Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #985: The Brothers' War Art with Taylor

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with The Brothers' War Lead Art Director Taylor Ingvarsson to talk about the world building and art for the set.

I'm not pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have Taylor Ingverson here to talk about art. So Taylor, you were the main art director, right, for Brothers War, is that correct? Yep, yep. From the concept push, early world building, and through commissioning. Okay, so let's do all of that. Let's start at the very beginning. So what's the very beginning. So, what's the very first thing you were told about the set? We were doing

the Brothers War, and I immediately had to go read these books. But no, it was super cool. It was really loose. It just basically we wanted to go back and revisit the Brothers War and do this as a magic set. So creative lead Emily Tang and myself basically set out to just read the book many times over.

And then Miguel, when he came on to the scene, do the same thing and try and figure out ways that we could update the novel into a card set, which was at the time felt very challenging. And there are things that I'm super happy that we did and some things that, you know, worked out just great for the card set. But we just wanted to try and capture everything that we possibly could from the novel, staying true to it. everything that we possibly could from the novel, staying true to it, while kind of bringing in our own vision and things that we could update or blow out that the novel didn't really mention all that much. Yeah, I just want to mention for the audience to understand, so antiquities existed as a set, but we don't see the Brothers' War. They dig up, like, you know, antiquities from the Brothers' War.

So there's no visualness of the Brothers' War other than a few random objects. The novel, Jeff Grubb wrote a novel, but it's a novel, it's all in prose. And other than a few really sporadic card images, there was no visual imagery of what the Brothers' War looked like. Yeah, no, 100%.

We took a lot of inspiration from the antiquity set, like you mentioned, but we couldn't just recreate that. Some of those things were pretty bananas. I'm not going to even attempt to get the card names right, but some were like, I think there was like a shovel-looking machine with legs running around, which was pretty cool. But the project really left us a lot of creative freedom to explore and build things out for the setting of the Brothers War

and kind of build out what Terrasier looked like thousands of years ago before we see it on the map in current Dominaria. There are a lot of things... I was going to say, when you first built i'm saying what was your visual when you first built the world what was your visual through line like what what was it you wanted the world to look like what guided you yeah so there are a lot of things that were going around of should we just make this look old um and that that wasn't really the idea that we wanted to run with we wanted we wanted everyone to feel like they were very

successful and uh in their in their craftsmanship and sort of like civilizations that they built um with on this continent um but the biggest visual through line was that we knew we wanted this to be about robots uh mechanically and thematically, so we really, really wanted everything to feel like everything was being adapted to deal with robots, robots being built, and everything like that. We wanted it to really feel like a cinematic approach to this novel, like we're making a movie nowadays. Now, was it important that Mishra and Urza had distinctive qualities visually? Yeah, absolutely. So the novel does a really good job of sort of setting the brothers up and showing how different they are, especially once they split. So Urza goes off and like,

long story short, kind of has a simpler, easier life, I guess, so to speak, where he always finds himself in seeds of power. And Mishra kind of has a little bit more of like a harder life growing up after they split. So we wanted that to come through in both their designs. Urza is always very powerful and staunch looking from the Urza everybody knows knows the long hair, the gray beard and then we just sort of like deconstructed his look for three different acts that we wanted to do with this story just to try

and capture a decades long conflict so he's always kind of like clean cut very stately looking and a little bit bigger and more powerful and Mishra we wanted to feel like sort of the the 90s bad boy um heartthrob biker guy um throughout the setting um so that visually you could obviously just tell the brothers apart and hopefully capture what their attitudes um

were about uh just by taking a peek at them um we actually the Mishra that we riffed off of pretty hard was inspired by, it was an old Scott Fisher piece. I can't remember if it's a Mishra card or just like a Mishra spell card, but really got that, I forget the name of the hairstyle, but all the TV shows back in the 90s had that sort of like bowl cut. No, not bowl cut.

