I'm not a lawyer(yet!), graduating in a few weeks though! But I took Int. Prop. and even asked a professor about the issue of painting cards last year when eBay was shutting down auctions.
It isn't illegal to paint on cards and then sell them. You own the card and you can do whatever you want with it which entails all the rights that belong to ownership, which includes sale of such property. You can do the same thing to a masterpiece painting, however its value will likely go down because of it.
What you can't do is copy a card and make a phony replica of a card and claim it as a legit card. Buying cards, painting them, and selling the painted version of the card does not infringe on that copyright UNLESS you insinuate that the entire artwork is done by you or that you have painted it as some sort of agent of Wizards. Basically, if you claim you altered an existing card by adding your own artwork to it you should be fine.
There could be violations of Copyright/Trademark in violations in which someone paints a Tweety or Calvin or anime, etc. But it's not so much with Wizards in that instance, it's with the Character's copyright holder.
I have also received responses from Wizards too. Basically they kept sending me up the ladder, most of them had no idea what was going on with eBay. Basically, eBay has a bunch of policies in place to protect itself and they took some preemptive action to protect themselves. If they wanted to enforce Copyright issues and really prevent Altered cards, they could do so easily, much in the same way that they have kept World of Warcraft accounts off eBay.
I don't know if anyone has caught this, but y'all do know that U/W control runs Martial Coup right? Getting the creatures won't be a problem and the extra U that would be pumped into another 1/1 now draws you 3? And people are saying it's garbage!?
EDIT: SERIOUSLY!?
Because we want cards that draw us the Martial Coup instead of having to draw Martial Coup and then playing our draw afterwards. Basically in UW, this card is a dead draw if we don't have Martial Coup in hand and ready. With that much mana available, I'd rather just play Mind Spring.
Level-up cards have far more potential than most people realize, and they will see play in competitive constructed tournaments.
No doubt there will be some levelers that see constructed play, but I don't think they're gonna be bomb-tastic with so much removal in Standard right now, leveling can be a lot of effort for little gain.
Vampire Hexmage makes things slightly more annoying too, plus things like O-Ring and Journey to nowhere even if destroyed later bring back a unleveled leveler that needs reinvestment.
Definitely seems most playable in a Mythic Bant deck as most only run 3 non-creature/land cards.
I'm not entirely sold on it since it can be erratic as to what you get and you may not get the right ability when you 'need' it, but that's what Fetches/KoTR are for.
If you haven't heard, it's probably because you're not paying enough attention.
It isn't illegal to paint on cards and then sell them. You own the card and you can do whatever you want with it which entails all the rights that belong to ownership, which includes sale of such property. You can do the same thing to a masterpiece painting, however its value will likely go down because of it.
What you can't do is copy a card and make a phony replica of a card and claim it as a legit card. Buying cards, painting them, and selling the painted version of the card does not infringe on that copyright UNLESS you insinuate that the entire artwork is done by you or that you have painted it as some sort of agent of Wizards. Basically, if you claim you altered an existing card by adding your own artwork to it you should be fine.
There could be violations of Copyright/Trademark in violations in which someone paints a Tweety or Calvin or anime, etc. But it's not so much with Wizards in that instance, it's with the Character's copyright holder.
I have also received responses from Wizards too. Basically they kept sending me up the ladder, most of them had no idea what was going on with eBay. Basically, eBay has a bunch of policies in place to protect itself and they took some preemptive action to protect themselves. If they wanted to enforce Copyright issues and really prevent Altered cards, they could do so easily, much in the same way that they have kept World of Warcraft accounts off eBay.
Here's some Vampire stuff I asked my Mom to do:
Because we want cards that draw us the Martial Coup instead of having to draw Martial Coup and then playing our draw afterwards. Basically in UW, this card is a dead draw if we don't have Martial Coup in hand and ready. With that much mana available, I'd rather just play Mind Spring.
Here's a couple of unrelated cards.
No doubt there will be some levelers that see constructed play, but I don't think they're gonna be bomb-tastic with so much removal in Standard right now, leveling can be a lot of effort for little gain.
Vampire Hexmage makes things slightly more annoying too, plus things like O-Ring and Journey to nowhere even if destroyed later bring back a unleveled leveler that needs reinvestment.
I'm not entirely sold on it since it can be erratic as to what you get and you may not get the right ability when you 'need' it, but that's what Fetches/KoTR are for.