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I'm gonna get downvoted to hell for this, but it's just my opinion. Is it perfect? Definitely not. Is it out of place? Yeah, kind of. Is she wearing a completely different outfit? Yes...

But the designers had an idea for the card, it's kind of fun, and despite not having the funding for the art, they made it work instead of scrapping it! I feel so bad for whoever made this art, who probably is not an artist nor has access to everything, who just took it upon themself to say, "You know what, I'm no artist, but I'm gonna do this and put this together and save the card for the people." Only for people to immediately make fun of it and doom and gloom all over it and what it means for the game and all that.

GOOD JOB to whoever made the art, I just want to say that, because I get the feeling that it's not something that you specialize in. If I'm being completely honest, I don't even think it's THAT bad. It's not really... good.... but I think it's just totally fine. So kudos to the team for pulling through without all the same resources that they may have had in the past and delivering a cool new, fun TPoC champ package.

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3 months ago - /u/Dan_Felder - Direct link

Another point, commissioning new art also takes a long time. Even if you ignore cost entirely, comissioning original art would probably delay the release by many weeks depending on artist availability and how many revisions are needed.

When I was on Hearthstone, a game with a huge budget, this type of delay was the biggest obstacle to releasing a cool new card as part of a bonus event or similar. When we did the Taverns of Time arena event, that was only possible because it reused art from the World of Warcraft TCG. Designers often have cool ideas that need card art, but waiting for new card art would take forever - so they can reuse existing art to get the mechanic in the game. It's just much more noticeable in LoR because the base art quality is so high.