There are fewMagic: The Gatheringartists more widely renowned than Rebecca Guay. Beginning her career in 1996’s Alliances, she went on to lend her distinctive style to nearly 200 cards over the game’s 30-year lifespan.
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The secret to Guay’s appeal lay in the ethereal nature of her compositions, and the way in which they centred both female characters and femininity, things that were rare in Magic art, and fantasy art in general, at the time. While she hasn’t been as active in the game’s modern era, she has contributed pieces topromotional products and Secret Lairs, which have die-hard fans clamouring for a full return. Here are ten of Guay’s finest pieces: pieces that prove such devotion is well-deserved.
10Elspeth, Sun’s Champion
Created as part of Magic’s 30th Anniversary Countdown Kit Secret Lair, this old-border rendition of Elspeth, Sun’s Champion embodies all of Guay’s artistic ideals perfectly. The piece manages to balance Elspeth’s power and femininity extremely well, with the point of her sword and the point of her heel looking equally sharp.
The piece also makes masterful use of its background, a dark cosmic void defined by the sweeping curves of light Elspeth casts. Certain parts of her body seem to fade into this darkness, creating a unique ethereal feel that matches the Theros setting of this card’s debut very well indeed.
9Dark Ritual
What’s striking about this take on Dark Ritual is, ironically, the lack of darkness present in it. There is a pitch-black night sky in the background, true, but it’s almost entirely eclipsed by a soft grey cloud. Below, mages in orange robes conduct the titular Ritual on a bright blue altar, perhaps a stand-in for Earth itself, if you read the piece metaphorically.
This results in one of the most unique takes on this oft-reprinted black staple we’ve ever seen, bringing a light to the darkness in more ways than one. The huge eye overlooking the scene is a welcome dash of the supernatural, but even that is framed with curled sunbeam lashes in a way that transposes its dark power into something altogether different, and more interesting.
8Hana Kami
Kamigawa’s Spirits have alwaysprovided fertile groundsin which the most far-flung fancies of Magic’s artists can bloom, and Hana Kami is a perfect showcase of that fact. Marrying an unconventional creature type with Guay’s unconventional style, the piece stands out even among its very distinctive peers.
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Showing a flower with a woman’s face, spewing out blue petals in an act both beautiful and grotesque, this piece inspires a complex mix of emotions in the viewer. The other flowers, sitting quietly in the background, may be ordinary, or they may be concealing faces of their own; such are the mysteries of Kamigawa, conveyed so wonderfully by Guay here.
7Heartmender
The Plane of Lorwyn, and its inverted form Shadowmoor, played host to some of the most inventive, outlandish Elemental designs the game has ever seen. Guays Heartmender is up there with the best of them, a boar-spider-snake hybrid that looks more likely to devour your heart than to mend it.
While it’s certainly a bizarre creature to look at, Guays exemplary use of texture grounds it in reality, making it appear horribly real. The background, all soft orange cloud drifts and riverside grass, is pure fantasy, but the Heartmenders soulless yellow eyes ensure it’s a fantasy we’re relieved not to be living in.
6Bitterblossom
Perhaps Guay’s best-known piece, Bitterblossoms artwork will be familiar to many due to its background appearances in the videos of Tolarian Community College. Looking at it with fresh eyes, it’s not hard to see why it has earned such an esteemed spot in the collective Magic player consciousness.
It’s a piece dense with detail, crafting a dark fairytale forest that seems to live and breathe as you look on, awestruck. While the foreground Faerie is well-defined, a swooping curve that guides the eye across the canvas, those further back seem to fade into an almost-transparency, creating a sense of physical depth that mirrors the emotional depth seen in the varied expressions of the Faeries in the piece.
5Saprazzan Cove
Sometimes Magic art takes us on daring journeys beyond the borders of our imagination, and sometimes it stays closer to home, reminding us of the fantastical beauty that exists in the waking world. Saprazzan Cove is a perfect example of the latter, presenting a sleepy seaside town rich with evocative detail.
From the faded orange spires, to the patchwork tiled roofs, to the clumps of trees lining the shore, this piece feels oddly nostalgic, even if you’ve never set foot in a seaside town in your life. The ship pulling into port, its sailors undoubtedly yearning for the comforts of home, serves as a final reminder of the piece’s cosy central thesis.
4Orchard Warden
Treefolk are nothing new in the world of Magic, taking root as astaple green creature typein 1993’s Alpha. It’s rare that a Treefolk is as striking or unique as the one portrayed by Guay in Orchard Warden, however. While many Treefolk possess human appendages, the Warden appears to move around using a spidery set of roots instead, distributing wisdom to young saplings with movements of his branch-like arms.
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The canopy of leaves growing on the Warden provides an excellent frame for the scene, wrapping three of the corners in a lush green darkness, leaving the rest for the small, strangely-shaped Treefolk the Warden is teaching. The Warden’s facial features, eyes, and mouth drawn in knots of wood, are an excellent final touch.
3Bandage
A piece both striking in its simplicity and profound in its depth, Bandage does a lot with very little. Staged against a speckled black background, we see a young woman’s hands tending to her father, wrapping bandages around his wounded eyes.
The reduction of the scene’s female character to a set of hands may seem out of style for Guay, but it lends her a kind of saint-like anonymity that adds a lot of weight to her actions. The grim, hard expression on the father’s face reinforces the magnitude of her loss, making the tiny narrative given in the card’s flavour text hit harder than it has any right to.
2Wonder
Gods and other such foundational beings are always tricky to portray in fantasy art. After all, how do you show a being that should bebeyond mortal comprehension? Guay takes a very good crack at it in her rendition of Wonder, one of the original Incarnations from Judgment.
While Guay’s Wonder looks superficially like an Aven, several elements add a more alien tone to the piece: the strange staggered wings, the empty eye socket, the seaweed hair, and the branchlike staff; it all comes together to create a being whose fundamentals we recognise, but whose specifics place it on a plane of existence far removed from our own.
1Path To Exile
Part of the hyper-exclusive DCI Promos series, this rendition of white’s second-best removal spell more than earns its value, beyond mere scarcity. It depicts a Knight’s funeral, the body lying in eternal sleep as the currents bear it downriver, a woman with a baby looking on from the shore.
There’s just so much to unpack here, and it’s all presented in such gorgeous detail. The prevalence of natural forces, like the wind and the waves, highlights the fact that death is part of the natural order of things. On the other hand, the pain on the woman’s face, visible even on such a small scale, reminds us of just how cruel that natural order can be at times.
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