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Article By Gothic Frog

Jussi Pylkäs on Sorcery

Finnish concept artist behind Sorcery's Battlemage Avatar and a run of ink-and-acrylic Gothic undead. Comic-rooted line work, painted by a player.

artists pylkas battlemage gothic
Portrait of Jussi Pylkäs
Photo via sorcerytcg.com

Jussi Pylkäs is a 2D and concept artist from Oulu, Finland, who came to Sorcery: Contested Realm by way of comics and the game industry. He started in comics, moved into concept work for indie games, and works primarily digitally in that day job. He's also a lifelong card-and-miniature-game enthusiast who actually plays Sorcery, which puts him in the small group of people on the roster painting the game from inside the table rather than just for it.

He describes himself as a "doodler" — someone constantly sketching monsters and creatures whether or not anyone asked for them — and that instinct is the through-line in his Sorcery work. For the game he deliberately stepped away from the screen and relearned traditional coloring, settling on acrylics, black markers, and inks as his reliable kit. "Acrylics suit me best," he says, with a working painter's honesty about the rest: "I'm not even sure if I would have the patience for oils."

Style

Pylkäs is the line-work artist on the Sorcery bench. His work is bold and comic-inspired — heavy ink, confident contour, storytelling pushed to the front — and he names his influences plainly: Mike Mignola and the Finnish fantasy illustrator Petri Hiltunen, with Collector Arthouse drawing a further line to Magic's late Quinton Hoover. The result is pulp-fantasy grit with a dark sense of humor, the kind of image that reads as a drawing first and a painting second.

Across the table his cards stand out precisely because they don't chase the painterly realism that dominates a lot of TCG art. They're graphic. The black is doing structural work, not just shading, and the compositions are built to survive the shrink to card size — he's talked about simplifying a skeleton's bow so it stays legible small, and about fighting to keep blue-tinted bowstrings visible against a dark background. That's a designer's discipline applied to a comic artist's eye.

The other half of the style is voice. He prizes the latitude the game gives illustrators: "the best part is the freedom left for the artists. I get to tell my own little stories." His own gloss on his Gothic skeleton piece — "just classic skeleton vibing… the dark forest, the moon, the necromanic glowy magic thingie… the good stuff" — is about as accurate a one-line description of the Pylkäs mood as exists.

Cards on Sorcery

Collector Arthouse lists Pylkäs as appearing across Alpha, Beta, Arthurian Legends, and Gothic — a footprint that spans most of the game's run so far.

His marquee piece is Battlemage, one of Sorcery's playable Avatars, printed in Alpha and Beta. That's the card most players will know him by even if they never clocked the credit.

His Gothic work is where the comic-horror style is most concentrated. Stygian Archers is a moonlit vision of skeletal marksmen with spectral bows drawn — the card Erik's Curiosa spotlighted in a dedicated artist feature for the December Gothic set. It's a deliberate companion piece to his Bone Rabble, sharing a color scheme and the same blue necromantic glow so the two read as one resurrected army.

Beyond those, sourced credits include Morgana le Fay in Arthurian Legends — a Unique Mortal Spellcaster with Stealth — along with Enchantress and Rolling Boulder. The Collector Arthouse gallery surfaces a wider spread of titles attributed to him (among them All Mortals Gone, Archangel Samael, Astral Alcazar, Babbling Brook, Blunderbore, Cherubim, and Divine Lance), but the full per-set card list isn't documented in one authoritative place, so I'm not going to pin set names to cards I can't verify individually. What's firmly sourced is the Battlemage Avatar, the Gothic undead pair, and the Arthurian and named cards above.

Where to see more Jussi

  • ArtStation — kisufisu — his portfolio, the source of record for the comics-and-creatures body of work behind the Sorcery cards.
  • His Sorcery cards — start with the Battlemage Avatar (Alpha/Beta), then the Gothic pair Stygian Archers and Bone Rabble, and Morgana le Fay in Arthurian Legends.
  • Collector Arthouse — Jussi Pylkäs — the Sorcery card gallery and set index this piece draws on.

Sources

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