Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1085: The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Art Direction with Ovidio Cartagena

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

In this podcast, I sit down with Ovidio Cartagena, the art director of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, to talk about worldbuilding and the visual look of the set.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today, I have a video card to hand you to talk all about the art direction of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Hey, video. Hey, Mark. How you doing, mate? Okay, so first, I want to stress, this is a subject matter near and dear to your heart.

Yeah, very much. This is a subject matter near and dear to your heart. Yeah, very much. I have been thinking about this set since I've been a Magic player. I've been a Magic player longer than we've had Ixalan. So when Ixalan came out, I was a big fan. It was the first time I couldn't really afford it, but it was the first time I got myself some booster boxes, you know, and tried to collect the whole set as much as I could. I really loved the work in the original set and that got me thinking, what would I do if I came back to this, you know? And back then,

it was not even a possibility for me. I was still in art school so um a few years later i got the chance right like y'all in the vision team decided when we were doing underground okay well you know what it seems like ixalan might be a good fit here no no to be clear vision did not do that we were not we handed off the set and then like two weeks later like could this be ixtalon so we had no idea oh my god it wasn't ixtalon yet but uh yeah i remember it was uh came from jess and doug yes and they were like okay mate uh there you go you got your thing go and play and we didn't have much time but i was lucky that i had been thinking about it for a long time right and we had so many awesome collaborations

so many awesome meetings before the concept push the concept push is where we invite concept artists to work on the set and we drop a lot of ideas think about how this

is going to look and the reason we got to do so many new things is because we went underground, right? And we got to create new groups, new places, new environments, new themes, new motifs. I wanted the set to look to the point that no matter where you put the camera, it's clear it's Ixalan. It's just, you're not going to get lost.

You might get lost, it's caves, but you're not going to get lost between cards. So what do you think is like the essence of feeling like Ixalan? What were the key things to you? So visually, as an art director, you think what came before and what can we add, right? What came before, very cool dinos, right? We have the Legion of Dusk. We have the Sun Empire. We have the Brazen Coalition and we have the River Hurls.

That came before yeah one way to tie everything together in the caverns was to use the mayan spiral um to to use the nesca inspired uh glowing lines on cave walls to have a very colorful palette this set has like a very rich colorful palette full of contrast and and uh some geometric patterns typical of modern indigenous textiles uh we we wanted to evoke many things we we knew miguel and i we knew that we had this set to make our statement about Latino America. We feel the love we have for our culture. And so we brought part of our life experience into the set, but codified the colors, the Maya spiral, the lines, and many of the other details that you put the camera and there's a lot of references to codexes, a lot of references to structures machu picchu there's even like sky gondolas

many things that that come from people who traveled to south america people who grew up there people who lived there okay so one of the things you pointed out this was underground so we were making a brand new environment obviously it had to feel like ixalan um so let's talk a little bit about how how do you make an underground environment how did you do that well that's a big challenge right because you the first thing you imagine when you imagine the underground it's quite drab and the first thing i said when you imagine the underground is it's quite drab. And the first thing I said to the concept artists was, hey, I don't want this to look drab. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to find a way to make this colorful.

And we can make the creatures colorful, but we need sources of light. I even wrote an essay that went into the handbook, the world guide that we send the artists. I wrote an essay on how illumination can work, what sources of illumination there exist down here, and how saturated the light should be. Like just technical, a lot of technical detail, just making sure that this feels vibrant. How does it look underground? You always have a roof, right? The light comes from under and it gets darker as it goes up. That's indisputably underground. Now, the biggest challenge was the core, right?

Because the core is a hollow sphere. It's an inverted sphere. Every time you're on the ground and we even measured how, what the diameter would be for the core, like around 22 kilometers. I don't know what that is in miles,

but the core was difficult because how does a hollow sphere look from the inside when you're standing in it? And we had to give it a few tries. Like it was hard for the artists and hard for me. It was a concept that was easy enough to verbalize, but to visualize it takes iteration and uh we we managed that look all the way down to the illustration level but now when something's set in the core

it's very clear you see land on the other side and it looks a little curved right and that was our cue okay so one of the things that, to make it feel like Ixalan, was definitely as you said, the four factions showed up here. The set's not about the factions so much, so from a mechanical standpoint I mean, there's a little bit of dino-typal

but how did you, what did you do for each of the four to bring them in but, you know, add your own sort of spin on things, if you will? So, I love the stuff that was done for the Legion of Dusk. Like, the leaning on their ideology and their religion and their relics and their pilgrimage. So, we even, like, one thing, one image that was constant from the beginning, I remember, came from Miguel, One image that was constant from the beginning, I remember, came from Miguel, was a line of heavily dressed conquistadores, going, snaking down a cliff, carrying relics and so on.

