New Battles of Legend Prevents Visual Monster Mayhem With Good Art Direction
Yu-Gi-Oh has slowly been dipping its' feet into alternate art cards but in, their newest release, Battles of Legend: Monster Mayhem they dove in. So far, Yu-Gi-Oh has stuck with the minor modifications of the Lost Art series or kept to alternate art that closely resemebled the normal card art. Now they have taken a bigger step by having a series of Chibi style variants. Yu-Gi-Oh's art has always been one of eclectic styles but still managed to maintain a cohesive look through their design philosophy. With other games like Magic or One Piece where varient art is abundant, actually reading the card becomes more import because it's hard to assume what the card is based off its' art alone; this is espically true with much of the Secret Lair products. Could the Yu-Gi-Oh's aesthetics help prevent that issues as they look into printing more varients?
When the Chibi cards were announced, my concern was that the style could be too visually close to the Toons archetype. The art has previously been used in one of Yu-Gi-Ohs digital games but things are different in a physical setting. Thankfully they made a series of design choices that clearly distinquish the variants from the Toon archetype. The first difference is the simple radial gradient backgrounds choosen for the chibi art which contrasts against the generally more chaotic and muddled look of Toon cards. The next is that the chibi monsters pop against the background better, this is due to a combination of the simplier backgrounds and what appears to be a heavier line weight outlining the characters. One of the more fitting to the toon theme is the eyes and facial expressions. The toons have larger and more expressive eyes, but the art department chose more flat and stern expressions for the chibi cards even though larger eyes can be a common in some chibi art. All these add up to making it so that it will be difficult to confuse the varient art cards with different cards in the catalog. If Yu-Gi-Oh continues with these practices then we can expect more art variation without introducing confusion.
Archetype symbols
While the holomarks of the Quarter Century Secret Rare might be gone, this set does include emblazoned archetype symbols for Dragonmaid, Ocrust, and P.U.N.K. It appears that they only appear on the Ultra Rare cards but this is a welcomed addition to card design going forward. We, at YCG have done our best to recreate them. P.U.N.K.'s is slightly incorrect since the concentric circle pattern is not precisely repeated on the cards. Dragonmaid is also not a percise as we hoped and could use more finessing to make it sharper.
Battles of Legend: Monster Mayehm Set Information
Each pack contains 5 cards, 1 Secret Rare, 1 emblazoned Ultra Rare, and 3 other Ultra Rares
Set consists of 177 cards, 43 new cards, 51 archetype emblazoned, and 25 possible in Starlight Rare