Kaladesh's Inventions, the ultra rare foil cards sprinkled throughout packs with unique borders, are great to look at, but only two — Mana Crypt and Mox Opal — stand out to me as really doing something . . .  well, different, let's say. The Inventions all stand out, don't get me wrong. Their whole design, and their artistic execution, is excellent on a level that the previous Zendikar Expeditions don't really reach, only a few of them rising through interesting reconceptualization ("Strip Mine" as an Eldrazi-made rather than human-made structure, for example) above the status of pretty generic Magic land art.

What really sets Mana Crypt and Mox Opal apart from the crowd though is the way the filigree border appears to merge with the artifacts themselves. What's really interesting about these pieces is the way frame and picture dissolve into each other. What that does in each case is slightly different. To me, Mox Opal feels like the whole card takes on an aspect of the machinery holding the Opal in place, as though the card as a whole is being drawn into the mechanism that powers the magic . . .  which, in a sense, is totally accurate, since the Opal powers its own Metalcraft ability! The Mana Crypt meanwhile seems to extend its strange power into a whole environment, the card becoming a kind of landscape through the blending of subject and frame far more successfully than the Zendikar Expeditions can through their uninspired strategy of "let's just make the art bigger I guess."

What's perhaps most interesting of all, in retrospect though, is the way these cards hint at much more radical possibilities for what these premium card frames can do.

And boy did Amonkhet ever dive headfirst into that wild space with its Invocations.

Now, talking about that space and how the Invocations explore it neutrally, or even in a positive light that still acknowledges places where they break down, is kind of tough, I think. It kind of feels like a bunch of folks made up their minds against the Invocations the moment they were revealed, simply based on their difference, their strangeness. This is pretty wild to me — isn't it people from my time period, the time before Mirrodin brought Magic's first radical border redesign, who supposedly dismiss anything new out of hand?

I mean . . .  not that that description of us is inaccurate, really.

But it's kind of funny that we're the only group that seems to have a reputation for that, when it's really something that afflicts the whole fandom. For all that Magic's greatest strength is its constant innovation, the fanbase has, at least in my estimation, often been weirdly slow to accept anything too off the beaten path. And hey, full disclosure, the first thing I thought when I looked at the first spoiled Invocation was, "Wow, what a goddamn mess."

I really do want to take a step back from that initial reaction, though — from my initial reaction — and see what new ground the Invocations break, and how cards that seem to primarily be aimed at collectors and players of older formats can be a bit more experimental.

One of the things most commented on is the reduced size of the art box. A lot has been made of this change, but I'm not entirely sure it warrants that much attention. If you count the pixels (i.e. if you're a loser like me) you'll find that the Invocation art boxes are 6% less wide and 10% less tall than the art box of the contemporary card frame. That's not insignificant, for sure, particularly when you're dealing with such small spaces . . .  but it's also not exactly the catastrophic compression some folks have made it out to be. (Incidentally, the length of the art box is about the same as the length of the art box in Magic's first card frames.)

I'm also not sure it's entirely accurate to say that the art box is smaller. See, here's the interesting thing about the art box: if you overlay an Invocation over a regular card and look at where the art box ends, it turns out that the . . .  well, let's call it the front of the facade, actually ends exactly where the frame on a regular card ends. So everything we actually see "intruding" on the art box is actually the architecture of the card receding in perspective. It's as if someone's taken a regular card and just sort of extruded it back in space.

This kind of suggests to me that we should view the frame as more than just a frame here. If part of the "frame" acts more like part of the art . . .  shouldn't we maybe analyze the frame as a whole as an extension of the art?

It's not like we're starving for precedent, if we do. There's a long tradition in art of painting architectural details that blend the subject and its environment. We can see it often in the trompe-l'oeil traditions of the Baroque for example where ornate frescos were designed to trick the eye (that's what "trompe-l'oeil" means), turning flat surfaces into receding, illusionistic architectural spaces full of mythological figures tumbling around. Tons of artists have played in this space, in monumental painting and graphic design, or even in actual sculpture with folks like Bernini creating complex, layered spaces in which a central figure is framed by complex real and simulated architectural frames, subject and ground mixing together in strange ways.

