Beta is the first retail Sorcery set — same card list as Alpha (403 cards), new border treatment, full retail print run, October 2023. It carries an estimated 18 Curio variants. For the full primer on Curios — what they are, why the publisher won't acknowledge them — see Curio Cards in Sorcery: Contested Realm, Explained.
Beta's Curio pool has a different character from Alpha's. Where Alpha's are pre-production design history — sketches, abandoned mechanics, pre-Kickstarter rarity tiers — Beta's shift toward variant printings. Mirrored art. Foil hybrids using Alpha frames with Spellbook backs. Cards with set symbols that don't match their printing context. Intentional typos. Curios that quietly fix Alpha's print-file errors. By Beta's print run the design was locked, so the publisher had no more pre-production material to slip in. What they had instead was the print process itself.
The 18 known cards
Jump to any entry:
- Avatar of Earth (Sketch)
- Avatar of Air (Sketch)
- Avatar of Fire (Sketch)
- Avatar of Water (Sketch)
- Erik's Curiosa (Beta)
- Adept Illusionist
- Sirian Templar (foil hybrid)
- Critical Strike (foil hybrid)
- Guile Sirens (foil)
- Black Obelisk
- Steppe
- Water Castle
- Far East Assassin
- Infernal Legion
- West-East Dragon
- Extinguish
- Spear of Destiny
- Shifting Sands
The marquee group is the Avatar sketch series. The pricing-driven story is the symbol-anomaly cards.
The Avatar sketch series
Avatar of Earth (Sketch) by Severine Pineaux — via Collector Arthouse
Four Curios. Each is the uncolored line-art version of one of the four elemental Avatar cards from the Beta preconstructed decks — Earth, Water, Fire, Air. The shipped Avatars are finished paintings; the Curios are the raw drawings before paint, all by Severine Pineaux.
The shipped Avatars themselves are a layered chase: non-foil versions were exclusive to Alpha preconstructed decks; the foil variant was exclusive to Alpha boosters. The Beta sketch Curios add a third tier — the drawings before any colour landed. Collectors treat the four as a single chase pool. Owning one is impressive; the full quad is a flex tier.
Avatar of Air (Sketch)
Avatar of Air (Sketch) by Severine Pineaux — via Collector Arthouse
The Air entry in the elemental sketch quad. Same construction as the others: uncoloured pencil lines from Pineaux's sketchbook, printed as a Beta Curio after the finished painting had already shipped in the Alpha preconstructed Air deck. Together with Water, Fire, and Earth, the four sketches form the Beta Avatar set — the cleanest "is this a complete collection?" question in the entire Curio catalogue.
Avatar of Fire (Sketch)
Avatar of Fire (Sketch) by Severine Pineaux — via Collector Arthouse
The Fire entry. Pineaux's elemental Avatars were among Alpha's most-recognised face cards; releasing the underlying sketches as Curios in Beta is the closest the publisher has come to publishing studio process material. Mechanically identical to the other three sketches — they exist as collector artefacts, not as cards that would ever see play.
Avatar of Water (Sketch)
Avatar of Water (Sketch) by Severine Pineaux — via Collector Arthouse
The Water entry, completing the elemental Avatar quad alongside Earth, Air, and Fire. Same provenance: pre-paint line drawing, by Pineaux, printed in Beta as homage to the original commission. Of the four, the sketches surface in roughly equal proportions in trades — no single element appears materially rarer than the others.
Black Obelisk and the Alpha-symbol anomaly
Black Obelisk — via Collector Arthouse
Black Obelisk is a Beta card that carries the Alpha set symbol in its corner. It is not a misprint that escaped quality control — it is the point. Several Beta Curios carry deliberate set-symbol mismatches, signaling something to collectors that the publisher won't elaborate on.
Adept Illusionist
Adept Illusionist (mirrored Curio variant) by Jeff Easley — via Collector Arthouse
The Curio variant has the card art horizontally mirrored and an intentional typo in the text box: "Duplicious means" instead of "Duplicitous means." Both alterations are subtle enough that the card has occasionally been mistaken for a regular printing in trades. Authentication usually rests on the mirror reversal first, the typo second.
Sirian Templar (foil hybrid)
Sirian Templar by Gadu Duaso — via Collector Arthouse
A Beta-symbol card using Alpha-set artwork, printed in foil with a Spellbook back instead of the Atlas/Sites back. The result is a card that doesn't slot cleanly into either deck — a print artifact, archival rather than playable in most contexts.
Critical Strike (foil hybrid)
Critical Strike by Jeff Easley — via Collector Arthouse
The companion to Sirian Templar — same construction (Beta symbol, Alpha-set artwork, foil, Spellbook back), different card. Easley is another long-time fantasy illustrator with substantial Magic-era credits; this is his marquee Beta Curio contribution.
