Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #951: Booster Fun with Tom & Sarah

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

I sit down with Tom Jenkot and Sarah Wassell to talk about the making of Booster Fun variants (all the cool alternate-art cards and special card frames that we do in a set).

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So normally I use my time at home to interview people, but today I'm interviewing two people because there's so much fun. And so I have Tom Jancott and Sarah Wassil who are doing Booster Fun. So we're going to talk about what Booster Fun is and what exactly does it take to do. So, hi guys! Hello! Okay, so let's first explain. So Tom, since you were here from the very beginning, what is Booster Fun? What is it? Oh yeah, what is it?

What is Booster Fun? Booster Fun is something that we attach to, to a set of cards. We have the main set of cards, and we take a certain number of those and make these highly resonant bespoke treatments. So we'll make a new frame, we'll find a new art style, and make something that fans get really excited about. Okay, so here's what I'm sort of interested in is let's say you're working on a set. Let's walk through what you have to do to make booster fun for a set. Oh,

sure. Yeah. So first it starts with the talking to the people that are creating the set, the game designers like you, and then the creative world building creatives. They're, they're working on working on that whole set when they're working on a new plane or whatever. And so we talk to those people and figure out what's really cool about the set. And that information feeds into a brainstorm, a big brainstorm where we go off, we do these kind of hefty things and really come up with a bunch of ideas um for

uh cool resonant things um then we do want me to go on then we go uh then we go to we create some proof of concepts uh we test those with some magic players uh to see which ones are working well. And then we align them to cards in the set. Then we commission the art. So it's a gross oversimplification that's like months and months and months in the making, but that's the basics. That's the top level. Okay, so Sarah, what makes a good booster fun?

Like, you guys have done a bunch of these. What are you looking for when you make booster fun? Well, we're looking for a couple of things. Like a main thing is we want real like visual resonance with like the set itself, right? With the world, with the feeling of it, with the vibe of it. So like the perfect situation is when we can find some kind of art style that fits really well with it and like um streets of new capenna is like a great example right because we had that like demon mobster like urban kind of noir vibe happening and then you know there's this like

art deco is such a strong visual style that it fits so perfectly with that. And it was just like the floodgate opened of all these amazing artists and all these like really cool visual things we could do with that that didn't look like main set art, right? There was just like this really fertile ground for it. So I would say that like fitting in the world visually is a big deal and also stuff that is exciting, you know, both for us as we're brainstorming and within the studio,

when we share ideas with other people, like the best thing ever is when I start to get a bunch of sketches or a bunch of final art in and like people walking by in different departments, I can pull them over and be like, Hey, you want to see something? And they'll see like 10 of these new pieces together. And they'll be like, Oh my gosh, these are so fun to look at. These are so exciting. And then when they when they you know when they open the packs that same feeling keeps happening so that's those are kind of like the two most important things i

would say that we're we're trying to do yeah one other thing you brought up which is really interesting is we have an amazing pool of artists but there are a lot more artists out there than our our normal pool of artists uh talk a little bit about, let's let you guys tap into stuff we don't normally get to do. So talk a little bit about getting to go outside magic sort of artistic norm, if you will. Yeah. Go on, Tom. Go on, Tom. Go on.

Say something good. Say something good. It's so much pressure. So we, you know, we're constantly on the lookout for artists um we also love art so like some of her pastimes are scrolling through instagram for instance and just really seeing some cool artists but when we have something specific in mind like uh sarah was mentioning like the demon monsters one of the one of the most uh resonant examples i think of is when we went to kaldheim the viking world and we made a not work like not

work frame viking frame when we used this kind of like metal death metal art like so we knew that's what we wanted so we go out and we look for these artists we look for these artists that do that thing um and we inevitably right we run into all of these artists that are doing crazy beautiful things but just don't normally have a home in like main set magic and so it gives us a chance to work with these new artists expand that edge uh expand that art style that we're using and a lot of times which is really cool we'll we'll find somebody that works well in Booster Fund and they'll end up doing stuff in the main set, which is just so great for us.

