Universes Within and Flavor Blasted Magic

On artists carrying exceptional burdens

It’s no secret, if you read these articles or others in the Vorthos ecosystem, that Magic is working through its identity (though, in truth, Magic has probably always been working through its identity). Besides the growing role of Universes Beyond in Magic’s product output, there’s simply a lot for anyone to keep track of: the speed of new set releases (in fairness, 2025 is supposed to be less intense than the whirlwind 2024) can often leave minor details, those little particularities of Magic’s world, in the dust.

This article takes a look at one such particularity, a funny and fascinating little blip that seems to have quietly faded away: Universes Within.

Universes Within is a response to the Universes Beyond mini-brand, catering to both a mechanical desire and a more niche (but quite intense) flavor desire. The first desire was to make the mechanically unique Universes Beyond cards appear in booster packs. The second desire was to have Universes Beyond cards sans non-Magic branding. To date, there have been four Universes Beyond releases: the first actually reskins the second foray in Universes Beyond, the Stranger Things Secret Lair drop, and plusses those cards upup with the flavor of Innistrad; next, characters from the Street Fighter Secret Lair were reincarnated in Dominaria; then, those from the Walking Dead Secret Lair (Magic’s very first venture outside its own universe) were refitted for Innistrad; and finally just a few days ago—to my happy surprise—the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Secret Lair cards were reskinned as non-branded characters in Dungeons & Dragons’ Forgotten Realms.

When I began this article, I was prepared to say that with Universes Beyond ballooning from a sideshow attraction to a full-fledged part of the Magic ecosystem, Universes Within has had its day. With the announcement of the Honor Among Thieves Universes Within, I’m not so sure—but it still seems true that Universes Within belongs to a world in which UB is an abberation, not a central part of the Magic release calendar.

In any case, it’s easy for large-scale meta-analyses and sociologies of Magic’s story to lose the particular within the general, to (reversing the common problem) see the trees for the forest. Universes Within is (is? was? let’s say is for the sake of optimism) not just some kind of palliative for fan angst—it also consists of artworks as well-thought and well-wrought as those of the most refined Magic sets. Indeed, Universes Within cards are in some ways more artistically impressive: divorced from larger sets, from narrative texts, from worldbuilding guides, they must do nothing less than condense the pure essence of Magic worlds into singular cards. They are, in short, Flavor Blasted.

---

Make it Magic

Many of the Universes Within art pieces could well be legendary creatures from a tentpole “worldbuilding” set, like Bloomburrow or Khans of Tarkir. What makes them special, though, is that they channel Magic’s worlds so evocatively with so little public-facing supplemental material to support them.

Zoltan Boros, "Vikya, Scorching Stalwart" (SLX #011); Zoltan Boros, "Baldin, Century Herdmaster" (SLX #010)

The Universes Within Dominarians are special highlights in this regard. The advantage of this batch of UW cards is that Dominaria has so many factions that it was impossible to capture all of them in sets like Dominaria and Dominaria United. Kai Carpenter’s “Immard, the Stormcleaver,” Zoltan Boros’ “Vikya, Scorching Stalwart” and Boros’ “Baldin, Century Herdmaster” are all, to judge from the geometric patterns on their outfits and their clockwork technology, based on New Argive, which was relatively underrepresented in the modern Dominaria sets (a URL on Carpenter’s website, interestingly, suggests that Immard was originally titled “Tatsuo, Vanguard of Argive”). What’s impressive, to me, is that Boros and Carpenter are able represent vastly different personalities and widely diverse angles of New Argive: Vikya, her clockwork appendage blazing with crimson magical fire, looks haughtily down at the viewer; Baldin hoots raucously atop furry oxen, each of which is branded by an earring in the shape of his cartoonish hammer; and Immard stands sentinel, electricity crackling out from his hammer.

Kai Carpenter, “Immard, the Stormcleaver” (SLX #014)

Carpenter’s composition is especially impressive. Our gaze might first rest on his curving clockwork axe and the blue lightning lancing off it; the eye might follow the crackling bolt, sweep along the diagonal line of Immard’s arm, and follow the lightning to the far end of the frame, sweep over the arcing ruin, tumble into Immard’s popping crimson cape, swing off the tidal surge of the cape to the ruins to his right, then return to the arc of the axe. The dynamism of Immard’s own aesthetic is inseparable from the dynamism of his environment; the world of New Argive seems alive because Immard does. We have very little lore to work off here, but Carpenter’s lines and colors and lights give a living picture here, character and environment all at once.

