A few months ago, a few of us Hipsters—mainly Dave “Bones” McCoy, Rich Stein, and Matt Jones—started talking about a cool way to commemorate Grand Prix Las Vegas. Matt Jones had the idea to ask a handful of Brooklyn artists to come up with original artwork for some Modern Masters 2015 tokens.
At that time we didn’t know what token-makers would be in the set, and thus couldn’t get a head start on the work. So we waited until the full set was revealed, and Matt did all the artwork himself—some amazing watercolors, with Hipsters, Friends of Hipsters, and our sponsor CastHaven on the back.
Honestly they turned out fucking awesome. We made 1/1 soldier, 1/1 spirit, 0/1 Eldrazi spawn, and 0/0 germ tokens, and we’ve got about a billion of them. Without further adieu, dig ‘em:
There’s a story behind each one. Here’s Matt on the origin of each:
“All the watercolors come from iPhone photos I’ve taken over the years. The Eldrazi spawn is of my niece, Arabella, the spawn of my brother and sister-in-law. Hunter asked me if the sacrifice ability of the token was a problem, given that you’d be sacrificing a baby. ‘Nah,’ I said, and told Hunter to go soak his head.”
“The soldier token is my buddy Mark, a one-time Magic player and full-time guantlet wearer. I wanted to make the token look badass, and Mark’s a badass guy so it worked out OK.”
“The spirit token was gonna be a bottle of whiskey or something—you know, cuz alcohol, spirits, ha ha. Being an asshole sober guy, I replaced the alcohol bottles with Club Mate, my super-caffeinated poison of choice.”
“The germ has the greatest tie-in to Magic of all the tokens. It’s an image of an actual black garbage bag and duct tape–wrapped urinal found at a PTQ venue a year ago. Makes me miss the old days.”
Great stuff, right? My favorite might be the soldier—Mark “Darth” Gibson is a cool guy, and he definitely looks badass as a Magic avatar—but all of them are really sweet.
And, the best thing is, they’re for you! I’m writing this from our JetBlue flight out to Vegas, and Matt’s got a gym bag full of the things. The TSA kind of freaked out on what they were—and then made fun of Matt about Pokemon—but they made it through security and we’re bringing ‘em to the GP.
If you see or play any of us Hipsters at the GP, say hi and ask for some tokens! Feel free to tweet us at @HotCblog, too, if you really want to get your hands on some. We’d love to share them with you and spread some dope Magic-inspired art around the country and the world.