So one of the things that I know, because I'm participating behind the scenes, is for any one idea you do do, there's lots of ideas you don't do. And I don't think, let's walk a little, I just want to walk a little bit through this because I know it's interesting. How many ideas do you...

Let's say for a premiere set, how many ideas do you guys explore? And then, how many do you tend to pick? What do you start with, and what do you end up with? Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a good question. Early on for Booster Fun, we were looking for that one golden idea.

But we found that there's a lot more room for ideas. So if I answer the second question first, we usually end up with two to three ideas for a set. That seems to be about, you know, that right moment where we're making the best ideas. you know, that right moment, like where we're making the best ideas. But as far as groups of ideas, I was just pouring through some, our last brainstorm, kind of cleaning it up for review. And I mean, there's like 40 ideas in there and they're all good, but it's just what's going to fit the cards the best, right? What people are going to respond to the best.

So 40 and three, that's the answer do you have have anything to add to that i do actually because you said like i don't want to um like inflate your ego or anything but you said something really smart like this week at some point we were talking about like you know the process really hard not to inflate my ego i don't want you to get drunk with power that's really like i'm thinking of you in the moment i'm trying to be supportive um but we like as tom detailed this process of like all this listening we do and all the brainstorming and like he said it generally but all of those like kind of steps equate to like some really like um specific processes that we do as a team right to like

generate kind of to try to generate the same level of ideas with each set but the reality is is there's always an element of chaos because at any point we have to kind of like recognize that all we're the main thing we're trying to do is make the coolest thing and sometimes the coolest idea doesn't come up in the brainstorm even in those 40 ideas sometimes we do that brainstorm and we pick three and we're like these are amazing and we get working on them and then someone says something two weeks later and we're all like uh that's the coolest thing oh man like chaos chaos is key i'm glad you brought that up so so can we have an example can you example where that happened in Booster Fun?

In a release product. Oh, I've got one. I've got a kind of a quick one. I think I can talk about this. So this is, again, like Streets of New Capenna. You know, we were working on all those deco cards, and we had like two or three kind of, we had the lands versions of them,

and then we had the like, you know, those black and gold gilded frames which came with that special treatment print treatment and look super cool and we realized like part of the way through that process that we needed to do some um planeswalker versions in the art deco style but we kind of like hadn't figured out the best way to pull that off and then i had gotten in one of our first artists new artists that we signed up is this guy tom roberts that tom and i really like initially keyed off he did in his own personal work he did this amazing metropolis poster you know from that like 1920s like really cool early early film and so he had done one of the first pieces of elspeth for the set and we realized oh this guy's really got a handle on it.

Let's just have him do all the planeswalkers. And so they were tied together. They were themed with the set. But that was not a thing that we had planned early on. It just kind of happened in the set development. Yeah, one of the things that's also interesting as we talk about it is, just for the audience to clarify, there's a lot of different component pieces of what they work on. So art is one thing, different styles of art, frames and sort of different visual looks of the cards, and then printing treatments, which is, we're getting into more in the future, so we haven't done a lot yet, but the future has a lot of printing treatments in it, so we're looking at a lot of things.

So there's a lot of component pieces here. A lot of what I know you guys do is find all these component pieces and bring them together so that the finished product is something really cool. So it might be fun to just share some stories of different sets. So I'm going to pick a set, and then you guys tell me a booster fun story from that set okay okay so the first one's gonna be for tom throne of eldraine which was the very first booster fun uh product what what is your give me a story from doing throne of eldraine that's a that's a tough one because uh that was before my time i was, was that Diger? Yeah, I was hired into the studio like three or four months before it released.

Okay, we can start a set later. I thought you had done Throne of Eldraine. So, okay, let's jump to what was after Throne of Eldraine was Theros, Theros Beyond Death. Did you work on Theros Beyond Death? Mm-mm, no. Okay, we'll keep going. Ikoria. Did you work on Theros Beyond Death? Mm-mm. No. Okay.