Billy Christian, “Zethi, Arcane Blademaster” (SLX #017)

Billy Christian’s “Zethi, Arcane Blademaster,” in a similar way, opens up a corner of Dominaria by elaborating on a familiar visual language. Zethi wears the chained spellbooks and blue robes of a Tolarian scholar, but unlike most Tolarians, she’s neither cloistered in a community nor spellweaving from afar—no, she’s twirling swords that stream blue light. Her design illuminates something new in this well-trod aesthetic, and Christian’s composition lets us linger on it: the scenic backdrop ensures there’s enough negative space that our eyes focus on the foreground, where the spiraling chains and arcing electricity feed into one another. In the visual language, Zethi’s swordsmanship collides with her sorcery—and in the process births a Dominaria we’ve never seen before.

Bram Sels, "Greymond, Avacyn's Stalwart" (SLX #0018); Diego Gisbert, "Wernog, Rider's Chaplain" (SLX #008)

Leaping out of the Street Fighter/Dominaria UW for the moment, we can see a similar world-building effect in Diego Gilbert’s “Wernog, Rider’s Chaplain” (from the Stranger Things/Innistrad series) and Bram Sels’ “Greymond, Avacyn’s Steward” (from the Walking Dead/Innistrad series). These paintings deserve individual analysis, but I group them together here because they’re examples of how singular works can expand the design of a world through its particulars—in this case, through Innistrad’s Cathars. Both are lit primarily by internal light—Wernog by his ashy lantern and Greymond by his glowing golden hammer. Surprisingly, as well-represented as Cathars are among Innistrad art, very few are actually illuminated by lanterns or torches; more often they’re lit the enormous moon (a mainstay of Innistrad’s art design) or by nonspecific ambient lightning.

These paintings, then, make an interesting expansion to the game’s visual vocabulary: if the Cathars are beacons of light in the dark, dire world, Greymond and Wernog visually index what this light can mean. It might be explosive and hard, gilded like porcelain and glimmering like gold, like Greymond’s hat and armor, perhaps even a little blinding, like the lens flare that Sels paints over his hammer. Or this light might be flickering and stark and soft like Wernog’s, illuminating a strip of light but leaving everything else to take on vivid colors, purples and blues and pale yellows. It might be be more than a little unsettling, like the uncanny geometry of the lens flare on Wernog’s lantern. If Sels’ “Greymond” finds pure burning intensity in the Cathars, then in “Wernog” there’s the sort of flickering, dark, compromised hope always on the brink of disappearing.

Evyn Fong, “Aisha of Sparks and Smoke” (SLX #012)

Perhaps my favorite of this bunch is Evyn Fong’s “Aisha of Sparks and Smoke,” both for its aesthetics and for the vivid life it educes in Dominaria. Based on her costuming, Aisha is part of the Ghitu culture of Shiv—indeed, Fong used Ghitu Lavarunner’s costuming as design source and, by her own account, imagined Aisha as the Lavaunner’s highly creative, hot-headed pupil. The painting’s backdrop is the least detailed of the Street Fighter/Dominaria UWs, but it’s not blank: the dark enclosure is flecked with purples and pinks, and in the foreground, we see something like a carbonized tree branch. This muddy half-realized imagery draws attention, by contrast, to the molten flames spilling off—or surging into—Aisha’s right forefinger, and to the wicked sword whose undulating blade seems to sizzle at the end. In my eyes, the painting is a master-class in creating a Legendary character even with minimal material. Aisha isn’t a slightly-more-detailed version of a vanilla creature, she’s a person. This feels not like a face stuck onto a card, but like a figure around which stories could unfold.

---

Built-in Stories

Other UW cards are interesting because they use their limited (metaphorical) screen time to create micro-stories, readymade narrative tensions that lodge the subject in the reader’s mind. Some, like Anastasia Balakchina’s “Cecily, Haunted Mage,” are supercharged with such tension—both linguistically, in the character’s evocative epithet, and visually, in the crackling red and blue surging against the inky sky. Others, like Jamroz Gary’s “Bjorna, Nightfall Alchemist,” raise questions for entrenched lore-lovers: the Nightfall Riders are a sect of Cathars who guard the city of Nephalia, so why is this Nightfall Rider a matronly alchemist leaving a trail of blazing destruction in her wake? We have no informational answers—but the art does plenty to paint a picture of this world in all its tensions.

