Tom Kilian
@tomkilianart
Freelance Illustrator kiliandraws@gmail.com www.tkillustration.com
Inspired by ~2000s-era Warhammer books, I made a lot of illustrated borders and corners for The Great North
30) Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte Specifically the Tokyopop translation, which I honestly prefer. They’ll always be Lefty, Mr. A, and Tamara Rockford to me. This was probably too violent to read in 4th grade, but the weird beauty stuck with me too. Plus the fashion is absolutely killer.
29) BBC Radio’s The Lord of the Rings A great cast and an incredible work of adaptation. Last year I bullied my friends into doing a live reading of the script, and it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. (I very, very slightly expanded some of Theoden’s lines so I could read them)
28) A Wizard of Earthsea I hate to say it, but the first book of Le Guin’s Earthsea stories is still my favorite. I love how the names of the islands are kind of silly but still have the weight of history. More modern fantasy authors should try and emulate her rip roaring pacing too.
27) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I actually have the black and gold omnibus edition, but the real treasure is my set of CDs narrated by Douglas Adams. Adams was my formative “too young to get all the jokes” author. Nowadays I appreciate his essays most.
26) Chris Wooding’s Broken Sky “A man describes his ideal anime series to you via a series of illustrated novels for young readers” shouldn’t work. It does though! Wooding has good taste in anime, citing Escaflowne and Nausicaa, is a creative guy, and takes the premise of his story seriously.
I think they missed a trick here by not quoting Beorn's "Troop of ponies!" for the flavor text.
His last two stickers went on lands. Utility Dual turned a basic Swamp into a UB surveil land, and Number 7 made Terminal Moraine pretty wacky. It’s effectively now “pay (7), sacrifice Terminal Moraine: put the rest of the lands in your deck onto the battlefield tapped”.
Where I went for synergy, Patrick improved the power of his bombs. A Compleated Sengir Vampire becomes effectively 4/4 flying for 4. Deadbridge Goliath gets a fight ETB off of the Rare Green Keywords sticker, and Air Elemental receives a card-draw saboteur ability from the Dimir sticker.
The Cascade sticker went on my Head of the Homestead. Five power and… something! for six mana. It will be neat when this goes back into the card pool for the next draft, as green might be able to cascade into bigger threats with this..
The Power Creep sticker improves one number on a card by 1, so I made my Divination more efficient. Blinding Mage got the token creation mode of the Rider +1 sticker, increasing its mana cost but making its tap ability much stronger.
In round 2 I tried leaning into lifegain synergy. The Alliance sticker turned Staunch Shieldmate into a better Hinterland Sanctifier, and the Rider sticker put incidental lifegain on Capashen Knight’s activated ability.
Exert Your Will on Nocturnal Hunger made for a flexible cost removal spell. You still have to give a good or pay 2 life if you play it as a pitch spell.
The Mana Dork sticker on Mana Cyclix makes for a poor man’s mox or a rich man’s signet, depending on your point of view.
Gift of the Magi turned to Ichor Wellspring into an extremely annoying value creature (2/2 Ooze Wizard — imagine the globules are a face in profile)
At the other end of the scale, a Minimize sticker on Meteor Golem resulted in cheap any-target removal.
Then the Titanize sticker turned Stoic Grove-Guide into a budget Grave Titan.
Overall, my Azorius Skies build was a simple, workmanlike tempo deck. My brother went for something a little nastier with a 3-color control deck. He started by adding the Buyback sticker to Essence Scatter for a 5-mana lock.
The Helpers sticker added Delve to Inspired Charge. At 3+ cards in the graveyard you’re getting a discount over the normal version. I cast it once, for 1WW.
Exclusion Mage became scaleable with the X sticker. Unfortunately my brother’s deck was stacked with powerful ETB effects, so I mostly played her as a 2/2 for 2 to attack and block.
Cavalry Drillmaster got flash from the Blue Keywords sticker and became UW. It’s nothing fancy, but he killed a lot of attacking creatures by flashing in as a 4/1 first striker.
My Lifecreed Duo got the Ajani’s Pridemate ability, which he can trigger with his native ability to become an evasive threat.
Changing Shire Terrace’s activated ability into an ”enters the battlefield“ trigger turned it from a modest mana-fixing land into free ramp.
My first pull was the powerful Redact sticker, which turned my Wormfang Drake into a powerful beater with built-in removal.
My favorite trading card flavor texts from the two genres of flavor text writing: setting/story info and joke