We'll keep going. Ikoria. Did you work on Ikoria? Can you try again? Zendikar Rising. Yes. Okay, let's talk Zendikar Rising. Okay, Zendikar Rising is the first set. And so, that was an interesting one. I honestly had come on

and the frame was already done. I forget what they call it, but the Zendikar frame with the hedrons. And they had wanted to do like a travel poster style for that. So it was really quick. It was like that first, it wasn't the first job actually I did. The first one was the first double masters which was which was really cool uh but for zendikar um it was just finding these travel poster artists that do kind of like that uh that kind of sun-kissed kind of like medium to long shot versions of these things like you can see these creatures off to the distance we got some amazing things like that lotus cobra um the i think the best

story for zendikar is a booster fun is that we i worked with anato finn stark and dominic mayer we had those artists those that was their first jobs for magic there and they did an amazing job in there and since then they're doing tons of main set art they've graduated over to main set like i don't think you can see a set past zendikar or maybe a couple sets down where they're not in that set and they're just killing it i'm just so happy for them okay so after zendikar rising was call time we touched about earlier but what's a fun story from Kaldheim? Fun story from Kaldheim. God, you know, it's tough for me. I focus on, this is going to be horrible.

I don't want the world to know this, but I'm just going to say it. I focus on the negative. I see all those little nicks and those things like that. What's a fun thing? All the late art, all the struggles. What's a fun thing? Were you involved with the poster, the metal posters? Were you involved in that?

Oh, the metal lands? So I think that's a fun story there. So it's kind of Booster Fun, kind of Secret Lair Drop. We had realized that as these cards were getting together with the not work and the death metal art that they were really cool and we wanted to do something some basic lands in that style and so in the course of a couple weeks we spun up this project for secret laird up to do those margaritic lands where he redrew the mana symbols. Sorry, I just found a piece of breakfast on my arm. We can fix that in post.

We hired him to do these lands. We didn't have a lot of time. He knocked them out in like two weeks, and they're perfect. They were called like the brutal, what were they called? Brutal Basic Lands or something like that. Yeah, I think something like that.

Perfect name too, yeah. You make a good point that I want to stress to the audience in that you guys do the booster fun for the normal sets, but also Secret Lair. A lot of the booster fun aesthetic gets sort of moved into some Secret Lair stuff as well. So you guys are also working on the Secret Lair as well as working on the, you know, all the normal stuff for the normal sets. Okay, so after call time was... So Sarah, I'm not sure when you started. So jump in with a story when I get to a set that you worked on, okay?

I will, I will. Strixhaven. What do you remember from Strixhaven? Strixhaven was insane. So that was pre-Sarah 2. So Sarah will have her time. She's the newest and the best addition to the team. That said, she's been here for over a year on the team.

Strixhaven was like this kind of kismet moment, like where we had, we knew we were doing this set of cards, what turned out to be the Mystical Archives. There's like 63 of them. And we didn't know what to do with them here was we got the list what do we do with this list there's all these spells like from across the multiverse right but it was set on this school world archavios is that archavios is the world yeah strict haven is the world strict haven's the set yeah and we really did we didn't know what to do with this so it was a lot of brainstorming a lot of back and forth i worked really closely with doug byer to a

brainstorm what this could be and and we just found this kismet moment where it's oh this is a library with kind of index cards of these spells that have been cast or like you know these beautiful like illuminated illuminated manuscript uh books with all these spells that have been cast or like you know these beautiful like illuminated illuminated manuscript uh books with all these spells that have been cast like the depicting the first time that they've been cast so of course this the library of the multiverse would uh catalog all this stuff and so that was our that was our lean in there so we created a gorgeous frame and we came up with a style for the art that was kind of illuminated manuscript leaning more a little more modern some of the graphical elements um i had some help with that from taylor ingervison with chatting so it was it's always a group effort i think i'll try to

hit that point a bunch but that thing was like just came together so well and the fans loved it too so just kind of validation like when we love something as a Magic player, as a Magic fans, that the fans are going to love it too. Okay, so next up is Adventures in the Forgotten Realm, our D&D set. So we did some really fun stuff in this set. So what's your favorite story from working on the D&D set? Sure. Again, this is me, pre-Sarah, but she'll get her chance.

