Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #191 - World Building

Episode Date: January 9, 2015

Matt Cavotta joins Mark to talk about what the creative team must do to create a new world every year.

I'm pulling out of Matt's driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And Matt Cavanaugh's with us. Good times. So, I thought I would see less of you, but we're getting more Matt podcasts. It's feast of family. Okay, so today I thought we'd talk about another creative topic, something the creative team does. Since in your distant past you were once a member of the creative team, what we call world building, which is, Magic does this crazy, crazy thing where every year we make a brand new world from scratch. And we're signing up to do two

brand new worlds from scratch. So I want to talk about, I mean, you and I have both been involved, and I mean, we're not in charge of the process, but both of us have witnessed the process of what exactly do we do to come up with a brand new world you've never seen before? Well, from, again, my distant vantage point of this part of the process uh it starts out with the very very big and broad decision of um we need to make a new set that focuses on this type of card or this type of mechanic or we want to do another multi-color set and from that could spawn an idea about a world that could house that structure. Yeah, I mean, I think the key to building worlds is usually the set, a little bit of

work is done on the set before the creative world is completely defined. That's not always true depending on the world and stuff, but usually we do a little bit of design work before the world starts. Well, for example, we knew we were doing a multicolored set before we attached guilds, or the concept of guilds, to Ravnica.

Correct, right. So what happened there, if people don't know the story, is we had penciled in to do another multicolored set. And the previous multicolored block had been Invasion. And Invasion really said play lots of colors, play four or five colors.

So I was trying to make the most not-invasion multicolored block I could. So I came up with the idea of, well, what if I make you play two colors, and not just ally two colors, but both the enemy and the ally. Play any two colors you want. They're all on equal footing, which was kind of

a novel idea at the time. But we're going to push you to play two, and the idea was, you know, just two colors. Obviously, in drafts and stuff, people started playing more than two. So I went to Brady Dominath, who was the head of the creative team at the time, and I pitched my idea. I said, okay, it's

a world in which, you know, it's two color focused, they're all on equal footing. And said, okay, it's a world in which, you know, it's two-color focused. They're all on equal footing. And the great story is Brady was like working out on his treadmill at home or something, and it just hit him, the idea of guilds. He slipped on the toilet and hit his head, and that's when he thought of the first capacitor. Yes. So he came up with the idea of guilds, and then from the idea of guilds, he said, oh, a city.

It would need to take place in the city. So he got the idea of a city world, city plane, from the idea of guilds, he said, oh, a city. It would need to take place in the city. So he got the idea of a city world, city plane, from the idea of the guilds. And then, I mean, he came and talked to me about it. I said, oh, that sounds perfect. And then I readapted what I was doing to have more of a guild focus. And that's when we came up with the 433 thing. Oh, anyway, okay, so we're not talking about design today. Today is world building.

So what does he do at that point? So he has an idea for a city world that has these guilds in it. Well, what I remember, because I was involved in the world building process for the first go-round with Ravnica, is that we started working on the personalities of the individual guilds at that point. The concept of a city world was mostly going to be realized in the concept art push. So explain to people, what is the concept art push? Let's get to that in a minute. Okay. First, before we even got the artists working on concept art, we had to have some basis of the challenges they would be attempting to

solve. So we had to have at least a baseline personality for each of the guilds. So at that time, Brady and Brandon Bozzi and I each set about to writing up whatever brain barf we could come up with on each of the individual guilds until we had enough meat to have the art director sick the artist on all the related concepts during the concept art push. Which is usually... I feel like we

talked about this in one of our previous... We did talk a little bit, but we can go into more detail than we did last time. It's like a three- to four-week process where a handful of artists are brought in. Almost always, those artists are existing magic artists, but I think there are a few cases

of artists being brought in because their particular experience and style was suited thematically to whatever that world was doing. For example, when we were doing Zendikar, a new artist was brought in who hadn't done cards up to that point. His name was Vincent Prost. cards up to that point. His name was Vincent Prost. The art director

saw something in his style that was particularly good for the rough and tumble world of Zendikar. Something for people to understand is that not every artist is good at

conceptual art. Talk a little bit about what exactly that skill is. So some artists are excellent craftsmen. And if you tell them, show me a scene with two warriors battling and each one has a giant axe or whatever, they will be able to assume the role of the cinematographer and come up with the right angle and the right lighting, and then they have the skill to expertly render that scene.

