Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #940: Creative Components

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

For this podcast, I look at how the creative components (name, art, flavor text, card concept) are made from start to finish in the making of a Magic set.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the creative components of making a card. And so normally I do vision design. That's the thing. So it's the beginning part of the process. But for Unfinity, I actually did the whole the whole shebang. I did exploratory, I did vision design, I did set design, I did I did all the way to the end to the polish. So I want to talk about the process but through the lens of actually having done it. So I can't give away any details that aren't public yet about Unfinity but I'm going to use Infinity as my guideline to talk about the process. So you'll learn a little bit about Infinity. I'm not giving away any details. You're not going to learn things you didn't know. But

anyway, it's a chance to sort of walk through and talk through in more detail how the creative components come together. I've talked about this in pieces before, but hopefully this will be a little more cohesive in talking sort of the full picture. Okay, so how and when and where and why. So when I talk about the creative components, let me explain what I mean. So there's basically four main components that we're talking about. So one is names. One is art.

One is flavor text. And the last is what I'll call the card concept. Meaning, what is, in total, what is it? So, for example, let's say I had a red spell that for one red mana did three damage.

What does that represent? It could be electrical, it could be electrical. It could be fire. It could be sonic. It could be earth. Maybe I'm throwing earth at somebody. Red is the color of earth and fire elements.

And so, maybe it's using one of those. Maybe it's using... There's lots of different possibilities of what it could be. So, somebody has to figure out, oh, what if this was a lightning bolt? What the card represents is I'm calling the lightning from the sky and striking you with a lightning bolt. That is what a card concept is. So those four components are the creative components of a card. So I'm going to talk about how those get made and when and where and why. I'm going to go into great detail about the procedure of making all the creative components to it.

Okay, so early on when I was in exploratory and in vision, I worked with Don Mirren. So Don was our art director. And so I worked with Don and several other people in the creative team. Annie Sardellis was one of them. Talking about sort of what world are we building? As you saw, as we previewed last November, I think, November, December, the main setting of Infinity is a space carnival. Myra the Magnificent's

intergalactic Astratorium of Fun. And so it is this carnival slash amusement park slash circus that literally is a bunch of ships and it moves from planet to planet. And then people can come. And so we spent a lot of ships, and it moves from planet to planet.

And then people can come. And so we spent a lot of time figuring out what that was. And it was during this period. I think when we started, it was like a circus. And they're like, well, that's not enough. Okay, it's an amusement park. That's not enough. Okay, it's a carnival. It kept sort of expanding in scope to be big enough to make sense for a full set. Like, it kept sort of expanding in scope to be big enough to make sense for a full set.

And so early on, what happens is we're just sort of talking through ideas and spitballing concepts. And so we want to make sure that the world we're building mechanically and the world that the creative team wants to build is in sync. And so during the early part, during Exploratory and Vision, it's mostly what we call exploratory world building, in which there's a lot of talk about ideas. I think Annie was the one that oversaw that part as far as the world building. And Annie and Dawn

worked very closely together. And so, okay, so through Vision, we're just sort of talking concepts of what we want. I mean, I think we had centered on the idea that it was a circus carnival amusement park, like all the trope space that went there. Oh, one of the important things I should point out for Infinity was it was always the plan from the very beginning that Infinity was going to be a top-down set.

One of the things I try to do in unsets is I want to do something that normal magic does, but do an unversion of it. And so just like Unstable had been a faction set, something magic does all the time, I wanted Unfinity to be a top-down set. So I worked with Dawn very early on to say, what top-down space could we explore that maybe is a little bit much for normal magic? And the two ideas that came up was doing, Dawn was very interested in doing retro science fiction, and I was very interested in doing a circus. And so we said, okay, why isn't it a retro science fiction circus? And then the circus became an amusement park and a carnival.

It sort of expanded from there. Circus itself is a little too, there just wasn't enough there. But adding on the carnival and amusement park tropes and all that made it big enough. And they're all pretty, they all connect to each other. There's a lot of overlap between those tropes. So it all made sense as this giant amusement park world. So early on, we committed to the general concept. We committed to a retro sci-fi space carnival. And there was early work going on about

what does that mean? But vision design was doing a lot of planning and plotting of what that is. So anyway, while mechanics were going on, I can't talk mechanics yet, once we got past vision, then we have what we call the world push. And the world push is we bring in artists usually for like three weeks and we have them sort of help build out the world. Like there's enough stuff that's been done during vision. Like vision and creative world building have sort of signed off on, okay, we understand the set we're making, we understand the world we want.

So with the world push, there's been a lot of making of sort of what things are. And visually, what does it look like? What does the park look like? Okay, what does retro sci-fi mean? What kind of costuming? What kind of creatures? Who makes up this world? What kind of rides are there? There's lots of... We're making a world and we're fleshing out everything within that world. So in the world we were making, we had to figure out what the performers looked like and what the employees looked like and

just what the park itself looked like. There's not a lot of retro science fiction amusement parks space carnivals to model after. So we were making our own thing and we're making something that was uniquely our own. And it was during that period, for example, that we stumbled upon the idea that the IP that Myra ripped off was magic, which allowed us to make a lot of magic jokes. So anyway, we figured that out. So there's a world push.

World push goes on for three weeks. The end result of the world push is what we call the world guide, the creative guide. So we want to have a visual look for the world so that when it's time for the artist to draw it, we've figured out the component elements to show the artist. Because what we want is, we want lots of artists to illustrate it, but we want the world to be cohesive. So a lot of making the world guide is, what kind of creatures are there? What do they look like? What does the costuming look like?

What do the weapons look like? Or the weapons in the space car are less weapons, but the tools and stuff. You know, what are all the component pieces you expect? And for this particular thing, we needed, like, what does the astratorium look like? What does it physically look like? What does it look like from afar? What does it look like up close? And how do we get a general sense that no matter what you're seeing,

this is also the point where, like, we figured out we wanted, we knew we wanted clowns and we made our clowns robots. What do the robot clowns look like? What do the other robots look like? There's aliens because it's science fiction. What do aliens look like? So there's a lot of things we had to figure out, look and feel. Okay, so the next thing that happens is art.

We need to make art. So the way the art process works is during set design, by the middle of set design, we have to put art into what we call art waves. So basically, an art wave is seven weeks long. At the beginning of the art wave, we give the artists their assignment, and they have until seven weeks till it's done to turn in their assignment. Some artists will get one picture, sometimes multiple pictures, depending on what the artist can handle. And then they have seven weeks to draw it.

Now, before we can do that, we first have to concept the cards, as I talked about earlier. What does this card represent? And so Annie Sardell was in charge of concepting. So what she would do is she would have a meeting, and the meetings were Annie, myself as lead designer, Chris Mooney, who was like my right-hand person, was there, and Dawn as the art director. And then Matt Tabak was our editor. I don't know if Matt was in those meetings. He might have been. I know for sure it was me and Annie and Chris and Dawn. I don't think Matt was in those meetings. Sometimes the editor can be in those meetings. I don't think in this case he was. So anyway,

we go to those meetings and for each card, we as a group, what do we think this represents? Conceptually, what is this card? And so sometimes, for example, Chris and I, having worked on the file and worked on the cards like oh yeah yeah this is a top-down version of this you know we're trying to do this it's this trope we're doing or you know it represents this you know it's a performer in the circus it's a employee on the Midway you know we're we're figuring out the essence of what the

thing is. And sometimes it's a little more open-ended. Well, it's doing this mechanical thing, so we're not really tied. And the idea is that we had the world guide to look at, to reference. And so what Annie needed to do with the help of the rest of the team is figure out for each card concept

what it wanted to be. And because the unsets are humorous, it's not just a matter of figuring out help of the rest of the team is figure out for each card concept what it wanted to be and because the unsets are humorous it's not just a matter of figuring out the concept but also where's the fun where's the humor in it we wanted to figure out humorous concepts we wanted to be giving the artists um ideas to draw that would lead to funny things so not only were we coming up with what is it but also we're coming up with like what's's the gag? What's the joke? What are we trying to do? I'll use a few examples of cards that are public. So we had a card called Killer Cosplay, for example. So the card allowed you its equipment, and when you put it on a creature, you can let that creature become any card, any

