Since restarting the Stone Rain Project I've discovered a number of other Global Set Projects have popped up on the 'net in the interim. I think this is very cool, especially since every new person who tries a hand at a global set takes a fresh perspective and comes up with a new spin on the idea. For instance why does it have to be just one card? Why not every card by a certain artist? Or with a certain artistic element in the picture? Or with something special about the name? Or as today's interviewee Matt Sestak decided, why not collect all the cards which have a particular creature type? Hence comes Matt's literally cute and fuzzy global set "It's a Bear!" Which when complete will contain one printing of every bear in every language.

Matt was nice enough to agree to take part in an e-mail interview about his interesting collection. Here's that interview:

  1. Okay, let's get the obvious question out of the way. What made you pick bears?
    Well, it all started with one of my friends back in high school. Apparently from some online RPG, he picked up the phrase "It's a Bear!" and would shout it all the time. I soon adopted the phrase as well, and then somehow it (and bears in general) became associated solely with me. So of all the things to collect, Bears seemed like the way to go.
  2. Which bear has the best artwork in your opinion?
    I love a lot of the Bear art. Ron Spencer's Bear Cub is great, Menges' original Alpha Grizzly Bears is great, Heather Hudson's Bear token is excellent. But I think my favorite would have to be the 7th Edition art by D.J. Cleland-Hura. Now that's some power!
  3. What's the most unusual trade you made to get a bear?
    Well, I can't think of any trades I've made that have been particularly unusual, but there is one story of a purchase that didn't happen. This was back back around the time I started going for the global set rather than simply the full English set of Bears.

    I was at a local gaming store with a couple of friends. Somehow it came to my attention that they had a box of singles from the gold-bordered Championship decks for sale. Since I was still looking for the Werebear from Raphael Levy's Worlds 2002 deck, I asked if they could look to see if they had one in there. The clerk starts looking through the box, and then another employee also comes over to help. So I've got two store employees digging through an unsorted box of near-worthless cards for a Werebear. End result: tons of Birds of Paradise, a bunch of assorted painlands, and no Werebear whatsoever. Eventually I just ended up buying the deck online for the Werebear.
  4. What's the most "special" bear in your collection and why?
    I'd have to go with the Heather Hudson signed Bear token. Out of the blue, I was approached by a trader from MOTL, skyler mason, who had a Bear token signed by Heather Hudson and personalized to me and saying "It's a Bear!" Well, I found that... actually kind of weird, but also pretty cool.

    Of course, there's also Erl00's rendition of Jeff Menges' Grizzly Bears art on a toploader. (I'm not sure I would have put it up on the website were it not for your toploader scan on the SRP.)
  5. Your interpretation seems to be strictly creature type = bear. Any chance you might expand in the future to include cards with bear artwork on them, like Fylgja?
    I doubt I'll expand the collection like that. For quite a few years now, I've been a bit of a "rules geek" about Magic, so to me a bear is only a bear if its creature type is Bear. As a matter of fact, on of my hardest decisions in my collection was dropping Mistform Ultimus. I was collecting them as Bears for a while, but in the end, I decided to drop them from the collection due to the flavor not really fitting (and, admittedly, due to them being rare and available in foil).
  6. Okay, tell the truth. Bear Cub. Cutest ever?
    Well, yeah. :)
  7. Do you play Magic or just collect? Do you do any tournament play? What sort of decks are your faves?
    I like to think I'm still more of a Magic player than I am a collector, though I wish I got to play Magic more often. As for tournaments, I try to go to every prerelease. The only prerelease i've missed since Judgment was the Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease, which I missed due to a rather large snowstorm. I also go to Friday Night Magic tournaments over the summer if I can build a Standard deck cheaply at the time. I won an FNM tournament a while back, but that was largely because it was raining and only eight people showed up.

    That said, I'm mostly a multiplayer casual player. For a while it seemed the only successful decks I could build were combo decks, but I've been having some success lately with more aggressive decks. I'd say my sentimental favorite deck is my Coalition Victory deck, though my favorite deck for actually winning games is Reanimator.
  8. Who is your favorite Magic Artist?
    Rebecca Guay is definitely my favorite Magic artist. I love her style, and it's always great to see what she can convey when Wizards gives her an assignment outside of what seems to be her "normal" assignments: the 7th Edition art for Dark Banishing, for example, is one of my favorites.
  9. Favorite musical group? Movie? Book? TV Show?
    My favorite band is Pink Floyd; anything they do is great. Favorite movie I think goes to American Beauty, though Clerks comes in a close second. I believe my favorite book may soon be The Divine Comedy, though I haven't quite finished reading it yet, so I'll fall back on The Catcher in the Rye. As for favorite TV show, I'd have to go with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
  10. The layout of "It's a bear!" is very slick and clean. Are you a professional web designer?
    Oh no, I've done a few web sites, but I'm no professional.
  11. When you get new bears or make new deals, do you update the entire site by hand or is some portion of the work automated?
    Well, I built the website in Frontpage so that it would be easier to update. I also have parts of the image creation process automated after I scan the cards into Photoshop. But other than those shortcuts, it's more or less manual updates.
  12. I assume you picked green because all bears are green. What are you going to do if WOTC releases bears in other colors?
    Unless there were some massive shift in Bears out of green, the website would probably stay green. As I mentioned earlier, I used to have Mistform Ultimus up on the site, and the blue border didn't look too bad against the green background. But if Bears suddenly became red for some reason, I'd consider changing the website color to red or something more neutral.
  13. Now, one question to flex your creativity. Imagine WOTC called you on the phone tomorrow and said that in the next set, they'd like you to design a "cycle" of bears (i.e. one of each color). What would the five bears be called? What would they do?
    Haha. Well, okay. Probably the most important thing about a bear is that it's ferocious. So they'll need to be attackers.
     
    • Armored Bear
      {2}{W}{W}
      Creature--Bear Soldier
      Vigilance
      Whenever Armored Bear attacks, other creatures you control get +1/+1 until end of turn.
      2/4
       
    • Ghastly Bear
      {2}{U}{U}
      Creature--Bear Spirit
      Flying
      Whenever Ghastly Bear attacks, draw a card, then discard a card.
      2/1
       
    • Undead Bear
      {2}{B}{B}
      Creature--Zombie Bear
      Whenever Undead Bear attacks, return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand.
      {2}{B}: Return Undead Bear from your graveyard to your hand. Play this ability only during your upkeep.
      2/2
       
    • Menacing Bear
      {2}{R}{R}
      Creature--Bear Warrior
      First Strike
      Whenever Menacing Bear attacks, target creature can't block this turn.
      3/2
       
    • Bear of Gaea
      {2}{G}{G}
      Creature--Bear Druid
      Forestwalk
      Whenever Bear of Gaea attacks, you may search your library for a basic land card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
      3/3
       
    They're not all necessarily what one would call "balanced," but they seem like bears to me! Even when they're floating ghost bears or zombified bears.
  14. In closing, is there anything you'd like to add that I haven't asked? Or any links you'd like included here?
    I think that about covers it. Thanks, and keep up the great work on the SRP!

If you get a chance, do check out Matt's "It's a Bear!" site.  It's really cool!  And of course, if you have any of the bears he needs, do help him out!