Remember all the great old Magic art and flavor text? What happened?

With precious few almost all Magic art now looks like generic high fantasy crap. Like the cover of a D&D rulebook, a pulp fantasy novel, or a comic book. Pretty enough, but utterly soulless. Most of it looks like it could have been done by the same person.

It's almost like WotC has invented some kind of fantasy art painting machine that they just feed card names into.

Anson Maddocks, Mark Poole, Dan Frazier, Liz Danforth, Daniel Gelon, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Jesper Myfors, Julie Baroh, Christopher Rush, Quinton Hoover, even much-maligned Drew Tucker.

Their work had character. Love 'em or hate 'em, they at least made you feel something. Their art stirred the imagination and brought Magic to life.

Where is evocative artwork like that now?

Magic art is fancier than ever, but, just like so many gaudy-yet-empty Hollywood "blockbusters", whistles and bells can't disguise its near-total lack of imagination or heart. It's not even true art at all anymore, but mere illustration.

And the flavor text has gone similarly downhill. Remember when every card didn't reference some inane story that nobody outside of grade school even cares about anyway? Or tried to be clever or witty but just ended up sounding lame? I remember when Magic flavor text had more Shakespeare and less Squee.

Example time. Let's take a look at 1993's Phantom Monster:

WotC should bring back the great art and powerful quotes on Magic cards. The hacks they employ now can't do 1/1,000,000 as good and only look bad and disgrace the game trying.