When Renaissance Variety owner Jason Yereck came into his Shawville store on Tuesday, he wasn’t expecting a visit from a popular trading card game artist, but that’s exactly what he got.
It all started with someone he thought to be a regular customer, asking if he carried any Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game from the 90s with over 20 million players worldwide.
“He pulls up some Magic cards, and says, ‘I wonder if any of my cards are in here,’” Yereck said.
Intrigued, Yereck set out to find out who the mystery man was. “We started chatting, and he’s like, ‘I’m Jason Rainville, I’m the one who does the art for some of these cards,’” he said.
Rainville, a fantasy artist based in northern Ontario, has designed over 100 cards for Magic: The Gathering’s parent company Wizards of the Coast during his 12-year stint. He has also created art for gaming franchises League of Legends, Warhammer, and Dungeons & Dragons, including three book cover illustrations.
Rainville said he and his uncle found Yereck’s shop on their way back home from Ottawa, where Rainville was attending a card convention. When the two men passed through Shawville on the way to pay homage to a deceased family friend in Ladysmith, they spotted the bright-coloured store on the main drag and decided to take a look.
Sure enough, Yereck’s store had roughly two dozen of the 100-plus cards that Rainville has designed. The artist promptly adorned the cards with his signature and posed for a photo with Renaissance staff.
“It just so happened that the particular collection he had was in the right timeframe to find quite a few of my cards,” Rainville said.
Yereck, who has seen many notable names come through his doors over the years, said the chance encounter was cool because he had never had the chance to meet a Magic artist.
Yereck said there is a small local Magic community that is loyal to the game. While he does not play himself, he said the encounter prompted him to take a closer look at some of the artwork on the cards.
“He’s got goth in there, he’s got a cyberpunk style. It made me really appreciate the cards,” he said. “It was cool.”
Rainville said that when attending conventions and other events he doesn’t often get recognition for his art, so it was neat to be able to share it with Yereck and his staff.
Some individual Magic cards can be worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars. While many of Rainville’s cards are worth only a fraction of that, Rainville said the signatures can add up to $7 in the card’s value to the right collector.
“It’s a talking piece, at least,” he said.
Rainville said he was impressed with Renaissance’s wide variety of gaming equipment, and was glad he stopped in. In exchange for the card contribution, Yereck offered the artist a Nintendo 64 console he had been eyeing.
“It was a lot of fun for me, and I hope he is able to sell those cards,” Rainville said.