Once it's Sarah's turn, I'm just going to turn off my mic. Yeah, okay. So AFR was like kind of our first crossover, one of our first crossovers besides Secret Lair Drop. And so there was there was a lot of material there right like we we looked back at like you know 50 years of dnd and that was one of those instances where we had way too many ideas way too many ideas to to do but um the development process of what's what bubbled up to the top there were

those classic rulebook style cards and just seeing that charming black and white art and figuring out a way to get those into cards with color identity and stuff but my favorite, probably of all time so far it hasn't been topped, was the module lands. These were like a throwback to that late 70s, early 80s D&D module covers with those, you know, bright colors and a pretty simple design, that yellow band up in the top left. There were nine of them.

We also hired legacy D&D artists. And what do I mean by legacy? What I mean is like the artists that were there in the beginning doing it so like larry elmore who uh you know from who did all the red the red box art and the original dragonlance covers and all this dnd art uh wayne reynolds errol otis who did the demi demis and demiods covers. Deities and Demigods, yeah. Deities and Demigods. Yeah, deities, deities. And so many more. Alex Horley, Jeff Easley,

these people that did that art, we brought them back for these old module covers. And one other cool note, too, if you notice, they have these kind of fake numbering in the top. Like I forget what they are, but it's like A11 or B13 or whatever. Those are actually like the letters were actually used on old modules back in the day. And the numbers are a continuation. So like if they made A1 through 11, we started at A12, for instance. I just thought that was a really cute note.

Yeah, it's funny. I played a lot of D&D back in my youth. And so I loved the modules. It took me back. It was great. Okay, so after that, we now get into Midnight Hunt, Innistrad Midnight Hunt. All right, we're going to a sarah story here i think

okay i think so i mean there's there's a there's two sets and then a uh kind of a you know follow-up set that you were involved in we can talk about midnight hunt and crimson vow together obviously they they yeah um so these two were kind of the first the interesting thing here was they were kind of the first sets where we always have our internal effort for brainstorming, creating proof of concepts. But this was the first that we commissioned some frame concepts out. So we worked with Justine Jones on the Harvest Tide frame for the first set, Midnight Hunt. on the Harvest Tide frame for the first set, Midnight Hunt.

She did some beautiful black and white drawings of these harvest-y, basically, celebration with some dark edges and stuff. She did both sides. And then we worked with Alex Bronwyn. Both magic

artists, they both have magic cards on the Fang frame for Vow. I'm using abbreviations. Crimson Vow. The audience will get it, don't worry. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, that was a really good, like, it was great to have, like, additional voices there.

Like, we can come up with stuff, but we're in a little bit of a vacuum, right? And so, like, having these other voices contribute to that uh really helped and we've been doing that ever since to like just add in that different voice um the fang frames were the fang frames were super fun um but i also love the celebrity artists that we got for uh so'. There was a Soarin' card done by Ayami Kojima, a really famous Japanese artist who does a lot of vampires. And that was a great, I loved seeing her art on that card. So just curious, the Dracula stuff,

was that considered booster fun or is that considered a different thing? Oh, I forgot about the Dracula stuff. Okay. Do you guys do, when you do skins like godzilla and dracula is that your area or is that yes or no back in the day it was um but it's it's shifted to a new team now because there's there's there's a lot of work to do um but back in for dracula that was me as well so i mean that's it's a pretty simple story um I guess there's some fun bits so I worked with Doug Byer again on that who I worked with on the mystical archive cards