other creature that shares its mana cost. So, the idea there is, okay, what is that? What does it represent? And we came up with the idea, what if this was someone doing cosplay at the park? What if it's somebody, because one of the things you see with little kids is, they're like, you know, you go to Disney World

and there's little girls dressed up like Snow White and stuff like that. What if somebody was doing some cosplay at the park? And then Annie came up with the idea of, well, what if, or I think we pitched the following idea, and Annie came up with the execution. We said, what if the creature wearing the outfit is then cosplaying like something that's the same mana cost as that creature to hint at what the card is doing.

And Annie came up, I think, with the grizzly bear and... It's a little bear, bear cob. It's a bear cob and it is a ptarmigoif, I believe. Or not, yeah, ptarmigoif. So bear cob is one in the green. Ptarmigoif is one in the green. So a bear cob, if you put this on it, could become a ptarmigoif. But because it's humor,

it looks like a little kid cosplaying as a Tarmogoyf, but it's very cute. Okay. So, we figure out what that is. I think that what Chris and I were adding to it is, here's what the card does mechanically, here's the joke we could play, and then Annie figured out, okay, what is the cutest thing

that could become another thing? That's, you know, thing A is cosplaying as thing B, and they share mana costs. So anyway, for each of those cards, Annie has to figure out the card concepting for the card, and then, so she ends up writing a pretty big document. For each card, writing up, sort of, there's a, you know, this is all the things you need to understand about the card. There's a little, have you ever seen me print in my article when I print up art descriptions? There's like location, mood, action. There's things we list about what that usually the card conceptor does.

So anyway, Annie would write that up. And then I and Chris and Dawn would all look at them, and, you know, maybe, for example, when the card concept came up, you know, it doesn't quite reflect the mechanic the way we want, so I or Chris would make a comment about that. Or maybe Dawn is like, oh, I think there's a better way artistically, like, this is too restrictive, or you're asking the artist to do something that's not going to end up with a good picture. So Dawn will give notes to sort of make sure that it maximizes what it needs to be to make the best picture possible. And then also, just as a

comedy writer, my background being in comedy writing, I also gave a lot of notes to punch up jokes and things. It might be a little like, sometimes Annie would do something and I'm like, oh, hey, that's a funny idea. We could make it even more fun if we do this or that. Like, it might be a little, like, sometimes Annie would do something, and I'm like, oh, hey, that's a funny idea. We could make it even more fun if we do this or that. Also, normally in magic sets, we can't do words in cards, because we're translated

in so many languages. But, this set was only in English, so we were allowed to put English signs in the art. And there's a bunch of, we did a bunch of jokes in the signs, so, as you'll see when the set comes out, there's a lot of, always read the signs in the background, they're in the art. And there's a bunch of, we did a bunch of jokes in the signs. So as you'll see when the set comes out, there's a lot of, always read the signs in the background. They're usually the jokes.

So anyway, we do that. We give notes. Then once Annie is done, she gives it to Dawn. Then Dawn, as art director, has to do a few passes. There are some technical spec issues that the art director has to care about.

Okay, is this a normal card? Is this a card that's going to have borderless? Is this a card that's going to have different dimensions? You know, whenever you do it, there's a lot of different reasons. And as is the case with this particular set, our booster fun was taking the art done by one artist and having another artist do this sort of retro sci-fi, cartoon-y sort of look on it.

So in order to do that, we have the cards put in one wave so that a later wave could reference them. That's another thing that the art director has to figure out is what goes in what wave. Sometimes things are conditional on other things. For example, let's say you have a legendary creature and then a card that references the legendary creature and then a card that references the legendary creature. You need to make sure the person doing the spell knows what the creature looks like. So either you assign it to the same artist, or you assign the legendary first

in one wave, and then in a later wave, you're able to assign the second piece so they can look at the art from the first wave. So anyway, Dawn has to figure all that out. Dawn has to pick all her artists. The art director picks what artist is best for what thing and line up each concept with an artist. And then she assigns the art. What happened with this particular set

due to the nature we had started a little bit early was normally sets are in two waves. We were stretched across four or five waves. They stuck us where they could stick us. And so we were put in two waves. We were stretched across four or five waves. That we were sort of, they stuck us where they could stick us. And so we were put through many waves. The other thing, by the way, is the art director works with the lead set designer to pick what cards to get commissioned first. Because if a card, it's still in flux.

