#mtgakh

Archfiend of Ifnir Pixel-Proxy (2025)

Made another pixelart MtG card. Love the eerie mood of Seb McKinnon's original piece.

Finally opened the Magic Deck my brother gave me for my birthday years ago. I didn't want to, BUT the package was getting old.

'Shadowstorm Vizier' by Yongjae Choi.

For some reason I thought I’d posted this but it’s been stuck in my drafts instead. Don’t ask me how but I guess my brain just hasn’t been functioning properly since forever.

Anyway, here’s a line by line transliteration/translation of the Wrath of God card, with commentary.

Dnd nTrWrath (of) God

Both accurate and inaccurate: Middle Egyptian has a direct genitive construction wherein two nouns (possessor and possessed) can be written side by side. However, the flagpole hieroglyph, nTr, should have been written at the start of the line because of honorific transposition. It doesn’t make a difference for the transliteration, since that would still be Dnd nTr, but it just looks weird. It also doesn’t need the seated god-determinative after it. 

ra.wy sn (assuming similar RL orientation as Dnd nTr)Two two suns

The mana cost only works if you take the ideogram ra (sun) as an ideogram for white mana, obviously. This is all very literal. 

HkAMagic, incantation

Could work as “sorcery”, on a semantic level. HkA as a term is not one-on-one translatable with the fantasy kind of magic. Also, the orientation of these signs has suddenly flipped from RL to LR. I can see why these hieroglyphs are oriented LR, but I fail to see why Dnd nTr and ra.wy sn are oriented RL. 

iw HDi Ha.w nb m priDestroy every body in (the) battlefield

Jesus, these hieroglyphs are a mess. The orientation changed again, to RL. But the palm rib (the sign to the right of the arm-with-shield-and-club) is facing the wrong way. The word/sign groupings are also weird. m (the owl) and pri (the battlefield group) should not be mashed together like this. I also haven’t seen pri spelled like that before, but that could be me. 

As far as the grammar goes, I’m ridiculously out of practice with translating/parsing so while I’m not 100% certain this is correct I can’t pinpoint exactly why. I’m honestly no good when it comes to translating to hieroglyphs, since that was never required of us in uni.

n rDi.n=s ts anx tw nhiwithout her(?) giving (?) life this escape

Another orientation change - LR again now. While hieroglyphs could change orientation within a text depending on the situation, there’s no reason for the constant change on this card. It’s just… wrong.  The word groupings are once again off. The r sign (mouth) should not be below the two arms (n), for example. 

Grammatically the first part seems okay because I want to read a negation of the circumstantial sDm.n=f (n rDi.n=s). The rest I can’t make any sense of. The suffix =s is odd. I’d prefer to read =sn (they/them/their), but =sn isn’t at all written like this. Another option could be n rDi n=s, “without/not giving to her”.

Eternal Witness Fanart by Zomburai! After Terese Nielsen Digital media Went back and forth on whether I was going to keep this as a Magic fanart or branch it off into its own thing, and I’m certainly doing no favors to my art by comparing it with Terese “Jesus Christ” Nielsen’s incredible use of composition, texture, and color, but fuck it. The concept was just too good and I’m really proud of the final piece.