That's the wrong, that's the wrong word had that sort of like uh bowl cut no not bowl cut that's the wrong that's the wrong word for that so you're talking about mishra artificial prodigy which was from time spiral scott fisher was was the artist so it's the first time mishra ever got a card uh yeah it's a legendary creature of mishra he actually got one before urza if you don't count blind seer from long ago um so you had they they physically had a different look did their inventions did their you know like one before Urza, if you don't count Blindseer from long ago. So, they physically had a different look. Did their inventions, did their, you know, like did you try to separate how

the creations of Urza differed from the creations of Mishra? Yeah, absolutely. Taking their personalities into account was a huge inspiration for their machines and the design of their mechs. Trying to keep that same through line coming across,

we sort of pictured Urza as more of like a defensive player on the battlefield. So all of his machines are, well, both their machines are huge, or can be huge, but very like big and imposing, bulky silhouettes that feel pretty slow but incredibly powerful, sort of like a heavyweight boxer on the battlefield. So you could just imagine sort of just, like, legions of these things lining up and creating, like, an immovable wall, essentially, to try and get through. we wanted everything to feel like super fast and aggressive and and uh sharp like you just wants to get across the battlefield as fast as possible to tear apart his brother's machines um there's also just like a hint of phyrexian influence in a lot of mishra's uh designs just trying to trying to weave in as many of the plot points as we possibly can of him being sort of haunted by nightmares of Phyrexia and his experience there.

So that's really what we wanted to get across in their robot design is really trying to have them be reflections of their own personalities and how they sort of look at the world. There's also a bunch of fun stuff where this is sort of like where it comes in with inspiration from the antiquity set and then just designs from the 90s from other magazines or cartoons or movies back then. And like everything sort of has like this, it's like a layer of grit on it, both like in the artwork or just everything very textural. And I feel like when you run your hand across it it'd be a little bit it would be a little bit gritty but also everything kind of

has this i don't know i said awkward chunk a lot uh during the development of of this one but what it meant was leaning more into just like really awesome shape language that didn't necessarily have to make sense if you were going to build it today. Obviously we want things to be believable, but that's sort of the way we wanted to try and pay homage to the previous magic sets and just sort of the art and time period of the nineties was apply some grit to everything and then bring out these like really big shapes that might feel a little bit precarious if you put them on them can you explain

the audience what is when you say shape language what does that mean when you talk about that oh yeah yeah absolutely so everything has a particular shape language and that's how you know it belongs to that particular group or faction so So shape language is just literally like really leaning into how you want to describe how something looks and very much just like a visual language. So when you see one of Mishra's robots, you know exactly right off the bat, oh, that's one of Mishra's bots and not one of Urza's machines. So that's generally what I mean by that. And how did the shape language change between the two?

Like, how do you visually know it's Urza versus Mishra? Yeah, so kind of like what I was saying earlier, Urza's machines are very clean and big and bulky. And Mishra's machines are very live and aggressive and very fast, fast looking. I wanted them to feel sort of like hot rods zipping across the desert. So that's kind of how they vary. Mishra's are very live and fast and Urfa's are very big and bulky. You also bring up the 90s a lot. So obviously the story, the original brothers war story came from the 90s it was created in the 90s were you trying to get sort of a a look that sort of had a nod to the 90s

yeah absolutely um the brothers war was a fun moving target to hit where you wanted to stay true to the source material but you wanted to kind of like update it through the modern lens so um the 90s had a huge influence on where we wanted to uh go visually with this particular set um everything from just taking inspirations from popular tv shows at the time and letting that inspire some some shapes especially for for gix. If you re-look at his design, very inspired from a lot of popular villains and sort of like cartoon shows of that time period, as well as the original awesome art that we have of Gix from back in the day.

So yeah, absolutely. The 90s played a huge, huge role in the visual development for the Brothers War. So I want to bring up a different decade now. So the 1910s. So I know one of the things that you guys talked a lot about was looking at some of the visual iconography of World War I. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah. So the conflict of the brothers war takes place over decades um and we were kind of

beating our heads against the wall of like how are we going to do a decades-long conflict in a magic setting um magic is is an incredible game but for with stories that can be a little bit tricky sometimes because it's it's a non-linearlinear story delivery vehicle. So one thing that we came up with was trying to do, breaking the story up into three acts to try and show the brothers' progression throughout their lives. But the other big thing that we wanted to play around with was the idea of sort of trench warfare being sort of a vehicle to allow us to just show how long and drawn out this conflict is. And so World War I, we have our own unfortunate examples of this, of people just hunkering down and trying to do the best they could to sort of adapt to a change in how warfare was conducted, to a change in how warfare was conducted and it just feeling like a slow slog of a fight. So that had a big influence

on the environmental cues for Brothers War also. So real quickly, you mentioned this, so the audience might not be aware. When we talk about three parts of the story, like the three acts of the story, so in War of the Spark, which was another set that of the story, like the three acts of the story. So in War of the Spark, which was another set that followed the story, the three acts were like morning, noon, and night.