Alexey Kruglov, “Othelm, Sigardian Outcast” (SLX #006)

Alexey Kruglov’s “Othelm, Sigardian Outcast” is one such piece. The name says it all: Othelm is a character already in flux, thrown from normalcy into the dynamic unknown. What did he do to earn his exile? Why is it that the Sigardians, the more pastoral and neutral-good Angel-worshippers on Innistrad, have cast anyone out? The card doesn’t make it clear; we only see Othelm, his pack and cape making his silhouette curl into a hunched crescent, reciting an incantation before a curious spirit. Their relationship seems to be friendly, (an assumption borne out by Kruglov’s sketches for the piece), but it isn’t entirely clear. But the answer isn’t the drama of the piece: it’s the fact that the two of them seem on the precipice of communion, the mottled gray of his cloak meeting the electric blue of the spirit’s form against the eerie green of a crowded Innistrad city. Like the card name, the painting gives us enough material to imagine a story, but its dynamism comes from suspending us in the step before revelation.

Bartek Fedyczak, “Sophina, Spearsage Deserter” (SLX 007)

One of the most expressive pieces in the Stranger Things/Innistrad UW is Bartek Fedyczak’s “Sophina, Spearsage Deserter.” As with Othelm, Sophina’s name implies she’s an outcast, in this case from the Church of Avacyn’s Cathars—though again, the why isn’t clear. Yet the painting is so dynamic that it dispenses with the need for explanation. Less important is Sophina’s backstory than the compressed energy of this moment.

Fedyczak’s composition is one of the most diagonal of the pieces I’m surveying here, which is probably why it’s so good at directing the viewer’s gaze: the eye is drawn along the sharp decline of her spear, up through the flames that billow off it, down the fluttering cape, and, most powerully to the bags—or are those burns, or eyelids puffed with tears, or streaks of blood?—under Sophina’s blazing eyes. In those eyes seem contained the entire essence of Sophina’s character, the incendiary animus that propels her being. Should we wander away from the smoldering look at her face, Fedyzak has built visual roads to bring us back: the belt loop that brings us from hip to waist, the Avacyn-collar belt buckle that curls up toward the chest, the straps that crisscross Sophina’s body…back to her gaze. Visually, this is a body full of movement, of slicing energy that radiates from Sophina’s form. Although we don’t know why she deserted, the image gives us a shimmering glimpse of pure, flavorblasted character.

---

Different Faces

The final stop in our tour—an entirely too-short tour, given the astonishing work in the 30-to-date Universes Within cards!—are the cards that play on the dual nature of Universes Within, envisioning the way that even similar archetypes can render different character identities.

Much of Magic’s character design is predicated on the synergy between mechanics, art and story; a card’s function as a game piece will typically mirror the story of the character riveted to it. For instance, Ajani planeswalker cards mirror Ajani’s role as a benevolent supporter of his allies and rallier of troops by buffing creatures and creating tokens (usually cats, indexing Ajani’s connection to his tribe on Naya). Similarly, Alesha is khan of the Mardu Horde, whose ideology is grounded in swift action, eager sacrifice, and unrelenting energy—and so “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death” encourages players to hurl small creatures into battle. And so on. There’s a sort of presumed synchronicity: ideally, mechanics should flow perfectly into character and character perfectly into mechanics. But cards like “Malik, Grim Manipulator” flip this principle on its head.

Joshua Raphael, “Malik, Grim Manipulator” (SLX #0023)

Malik adapts “Negan, the Cold-Blooded,” which depicts the titular The Walking Dead villain—a brutal authoritarian whose methods teeter between pragmatism and sadism. Fitting this sick duality, “Negan, the Cold-Blooded” both forces another player to select and sacrifice a creature and allows Negan’s controller to choose a creature for the target player to sacrifice. The ability makes for a fascinating and unsettling mental game. The target player is incentivized to make a hefty sacrifice: if they select the same creature as Negan’s (or Malik’s) controller, they’ll minimize their losses, but doing so will likely mean sacrificing their most powerful creature—perhaps unnecessarily, depending on how Negan’s controller picks. The cost is heavy for the target player, but Negan’s controller benefits either way, gaining a treasure token for each creature sacrificed.

This vicious game is an apt reflection of Negan’s character—but Joshua Raphael’s “Malik, Grim Manipulator” suggests that the bonds between mechanic and identity might be looser than we think. Raphael’s Malik has none of the smarmy glee that we see in Jake Murray’s rendition of Negan. Instead, true to his epithet, Malik is grim and weathered, as though unhappy with the choice he’s inflicting on his victims. Raphael throws deep shadows over Malik’s hazel eyes, which themselves are partially obscured by his slicing snowy hair; at the scale of a 2.5-by-3.5-inch card, they read like tiny shimmering onyxes, not wide with joy but slackened into something like regret. His mouth is set in a half frown, and in Raphael’s astonishingly detailed full painting, we can make out scruffy patches of white facial hair. At the focal point of the painting, Malik’s two-pointed knife, the focus blurs, as though reality itself distorts fuzzily around the knife; its implication of violence is hazy, a mere setpiece to Malik’s melancholy.

