Full Blown Pimp

Hey guys! If you have ever traded with me, you may know that I love pimping out my deck as much as I can. You have a foil of the card I need? I will trade for that before the normal one. Is it foreign? You got a buyer! If you have a foreign foil card? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLnWf1sQkjY

Foreign and foil cards aren't the only ways you can pimp out cards though. In fact, there is an even cooler type of card pimping that I seek out even more then foreign foil cards (and let me tell you, those things make my day). What is it?

Painted cards!

Painted cards, for those not in the know, are cards that have their art altered in some fashion by some random dude with a paintbrush. There are tons of different alt-art variations, but the 2 most common ones are those that expand the card art to take over the borders of the card, and those that add something to the card's art to make it better. Here's a card I recently traded for:

Yeah, that's an alt-art Japanese Fauna Shaman! A normal Fauna is at $7.50, but I valued this bad boy at 10. You know what the best part is? The guy who painted this is a regular at Toys, so now I can try to get him to paint a variety of cards for me!

A simpler kind of card art altering is just to add something to the art to make it better/funnier. I don't have a picture of the real thing, but Andrew used to have a Sarkhan the Mad holding a pokeball:

They also do all sorts of simple card alterations, mainly making gentlemen of every card possible. My favorite to date is when they gave an Inferno Titan a tophat and a monical. A sharpie, a little inspiration, 5 minutes, and you will get something funny to show off and joke about later. They have also been making Gentlemen Germs recently:

I happened to notice that one of the winners of the SCG Talent Search was a guy who talks all about card art alterations. Here's a link to his archives. I am the furthest thing from an artist, so I really couldn't care less about the article, but holy cow! That's some insane art!!!!! It's cool to pwn with good cards, but it's just gravy to pwn with awesome cards with jaw-dropping art. Check out our mini-Louvre

I don't care who you are, if you're not blown away by these cards, you need to loosen up and lay off the spike-or-die crack. I would trade for/buy any of these cards on the spot!!

Until next time, stay classy!