#slivers

I'm hoping you still play MtG, otherwise this will be awkward.

So I am always a bit on/off about MtG, but I do make it a habit of getting one booster box a year as an Adventskalender for December. This year was Edge of Eternities. And I got something I didn't expect. Sliver tokens. I know that it's from an artifact (thrumming hivepool.which I bought seperately, because I am not that lucky xD)

Slivers are my absolute favorite. I learned to play with them and I have one of each in my "Sliver Biblary" and have a commander with only foils and am now slowly looking into getting all the reprints/variants I don't own yet. And because I printed out what you wrote around 2014 about all the slivers back then on my shitty printer I remembered you and wanted to ask:

What do you know about Slivers/Thrumming Hive pool in this set? What are your thoughts? Where could I go to read more?

Btw: thank you, I still have fun reading through my little print outs <3

brb gonna go lay down in a hole and bury myself because 2014 was twelve years ago...

ANYWAY

Slivers in the Edge! We know from the main set story that Sami believes they aren't real, just movie monsters made to scare people. What Sotherans don't know about slivers, however, is that they're alive in the system right this very moment...

Here's the art for Wurmwall Sweeper:

It's a scavenger ship landing on a hunk of rock in the Wurmwall orbiting the outer limits of the Sothera system hoping to recover loot from a Sunstar crash site. It's hard to see on the card because of the text box, but there's a silhouette of a sliver in the bottom-left corner.

So...what happens to that salvage crew?

They have their own little horror story woven through a few cards where they are systematically killed and eaten by mysterious horrors that sorta look like slivers...until the final crew member discovers the hivepool.

What is the hivepool? Who made it? Why are there sorta-sliver-esque monsters here? What will happen if the slivers escape into the wider Sothera system?

Here's another Artfight, this time the OC Hiveheart by Iconmaster, who's a Sliver Planeswalker from Magic the Gathering!

Given my feelings on how fantasy works that actively decenter non-humanlike characters are bitchass cowards, and that doubly applies to Magic and its userbase preferring the human-y Planeswalkers, y'all know it was love at first sight for the idea of a Sliver Planeswalker.

I drew her as if she's casting some sort of dark gribbly, maybe Death's Shadow but I'm not sure given how they don't seem wounded enough to make that work.

Q: What inspirations did your draw from when working on Thrumming Hivepool?

A: I certainly looked through lots of other sliver cards to see what other artists had done with the creatures. The prompt included that this was to be a vessel filled with silver liquid, so obviously cultural references like Terminator 2 came to mind immediately with its liquid metal villain. For reference, I found a video by the Slow Mo Guys on Youtube very useful where they filmed liquid gallium metal in various ways: pouring, splashing, and spun around in a blender.

Q: Were there any particular points where you deviated from the prompt or did you stick to it pretty tightly?

A: I did follow the prompt pretty closely. It mentioned that the cavern used to be a place of worship. I probably took this too far where one of my sketches included a religious looking relief sculpture of several figures on the back wall. I think the art director was probably correct to nix this as it was probably too distracting from the main focus of the image, the slivers. However, I do like the gold design motifs I came up with for the left and right sides of the image that feel vaguely religious, but also vaguely sharp and dangerous.

Q: What are your thoughts regarding slivers as whole?(whether in the actual card game or just appearance wise)

A: They're pretty damn creepy. Actually, I've never been into horror movies, and monsters aren't a particular interest for me, so this commission was a bit outside of my comfort zone. It was a fun challenge though and I would be happy to do it again. I enjoyed the process of figuring out how to paint the liquid metal.

Q: What’s your favorite part of the art you drew for Thrumming Hivepool?

A: I like the tails whipping out of the liquid and the way the liquid dribbles down the outside of the roughly textured vessel. I like the glow I created below the vessel. I like the implied meaning of the crack running down the back wall and between the cloud motif, giving the sense of a cataclysmic event as the slivers emerge.

Q: Do you have any trivia or a fun fact regarding Thrumming Hivepool?

A: The funniest thing for me about this image is that the idea of the single sliver breaking the surface of the liquid in a dramatic whipping motion, for some reason, strongly brought to mind the iconic scene from The Little Mermaid, where Ariel breaks the ocean surface and whips her hair out of the water. The thought of this sliver performing a similarly dramatic scene, with perhaps the same dramatic music, just makes me laugh every time I think about it. The Little Slivermaid.

Q: Did you work with the artist who did the sliver token art at all or did you work independently?

A: I worked independently. Though as I said earlier, I looked at all the other sliver art I could find before I started work on this image to make sure I was getting it right.

Q: Is there anywhere fans can go to pick up pieces of your other work or maybe an artist proof of the card once it releases?

A: My website is Robreyart.com, which has an "Available Works" page to easily see what originals I have available. There is also a link to my print store, where I will probably be listing artist proofs soon. If there's something you would like to see added to the print store, just get in touch and let me know.

Q: Is there anything else you want to say about the work?

Sliver Weftwinder Sliver, it/its

Born from innumerable cycles of sliver broods, cultivated atop vast graveyards of lost civilizations and over the course of epochs, an apex being emerged like nothing its predecessors had witnessed. Able to burrow beyond the tangible, to hollow the Weft as one might bore tunnels through earth, the Weftwinder has found its home within the Chaos Wall. So far, the hive has been quiet. And for the sake of the Edge, one can only hope they stay that way.