uh and we we it's not the movie right it's not any of the movies it's not the comic books it's there's no we were using just the book Bram Stoker's book. And the way the book is written, there's not a lot of descriptions of people in there, too. So Doug did an amazing job cobbling together what he had and what he could find to really figure out who these characters are. And then on my end, I literally just went, I almost swore, caught myself, Mark. I literally went to like a card database and typed in vampire, picked my favorite vampire artists, and got them all to do all the cards for Dracula. And it turned out beautifully. Okay, so now we're going to advance to the next set uh which is uh kamigawa neon dynasty so sarah did you work on kamigawa neon dynasty um you know kamigawa was such a it was the worst

for me personally because i was transitioning to this team so i didn't get to work on it my old team which is packaging and i didn't get to work on it in this team the only thing i did on it was help the inside team that did all of the like print treatment research to make the neon ink cards oh yeah i worked on that for months that was that was a lot of like development and i you know like just sheets and sheets of samples of different different methods to try to like work that ink into the designs of the cards in the coolest way so that was like the main thing that i did for that set yeah one thing that the audience just for the audience whenever we do something new that's a treatment like we it's not like the first time we ever do it is when you guys see it like we

have to test it and you know there's infinite uh there's a lot of like technical behind the scenes of making sure it's the right version and just like there's 40 versions of booster fun there's infinite there's a lot of like technical behind the scenes of making sure it's the right version and just like there's 40 versions of Booster Fun there's all these different versions of trying different things and testing lots of different things so that we can get the absolute best and it's fun to see

I love seeing test sheets when you see all the different things and the funny thing behind the scenes is there's one or two cards they always use so it's always like the same card but they're testing different things. And the funny thing behind the scenes is there's one or two cards they always use. So it's always like the same card, but they're testing different things so they can compare them. Cause you, you want,

whenever you're testing something, you want everything to be the same so that you can, you, what you can see is the quality you're testing and not caring about the quality of the card. So that's always fun. Yeah. So Tom,

what, what is the story for you from neon, neon dynasty? What, what do you remember? Neon dynasty? What do you remember? Neon Dynasty, we blew the hinges off the door on that one with the number of treatments. We had Ninja, Samurai.

We had kind of this neon. I don't know all of the official front-facing names, but we had kind of the catch-all. And then we had those Ukiyo-e basics, which are just insanely gorgeous. Everybody loves them. Those are the ones with the Japanese writing on them that has the sort of old watercolor style, right? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah.

We replaced, yeah, that's that Ukiyo-e kind of traditional Japanese style. Yeah, yeah, we replaced, yeah, that's that Yuki Ue kind of traditional Japanese style. And then we replaced the normal title bar with this, the symbol, the Japanese symbol for mountain and et cetera, with the mana symbol. All of that stuff I worked with our agency in Japan to make sure that it was authentic. This agency, Kogudo, that they've been an art agency for over 100 years in in tokyo which is crazy um and they through us like uh through working with them we got some really amazing pieces um some of the some of the coolest things that we got were working with some celebrity artists like we worked with uh hara tatsu, who did Fist of the North Star. Tarada Katsuya, who's an artist on his own right, does some amazing things. And then we also worked with, for the box topper, it was Yoji Shinkawa, who's done a lot of Metal Gear Solid stuff.

Like just really heavy hitters, because we this is our you know our japanese set at least for you know a while uh we really we really hit hard on the all those uh celebrity artists like we like to call them okay so that moves on to streets of nukapena we talked a little bit already about just nukapena any other i'm gonna shut up i'm turning my mic off now okay sir so any other cool stories from streets of new capenna oh man yeah so that like for me like i came into the job and tom was like all right find a bunch of artists for this project like this is what we need it to look like and it was i was like a kid in the candy store like i couldn't believe that that was my first assignment to get to like

find these artists that do this like strong deco style and i i i found like people like there's uh artist sean pagels that was a big surprise for me because his work i would say is probably the most abstract out of the whole booster fun card set and i was pretty nervous like i think his work is amazing and you know a lot of people have like been it you know in or in the studio are enthusiastic about it too but I definitely like to push the envelope I like weird art I like art that's unexpected that surprises people that makes people think like I never would have thought I liked that but now I'm seeing it I do like it you know that's kind of what gets me really going and so I I commissioned Sean Pagels to do some

cards and I and I had people from all over the studio coming over and being like those are my favorites so far those are my favorites so that was a really exciting moment to see how open-minded people actually can be about art um because I would have you know played it a little safe in some places because I didn't want to push it too far but um working with with him was amazing and then um Scottott fisher did the most crazy physical um dragon painting of zeotora and it just like he he's amazing because he'll send so many process sketches as he works but just knowing that like i was part of making this dragon painting come into the world into existence that didn't wouldn't have existed before, is one of the best moments I've ever had in my career, like hands down.

Okay, so one last set before we wrap up for today, which is Battle for Baldur's Gate. It's Commander Legends, Battle for Baldur's Gate. So once again, we get to tip our toe back into D&D. So what are the fun stories from this set? Yeah, I don't know about... So this one was me again. I think this was kind of commissioning

at the same time as an S&C. So Sarah and I were kind of two parts of a yin-yang, so we divided and conquered. For this one, I don't know if there's like fun, fun stories, except that we we dip back into that classic rulebook style in a big way, in a bigger way. We did more cards. We branched out from monsters in a cool way. And we got to bring in a bunch of new artists to do the thing, like Jeff Maricola, longtime magic artist, famous for his A-Togs and his Beebles, does amazing ink work. And so he really killed it. We got to bring in like Errol Otis did a black and white drawing, old time artist Jeff D.

Lots of artists contribute to that style again. But like nothing, we knew we had a hit with the classic rulebook style. So we brought it back and we want to like bring things back when people love them, right? But nothing like crazy.

We didn't go crazy with this one. So I don't know if there's a, this is a really sad note to end on. There's not a fun story for this one.

Well, I just wanted to give a final note about Booster Fund as a whole, as our final thing is one of the things that's a lot of fun, and I recommend to the audience who hasn't done that

to go on Gatherer or the search engine of your choice and really take a look at all, like, there's a lot there. And it's really, really fun to look at all the art and see the different versions of cards. Okay, so we're going to tease the future. We're going to use code names, and we're not going to tease the future we're going to use code names and we're not going to say anything about it just

what upcoming set that you've worked on that hasn't released yet are you the most excited to see people's responses to not about what is in it or anything just what set coming up you're like I'm excited to see people see this set code names code names okay I would say we have a set called coming up that you're like, I'm excited to see people see this set? You go first, Sarah.

Yeah, use code names. Code names? Okay. I would say we have a set called Actuary coming up that I commissioned a series of pieces for. And they, it's a simple idea, but man, are they getting big reactions and excitement

from players in the studio. Okay, Tom, what upcoming set are you most excited to see people's responses to? they get in big reactions and excitement from players in the, in studio. Okay. Tom, what, what upcoming set are you most excited to see people's responses here? That's a tough one,

but it is a, it's a Sarah, it's a Sarah joint. Well, we all worked on it, but it was net ball. Okay. Net ball.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's, it's, it's currently commissioning right now. We all, the whole team, you know, it's a whole team effort, but's currently commissioning right now. We all... The whole team...

You know, it's a whole team effort, but Sarah's commissioning all the art for this one, and it's... The card treatment, the frames, the art is just coming together. Oh, I almost swore. It caught me something else. Really well.

Really well. I was like, is he going to say flawless or is he going to say something else? It was more Mark warned us not to swear. So anyway, guys, I can see my desk. That means I've made it to work. So I want to thank both of you for being here. I really, really enjoy having people on that do something completely different than what I do.

So the audience can just sort of hear of all the passion that goes into making other aspects of magic. Because magic is a group effort that lots and lots of people work on. So thank you so much for being here today. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having us, Mark. Anytime. Yeah, anytime.

And to everybody else, since I'm at my desk, you know what that means? It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So once again, thanks to Tom and Sarah, and I'll see all of you guys next time.

Bye-bye.