Is that supposed to be Serra in Gideon's background?

I recognize the other four, but I don't know that one.

I would say, angelic-ish planeswalker with honey-blonde hair? Yeah, that's Serra behind Gideon. Kind of disappointed that it's Bolas and not Leshrac behind Liliana, but they do have history (like Jaya/Chandra) and they probably don't have a modern concept art reference for Leshrac.

These are super pretty. Might actually try to get a set this year. If I recall they sold the the SDCC boxes on the Hasbro site last year, so maybe they'll do the same thing again.

They're even in colour order by prettiness. Nice touch there. Red and black are pretty close though and that kind of dampens the artistic effect of the scaling.

Erg... Honestly, not a fan.
I'm not terribly thrilled with the juxtaposition of the old and new, acting too much a reminder of the clash of character styles from the different eras. Beyond that, many of the poses are fairly static in a jarring way.

And, admittedly, I just wish they wouldn't throw so much work to Nielson. Largely because every time they do, that eats up the potential that they could pass watercolor work to another artist. And I'm not overly fond of her compositions or base linework. She's talented, no mistake, but...

I like them, but could NEVER afford them.

GOnna be honest, I straight up don't think most of this art even looks nice. Especially Gideon's face. And why the hell is there a random table for Jace to lean on instead of just having him look like an adult and standing up straight back turned to Urza?

why is the best art on things we can never obtain

So apparently Terese Nielsen asked Christine Sprankle to model for ALL of the female images in these sdcc cards: Serra, Liliana, Chandra, Jaya, Nissa, and Freyalise.
I think that's really epic and sweet!

Source is both Terese Nielsen's twitter and Christine Sprankle's instagram.
https://twitter.com/tnielsenart
https://www.instagram.com/cspranklerun/?hl=en

Also Allison Luhrs shared the art descriptions of each of the five pieces through a string of tweets.
https://twitter.com/MTGAlison/status/10 ... 5944682496


I'd love to order these, assuming they plan to drop some limited number of them on the hasbro website, but I sadly do not own a money tree and these are not as important to me as say new cards in M19 (or paying the mortgage on my house...).

Jace got that 'its not just a phase Urza, its who i am!' thing going on.