Your first look at Magic’s Lord of the Rings cards inspired by the classic Bakshi cartoon
Peter Jackson’s interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy looms large in our cultural consciousness. For Magic: The Gathering’s latest set, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, Wizards of the Coast tells Polygon it was hard pressed to move beyond it. But there is one classic version of those stories that Wizards chose to embrace: Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings animated feature film. Titled More Adventures in Middle-earth, this special Secret Lair Drop of unique alternate art cards becomes available today. Polygon has your exclusive first look — plus an interview with the creatives who helped bring it to life.
“We were all excited that the Bakshi film was in bounds for this project,” wrote principal art director Tom Jenkot in an email interview. “It’s such a beautiful movie and it has some amazing technical aspects like the rotoscoping of the characters from live footage of actors and the beautiful color wash backgrounds. For longtime fans, it was the first visualization of Lord of the Rings.”
Bakshi’s work also helped to inspire Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s work in his own live-action films. For many fans of a certain age, those florid landscapes will always be their image of Middle-earth. But at Wizards, it all came down to image selection.
“For the particular scenes/shots on the cards, we worked with the Tolkien Estate and poured over many key scenes and landscapes from the film and aligned them with amazing cards,” Jenkot wrote. “We balanced the selections between key characters and key locations to show off all the beauty of the film.”
Magic’s Secret Lair program started off in 2019 as a massive experiment offering unique alternate art on existing cards — some of them
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