While researching ideas for swamps I came across this site explaining the though processes behind a series of games, very similar to the idea I had been coming up with, though this was a later world being develop in a series o settings. This image above was a fisrt idea where the designers had come up with another planet where everything was metal. I love this image, the steaminess is great, in this case they thought it too industrial and after a lot of brainstorming came up with the design below which they used as a base for their next game setting. http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/194 “You can see that this first concept by Carl Critchlow, while very beautiful, looks too industrial. The color pallet of browns and blacks is too expected. We wanted to try and get some bright-green color in to represent the corrosive necrogen mist that devours everything living in the Mephidross Swamp. I had this idea that the necrogen could bubble out of the ground, like lava does in the Pacific. I wanted to see bubbling sores on the metal plane’s surface that built up as the necrogen oozed out. Mark Tedin went to work, and by his third sketch he had something we could use.”

Basically they eventually came up with this design for a swamp,. Which is much more organic but I like the colour palette they have used, and the graphics for the swamp too, kind of fairytale like but also gritty with the dark colours mingling with bright greens, I like how with these images you think you recognise the landscape but when you look closer you realise that they are not made form materials you are expecting and though it looks like a ruin, you cannot be sure that it is not something that is growing rather than decaying.