Double dipping art

You weren't imagining it. There may have been other instances, but I primarily remember them doing this with their AD&D Trading Cards line. Art that clearly depicted a character from a module or novel was frequently re-used for a completely new character on a card.

Riley said:

I feel like I was annoyed by TSR doing this a couple times in the 2e era, but I can’t remember the specific irritants, so maybe I just imagined it.

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To me, RPG interior art is worth a few moments of appreciation if good, a few minutes and the occasionally stop while paging by if great, and much consternation if it's either bad or I feel it's wrong. Like 5e halflings - one of my favorite everyman races turned into such the caricature. Oh, and if it's consistent and non-generic, it helps set a tone while reading which is actually a bigger deal then many of the individual pieces. That said, that still more eyeball time per square inch then most non-reference writing, which I will likely read but once. (Oh, reference art gets even more time - that's a bigger deal for me.)

I haven't played M:tG in decades, but a lot of the art was quite good. I'm glad I'm getting a chance to see it. So it doesn't feel like I was sold it twice. And even if I had bought it in both formats, it's different formats. It's like complaining if you buy a movie poster that you already have the movie so you're getting charged twice, even if they are in different formats.

What @Riley said. If the art is good and appropriate to its location in the product, and if the artist is being fairly compensated, it's perfectly fine by me.

Riley said:

I feel like I was annoyed by TSR doing this a couple times in the 2e era, but I can’t remember the specific irritants, so maybe I just imagined it.

Otherwise, if the art is good and appropriate to its location in the product, I’m fine with it.

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I remembered the one and only book that really annoyed me in this manner: 1988’s Greyhawk Adventures.
That thing is full of misused, recycled art.

Errol Otus’s wonderful “Rain of Colorless Fire” used to illustrate a spell called “Meteors.”* Lots of A1-4 Slavelord-specific images used for new things, and often just as random (and seemingly-irrelevant) filler.

It’s so distracting, I’ve hardly read the thing in the almost-30-years it has sat on my shelf.

(I do love the Bigby’s Hand spell variants in the book, though.)

*: Meteors, sadly, does not do this: