of conveying the expansiveness associated with prairie, steppe, and grassland, while also giving us a sense of perspective of the surrounding landscapes.

Another reason why Plains is a good place to start this feature is that its next-most-common group of same-art-reprints (with six reprints each) includes a good reason to talk about the mistakes in Magic's first ever Core Set. Originally released in August 1993, the Alpha printing of Limited Edition included only two of each type of basic land, the Plains versions of which (illustrated by Jesper Myrfors) appear above. While they look very similar in terms of color and composition, notice the subtle addition of trees in the second one. In the Beta printing (October 1993), a third basic land of each type was added, after being mistakenly left out of the first print run. See the next section for the third "original" Plains.

2008's Shards of Alara expansion - which is based on three-color combinations known as "shards" - had a fun gimmick regarding the art on basic lands: one artist was assigned to illustrate four lands per shard, two from the central color and one each for the two flanking colors. Michael Komarck got the lands for the Bant shard (Green-White-Blue), which means he illustrated two Plains, one Island, and one Forest. The second of these two Plains (#232, depicting a tree-dotted hill with a castle in the distance and a tranquil stream in the foreground) is the third card pictured above. In an even more fun basic land gimmick, the following year's Zendikar expansion featured full art lands (a concept that debuted in 1998's parody set Unglued). Our old pal John Avon provided the pillar-esque art for Plains #230, although every subsequent reprint of the image featured a cropped version with the traditional card frame.

Rounding things out, five Plains have pieces of art that have been reprinted five times, three of which are from expansion sets we've seen before. First on the list (i.e. the earliest to be released) is the aforementioned Beta Plains that was unintentionally left out of the Alpha print run, this one with a flat foreground, as opposed to the U-shaped ones from Jesper Myrfors's two Plains from Alpha. Number two is the first of Michael Komarck's Plains from Shards of Alara (#231), which leans more into the Green mana side of Bant (hence all those trees). And number four is another full art land from Zendikar, and unlike John Avon's above installment from the same set, this hedron-filled one by Vincent Proce (#233) has been reprinted in its full art version, for 2015's return to the plane, Battle for Zendikar. Speaking of John Avon, his art for Plains #231 in the Magic 2010 Core Set shares many elements of his above-pictured Invasion Plains, most notably the overall burnt-umber coloring and its placement in a field. The main differences are that the path is emphasized, the point of view is slightly wider, so we see more of the sunset in the distance, and the vegetation looks more like tall grass than crops. The final Plains on this list is also from a Core Set (#232 from Magic 2013), and while Nils Hamm's artwork doesn't feature much in the way of details in the landscape, the color scheme and gentle lines present a very pleasant-seeming environment indeed.


Next time I'll continue around the color wheel and take a journey into Magic's most-reprinted artwork for Islands.