Like they were three parts of the day. But this set takes place, I believe, over seven decades, correct? 70 years. Yeah. So act one, they're boys, right? They're going to the Cave of Coilos and finding the Might Stone and the Meek Stone. Act two, which is I think the longest, is kind of the cave of Koilos and finding the might stone and the meek stone

act 2 which is I think the longest is kind of the middle of their life and then act 3 is the end which they're old men yeah so act 1 is very much spends a lot of time as them with kids and their mentor

Tocasia and it basically leads up into the brothers splitting, Tocasia's unfortunate demise, and then basically the evidence of the start of the war. time span i think that we spend uh within each of the three acts um the structure the trenches being built tank traps factories being put up in the environment um and then that's where like the bulk of all the high action fighting happens and takes place on cards um is within act two and like the seeing crazy machines um and big old dragon engines and all that stuff. And then Act 3, everything is sort of like the main continent of Terrasier has been just strip mined of all of its resources. It's a desolate mudscape full of dilapidated machines. The sky is choked with

smog. It's very dark and gloomy. But we wanted to bring like a little bit of color into it so everything didn't feel so so down in the dumps um and just brown on on cards so um we wanted to try and play around with the idea that as good as the brothers are they couldn't really crack the code of studying the thran artifacts way back when they were boys in the caves. So we tried to come up with showing that because they couldn't crack the code of how the Thran built their machines, so with their own machines, they're still awesome and huge and big and very powerful, but their power stones degrade over time.

and big and very powerful, but their power stones degrade over time. So in Act 3, you'll see these magical little twinkles of twilight floating around in the air. And that was sort of like our little nod at trying to show again just how long everything's been going on, and even these magnificent machines are degrading and starting to poison the atmosphere a little bit. Act 3 is also sort of where we get this like really big contrast in environment um because the brothers go from the main uh

continent of teresier over to the island of argoth um for more resources because they just they're constantly just wanting to keep keep this conflict going for someone to be the victor. So there we get to really elevate the high fantasy, and that's where we'll see Titania and her forces of tree folk and elves and sprites going toe-to-toe with these robots. I've mentioned it before in a couple different spots, but some of my favorite pieces are just seeing tree folk cleave through robots or a sprite jump out of the chest of a robot as it's exploding in the background. It was a really fun, fun act to play around in because you have this absolutely depressing situation on the mainland.

And then you get to come to this beautiful island of Arga. That's like the picture perfect vacation spot, beautiful beaches, lovely forests and then you know they didn't want anything to do with the conflict but they're going to do everything to defend their homeland so it's really, Act 3 has a lot going on in it

it's really really fun to play up that contrast. Yeah one of the tricky things I joked that this set was a little bit like a Universe is Beyond set, in the sense that the story was already locked in, right? Normally when we build a magic world, well,

if we need something, we build it in. But this story was kind of a locked, known story. And Argoff, the reason we spent so much time in Argoff is, like, there was nothing for green. None of the story had any green in it. And we had to find places to sit green. So let's talk a little bit about, we talked a lot about the world building, but let's talk a little bit about getting artists.

So one of the things that I find really fascinating is the artists vary from set to set. Like, you don't, it's not like it's the exact same number of artists and the next set is completely the same artist like they're we have a pool but you want to adapt which artist you choose to the world you're building we talk a little bit about like what what did brothers war want yeah absolutely um real quick just going back to green yeah with artifacts uh this this was very much an area where uh we got to sort of take some liberties with the source material and kind of fill in some of the gaps just for the needs of the card set so artifacts in green

doesn't happen like a lot a lot so this is where we sort of got to like play around with scrappers sort of putting together their own machines or magical tree vines sort of putting together their own machines or uh magical tree vines sort of taking over uh shells of of misha or urza's bots and like reanimating them and kind of walking around um none of that's really mentioned in the in the story or anything like that but so that was

a fun little a fun little twist that we got to play just so that we could fill out some green automatons which was which was a ton of fun um but shifting over to your other question for what does brothers war want with uh as far as artists goes um it was sort of trying to hit a similar uh target as how we kind of approach the set in general um being able to bring back some um artists that have been doing work for Magic for a long time was something that we wanted to bring into the fold for this set as well. Richard Kane Ferguson did a card for this, I think it's like Dispel or something like that. Forgive me if I got that card wrong. Mark Jadine did some stuff for Commander.

Mark Jadine did some stuff for Commander and really trying to like capture what was really awesome about art, fantasy art from back in the day and allow that to come into the Brothers Ward was really important to us. making it feel like approaching this as sort of like a cinematic movie like we wanted it to feel like people were going and sitting down in the movie theater and getting to watch like michael bay create the brothers war and see all these beautiful things on the screen selecting ours and creating like your perfect plan for each set is always a is a fun challenge it's a giant puzzle i call it like the sudoku step of what we do because once somebody is unable to take something it can affect like the next 20 people's assignments so you're always trying to set the artists up for success the best way you can and give them um assignments that that feel like they're tailored for them We do that a lot of ways by either adjusting what we're asking for to fit

what the artist is great at, um, or adjusting who's assigned to this particular card to make sure that they can actually achieve what we need them to achieve for this. Can you give an example of an artist and like how we adapted, like we gave them this card cause they're good at this thing. Yeah. Okay.

Let me think for this this particular set um so while you're thinking i did look it up disenchant was the richard king ferguson picture yeah okay thank you um yeah okay so it's a joe mehan comes to mind I wanted someone who could bring say his name one more time Joe Meehan fantastic artist there's this item in the story called the Silex and it's really just a bowl

when you think about it, it's a magical dish it's a lot cooler in in the narrative and the fantasy of it and magic's history um but design wise it really is it's a bowl so we uh we put some fran engravings in there um but it was a great example of the event pairing with the artist to try and make this something very exciting and sort of express how magically powerful this particular item is.

Let me get some context to the audience because they might not be aware. So the Urza Silex, Urza uses it to end the war. It's the thing he uses basically which blows everything up. And in the modern story,

the reason Teferi's going back in time is he needs to learn about the Silex. And he needs Saheeli to make a copy of the Silex. So this is like very, very central to the entire story and very pivotal in the actual original Brothers War. It's the item he uses to end the war.

So like, yeah, it's super, super pivotal and it's a very destructive element, and the art has to show how destructive it is. That's an important part of the art. Yeah, we needed this to feel very powerful, and we took a little bit of liberties with this as well, too. Like, just like what you were saying, if you look at a modern map of Dominaria

and a Brothers War era map of Dominaria, the shattered island of argoth is because this silex was activated so this silex blew up the entire island uh triggered all the events uh that happened on dominaria such as the ice age um after the brothers war um So it is an item that is not to be trifled with. So Joe was able to bring like just sort of an epic level of awesomeness to this particular piece. It's right after the Silex went off. So there's like the earth is sort of cracked and shattered, but the silex is still glowing and floating almost like nothing happened um and i think that that that particular image on that card could have gone so many ways um but i think he was he was really able to capture just how magical and powerful this

particular item is okay and other images that come to mind of just like this artist or this image really captured something. Yeah. Um, re-imagining Gix and bringing them to, to life, uh, both in the card set and in the concept push,

um, was really, really fun. There's a bunch of artists that sort of went in to the hand for these, uh, well, there's a lot of artists that did a lot of stuff for the set and then a lot of great artists

that really, really helped us out in the concept push. Anna Steinbauer redesigned Gix during the concept push and she did a fantastic job going back and forth with me and really updating Gix's design and also the brotherhood of Gix and just sort of how the thinking behind how Gix would sort of manipulate his followers

or place his hand in their heads to see what they have seen. But Anapoda Morna illustrated the card for Gix in the Brothers War and it's just absolutely incredible. We really wanted to capture that moment where Gix is coming through the Phyrexian portal. So I wanted somebody who could really bring a lot of that energy and just like imposing will that Gix has and could have to the card, and she actually blew that card out of the water. It's one of my favorite pieces in the set, for sure. Yeah, it's a very impressive piece. One thing about doing a podcast, it's very hard when we're talking about images. So guys, as we're talking about this, you've got to go look up the images.

So this is Gix Yawgmoth Prater. Go look up the images so you can see what we're talking about. But yeah, they're really cool. Yeah, and the other interesting thing is that, so the Phyrexians, there was a balance we had to strike, because they play a role in the Brothers War, but not a big role. But in the

larger story, they play a very big part. So, like, we both wanted to make sure that we represented the Phyrexians, you know, but not have them take over, because the Brothers War really isn't about Phyrexia. I mean, they influenced Mishra, but... Yeah. There's also a... Newer to card sets, I believe this is the first time he worked on a card set with us, but he's been doing concept work with us for a while. worked on a card set with us,

but he's been doing concept work with us for a while. Leon Tucker absolutely crushed all of his cards with, he did, I believe he did six cards for Brothers War. It looked like he did seven cards for Brothers War. Seven cards. Oh, because he did the promo too for Mitra's Foundry. Yeah. Yeah. So like Mitra's Foundry is just

giant mechs throughout the story. Yeah, let me say what he did real quickly. So he did Platoon Dispenser, Skitterbeam Battalion, Rootwire Amalgam, Clay Champion, Aeronauts Wings, Cityscape Level, and as you said, Mitra's Foundry.

So. He's been great. And we've been using him ever since for continuing to do concept art and on cards and I hope to continue to use him more. Yeah, I know. One of the things the audience isn't aware but I know you're acutely aware

is artists as a resource is a very valuable resource. We have a lot of cards to make. We have a lot of art to do and so I know you guys are constantly looking for new artists while working with lots of existing artists. How many

new artists do you tend to, like on a set, how many new artists do you usually do on any, like Brothers War? How many new artists were on Brothers War? Gosh. I'm going to put my foot in my mouth on this one. I mean, you can guess a number. It's not, you know. I i'm gonna guess on brothers war five to ten new artists um but in general uh we have there's so much stuff going

on right now so the the pool is always expanding i think right now we have like 800 something on our our uh that we work with on our artist roster um and they're all it's always rotating um so we always like finding new voices to help us tell our stories um and just bring incitement to this brand so if you're a magic artist feel free to reach out or meet one of us at an event or chat us up, we're more than happy to talk, so. Yeah, it is amazing that it's at,

because we keep bouncing around, like every set is very different, you know, like this, this is the Brothers War, but, you know,

earlier in the year we were like doing 1920s, you know, magic, or we were doing Kamigawa, which was very sort of more, more modern, you know, magic, or we were doing Kamigawa, which was very sort of more modern, you know, and like,

I don't know, I find it fascinating, just, you know, you guys keep knocking on the part, but we keep like, here's this, this is completely different, we're doing this thing now. Yeah, we get to work with a ton of great folks, and it does rotate based on the ask of the particular world, or what we want to work with a ton of great folks, and it does rotate based on the ask of the particular world or what we want to achieve with it.

But we're always hoping to keep people happy and hope that they're happy working on Magic and hope to just keep working with everybody. It's great. So I'm almost at my desk here. So any final thoughts about the, the visualness of the brothers war of making all the, all the mini arts and all the world building and everything. What, any final thoughts on brothers war? Yeah,

I think there was, there was a lot to generate and create for the brothers war. And it was all incredibly exciting and i think they're like the all the different factions were so much fun to take on they had their own unique challenges um between like the brotherhood of gigs the third path uh the philogy which were super fun to work on and reimagine. Argive, the people of Argive. Yochia. It was really, really, really exciting to just sort of let all those different cultures kind of have their own personality shine through

and be able to give them some spotlight outside of just the two brothers. I think that for me was one of the most fun parts about this particular magic set is that we got to highlight characters and peoples that didn't get the the page count in in the novel um but were super important to the story so um i think that was that was that was really really fun to do with this particular set. Well, I should say, I loved how it turned out. I think it looks great. I mean, I'm an old, old-time Magic player, right?

I remember opening up Antiquities packs, and back then, like, the Antiquities really kind of hinted at the story, but didn't show the story. So it's really exciting now to, like, actually see the story in a way that we've never really done before. So that's awesome. Awesome. Cool. Yeah, I'm glad you like it more. But anyway, I want to thank you for joining us today.

So thank you, Taylor, for being with us. Thanks so much for having me. And to everybody else, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. This is my end of drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So once again, thanks for being with us, Taylor. And to all of you, I will see you next week.

Bye-bye.