But if you were to say to that same artist, we just need a battle between two kinds of warriors that we've never seen before. Like, have at it. That person might just be paralyzed because they don't feel comfortable solving the what-is-it problem as much as the what-does-it-look-like problem. So there are some artists who thrive in that blank canvas territory the couple names that come to my mind are steve prescott and wayne reynolds both of those guys when they come in for concept pushes they will produce 60 of the art on the wall they just they're prolific and anytime their pencil touches the paper something

like meaty and usable comes out it's really uh i've been involved in concept pushes and i know how hard it is to come up with whole cloth new ideas and i am i am blown away every time i see what those two guys do so the key to the process is you get artists in. There's been some work ahead of time. I've talked before how currently the creative team is split into two separate teams. There is the story team and there's the art team. Usually what happens is the story team preps, like writes about what's going on and what are the civilizations like

and enough of a sense of the world that when the artists show up, that there's something to tell them. You have to know something. In order to build the world, you have to have some idea. I know that Ravnick was built around the guilds and a sense of a city feel. I know Zendikar was trying to be an adventure world. There's always some germ of an idea that they can build around. And then what happens is they come in,

and Jeremy's the art director, Jeremy Jarvis, and he'll say, here's what we're looking for, and give them material. And then they just go to town. They draw whatever they can come up with. And then at the end of each day, I think, he looks at what's been produced and sort of says, I like this.

This is maybe not the direction we want. He guides them, right? So I'm going to digress for a minute and talk about what life is like as a young artist. Okay. Life as a young artist. When I was in art college, I had this idiotic thought that whatever I drew or whatever I was thinking of, that was a great idea. That is so, so wrong. And I imagine that there are people out there who might think that

when these concept artists come to town and they start drawing, that whatever they draw, we use. That is not the case. There is so much material on the cutting room floor, and it doesn't even mean that those things are bad. It just means that they're on the fringes or outside of the realm of what the intended goal was. Hundreds, at least hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings for each concept push, and it gets whittled down to the tightest and rightest, I don't know, hundred or so pictures. So here's one of the cool, this is my experience, I've never, I'm always a bit afar from the

process, so let me explain how I experience the process, which is, there's a wall near R&D, which whenever there's a concepting, they just start putting things up on this wall. And just you'll walk by, there's all these pictures and all these different stuff going on. And you're like, oh, that looks cool. That looks cool. And then every day they're like taking things down and putting new things up.

And little by little, they start clumping things together and labeling things, you know, and you can slowly sort of see it taking shape. Yeah. It's really cool to see, like on the first couple days, there will be a bunch of drawings in all sorts of different directions. And there will be one picture somewhere. Someone will hit on a concept, whether it's a theme for costuming or a particular look for a kind

of goblin race or something, that the next day when you get there, there will be all these other similar drawings orbiting around that one. Yeah. And the good ideas tend to have a gravity of their own, and they end up forming whole themes, or in some cases, unplanned themes. A great example is when we were doing the concept push for Zendikar, there was very very little pre-writing given to the artists other than lands are going to matter here. And Mark Tadine

and Vincent and I were sort of doodling around trying to find an answer for something, anything, and Tadine drew what we now know of as the hedron, the eight like, diamond-shaped thing. Yeah.

And we were so excited that there was anything, anything that seemed cool, that we started putting it in everything we did. We're like, you need a tree? How about I stick that thing in the tree? You need a guy? I'm going to put that thing on the guy's club. It was everywhere.

And it ended up becoming an important part of both Zendikar and other worlds. It's really cool how organically that happened. Let me explain something so people understand this. The Eldrassi did not exist as a story point when they started creating it. When they made the hedrons, they were just cool-looking hedrons. They were just cool.

And then the story people said, these hedrons look awesome. Why are there hedrons? And so they started having to figure this thing out. And from that, they came upon the idea of these creatures, these ancient creatures trapped in the world. And that one of the reasons the world was so crazy was his reacting to this. And that,

like, originally the plan was for Zendikar was there was going to be a large set and a small set, so Zendikar and Worldwake and then what you guys

all know as Rise of Eldrazi was going to be set in a completely different world. Not even going to be in Zendikar. And,

and then once the creative team came up with this idea of the Eldrazi trapped within, they're like, oh, instead of going to a new world, what if we just release the Eldrazi? That's the third set. And so these little hedron doodles ended up being a major magic story point. Yes. major magic story point. Yes. So, most of the time,

the stuff that we see developed on cards is intentional. It's absolutely intentional. But every once in a while, you do get something that is the random brainchild of one of the concept artists that ends up gaining a little fandom of its own.

So, the other thing that happens is, not only are they trying to build the world, but the, usually Jeremy, whoever the art director for the particular project is, is also giving them assignments. For example, sometimes, like I know in Innistrad, we knew we wanted werewolves. So like one of the things was,

okay, we knew there were werewolves, we knew there were vampires, we knew there were zombies, we knew there were spirits and humans, we knew that. But it's like, oh, well, we wanted zombies in both black and blue, but we wanted them to look different, you know? And so we'd come across the idea of, well, maybe black zombies are necromantic? You know, zombies raised from the dead, where blue might be more Frankenstein, like science-made zombies. But that's all we had. And so we said, okay. And then during the creative push, like the Scobs, which were the Frankenstein-y ones, you know, they went

out and figured out how to make that look. And we knew we needed the werewolves to have a distinctive look that matched the world, but felt like a magic's take. Let's talk about that for a second. The idea of magic's take on blank. Right. Well, that's super important during world building. Not only just to set the magic take apart from the concept that you're used to seeing outside of magic, but magic has to leave space for itself to reiterate on that concept so that we can make another kind of zombie the next time we go to the world we haven't invented yet, and then another

kind of zombie on the world after that. We can't go blindly into using up all the good concepts all at once. In a lot of cases, we have to use a painful amount of restraint to say, that is so awesome, but we're not going to use it yet. The other thing that happens is they always sort of ask us what our needs are because one of the, for example, one of the things about making a magic world, which is quirky, is there is, and it's not literal always, but there is a plains and an island and a mountain and a swamp and a forest on every world. Something that at least evokes each of the five colors.

It might not literally be those five things. But that sense of ecosystem really forces magic to go to places that other worlds might not do. Well, there's also a very difficult construct, and that is not only do you have to have those five kinds of land, those five colors, but you have to have a medium-sized flyer in that color no matter what. And, like, let's say you have a concept for a world where everything's tiny. Well, guess what?

You can't do that. You just can't. You can't do it. You can't support a whole epic set without beefy creatures. Why we never visit Zagovia. We make a thing called a creature grid. Creative Team makes what's called a creature grid.

What a creature grid is is all the colors and all the sizes and then flying or not. So it's sort of like for each color, you need a small flyer, small non-flyer, medium flyer, medium non-flyer, large flyer, large non-flyer. Now, there's some holes sometimes, like green large flyer usually isn't necessary, so they don't have to worry about that. But part of doing the creative thing is saying, well what are in these spaces and sometimes when the artists come in it's like okay guys we need to figure out what the big white flying thing is in this world do you have any ideas you know and that gets that gets really challenging when you think about okay we're in a city world what What is the giant, uh, giant green land creature? Well, what's it doing in the city? What do you do? What is that for? So that takes, uh, that takes some,

some real creative thinking. Um, if there's any, if there's any notion that I would want people to know about the world building process is that it is not a, it's not like a whimsical journey through random ideas, that there is a lot of rigor and requirement to it, that it is an equal balance of creativity and discipline, really. And the thing to remember, so the thing that gets created out of this process is what we call a world guide, which is samples of the different, you know, here are the different races on the world

and the costuming and the weapons and the locations. Right. Now, once that is done, there are still, I mean, our freelance artists have some freedom to extrapolate from what the world guide is doing. Yes. And so some of the things, one of the neat things sometimes is we make a world guide and then other artists who were never even in the building during that, because they see what was done, like can sort of make new things that fit the tone of the world. In general, the material that's put into the World Guide

is not the corner cases. It's the staple creatures and races and themes that will play out a number of times on cards illustrated by other people. And that those fringe elements, sometimes really interesting and really compelling, those don't end up getting cooked into the world building or the world guide. or the world guide, those spring forth from the material at the heart of that, like the theme or the general look and feel that's established in the world guide. And sometimes one of the things that happens is the design team will look through the world

guide and go, what's that? We've got to make a card for that. That looks awesome. Sure. You know, and we'll do that. We'll do that. But like I said, the story I always tell is, so Zendikar comes out, and then, I don't know, six months later maybe,

Avatar the movie came out. And I mean, obviously, neither had anything to do with the other, but there were a lot of similarities. Zendikar had the floating mountains and stuff. And then we found out that the people who worked on Pandora which is the world of Avatar spent five years on it you know and that

the fact that our creative team does something of that quality every year you know is quite amazing it is it is it's pretty cool

and now we've signed up and said wow one a year let's try two years let me talk to bring something else that's very important so sometimes we go back to places and i think people feel like oh well do they take the year off we're we're going back someplace and i'm like no no no no not at all in fact when you go back i mean talk a little bit about like when you revisit something what has to get done well Well, first of all, no one is perfect. And the first time you do something, in realizing that whole creative effort from start to finish,

you might say, X, Y, and Z are working really well. But A, B, and C, eh, not so much. But when you revisit, you can tighten up A, B, and C, or you can remove them and double down on X, Y, and Z. So Ravnica's a really good example. When we went back to Ravnica, the creative team was happy with most of the guilds, but a few of the guilds, for different reasons, didn't quite nail what they wanted. And so I know when we went back, they were like, here's the guilds we really want to focus on because we feel like they need a little more love.

We didn't quite nail these ones last time. And for different reasons, one of the things... Here's something I didn't even bring up before. Another problem Magic has is you are in between sets, in between worlds. So whatever the previous world did, you kind of bend it to get away from it. And so I know, for example,

Simic had this problem in the original Ravnica, which was the set before Ravnica was Kamigawa. And Kamigawa had a lot of animal hybrid type things. Well, the Simic, they love animal hybrid type things, but because we had just done that in so much volume,

they pushed Simic a different direction. Jelly bubbles. Yes, and then when we came back, we were like, oh, you know what? Now that we're not next to Kamigawa, let's get Simic more into the, you know, the animal hybrid things, which is what Simic really wanted to be.

Right. And another example of this is Innistrad followed Rise of the Odrazi. And both Rise of the Odrazi and, I'm not saying Rise of the Odrazi, Scars of Mirrodin. Innistrad Fowled Scars of Mirrodin. Well, the Phyrexians are very much horror-like. So we were going from something that was very horror-inspired to something else that was horror-inspired. That's a tricky word to say correctly.

So what we decided was we had to carve it up. So what we did was the creative team made the choice that New Phyrexia was more science fiction-y in its horror and that Innistrad was more gothic in its horror. And so to pull them apart so that even though they both had a horror quality to them, they felt and looked different. Right, right. If you think about the second swing at Ravnica or Mirrodin, for example, it's almost like you get to imagine what the creative team would have been able to accomplish if they had two years to do the project instead of one.

Like you said, the Pandora people had five. Yeah. So how tight and awesome would things get, you know, if you have more time? I mean, although I've been talking to the creative team about this, I mean, although they're doing a lot of crazy work, one of the things that's fun for the creative team, one of the reasons I have a lot of fun in design in design too is magic lets you constantly do different things and so i don't know five years in at some point you just you go i'm sick of drawing this plant you'd go insane you'd start having nightmares about the plant you know the i mean obviously that world was very very realized

but i mean the the thing i like about magic is that we we're constantly sort of i call pushing the pendulum that it's really neat that you know is that we're constantly sort of, I call it pushing the pendulum. That it's really neat that, you know, one year we're in adventure worlds. And next year we're back on Mirrodin and it's this creepy Frexians. And the next year we're on gothic horror. And the next year we're in, what, Greek inspired, you know. And that we're constantly changing things around. And one of the things that's interesting, we didn't even get to this, is the idea of inspiration.

That every year, sometimes it's more direct than others, but no matter what we do, there always is some real world inspiration to draw from. Ravnica, for example, what, Eastern Europe? Yeah, like Prague. Yeah. The model.

One of the things that gets done, I don't think people think about this, is there's research done. I know that Jeremy and his team will, like, go through magazines and pull pictures. And, like, when the artists come up, they'll have slideshows of here's images that are real-world images that are jumping off points. Something that you can, you know, you can think about. Well, there are at least two reasons for that. One is that having inspiration will put a creative ship in the water and moving,

whereas having nothing leaves you at the beach wondering what you're supposed to do next. But the other thing is that when you start with something that is a a recognizable beginning that's the like that's the the heart of a resonant concept and what magic has been trying to do more of lately is iterate on resonant concepts things that people know and love and already have a sort of a geek appreciation for, rather than inventing whole cloth some weird esoteric thing. Sometimes that's fun, but for the most part, we have been reaping the rewards of seeing our creative that's based upon a broad concept like Gothic horror or Greek mythology,

and that people just really, really love that. And I'll take cons, because that's the current set as an example. So what we did with the concept of Archaea was there were five factions, and each faction had a different real-world influence. And it wasn't... The thing that's important is it wasn't that they were trying to recreate

the exact versions of them, but they just needed something that was a jumping-off point. Yeah. And one of the reasons that the factions, I think, really work is they feel very different. That when you look at the Teemer and compare them to the Jeskai, they're really different. They're different things. But they all came from a similar geographic sort of, you know, that there was something that kind of linked them together so they felt connected.

Right. I think that was important. Yeah, it's almost like as a fan you decide, do you like Conan movies more or do you like Kung Fu movies more? Yeah. And that will tell you which of these is going to resonate with you more. Yeah, and one of the things that we, I mean, obviously we're almost out of time here.

We just got to work. No trophy today. One of the things that I notice as we move forward is that definitely the creative is starting to take

more and more of a lead in the world building, meaning it used to be we're doing a set all about gold. What's that going to be? And now, creative's coming to us

and we're working much earlier to say, here is a concept we're playing around with and we're like, well, here coming to us and we're working much earlier to say here is a concept we're playing around with and we're like well here's our themes and we are marrying much much earlier what those things are and that the world's becoming more and more realized because we have ingrained the creative process even earlier into what we're doing um we now have what we call exploratory design which is super early and so so we'll actually talk with the creative team before design even begins. And it is very, very fun to watch sort of ideas.

Although it's funny because a lot of times people will pitch things early. And until you can see them, they sound crazy sometimes. Jeremy will say, I see such and such. You're like, what? And he's like, I also show you. Until you see it, you until you see it you can't get it but anyway

we are now here at work so Matt thank you very much for joining me I hope you guys learned a bit today about I don't know

any final thoughts on world building any final takeaways no no the thing I will say is that I believe that if you've never really

taken the time to do this and hopefully you have just take one of the you know one of the style guys that I believe that if you've never really taken the time to do this, and hopefully you have, just take one of the books of all the cards or go and gather something and just take time to look at the art. Just look at sort of the background and look at the world. It's amazing when you see all the stuff that's going on that sometimes when you play

and you don't take the moment to stop and focus, you don't see some of the detail. And it is... The amount of detail is really amazing. The world building that the creative team does is truly, truly remarkable. And I think one of the big assets the game has

is that we create really interesting, amazing worlds. I mean, I think the game's a great game, but the fact that we layer this great game on top of this amazing creative I think is one of Magic's greatest strengths. Yeah. I mean, I think the game's a great game, but the fact that we layered this great game on top of this amazing creative, I think is one of Magic's greatest strengths. Yeah. So anyway,

I've now parked my car, so we all know what that means. It means it's time for me to end my drive to work. So I'm off, and Matt and I

will be making magic, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.