The Living End

Time Spiral features a 6-card cycle of suspend cards that mimic the functions of powerful spells from times past. Lotus Bloom and Ancestral Vision saw a lot of play at Worlds. One that was encountered less often was Living End, a suspend throwback to the Tempest wrecking-ball, Living Death.

The art of Living Death depicts a host of zombies rising from their resting places and shoving a living man down into an open grave. The dead burying the living—disturbing!

Living Death art by Charles Gillespie

Now check out the art of Time Spiral’s Living End.

Living End art by Greg Staples

You can see that this is another scene of zombies rising from their graves, this time with the “suspend visual cue” of the blue time-barrier. Note that there’s also a little reference to the original Living Death art: Check out the rose growing from the zombie-head in the foreground of Living Death. It’s mimicked in the flowers on the head of the zombie in the background of Living End.

Note also that the “suspend visual cue” was added in post-production. Greg Staples’s original didn’t have the electric-blue barrier to represent the spell appearing from a rift in time; it was just a shot of these zombies rising out of the earth. Here’s the original before the post-production changes: