Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #973: UNF Card Concepting with Annie Sardelis

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

I sit down with Annie Sardelis to talk about what card concepting is and how she did the card concepting for various cards in Unfinity.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have Annie Sardellis, and we're going to talk all about card concepting, and Infinity in particular, just because Annie did the card concepting for Infinity. So hi, Annie. Hello. So let's begin with what is card concepting? A lot of the audience might have not any idea what we're talking about. What is that? Oh, okay. So as you all know, every single magic card has a piece of art that goes with it.

And there's a lot of work into getting that art made so that it makes sense, like with the world building and with the mechanics. So card concepting is, you know, making it all come together and delivering something an artist can work with and we do that in the form of an art brief which is just a little tiny paragraph of text uh which we call the card concept uh that uh says like the setting like maybe the plane it's on but what what should be depicted in the art any important important characters, even what color of mana something's associated with it, because that can inform the color palette the artists use. And we basically whip up one of those paragraphs for every single card in the game,

every single alt art in the game even sometimes. And then we ship those to the artists, and the AD works with them to bring back a cool sketch. So that's how it comes up. I have done a number of card-by-card stories in my column where I'll show the art descriptions, for example. So if people are interested in seeing those, I've done numerous of them. If you look at my column, like into my card-by-card columns,

you can see sort of examples of what we'll give the artist, the thing you're talking about. Yeah. Okay, so in big picture, card concepting very much is about, okay, we've made a card. The card does something mechanically, but what does that mean? Like, flavorfully, what does it mean? And a good, like, low-hanging example is, I have a direct damage card. The card does three damage to any target.

Okay, but how are we conveying that what does it mean is it a lightning bolt are you is it fire is it sonic like what what exactly are you doing like it's because the artist has to somehow it can't just be damage isn't damage in a vacuum what does it mean yeah yeah and the hardest part is getting really creative with that kind of stuff like that's that's why we always jump to new worlds, because, like, hey, maybe the fire here looks different than the fire there, you know? So we're always trying to come up with new and inventive ways to show, you know, that good old three damage. And sometimes, like, a lightning bolt or whatever, direct damage is very easy. You know, okay, you're showing something harming something. Sometimes we make a card and, like, okay, what damage is very easy. You know, okay, you're showing something harming something. Sometimes we make a card

and like, okay, what exactly is this? It might mean something in game terms, but it's very, it's much vaguer in sort of flavor terms. Yeah. We sort of have like, what is it? Sort of like a, not an encyclopedia, but you know,

like our go-to ways of expressing like discard or mill or I don't know, like stuff in your graveyard coming back to life and stuff like that. Like it's, there's, there's all sorts of like visual language we can use to express different effects that are a little bit more abstract, but you know, we have to discover those and see what really resonates with people first. Yeah.

Now layered on top of that, so all of the card concepting work has to happen. And then for this particular set, we're talking about Infinity, there also was like a certain level of humor. Like you're also trying to, you know, be funny and make references. Like there's a lot of other layered stuff on top of that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. With unsets, we like to go really deep on all sorts of different types of humor like referential stuff and even like magic referential stuff so in addition to like building our own world of this outer space theme park like we do like want to make sure we can hit uh all all the jokes people have come to from previous Unsets as well. Okay, so what happens is you as the person who's in charge of this called meetings. And I think the meetings were you and me,

because I was the lead of the design, Chris Mooney, because Chris was my right-hand person, and Dawn, who was the art director. And we all got in a room and we literally went card by card. Yes. Those meetings were a good time. All of us are just trying to come up with like,

you know, like usually like there's the joke you guys want to tell because you have like the slam dunk card name. They're like, it's gotta be this. And it's like, all right, it's gotta be this. But like, how do we make that like work in our set so yeah we just brainstorm a bunch of ideas on how to visualize it like what kind of creatures to show and you know try to keep it like fresh try to keep it in world a little bit but make sure we're not missing like the real like home run joke that you

guys are trying to deliver with the mechanics and And then on top of that, something else that we spent a lot of time on is we made a long list of like every trope you can imagine. Like we're at this carnival amusement park circus. Like we want to make sure we hit all these different things. So as you're doing your concepting, it's also like, oh, we want to make sure to get a tightrope walker. We want to make sure to get a, you know, somebody throwing down milk cans. Like there's all this giant list ofer we want to make sure to get a you know somebody um throwing down milk cans like this is all this giant list of things we want to do and so as we're not just making sure

every card shines but also looking for opportunities to do things yeah definitely i think i was very biased towards having like giant vegetable thing because like for me like the local county fair was like my version of the carnival so i I'm like, we've got to have big, nasty vegetables. And I think we did end up with that on a card. Yes, we have. We do have that on the card. Awesome. It is called Vegetation Abomination.

Two green, two, two. Artifact creature, plant mutant food. Death touch. Sacrifice vegetation abomination. Roll six out of nine. You gain life equal to the result. So the interesting thing is this is a good example where we had this card

that just, okay, you gained life, right? Just this card that you gained life. And you're the one that said, oh, okay, well what if we I think this is a neat idea that we have this, you know, like this carnival sort of grow your giant food. What if we somehow made this into like living mutant food? That was your idea, right?

Yeah. I mean, the artists really like went with it and like designed some really cool creatures though. So, yeah. But it's a good example where this card, it's not like it's screaming from the rooftops that it should be mutant plants, right?

That's not what the card design was saying. The card design was, I mean, it was very open-ended, right? Yeah. And then the other thing that happened is once we made it that, it was not originally a food. And sort of like, as we started evolving it, we're like, oh, well, now that we're actually having vegetables and it's sacrificing for life,

oh, maybe sometimes we'll do cool things on the card concept side and then we'll react to it on the mechanical side. Yeah, it's definitely a two-way street. the mechanical side yeah it's definitely a two-way street like you know on world building we'll have these certain like character tropes we want to tell like rex nebula we wanted like the incompetent space pilot dude that you see in like these retro futuristic shows uh and we're just like cool do you got it you got a cool idea for this guy and i honestly think you guys nailed it with like the crash landing mechanic. Yeah. Like, it's very cute. Like, it's very holistic.

So it's really nice when things come together like that. Okay, so what I want to do is talk about some cards and sort of, I want to sort of dive into, like, okay, we gave you this concept. How did you take that from our concept to what it was? Okay. Okay, so we're going to start with Gallery of Legends. So I'm going to, let me read this for our audience. So Gallery of Legends is an attraction.

So Gallery of Legends, artifact attraction. When you visit it, exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a non-land card. Then choose a legendary creature card with the same mana value as that card. Create a token that's a copy of the name's a copy of the card with the chosen name, that token gains haste, exile the beginning of the next end step. Okay.

So, yeah. So, okay, you have this card. Where do you go with it? Well, basically, I think, like, the trope space for this one is sort of, like, Hall of Presidents or, like, I think like the trope space for this one is sort of like Hall of Presidents or like that weird educational space that you end up in a theme park or something like that. So basically, I just wanted to pick a set of legends to showcase that could easily-ish adapt into like a robotic form because, you know, this is a sci-fi setting a little bit high tech so like yeah let's make our animatronic robots out of these uh these legends so then it was like

well what what legends like everyone loves so many of these characters is like who do i pick i don't know but i decided to start by searching uh for un in the names like the proper un like not in the middle of the name like no seriously like in the name and the first one I saw was stage the untouchable and I just thought it was really funny with the mechanics as well because if you do pick her uh it's not gonna end well for you and then after that I was like all right who else is here we go in the chaos people should recognize him because he gets a lot of play. Yeah, let's slap him on there. And in the background, if you can tell,

there's a little Hydra back there, and that is Pelucranos the Unchained. So those are our three. Right, and it's Macias. What's Macias? Macias the Un... Unhollowed. Unhollowed, okay.

Yeah. And that's a... One of the things that we came up with very early on was the idea that the park had the magic as its motif. Yeah. And so it's fun. Like, this is a good example where, like, you could appreciate this card and not recognize the characters. But, right, if you recognize the characters, there's this other layer of joke to it.

Yeah. I tried to squeeze those in, like, basically i could you know it was uh it was a lot of work like giving so much brain energy to each of these cards it's like they're just each yelling at you to like be funny or like tell a reference and i'm like oh my gosh i'm gonna try my best so so here's here's one of my favorite um one of the ones that i really enjoyed the how much sort of magic jokes are in it. So there's a card called Bag Check. So Bag Check is one blue blue instant

counter-target spell, then ask a person outside the game if that spell looks dangerous to them. If they say yes, draw a card, then discard a card. And so the visual on it is somebody's emptying somebody's bag, because it's a security check. But what you did is every object in this is from magic's past

yeah i think i tried to make sure let's see okay so we straight up just have like gremlins at the park like i think they show up in a couple of the cards because naturally you have a park things are going to get kind of nasty you're going to get an infestation or something um yeah there's a kill bot in there i think from a past unsaid from unstable yeah yeah from unstable the classic thumb yeah it's crunk song yeah so yeah it was just a mix of things that i thought would be like you know silly like somewhat you know like what are you doing with all this like lame stuff in your bag some of of it. So it's just fun. And what I would say is something for people to enjoy is look at the art.

So much of the time, it's not a random thing. You spent, one of the things I know you did is you would send the artist, like, links to here are the cards you're referencing. Make sure you look at these cards. And a lot of the art descriptions had links to existing magic art. Oh, yeah, totally. So, like, we would put in, you know know some pages from our world guide that we whipped up but like always alongside you know some other piece of art from magic it'd be like yeah can you like dress this guy up but

with like these neon you know performer outfit things and stuff like that. So yeah, it's always a mishmash. Okay, so the next one is a weird one. So it was called the Astroquarium. So the Astroquarium, let me read it, two in a blue artifact. When Astroquarium enters the battlefield, you may put an art sticker on it. One and tap until end of turn,

target creature becomes a blue shark with base power and toughness 4-4. If the cracks in Astroquarium's art are completely covered, that creature becomes a blue octopus with base power and toughness 8-8 instead. Activate only the sorcery. The art shows behind glass, you see

a shark and you see an octopus, although they have a lot of neon in them. And then the glass is, you see cracks in the glass. So let's talk about the origin of this card okay i i swear it started with you guys like wanting to have something to like sticker on that was like weird and quirky but like had to do with the art um but it was more about like oh my gosh like with this crack we definitely want it to be like playable.

Like we do want you to be able to cover the crack. We don't want it to be like a gimme, like can't be too easy. So we did. I remember we were in a call and you like held up this piece of paper being like, this is how the crack should look. And I'm like, okay. And I drew that on a card of voracious great shark and attach that to the reference because we want it to be like a Y shaped crack. So you got to put a little effort into it.

And, but make sure like you can tell it's holding in water. So like we have a little bit of water coming out, but not too much because he's the one you'd be able to tell where the crack is. It was just this whole debate over like, is this crack too large? Like how big are the stickers going to be? And like, I hope in the end, it turned out to be something people can, you know, make that 8-8 giant shark

or whatever you're doing. But it was, yeah, a lot of work. This is another good example, by the way, where the mechanics ended up being reflected by the card concepting. So I think when we originally made it, Chris actually made this card originally, it was like Merfolk Tank or something,

like the Merfolk from performing in it. And it did something completely differently. But I think what you said in the meetings is the joke of this card is there's dangerous things in the tank. It's not funny that there's a Merfolk in the tank. It's funny that there's a shark in the tank. And the fact that it's cracking

is like, oh, there's this, like, the park has this ongoing sense of danger to it, which is kind of, like, one of our things we play into all the time for humor. And you're the one that said, hey, we should make this like a shark tank. And then we went back and we changed what the mechanic was, and we ended up saying, okay, well, you become either a

shark or octopus, so, like, we could put dangerous things in the tank. I mean, yeah, it's not much fun unless there's a bit of risk i don't know it's like that's sort of like uh we always try to keep things like a little like a little a little keep you on your toes when you're playing magic gathering you know it's like you always want to feel like something crazy could happen so yeah and unsets are weird in that we have cards like astroquarium where the art matters mechanically which usually isn't a thing oh we can talk about that real quickly so one of the themes of the set is hat matters and so one of the things we had to do is we had a tag on some of the cards when it had to have a hat yes yeah there's a tag on every single card in the database whether it has a hat or not and i

had to emphasize like up front for some and you know some we just left them like free form like sure maybe an artist will draw a hat maybe they won't but in the end like we did have to track all of it and i think like the reason why like hats matter is really resonant i think it's just because when you do say like artists go crazy with this set, they just end up putting hats on stuff, you know, like, I don't know why, but they just always put hats on stuff. So yeah, it was, it was funny in that, right. We told certain, certain cards need to have a hat.

We said, please put a hat on it. And a lot of cards we didn't say, but then there were different waves. And this set was stretched over like five wave, which is abnormal. Normally magic is two waves. But every time a wave would come in, we'd count all the hats to see where we were at. Yeah. It's true. And then also, we have, like, a certain ratio of, like, hat stickers we made

sure to put on those cards as well. Oh, yes. Oh, do you want to talk a little bit about the making of the stickers? Oh, yeah, I guess. There are a lot of them and uh we also had to commission those out just like any old piece of art so there's just this mega list that uh was sort of grouped in certain ways of just like things you'd find at the park hats the stuff you could like hold in your hand you you know, like weapons and things like that. Because it's just fun to like, you know, kind of be told like where to stick this if you want to like, you know, kind of make it make sense.

I think food was a category. There is a couple like speech bubble thingies or like sound effects is a category as well. And like miscellaneous items and stuff like, oh, magic references was another one of them. I think like the Bind of Thassa

got spoiled today or something like that. So, yeah, this is just a lot of miscellaneous things. Yeah, basically what happened

is you made a list and then we would review it and we're like, oh, can we add this or add that? You know, I'm like, please,

can we have a little bobblehead card're like, oh, can we add this or add that? You know, I'm like, please, can we have a little bobblehead card? Okay, so the next card we want to talk about is Form of the Approach of the Second Sun. Four white enchantment. When this enchantment enters the battlefield, you gain seven life. You become a card until you leave your library

or that library is shuffled. Put yourself seven from the top, balancing cards on top of your head. When you draw yourself, you win the game. When one or more cards fall off your library, or that library is shuffled. Put yourself seventh from the top, balancing cards on top of your head. When you draw yourself, you win the game. When one or more cards fall off your head, exile them and all cards on your head. Then sacrifice this enchantment. Okay, so how do you concept this card? Well, okay.

This one was definitely handed off from you guys, like, exactly in this shape with exactly this name. You know, like, or at least something really close to it. because you know the joke is like look at me I'm the second card in the second sun whatever when you draw yourself blah blah blah so with this uh yeah like you just mentioned how we had all these different waves for the art like in an early wave we had Vorthos which is like I don't know probably one of my top three favorite cards in the set and she came out so great i'm like vorthos is also the type of person who would just have an absolute blast at this park like she's like the perfect fan to be here so she shows up on like trivia contests because of course she would win that and but also here

on form of the approach of the second son because uh it's just like a bolas callback and i'm just like well she's got the bolas costume and we can use that costume to sort of mirror the composition of the original card you know with its two sons except here they are fireworks and just you know have a really clear visual callback but also be riffing on our own you know little astratorium world and worth those so i just think it's it's really cute to just be able to reuse characters between cards and just sort of tell their little story so yeah i i love when you have things reappear and so that it gives a sense of continuity to the world i think that's lots of fun. And this is a good example

where something that Unsets do is I mean, Magic will do it a little bit, but Unsets do it more than normal, is when you do visual callbacks. It's very fun to sort of, hey, this card clearly mechanically is referencing Approach of the Second Son, so why don't we visually, you know, I think that's really cool.

Okay. Next up is Lila, Hospitality Hostess. So she's two green, white, legendary creature, elf employee, 3-3. You may look at the top card of your library at any time. You may cast common spells from the top of your library. Guests you control get plus one, plus one. Okay, so where did this come from? Okay. Okay, so where did this come from? Okay, so we have all of these, you know, like really tropey things around the park, like with different employees and performers.

This one is just a nice employee guiding around this little kid to the park and yeah the tricky part was finding a common creature for her to be hanging out with because we wanted to be cute and I went to look at the commons at the time you know it was several years ago so we printed different comm since then but i looked at like the top most popular common creatures and there was like a gurmag angler and i'm like i don't know about that there's like a boggle it was really tough because i wanted to find like a humanoid person uh and the one that uh i decided to settle on was delver of Secrets. So this is sort of just a little tiny baby Delver with, you know, the B is sort of like a little call out to the insect side of it. But other than that, it's just like a cute, cute kid having a blast.

So even if you don't see that little reference, you know, it's totally fine. And I don't know. I just think it's a really charming card. So I wanted to keep it keep it cute uh and you know just give a little bit of a shout out to the good old classic delver of secrets and this is another card i mean we're not planning this on purpose but there's another card where the way the art came out we actually changed the card a little bit um the guess you control get plus one plus one wasn't originally on this card but when we sort of saw it all come together it just it just felt like she was so helpful.

And we had added guests late in the process for a long, long time. If you were a guest, you were what you were. You were a human or whatever. And we added guests in because they seemed so blank, so we added guests in. And then we wanted to interact with guests, and she seemed like the perfect one.

So that all kind of came together off the concept. So that's cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm glad to see guests getting used. It just feels right to have like a job on like some of these characters running around the park because if you're not working there and you're not like a show person,

like, well, what are you? I'm like, well, I hope you're not like a soldier or a warrior or something like that. So like guests is just a really just a really chill creature type. Okay, next up. Finishing move. Two and a green sorcery. You get two tickets.

Then you may put a sticker on non-land permanent you own. Target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to target creature you don't control. So this art shows a wrestling ring. creature you don't control. So this art shows a wrestling ring and a woman dressed up like Liliana is wrestling a person, a different person, not Vorthos, dressed up like Bolas. So how did this come about? Oh, well, you know, this is just, you know, at the time, I think like War of the Spark was like pretty fresh, you know, like it was like the biggest, most catastrophic thing we've done in a while so i just wanted to sort of like have a little bit of fun with it and show like these

characters reenacting uh you know the pivotal moment when uh liliana wrestles bolas and breaks his leg you know that happened uh it's just it's just don't know, it's just cute. And I think maybe like Don could more speak to it. But I'm pretty sure this is just like the artist and his wife posing for this. So I thought that was really cute. Yeah, that's really all there is to it. It's just sort of like, allow the Astratorium just just sort of like have fun with magic, like not take it too serious. the Astratorium just sort of like have fun with magic, like not take it too serious. Like it's, I wouldn't say like the Astratorium is like magic land.

It has more of the vibe of like, you know, when you go to a carnival and you see like prizes for sale that definitely aren't, you know, they're definitely bootleg or like you see something painted on the side of a ride and you're like i don't really know if this is branded correctly you know so it's just sort of just having fun with our own

ip that's all yeah and it's one of the things i enjoy that's a lot of fun to do is just poke fun and you know saying like it's i yeah i think i think we had written that somewhere we wanted to have some wrestling somewhere just because it seemed like a fun thing. And this was a neat place to put it, so. Mm-hmm. Okay, next up is Killer Cosplay. So Killer Cosplay costs green. It's an artifact equipment.

When Killer Cosplay becomes attached to a creature, choose a creature card name with an identical mana cost. That creature becomes a copy of the card with the chosen name until Killer Cosplay becomes unattached from it. Equip three. Okay, so, and so the picture, this is not a visual medium, the picture is this little bear

who's obviously walking with his mom because he's holding her hand, although you can't really make her out too much, and he's wearing a little, like, Tarmogoyf outfit, a very cute-looking Tarmogoyf outfit. A very cute-looking Tarmogoyf outfit. So how did all this come about? Yeah, this one is definitely mechanically-driven reference here.

Because the most classic, at least to me, you know... Okay, I'm biased. I like bears, all right? So I like the good old one-in-a-green grizzly bear i like eat the good old one in a green grizzly bear like the good old one in a green bear cub it's also very cute to me um but what else is one in a green is tarmogoyf who's like very high profile barely gnarly nasty and so it was just sort of like a you know like a one two thing that felt like it clicked together with the mechanics of like this really simple like classic card with like this really nasty looking like weird mechanical card and i'm just like but it's also a powerful card so uh i just wanted to put it a cute bear cub in a tarmac wife onesie basically and see if anyone like caught on to what was going on there i can see the

flavor text team really brought it home but the whole with the text they put on there oh yeah the flavor text real quickly just uh is akhan's run get the camera he's adorable steffy bob's daughter next words next words yeah well yeah yeah it's just it's just uh it's fun i tried to sneak in stuff like this whenever i could and uh you know hopefully people notice that's all okay so now i'm gonna one of my favorite jokes that you put in and you and i would talk all the time about like like um because this was only in english we were allowed to put uh normally in magic cards you can't put english on them right right, because there's many languages and stuff, but this product was printed in English

and only English, so we were allowed to sort of put some English, so we were allowed to make jokes in the background in English, which is not something we normally get to do so my favorite, where is he? my favorite card is so one of the things is we decided that all the people who

work in the Midway are vampires mostly. Do you know the card I'm going to here? There's a couple vampire ones with text. Yeah, so it's... Where is he? Oh, Discour... Discourtesy Clerk is its name.

Three in a black, creature vampire employee. When Discourtesy Clerk enters the battlefield, open attraction. At the beginning of your end step, if you control three or more attractions, you draw a card and you lose one life. Three, two. Oh, okay. I do know this one. Yeah, so this

is just an annoyed clerk. Like, we were trying to play up I think the idea of just someone who doesn't want to help you. So get into how this card came about. And then there's a joke in the back that I adore. So, yeah. Really early on, like during the concept art process,

Jay Han Chu, who works, principal concept artist, drew this really awesome vampire employee with like, you know, backwards cap, had like shorts on on I'm like a vampire in shorts like I do not need to see those pale knees but like it was just so great so we made a bunch of our employees vampires I mean there's a couple other ones but just like these vampires that just couldn't care less about working there you know like it's a summer job and they just they don't want to be there they don't want to help you. They don't want to help you. They're tired. So that's that's how all these vampire employees came about.

OK, so. Yeah. So in the back of this one card, there is a sign. This is one of my favorite jokes. So there's a sign that says commander tax not included. Yeah, well, it's not not you have to pay too for every time no it's like there's a bunch usually when we hand off a concept like this we brainstorm a couple things that could go in the bag i remember we wanted to show like yogmoth's bargain bin or something like that if we could so we just give the artist a couple ideas and luckily this one really did make it on on the screen. So it's just another cute little reference to our game. So anyway, Annie, I'm almost almost to my desk here. So as we wrap up, any final thoughts about concepting this set?

uh i guess like it was just a really fun time to both be able to like create uh a world like its own little self-contained world like with its own you know retro futuristic aesthetic like its cute little robots and stuff like that but also a world that could hold like all of these magic references that people really have come to love from unsets it's just i don't know it just felt like it really came together so that we're not doing just like random one-off jokes you know it's like no seriously like it makes sense because he's a performer in like the parade thingy handing out gold you know good old gary right stuff like that um and yeah it felt really unique and uh you know it's in space i hope you like the lands they're very cool uh and yeah i had a great time i hope we can go back to myra the magnificence intergalactic astratorium of fun one day that's all so thank

you thank you so much for being with us annie this was i i had a lot of fun one day. That's all. So thank you. Thank you so much for being with us, Annie. This was, I had a lot of fun working with you on the set and it came out great. Like I said, if you've not looked through the art,

there's so many jokes and things like Annie and Dawn and everybody who worked on the art of the set. A, they look awesome, but there's so much there. There's a lot of jokes sneaked away.

Like, if you take a look, you'll find jokes you didn't realize were there if you take a second look. So it's really cool. Yeah, can't wait to draft it. But anyway, guys, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

Once again, thank you, you Annie for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.