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Article By Gothic Frog

Adam Kašpar on Sorcery

A Czech contemporary-realism painter known for landscapes and geology, shown beside Monet — and the hand behind Sorcery's Bedrock.

artists kaspar
Portrait of Adam Kašpar
Photo via sorcerytcg.com

Adam Kašpar is a Czech painter, born in 1993, who trained at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague and has become one of the more distinctive voices in contemporary Czech realism. He works almost entirely in landscape — deep primeval forests, Mongolian steppe, Icelandic glaciers, raw rock — and his reputation rests on the patience and scientific seriousness he brings to the natural world. Galleries place him in the lineage of the great Czech landscapists, Julius Mařák in particular, and Collector Arthouse notes he has been exhibited alongside names like Claude Monet and Antonín Slavíček. This is a fine-art painter who landed on a trading card, not a TCG illustrator who happens to paint well.

That background matters for how his work reads on a Sorcery card. Kašpar is not a fantasy artist. He paints what is actually there — and in his case "what is there" extends to the inorganic: rocks, stones, geological strata, and in recent cycles even space objects. He studies his subjects with cameras, telescopes, and microscopes, then composes the canvas, sometimes stitching several vantage points together to push a particular reading of the terrain. The result is realism that is exact in its detail but deliberate in its construction.

Style

The signature is naturalistic precision applied to the un-dramatic. Where most of the Sorcery roster paints creatures, heroes, and action, Kašpar paints the ground itself — and makes it the subject rather than the backdrop. His handling of stone and earth is where the geological eye shows: layered, weighty, observed rather than invented. The palette stays true to nature, the light is studied, and the composition is built to make an inert landscape feel like it carries meaning.

On a Sorcery Site card that approach is a natural fit. Sites are the board you build your realm on, and a painter whose entire practice is the honest depiction of terrain brings something the fantasy illustrators on the roster generally don't — a landscape that looks like it was stood in front of and recorded, not imagined. Across the table his contribution reads quieter and more grounded than the surrounding art, which is exactly its strength.

Cards on Sorcery

Kašpar's documented Sorcery footprint is small and should be stated plainly rather than padded. Collector Arthouse lists him as appearing in the Alpha and Beta sets, and the single card surfaced in their gallery for him is Bedrock — a Site, fittingly, given his subject matter. Bedrock is an Exceptional Site flavored as unyielding solid rock that can't be moved, destroyed, or modified, and it appears in both Alpha and Beta printings (the Beta version exists in foil). A painter who studies stone under a microscope drawing the card literally named for immovable rock is the kind of casting that suggests the commission was deliberate.

Beyond Bedrock, his card list is not publicly documented in detail. The Collector Arthouse artist page confirms the Alpha/Beta credit but surfaces only the one card, and I could not independently verify any additional titles from primary card data. If Kašpar painted more than Bedrock, that record isn't out in the open yet — so this stops here rather than guessing.

Where to see more Adam

Sources

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