Like once the art gets done, it's harder to change the card. So what happens is the cards you're sure of, either because mechanically you're sure of it, or like we know this legendary creature is going to be there, the artist is going to be the legendary creature, yeah, go ahead and do it, because we know they're going to be there. So we commit to art that we're happier with what the art is earlier, and things we're unsure of we put to later waves. Okay, so that happens. Then halfway through, I think roughly halfway through, the artists send in a sketch.

And so the idea is that the sketch represents the gist of what the artist is going to draw. It's not a fully done version. Some artists do more elaborate sketches than others. And then all the various people, Annie and me and Chris and Dawn again, will look at the sketch and make notes. I make notes of, oh, it's not really playing up some mechanical aspect. Annie might make notes about, oh, you know, they need to go look at page 49 for the performer costume. This is what it looks like. Or Dawn might say, oh, there's some artistic issue of, can you clean that up or remove this? And there's a lot of different

rules and things that, you know, there's lots of rules about what we will and won't do and how we do art. And there's color palettes. Anyway, there's lots and lots of art issues that the artist will deal with, the art director will deal with. So anyway, we give notes and then at the end of that time, the art comes in and then we see the art. So, okay, now at some point, the art is all in. Meanwhile, set design is still chugging along, making the set, changing things. the art is all in. Meanwhile, set design is still chugging along, making the set, changing things. Once the art is locked in, any changes you make

have to adapt to the art. Okay, then we get to the creative tech process. This is where Ari Zerilnik comes in. So, Ari put together a team of mostly outside people, because this is a humor set, he wanted to get a bunch of comedy writers. So, he went to Loading Ready Run

and got Graham and Kathleen and Cameron. He got Sean Baby from, he got, I have to remember everybody, but he got a bunch of people externally, about five or six people. And then he and I internally, both of us had comedy writing experience. And then what happens is, the way it works is, I think there was like 10 weeks we had. And then each week he would assign some number of cards, usually like 30 to 40 cards, I think, per week. And then we have a sort of tool we use where the whole team can log on and see the card.

And it says whether the card needs a name and whether the card needs flavor text. The reason a card might need flavor text but not a name is it could be a reprint. Infinity didn't have reprints, so that wasn't true there. But, oh, and the other thing that happens sometimes, even on Infinity, is sometimes we did a top-down thing and the name was what the card was. My example from a previous one is on Hinge, I done Shoe Tree, where it literally was,

it was a tree folk with shoes on it and you had to use your shoes as counters. So the whole concept of that was shoe tree. The idea of it being something other than that. So beforehand, Annie and I went through, and then I went through with Ari to say, look, basically we put them in three buckets. This name is perfect. We're not going to beat this name.

Second bucket was, we think we in three buckets. This name is perfect. We're not going to beat this name. Second bucket was, we think we like this name. I don't mind the team trying to make a better version than the name. Maybe there's an even better, maybe you can do even better than this name.

And the third is, it needs a name. And so, the second two buckets all got looked at by the team as far as name. So, every week, we'd show you the card

and like 40 cards and it would say, this card needs a name, this card needs flavor text. And then whenever somebody puts it in, everybody else who's along can see it. And so a lot of times what will happen is, and you can give notes on other people's cards

and you can thumbs up other people's cards to say you like it. So for example, I'll just use killer cosplay again just because it's public. I think it was Graham that came up with the idea that, oh, well, on the card, the character's dressed up like a Tarmogoyf, which is a Lurgoyf. And Lurgoyf has a really famous piece of flavor text, Akhan's run is for Lurgoyf. That's where it's Safi Eric's daughter. And so what happened was he came up with like Akhan's run. He had an Akhan's run joke. He was riffing for Lurgoyf. That's where it's Safi Eric's daughter. And so what happened was

he came up with, like, Akhan's Run. He had an Akhan's Run joke. He was riffing off Lurgoyf. And I said, so I make a note going, wow, I love making a riff off Lurgoyf.