The painting’s effect is to envision a different kind of Mardu-identity brutal manipulator from Negan. Malik earns profits from his opponent’s suffering and profits nonetheless, but he is chilled and numbed, seeming to regret the very agony he produces. The character is not an overwrought trope, but an open question.

Filipe Pagliuso, “Gregor, Shrewd Magistrate” (SLX #0021)

Malik sheds light on similarly refashioned identities among the Universes Within characters, as in the way The Walking Dead’s “Glenn, the Voice of Calm” (by Paolo Puggioni) becomes Filipe Pagliuso’s “Gregor, Shrewd Magistrate.” The original mechanics map Glenn as an Azorius saboteur character, his skulk ability helping him sneak past larger opponents to gather knowledge (in the form of drawn cards). But Pagliuso’s Gregor, his shining white eyes and inflamed cheeks beaming out from the cool blue palette of the inky darkness, spins these mechanics as sinister. Where Glenn is concerned but composed, Gregor seems frenzied, his frizzy black hair spraying out from his head as he glares down at the viewer. He draws a blade against an unseen interlocutor--perhaps he’s threatening the person who just bribed him, or perhaps he’s striking a deal (Pagliuso’s file name on ArtStation suggests that the card’s original name was “Tellen, the Collector”)—the image bodying forth a character whose intelligence, or perhaps madness, is an asset not for heroism but for cutthroat politicking.

The D&D: Honor Among Thieves/Forgotten Realms series is perhaps the best example of adapting archetypes. The original cards are interesting, but their burden was that they had to pantomime the faces of real-world actors; the art of “Forge, Neverwinter Charlatan” does less to capture the character’ essence or his relationship with the mise-en-scene and more to capture an impression of Hugh Grant’s face. In my view, such paintings run the risk of spiraling into the uncanny valley.)

Shuangcheng Leng, "Simon, Wild Magic Sorcerer" (SLD #1238); Michele Giorgi, "Mathise, Surge Channeler" (SLX #0025)

The Universes Within versions experiment with adapting the archetypes of the film’s character and distilling them into pure characterization. “Simon, Wild Magic Sorcerer,” for example, positions the titular character in a relatively inert pose against a nonspecific background—but Michele Giorgi’s UW version, “Mathise, Surge Chaneler,” evokes the dynamic personality inside the archetype of the uncontrollable sorcerer. If the card’s mechanics—themselves modeled on Dungeons and Dragons’ Wild Magic Sorcerer sub-class—channel unpredictability, then “Mathise” incarnates this principle. The painting strikes a Dutch angle that seems to throw reality itself off-balance, and Mathise is encircled by a storm of flowers and blue crystals whose vortexing path seems predictable and unpredictable at once. Their eyes, glowing the same blue as the crystals, tell us everything we need to know: this power comes from them and they love it, even if they can’t control it.

Victor Adame Minguez, "Casal, Lurkwood Pathfinder / Casal, Pathbreaker Owlbear" (SLX #0029)

Victor Adame Minguez’s “Casal, Lurkwood Pathfinder / Casal, Pathbreaker Owlbear” is similarly re-creative. Where the original “Doric, Nature’s Warden / Doric, Owlbear Avenger” emphasizes the character’s silhouette, aiming to capture Sophia Lillis’ aspect, “Casal” seems to contain a story within itself. Casal, creeping around a tree with their face cast half in shadow and half in moonlight, is clearly blazing a trail through an unknown, uncertain environment. Adding to the uncanny effect, their gleaming golden eyes flick to the right, as though tracing some oncoming threat.

Minguez’s version of Casal’s owlbear form adds further dynamism. He inverts the composition of the front side such that Casal faces right instead of left—but their eyes are angled in the same direction, as though their transformation does not affect their fixed purpose. And still, the soft blue light and deep shadows linger over the piece; Casal’s transformation has not brought triumph, but perhaps some uncertain violence. Though we know nothing about Casal, Minguez’s visuals offer an image of a druid archetype different from Doric: their transformation seems less like a combat tactic and more like a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, grimly bleeding into an uncontrollably powerful form. Path found; path broken.

---

Beyond Universes Beyond, Within Universes Within

Length prohibits me from saying more about these remarkable paintings, but I hope I’ve inspired you to take an extra look at them--perhaps even pick one of the cards up for yourselves. I have no idea if there’s any future for Universes Within--the prospects don’t seem great, but perhaps WOTC will surprise me. Regardless, there’s something worthwhile in studying these pieces. Shorn of all the context and information and even mechanical clarity on which Magic character design typically depends, these cards are a pure, distilled flavor blasts.