Just like you would have seen 500 years ago. That was a great image and i i think that was a good thing to lean on in as as they come to encounter a class which we hadn't seen before that was another thing we hadn't seen that class before purely right uh and um argwell's blood feast showed the face of Aklazotz but you realize that it's not truly the face it's just what Argyle is imagining in this ecstasy this passion that he's having on the Sun Empire we made them a lot more

lean like explorers than knights because they're about to head on an expedition and they're actually practical they actually have a practical mission to accomplish here the the river heralds are the ones who were the most connected with the caves because they've had they've had more time a head start to anyone right and you see see one of the merfolk legends already learned how to manipulate cosmium and water in a unique way within the cave system.

The dinos got more color. We brought some recognizable Latin American animal patterns, like not necessarily dino, but birds. But put it on dinos, right? There's some dinos that look like macaws. There's some dinos that have like the wing, they spread the wings

and you see like a little nice pattern like eyes. And many of them have glyphs on them. There's, I think there's a cycle of that. Yeah, there is a cycle of dinos that have glyphs. It's a cycling land dinos. It's a common cycle. So we made it our own in that manner, right? We added more color and we strengthened the motifing.

With the brazen coalition, this turned into a search for kinship and a search for home and they had a very unfortunate encounter with the michael tyrant right like a lot of downtowns taken and the shabir sal became just completely taken by the fungals so that's another thing you see here, them toiling with that, trying to come to terms, the ones that manage to escape and the ones that don't get to have some cool fungus growing on them. There's one card that shows one of them. He's just like being surprised by the fungus on his hand. fungus on his head. Okay, so you brought up a couple things I want to hit. One is while we're bringing some things from up above, you had to invent

some new things down below. We talked about the fungus. So how did you create the creatures that were unique, that we'd never seen before, that weren't above ground, that only existed below ground? How did you figure out what those were? So, it was pretty vast. It was pretty ground. How did you figure out what those were? So it was pretty fast. It was pretty fast.

We did want. I remember Doug making like a little chart. Of how we're going to handle that. With the color pairs. And who we're going to put on the color pairs. And what you might encounter. What's flavorful for caverns. What's flavorful for Exels, what's flavorful for,

for Ixalan and so on. And that gave us a very strong cue. We ended up adding the Jaguar folk. We ended up having cave goblins, like unique cave goblins, besides the ones that, from the Raisin Coalition. We had the Malametamet which is the jaguar

folk at that time it was just the jaguar folk that we called them and we got a lot of help from um alastor guzman who was the cultural consultant for the set yeah he gave us some guidelines that were very useful to develop this faction and very early in the development, which was great. The echoes, which were the... I remember talking about the importance of artifacts and us being able to...

Not artifacts, mechanically I mean, like culturally. And that being able to evoke a sense of history. And so that's what brought about the spirits here. They all have like a focus object that they come out of. They're always having like, there's always a solid object around which they form. And last but not least, the Oltec.

Oh, I'll talk about the fungus too because but uh the old tech i wanted us to have at least one other indigenous faction another indigenous theme faction we have several i think we used indigenous ancient maya south american motifs throughout the caves you see ruins and everything but but you also see it in the malamit even in the mycoids in in the the creatures of the myco tyrant you see it there's some south america toys that we took reference from and that's how we designed some of these. And with the Oltec, I wanted to create a culture that looked like it was the ancestor of all the ones that had spread, of the ones that had come out to the surface. So the Oltec started in the core and they stayed there. They're living ancestors.

And like, as we discussed, the mycoids were just so fun to work with what what inspired the fungus people what what inspired them we're talking about what to do with green black and one thing led to another you know that's in in magic we always talk about fungus and talk about that because it has that death and rebirth and continuous life. of them being these knowledge gatherers that never stop and that may overgrow the plane and just turn that into themselves. I loved that organic aspect, but at the same time, it's just one entity talking through all of them. And there was, Jehan designed some mycelium networks that you see. And Jehan designed some mycelium networks that you see.

So the fungi talk to each other. And in this case, that happens in real life. But in Exelon, you can see it on the surface. You see a wheel of fungus and a network that just grows out of a center and you know that they're talking to each other and that's where a new entity is going to just rise up, probably hit you over the head or something like that and turn you into them too. Okay, there's one creature from Underground

you haven't talked about yet. And it's an old-time magic thing. So way back in early magic, for some reason, we decided to make gnomes artifact creatures. And even though in the normal tradition, like normal mythology, gnomes are living. But magic early on made gnomes. And so it just was this thing we did in artifacts that we haven't done for a while.