Maybe we could play a little, like, I think his early version was, like, Afhan's, look how cute he is or something. And so I said, well, maybe we could play

a little more into it. So I'm like, Af Hans' run, go get the camera, he's adorable or something. Where I got the actual Akhans run in. Where I think the earlier version was, Akhans, he's adorable or something. And then, later on, I worked with Ari to try to get, we knew Safi Eriksdahl was the original one, so we wanted to come up with a twist on that. So I think I came up with Steffi Bob's daughter, I think is what it is.

So anyway, we did, there's a lot of riffing off each other, and so what happens is a lot of people, everybody submits, I think for each card, you're asked to submit at least three names and three flavor texts, if it needs a name or needs flavor texts. Some people submitted more than that. Some people, usually people would submit the minimum. And then Ari and I would go through and talk through all the different names to figure out which ones we liked best.

And there was some negotiating going on. There's certain kinds of humor that Ari likes that's more Ari's thing than mine. I like the name. Like, I'm into puns, and Ari's... Ari doesn't mind puns, but he's less into puns than me. So, you know, I was always pushed for more puns. He was always pushed for other things. And then we would do a lot of compromise.

Mostly we'd... And we would look at the thumbs up that all the writers gave to all the things to say, oh, well, the writers really seem to like this piece. Yeah, that seems to be the funniest piece or the best written piece or whatever. So anyway, Ari and I would then pick the pieces and then we sort of put stuff in the file. And we would.

So then, OK, then meanwhile, editing is going on. Our editor was Matt Tabak. So once we hand the things in, then there's an editing pass. So what happens is editing is working on the file and then they have to look at all the names and flavor texts. There's a bunch of different notes editing will give. One of the biggest is things will change as templating happens. And unsets in particular are more doing weird things than the average set. And the variability of how long something takes when you're actually trying to figure out how to template it can change quite a

bit when you're working with new and unknown territory. So unsets tend to get a little wordier just by the nature of, okay, we have to make this happen. So some of the flavor checks just didn't fit. Every once in a while, there'd be more room. We're like, oh, I thought it'd be two lines, it was one line, or I thought it'd be three lines, it's two lines, whatever. Usually, if there's more room, and we like the flavor text, the flavor text doesn't have to be take up all the space, so usually

that will stay the same. The ones where it has to change is, oh, we thought it was three lines, it's four lines. Instead of two lines of flavor text, you get one line of flavor text. So usually, if there's no room, the editor will remove it. If there's less room, the editor will try to edit it to see if they can come up with something.

But with anything that got changed, he would tag it so that Ari and I could look at it. And then Ari and I would look to see, oh, is there a way, do we like the shortened version that Matt tried? Is there a better way to make it funny? Is there a different piece of flavor text that we like, knowing that we only got one line? This was the funniest,

but there was a better one-line joke if we know we have one line. And so Ari and I went through and made changes. And then we sat down, Ari, I, and Matt, to figure out the problem childs of where there wasn't a clean fix. Then we would have meetings where we would pitch things to try to figure out. A good example is Assembled Ensemble. I think that name and that flavor text both got changed during the process.

favorite text, both got changed during the process. I think what happened was we were trying to name the card after, there's a guy that plays the triangle, the real giant guy plays the triangle. When we had done the world push, somebody had designed this giant robot that plays a triangle that we thought was hilarious. And so we made a card for him. But the way it ended up getting illustrated, it was more of a band than just a single thing. And the joke wasn't playing. Like, one of the other things the editor can do is, like, look, when I see the whole card together with all the kimono pieces, it's just not playing. It's not working. And what happened was it looked too much like the whole band.

Like, you couldn't get the focus on the one creature, so it's naming it after the one creature was confused. So we had to change the name to reflect the band rather than the triangle player specifically. And so in order to do that, we needed a new name. And the flavor text also had to change. So we had some meetings with the three of us where we would work to change things. And Tayback also has done a lot of comedy writing.