Guile Sirens (foil)
Guile Sirens (foil) by Elvira Shakirova — via Collector Arthouse
The alternate Guile Sirens artwork first surfaced in Alpha Kickstarter Pledge packs in non-foil form, by the same artist as the retail Alpha/Beta print. In Beta, it returned in a foil Curio variant — but with a twist that distinguishes it from the Sirian Templar / Critical Strike foil hybrids: the back is a regular Atlas back, not the full-art Spellbook back. The combination — alternate art, foil, but a standard back — makes it a category of one inside Beta's foil pool.
Steppe
Steppe by Truitt Parrish — via Collector Arthouse
A dual-artwork Curio: the same site card with two distinct compositions side by side, intended to be read as a comparison. Steppe is one of the few Curios that's actively about alternate art as the variant.
Erik's Curiosa (Beta)
Erik's Curiosa (Beta variant) by Francesca Baerald — via Collector Arthouse
The same card as the Alpha Curio, reprinted in the Beta border. Minor print differences (border treatment, set symbol) distinguish the two. Notable as the only Curio that appears across multiple sets — the publisher's namesake card got a second variant printing rather than being retired with Alpha.
Water Castle
Water Castle by Raffaela Lerch-Cech (AronjaArt) — via Collector Arthouse
Water Castle is an artwork that never shipped in any retail Sorcery set — the painting never found a home in the core card list, and the Beta Curio is its only public appearance as a card. Construction mirrors Alpha's Belfry: portrait orientation reflecting the early design where Sites were vertical, the abandoned diamond background pattern behind the text box, and unique mana/threshold symbols that pre-date the locked iconography. Per Collector Arthouse, the original painting was purchased by Erik Olofsson himself.
Far East Assassin
Far East Assassin by Severine Pineaux — via Collector Arthouse
The Far East Assassin Curio is the original commission — a Pineaux painting completed before Alpha shipped but replaced in retail by Elvira Shakirova's version. The Curio is the only public outing for the Pineaux piece, treated by the archive as a what-might-have-been alongside the Avatar sketches: another corner of the design history that didn't make the final cut.
Infernal Legion
Infernal Legion by Melissa Benson — via Collector Arthouse
Alternate art by Melissa Benson, with a small but deliberate text-line tell to help collectors spot it: the type line on the Curio reads "An Elite Undead army in flames" instead of the standard wording. Per Collector Arthouse, the variant type line is part of a post-Alpha pattern — after the mirrored Selfsame Simulacrum proved too subtle, later Curios were given small wording changes to make authentication easier. The Infernal Legion Curio is a peek at an earlier version of the card before its art was finalized.
Spear of Destiny
Spear of Destiny — via Collector Arthouse
Spear of Destiny is a Curio that exists to correct an Alpha print-file error. The Alpha preconstructed-deck version of Spear of Destiny shipped with a copyright symbol where an Alpha set symbol should have been — an artifact of the early test-print pipeline that wasn't caught before fulfillment. The Beta Curio prints the "correct" version of the card. Shifting Sands shares the same backstory; the two cards are a matched pair of intentional fixes to documented Alpha bugs.
Extinguish
Extinguish by Brian Smith — via Collector Arthouse
Extinguish preserves an earlier version of Brian Smith's painting — the same composition as the retail card, but before Smith repainted the wave formation around the central figure to make it lighter and more pronounced. The central figure is unchanged; the surrounding water is the visual tell. The Curio also carries a one-word type-line change: the text uses "flickering" instead of the retail card's "guttering" — one of the deliberate wording shifts Erik's team introduced post-Alpha to make Curio authentication less ambiguous.
West-East Dragon
West-East Dragon — via Collector Arthouse
The retail card is East-West Dragon — composition showing the dragon pointing east to west. The Curio flips the painting horizontally and renames the card to match the new orientation: West-East Dragon. Several Beta Curios use inverted art as the variant (Selfsame Simulacrum from Alpha is the precedent), but this is the only one where the card name flips along with the painting. The most on-theme card in the mirrored-art subset.
Shifting Sands
Shifting Sands — via Collector Arthouse
Shifting Sands is the second half of the print-file-correction pair. Like Spear of Destiny, the Alpha preconstructed-deck version shipped with a copyright symbol in the spot where an Alpha set symbol should have appeared — a leftover from early test prints. The Beta Curio prints the corrected version, giving collectors a "right" copy of a card that originally went out wrong. The two correction Curios — Shifting Sands and Spear of Destiny — are the closest thing Beta has to acknowledged errata.
Sources of confusion
Two things to keep in mind if you're hunting Beta Curios:
- Set-symbol mismatches are intentional. A Beta card with an Alpha symbol is the Curio variant, not a misprint to be flagged.
- Some "Beta Curios" sold on eBay are mislabeled Alpha Curios. The two pools partially overlap on card names (Erik's Curiosa exists in both). Confirm the border and set symbol before paying Curio prices — and see the authentication guide for the visual signals.
What we still don't know
The 18 count is Collector Arthouse's current number. New variants surface periodically — Beta had a much larger print run than Alpha, more boxes in collector hands, more discoveries to come.
Sources
- Collector Arthouse Curio archive — canonical community archive. Source for every card image and editorial detail in this article; individual card pages linked inline above.
- Otakumart — Sorcery: Contested Realm Curios, Beta — early community writeup