Artist: Anson Maddocks

Continuing my series on the artists of Magic, today I look at Anson Maddocks.

Anson Maddocks was one of the game's 25 original artists. He illustrated 30 cards for the first Magic set, Alpha, making him (I think) the artist whose work featured most frequently in that initial set. His Hurloon Minotaur (above) was featured on the booster box (below), making it one of the games initial iconic images.

Per the first artist post, I use Scryfall to look up Maddocks' work. He illustrated 115 unique cards. Per Wikipedia, he was active from 1993-2006 and thus produced art for the game up through the Time Spiral set, illustrating 3 cards for that. 

His work continues showing up in reprints, too. Use this syntax in scryfall:

artist:“Anson Maddocks” unique:prints not:digital

You can peruse all of the reprints here. From this, it appears that his 115 unique pieces of art have been reprinted across 578 cards. The cards reprinted the most times with an Anson Maddocks illustration is Llanowar Elves (23 times), Disintegrate (18), and Elvish Archers (17). I suspect his most iconic card, outside of the Hurloon Minotaur, is the Sengir Vampire, whose image (below) is visceral and disturbing- as a vampire should be, I would argue.

Maddocks illustrated a number of minotaurs, a tribe I enjoy. (I collect copies of Hurloon Minotaur and have it in several languages. It's not a great card, but I like it.) I also liked his depictions involving skeletons and artifacts. These and some of his other iconic images are below.

Anson Maddocks is still active today, per his official website.