He didn't end up doing a lot of the original stuff, but during the rewrite, he would also make suggestions, and Ari and I would make suggestions. And so there was a lot of reworking that went on on the names and on the flavor text. But more reworking on the flavor text. There were a couple name issues that came up. Editing also is sort of looking at many, many different things. And there's numerous people that will look

at names and flavor text near the end, not just editing. We'll do a pass to make sure, like, are we being insensitive anywhere? You know, there might be, there's someone that does a pass to make sure we're not too close to other names, to make sure we're not copying something.

Sometimes the editor themselves does that. Sometimes a different person will do that. But anyway, there's a lot of looks. And we did get feedback from a consultant to make sure we weren't being insensitive about anything. And there's a few, not many, but a few comments that we looked at. And I think we tweaked a few tiny things. But anyway, so that all gets looked through. Then there is the slideshow.

So the slideshow happens late in the process. The set is mostly done. Cards are in frames. So people can look at sort of all the component pieces together. And then there's a chance for sort of final notes. And usually those notes are kind of, well, it's just people who've never seen the file before looking. And it's a whole bunch of R&D looking at it that's never seen it before. And so, A, it's a chance for people who aren't familiar with the set to get familiar with the set.

But B, it's just getting a lot of eyes on it. And people can send in notes. There's like a process of people sending notes. And then there's a whole wave where we're addressing notes. Like someone says, like an unfinishedittingly specific thing might be, I don't get that joke. Or, I don't find that joke funny, or whatever. And if enough people are like,

I don't get it, or it's not funny, we might look at the joke and tweak the joke, or, like, it's a joke not working for a certain reason. So we went back, and Ari and Taybeck and I, Matt and I, looked at them and made adjustments there. And so we would make adjustments on that. But then, you know, after that, like, we have to sign off.

And, you know, and then we get to what we call pencils down, where something doesn't change. The only time something will change on after pencils down is there's something egregious that just got missed and got noticed late. It doesn't happen very often, but it does every once in a while. Like somebody will like see a card and say, hey, in this context, with this viewpoint, my people think this. And usually that gets caught a lot earlier, but it's possible just sometimes when you're sort of in the middle of things

it's hard to get a because you understand the context in world if you will that sometimes it's hard to miss context external meaning somebody that knows nothing that looked at this might get something that was not our intention but oh yeah there's real world references and this and that and might someone think something that we didn't intend. Every once in a while, it's rare, we might make an emergency change late.

Usually, depending on how late it is, if it's not super late, they can do an emergency art swap, for example, where they get someone to do the art quickly. Not seven weeks, but much faster. But if it's super late, sometimes there's other options. Sometimes it doesn't require a whole new piece of art. Maybe there's some cropping.

Maybe we can go back to the artist and they can make a small change. There's a wide range of things that can happen. Actually, replacing the art has to be pretty dire just because it happens slowly in the process. But it has happened. But anyway, and then that is, with that point, we have everything put to bed. But like I'm saying, just so you understand, in that when you look at a magic card, I talk a lot, a lot, a lot about the mechanics, about the rules text.

But the names, the flavor text, the art, the card concept, all those component pieces have dedicated people spending a lot of time and energy on those things. And like, for example, when the set comes out, I will have Ari on, for example, and we'll just walk through a lot of flavor text and talk about all the different decisions we had to make. And, you know, and I'm sure we can bring up

some of the stuff that came up during editing. And, you know, and I'm sure we can bring up some of the stuff that came up during editing. And, you know, I promise when it comes out, I will do another podcast that's kind of in-depth talking about all the actual problems that we had. Today was a little more talking about the process than the actual. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it and gave a little more insight into what goes on. And it was interesting for me. One of the cool things about having the first chance to do set design, I'd never done set design before, was it allowed me to have a

first-hand look into some of these processes that I had seen and I was aware of but to be in the template, not templating, to be in the card concepting meetings, to be in the meetings about picking flavor text, to be in the editing meetings where we're, you know, fine-tuning things. I hadn't had the chance to do a lot of that stuff, and so it was fun to be part of that and to do that process. So anyway, and you guys get alert about it, so good for everybody. Anyway, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work, so instead of talking, magic

is time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.