The card arts chosen for some of the cards in powered cube are really hard to read. I'm talking especially about the Breaking News prosperity showcase arts that you use for e.g. Mana Drain and Pest Infestation. Fractured Identity too. The card art is so busy and cluttered it strains my eyes to read it, and the font is so stylized it barely registers as English text.

Yes, I know that if you hover over the card, it will show properly legible text. But this is an arena draft, where you have very limited time to look at the cards. You need to be able to rapidly recognize them by just looking at them in order to have time to make a decision. If I have to spend 3-5 seconds trying to figure out the card I'm looking at, then I get really screwed toward the end of a pack, when you only have like 5 seconds to make a pick.

I don't know if there is some motivation behind using these arts, like maybe you automatically use the most recently printed version that exists on Arena, or maybe whoever assembled the cube just picked these versions because they liked them. I don't think these card arts look good, and it's common to see people complain about it on YouTube (for example LSV complained about it in a video of his own draft, and it was clear he almost failed to pick a Mana Drain because he didn't recognize it at first).

I think for draft/sealed events, you should have a policy of always using the most legible, standard version of the card. And there should not be cards in Arena that only exist in these highly illegible, weird looking special arts. This is the case with some cards, like some of the “borderless source material cards” from TLE. There is no standard version of the card, and I hate to say it but these cards are extremely ugly and often hard to read. Thankfully they aren't used in the powered cube, but I thought I'd point it out that it's a bad situation where you want to use a card in your deck, but the only print available is a barely legible 720p screenshot from an old TV show.

This is the case with multiple cards I think, but I remember this happening to me with Valakut. Like, can't you just scan in the normal version of Valakut? Even the Expedition version would be fine. Attached is an image of the only version of the card available on Arena. It's not the ugliest source material card, but it's one you're basically forced to use if you want to play a red landfall deck in Brawl. You'd be handicapping yourself by not playing it. But it's just so ugly and blurry! It looks like it's been badly upscaled or something. I guess Nickelodeon/Paramount didn't have the high res mattes, so these cards are screenshots from a low res, highly compressed video. I don't expect these card arts to be fixed, but it would be nice if the standard versions of these cards were available.

But draft is where being able to quickly recognize a card really matters. Using an obscure, illegible card art creates “feels bad” moments where you run out of time or make a bad pick. It gives certain players (e.g. players with dyslexia, or players who can't use input devices to aim at and hover a card very quickly) a disadvantage when they otherwise would have a fair chance. They're not necessarily bad at Magic - the game doesn't normally present any challenges for their difficulties/disabilities. But using these weird prints makes it so now the game does pose a challenge that puts them at a disadvantage, and one that isn't really related to what we consider the core of the game.