Valkyrie Harbinger by Tran Nguyen

Valkyrie Harbinger by Tran Nguyen Painting is acrylic and colored pencil on 300lb hot press watercolor paper
16.5" X 12" (42CM X 30.5CM)

She paints with colored pencils and acrylic, which I first thought was gouache, but not so. It's all very light, and she uses up the entire paper, making a lovely framed work when you float the paper, which I would recommend.
I asked Tran to talk a bit on the work and she said:

"I referred to three to four different photo references/models to get the right angle for her face, including myself. For the card concept to read properly, I made sure to handle the relationship between the two ground-planes carefully so that it would smoothly lead the viewer's eye from one to the other, while still keeping the focus on the main Valkyrie. The tonal change in her wings are kept to a minimum to convey the ethereal quality that angels possess."
It's Kaldheim from the clothing braids that wrap the hair and flexible armor on her arms. The focus is the character, not on the location, and her airy quality of colored pencil give us the feel of being inside a cloud and coming upon her briefly, unfortunately in our case as her sword is being drawn.
There is one difference from the card, and that was to change the hair to brown, which was done digitally.
As for the card, two things you should notice. The first is that upon one attack, you have 8 power on the board. It is a must kill in standard on sight. The second is that Starnheim Aspirant exists, making this drop on turn 4 in standard and in brawl formats.

As for Commander, yes, this would fit into all those casual lifegain decks and cleric style decks, no question. You don't even need to attack to gain four life in most turns. Also note, the card does say "each turn."

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Tran Nguyen is one of my wife and my favorite artists and we already collect a lot of their works before she did Magic art. So when this showed up as her first piece, we had to support and show some love! Also loved that she put in that Star Wars vibe to a Magic card!