And we brought them back. So how did you make the gnomes? They're definitely a very entertaining look of creatures. So there were several iterations of gnomes throughout the push. And we ended up, they were going to be a minor part, I remember, when we started. And so we paid them mind, but we didn't spend a ton of time on them. Because there was, look at the set. There's a lot of ground to cover.

There's a ton of ground to cover. So when Doug said, oh, okay, so here's some gnomes, mate. Just let's think about gnomes. I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, we'll do it. And we started doing it. So we started doing it. By the time the push ended and we came back to the card set to take a look at what's going on. It was like, dude, there's a lot of gnomes here, mate.

The crafting has a lot to do with them. There's a lot happening. So we did some extra concept work to align them with the old tech and it played really nicely because the old tech were already coded as this very very very clever and technological civilization that had a lot of wisdom many forms of writing many aqueducts and structures and so on you know like between design and world building there's a lot of push and pull i give you you take and like as we develop the set we we do a lot of things like that we we just try to negotiate what works best for for the set of course we're just we're all trying to make the best cards that we can and we ended up designing well you know what the the the the gnomes it would be good to align them to the old tech and so i remember talking like okay linda let's put all this motifing jhan helping a

lot on steve prescott's design and there we went even even after that like when we came to the card set there's like oh what about this gnome that's made of several gnomes? What about this gnome that does whatever? I was like, oh, my God. Like during illustrations, we had to like come up with several creative ways to like the art for our braid. There's so many types of gnomes. And we had to come up with so many original ideas. I remember, okay, map maker okay, then

it can't be just a gnome with a regular map it has to be a gnome running around with a map that goes all the way back into the caves because that's how long the map is who knows how long it took it so we had to come up with not just the little group

the alignment and the motifing that the group would have, like it has old tech lifts on it and some had even old tech clothing. But also there were several one-off solutions because it was a very multi-purpose thing with artifact creatures in the set. So you have to come up with several ways to deal with it. And the cleverness in the creative team is incredible, and we're just very lucky we have

people who are very passionate, not just about the cards, but also about the world building we were doing. Okay, so we were talking about the creatures underground. So you brought up the concept of Cosmium. You want to talk a little bit about what Cosmium is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. the world building we were doing okay so we're talking about the creatures underground so you brought up the concept of cosmium we want to talk a little bit about what cosmium is yeah yeah yeah yeah oh so cosmium is it's a reason it's a source of power and it's a source of wisdom as well the only people who know how to wield it ideally are the old tech

who know how to wield it, ideally are the Ultec. You'll see how it affects the Legion of Dusk as well. And we've seen how Watley ends up actually learning Cosmium and getting Cosmium on her. And the Gnomes also have Cosmium in them. It powers them. So it's a resource that comes from the sun at the center of the hollow core of Ixalan. The Starchimile.

I love the names in that set. Like all the names were so awesome. And the Starchimile was riven by an ancient invader many millennia ago. We're going to know very little about that for now. But people are already, there's already conspiracy theories about that. So that's what Cosmium is and does. We wanted something that helped with the crafting, right? With the crafting mechanic.

Okay, so my next question is, this was a set and you were very excited. You know, it really came from your own background. What were the things that you and Miguel, like, what were you able to add that wasn't in original Ixalan that is now in Caverns Ixalan that you were excited that, you know, that you were able to add

to sort of bring forth your background? So I'll plug one of my illustrations first, because this is the one that first comes to mind. Like I did the promo for Jade Light's spelunker, and the pose and the weapon look like a sculpture I used to see all the time as a kid growing up in Guatemala. It's a sculpture of the prince of the Maya K'iche' Tecunuman. So that was a reference that it would have been hard to come up with if you hadn't grown up there. Like not many people know about this historical character.

We made other references. Like every day it's just really nice to see how people post that they found another reference. Like someone, I was just seeing today that someone found that we started, like we were inspired by the Nazca Lines or for the Glowing Lines. And people will see the ball game.

Like there's common things that many people know about Mesoamerican history. But there's modern things, right? Like the huipiles or the textile patterns and the palettes. The alternate treatments also evoke a lot of urban modern urban latin american art and alebrijes and things like that so we i think this time what we did was lean heavily more into the theme and make it this made it feel This made it feel we're seeing, we're being inspired by these cultures. We are seeing the inspiration from the inside rather from the outside, right? It's not just age of exploration. It's a mix of cultures.

