Longtime Magic: The Gathering artist, Mark Poole, joins Magic Untapped talks about the favorite pieces of artwork he's done for the CCG and dispels the urban legend around his Birds of Paradise artwork in the process.
The artist, whom began work on Magic: The Gathering back in 1992 -- one year before the game's launch in August of the following year -- recalls what it was like creating Magic card art in those earliest days.
"You didn't know what the cards did -- you didn't know what their power was," he tells. "You just got a name."
From there, it was to the drawing board (quite literally).
Poole remembers one such card he did the art for in Magic's initial release: Natural Selection.
"I was like how do you illustrate natural selection without...the Darwinism thing -- you could have some creature eat something -- I don't know," he says. "I just made this tiger guy holding a red orb and a staff. Who knows why that happened. I dunno. That's just what came out of my head."
Poole recalls that the card never really saw much notable play back in its day, though he wishes it had so that more players could have seen and enjoyed the card's artwork. Still, even today, Poole says that Natural Selection is probably his favorite of his early pieces for Magic: The Gathering. And that comes from a list of cards that includes Counterspell, Wild Growth, and Ancestral Recall.
"Natural Selection was the one for me," he states. "I still like the look of it -- the colors and stuff. It's very simple, but I like the colors."
WATCH: MARK POOLE TALKS ABOUT HIS MOST CHERISHED MTG ILLUSTRATIONS
Another card (well, series of cards) that Poole ranks up in his top favorite pieces he's done for Magic: The Gathering is his work for the card Urza's Tower from Antiquities.
For that card, he made four different pieces of artwork at the request of Wizards of the Coast with each version getting its own card printed in the set.
"What I did was I imagined that these towers could either pop up or whatever in different environments," he explains. "So that was my thinking."
Looking at some of Poole's more modern pieces of artwork for Magic, the artist says his work for the card City of Brass from Double Masters 2022 really stands out.
"Just how that one pulled together a the end," he says. "I did two paintings for that, actually, and we landed on the second one."
These two paintings Poole made for the one card weren't exactly small, either, at 18x24 inches apiece.
"It took a while getting the rulers and the lines and the stained glass windows in," he confesses. "Love the City of Brass."
One other more recent card for which he created artwork, also from Double Masters 2022, is Panharmonicon.
"I kinda like the nature aspect and the colors," he says.
Of course, landscapes are some of Poole's more recognizable early works. His work on the game's first basic Island cards are still highly appreciated and well known today more than 30 years later, though the cards don't actually showcase the original pieces of art that he made for the cards.
"I had two islands and I thought that's kind of plain, so I put a bird in one and pegasus in another," says Poole.
Both pieces of artwork he submitted for his two Island cards wound up being rejected by Wizards of the Coast for the land cards and, instead, had new cards made for them: Birds of Paradise and Island Sanctuary.
"A lot of people think [Birds of Paradise] is Volcanic Island, but no," he explains. "I just painted birds for an island and...pegasus for an island."
Poole then made two new island paintings without any sort of animals on them with those two new paintings being the ones Wizards used on the set's Island cards.
Just goes to prove that even a basic assignment like a basic land doesn't have to be as basic as it might sound (basically).