That's, I think, the tradition being invoked here. The Invocations at their best really do feel architectural, like you're looking into something constructed, gazing into a space. Sometimes for me that feels more real, like the card frame is literally the space, that we're in some sense invoking and calling into being a part of a world. In others it seems more artificial, like a stage set, a kind of distant performance that I can only observe.

That last experience might seem like a bad thing. After all, isn't the point of Magic to feel like you're engaging in a wizard duel? Shouldn't we feel immersed in the world?

Eeeh. I guess.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love detailed world-building, and it's great to see the concept art for Magic's settings realized in card form. But I'm not sure that trying to transfer epic blockbuster or AAA game visuals to small pieces of cardboard is the only, or even always the best, way of creating a sense of wonder.

What does having distance from the art actually do? Well, in the best examples — the breathtaking Daze, the graphically stunning Mind Twist, the elegant Divert — the art works with the frame to create a sense of abstraction, artificiality, staging. One of the possible readings of this is that we are seeing, in the Invocations, godly power that we can only access from a distance, only understand to an extent in metaphor, in abstraction. Everyone and their grandmother can shoot lightning from their fingers. A god, though . . .  well, you can know that a god's Wrath can level an army, but maybe you can only really understand that from a distance.

These frames might allow for a flickering between the metaphorical and the literal. If we were there, would we see a literal dark shadow attacking someone when someone casts Mind Twist, or on the card are we just seeing the best approximation of what's going on? The frame, I think, helps raise that question, particularly when it's combined with Igor Kieryluk's incredible flat planes of color. And I think when we compare this piece to one of Kieryluk's other works, the illustration for Chain Lightning, it's clear that what really sells Mind Twist's overall composition is that flatness. A more traditional, almost stereotypical piece of Magic action art doesn't really convey that same otherworldliness.

Not that this is completely new, of course. One of the things I love about Magic's very first card frames is the way they look something like carved stone or like strange book covers. It went well with the backs of the cards, and the use of terms like "library" for your deck. I haven't talked as much about the more architectural pieces, the ones like Diabolic Intent that really take the trompe-l'oeil spatial sensibilities and play up the idea of these cards as spaces, but I think those pieces feel the most like those old frames, the most like you're accessing another realm, another plane of reality. These cards really feel, for better or worse, like they come from a different world than Kaladesh's Inventions or Zendikar's Expeditions.

Adding to that, of course, is the last radical design feature of these cards: the fonts. If we're asking what do these design choices do, it's pretty obvious what the fonts do.

They make the cards unreadable.

This can potentially add to the sense of mystification, the sense of looking at something that is maybe a bit beyond our comprehension. We need to decode the names of these cards, process them before we can understand what we're seeing. For a premium product, something designed to be ultra-rare and remarkable, that could be a real plus, a way of making these particular Magic cards feel extra magical.

It can also be deeply frustrating for folks whose eyesight isn't great, or who are dyslexic. In the same way that Phyrexian mana is an elegant graphic design choice that can be deeply frustrating for color blind people, this trades accessibility for a particular experience or design space.

Is that trade worth it? I think that's kind of up to you. I'm not going to make a definitive claim one way or the other, because, well, sometimes I like to be infuriating like that. I think it's pretty easy to parse out what I do and don't think works here, but I think these are like any mechanic in Magic (or in art more broadly!) — ultimately, picking apart what a thing is doing and why doesn't say whether it works, or whether the end result is something we actually want in the first place!

But I will say that it's so, so awesome to me that WotC is playing in this area, because it's a whole arena for them to potentially tell stories with. I've seen some claims that this frame design is somehow "off-brand." This seems kind of silly to me. If anything, the new borders in general still feel kind of weirdly off-brand to me, as someone who started playing with the original borders! But beyond that, the Invocations represent another daring experiment in taking the card frame and integrating it more deeply and strangely than ever before with the artwork.

And nothing is more on-brand for Magic the Gathering than daring to explore strange new territory.