And it's reaching into history, reaching into the future, and reaching into yourself at the same time. So I'm going to pick one of my favorites, and I want to hear about it, because I know there's a lot to it. Cool. So when we do sagas, one of the things that we tend to do is, it's some form of art telling you about the history of the world. Normally when we do sagas, it's something organic to the world that's talking about whatever the thing is. So on the back of Huatli, we have Roar of the Fifth People, which the history is shown through clothing,

which I think is really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it's a really neat piece. I was very passionate about that piece. I remember we did, Miguel and I did ask Jules, like, hey, hey, mate, like, can this please, please, please have a saga on the other end? Can you please put a saga? Like, that would be awesome if he tells a poem, you know, like, and then we started thinking, like, what would be a good idea? Then we started thinking like what would be a good idea.

We had already put huipiles on. A huipile is a sort of, it's an upper body garment that's very loose. And many times it's tied with a belt under a corte, which is another form of lower body garment. Like it's not a skirt. It's not a dress. You just wrap yourself in it. body a garment like a it's not a skirt it's not a dress you just wrap yourself in it um and then i remember going to um a cultural center in santa catarina palopo it's by the lake atitlan we had the chance to talk with uh two of the indigenous women there who ran the center they were the founders they

they got the financing and everything and they opened it and we got to go in and they told us what their local weepil meant each pattern that we build on the sleeves on the collar the weave the sleeves on the collar the weave and the different the different combinations meant the morning tide the evening tide the winter the rainy season and as you go through the garment there's glyphs there's local birds woven into the fabric. It's such a rich, it was, I knew this. I knew this already. But in this conversation, I had like a very deep connection, right, to the culture. These are, that's also why like the Oltec are living ancestors. I want to make sure that indigenous peoples are here, right?

And they're still making stuff. And in many ways, they're using modern media to express themselves as well. And so that moment and the history I inherited inspired that whole saga, right? Like putting the glyphs in there, the dinos and the weave. And I remember when Tyler made the sketch, I remember telling Tyler, hey, dude, thank you for this piece. It's beautiful. Like the normal feedback that you give an artist right composition palette whatever but at the same time a compliment uh this reminded me a lot of my family and this reminded me a lot of home and it made me very happy to see it and that

was how i closed when i approved the piece i I felt like I had put something very special in the magic set. And I hope many people get to see it. And I hope many people get to connect with this set the way I did when I was developing it. When we pitched a lot of ideas, same with Miguel, he brought so much of him into the set that I hope the passion rates, I hope people get to see how passionate we were about it and

feel seen as well. So we're almost done here, but one last thing I wanted to talk about just because it came up is I'm getting a lot of compliments from people because you guys made some effort to get some animals that are more native

to the area. So let's talk a little bit about the animals because Matthew's got his first capybara and you know. The capybara was

a very listen it was a very early ask. Like probably like the capybara is the last thing we're talking about,

the top of the list when we were doing the concept push, everyone wanted to give it a go. We got a few in the set. The llamas, right? There's a quetzal somewhere there in one of the pieces. I think I reposted that today. So we were really trying to take a look at like the types of frogs, the coati,

which is a type of mapache, a raccoon. And we really wanted to enrich the set with many lived-in things that reference the world in our own special way. I remember saying, well, you know what? I don't want to see a single creature that looks just like a regular animal or just like a colorless

creature, right? Like, you need to put patterns here, and you need to put that textile, you know, geometric motif that we developed. We need to put that textile, you know, geometric motif that we developed. We need to put strength in this and reinforce the theme with each creature. And every time, as I said, no matter where you put the camera, that's a fun thing to think about. How much the team worked to make sure that the whole set was very flavorful.

Yeah, I just have to say, I mean, we have to wrap up here, but I really, really love just talking to you and Miguel, like how excited you were and how passionate you are to share all this stuff. It's really neat as you look through the set, you know,

you just can see, I mean, it's really, I don't know, it's really cool in a way that I adore. I love magic sets sort of teaching people things that they might not know. And that when we go to different worlds, it's really fun that every world has some inspiration from somewhere. And this one, obviously, it's a very direct inspiration. So that's neat to see. And I love hearing all your passions.

That's why it's exciting to talk to you about it. Thank you, Mark. So any final thoughts today? Any final thoughts on The Lost Caverns of Ixalan? Everyone who plays it, I hope people feel very curious

about our countries and about our culture. I think it's a good start. We felt the responsibility of being able to set a bar for any other. We set a bar for this, for Latin American fantasy. I want others to surpass it, of course.

I want more of this to be done. I want more of this to be done. I want more of this to happen in the world. We were thinking about what kind of cultural landscape we're bringing this about in. And we are very cognizant of that throughout the process. So for those who are Latin American, I hope they feel seen. Those who are not, I hope they feel curious. And I hope they go back to the inspiration that also inspired us. Well, great. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for being here today.

It was great talking with you. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thanks. Everybody else, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make magic.

So I want to thank Avidio. And we'll see all you guys next time. Bye-bye.