Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #381 - Card Concepting

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Mark explains the important process of figuring out what a card represents flavorfully.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. Today I'm going to talk about something that I don't think people think much about, although we do. Something called card concepting. A lot of you might, what is that? Okay, so let me explain. So, in design, we'll make a card. We design something. It does something. There's rules text to it. And at some point, somebody's got to draw a picture of it. You know, we have a whole bunch of freelance artists that do all our art. But there's an in-between step that's important. We're going to talk about that today, which is in-between design and art.

And this is a process called card concepting. And the idea of card concepting is trying to figure out what the card is. What does it represent? Now, sometimes, especially on top-down sets, you know, design will do a little bit of card concepting. Like sometimes we'll say, oh, you know, this is a jar of eyeballs. And the card concept is pretty much built into, like when we call it jar of eyeballs and we designed a jar of eyeballs, oh, I wonder what the card concept is. How about a jar of eyeballs, right? So sometimes, and as I said, mostly in top-down, you make a few things where you're like, okay, it's this thing. There were, like, in Innistrad, there were a lot, like, we made a black cat. Well,

clearly that's a black cat. I mean, the whole flavor of it was it's unlucky if you cross paths with it. But a lot of what goes on is that not every card is a top-down card. Not every card just tells you what it is. And so it's the job of the card conceptor. And usually the card concepting is done by a creative team member,

somebody on the story or art team. Traditionally, the story team does most of the card concepting. So there's a whole bunch of things you've got to think about. So first and foremost is you have to figure out what can it be. Like some of the times it's very straightforward. Some of the times it's like, oh, it's a goblin. Okay, well, it's a goblin. And then the card concept has to figure out not just what it is that it's a goblin,

but sort of, okay, well, what kind of goblin? What's the, you know, what exactly is the goblin doing? And the idea is the card concept wants to come up with a basic idea for what the card represents. And then, well, we'll get to that part. They eventually work with the art director, but we'll get there. Now, one of the things that's very important to sort of keep in mind is there's lots of different factors going on. That when you card concept something, I mean, first and foremost, you have to explain what it does.

And one of the things, like, I don't think people really think about this, but I talk a lot about the importance of resonance, right? That if you understand what the thing is, so I would use my example of, that's from my GDC talk, so you'll hear it again when I get to the GDC, but we made a card in Theros, top-down Trojan horse, basically. I ended up calling it a Croan horse, because there's no Troy, there's Akros, which is like the Troy equivalent, or Akros actually is more the Spartan equivalent, but closest we had to Troy. which is like the Troy equivalent, or actually it's more the Sparta equivalent, but the closest we had to Troy.

And when we called it Trojan Horse, people really liked the card. But we changed the name and for a while it had a different card concept. The card concept was, instead of a wooden horse, it was a wooden lion. And what happened was,

when you take away the word Trojan, because there's no Troy, and you take away the word horse, because it's a lion and not a horse, people didn't understand what it was anymore. That this top-down card that seemed flavorful and cool to people, as soon as you changed it, they didn't get what it was. So one of the things that's important with card concepting is that the card concept can communicate to the player to give them hints of what it is. Now, there are a couple basic things.

One of the classics is flying. So early magic, if you look at early magic, there are a bunch of examples of cards that in the art seem like they fly. And the classic example is Whippoorwill, which is from, I think, The Dark. So in the art, it's a green creature. Whippoorwill is a bird. In the art, it's shown mid-flight. So it's the name of a bird shown mid-flight

in the art, but the card doesn't fly. But what happened was, because everything about the card said it flew, everything except for the actual rules text implied it flied, people just assume it flied. They didn't even read the card. They're like, well, it's a bird. It must fly. And it caused

all sorts of problems because people were acting like... One of the big things that you'll find as you do playtesting is a lot of people don't really read the card. You would think that everybody goes, oh, I'm playing with this card. I should read the card. People make a lot of assumptions

and don't always actually read the text. So one of the jobs when you're concepting is you want to make sure that what the card is conveys as much as you can about what's going on. Not that it can convey everything. Yeah, people do need to read the card. But you want to get a general sense. You know, for example, flying being a good example, we have a strict and fast rule, which is if you fly, your art must convey that you fly. And if you don't fly, the art must not convey that you fly. For example, we'd fly, the art must not convey that you fly. For example, we'd run into problems every once in a while.

We'd have like a spirit or something that would just float a few inches off the ground just because we're trying to get a sense of it as a spirit. But it didn't fly because not all spirits fly. And that will throw people because they're like, oh, I see it in the air. It must fly. Oh, it's a ghost. I think a ghost is flying. And this one, literally, it's floating in the air, so it must be flying. And so we've been very careful about

how we represent things. One of the things you'll notice is, let's say we're showing a spear or something that doesn't fly. A lot of times we won't show the ground, meaning we won't give you the relationship for, like, it can't be floating off the ground. So either it's sitting on the ground, or in some way it clearly looks like it's not floating. Or if we want to make, it can't be floating off the ground. So either it's sitting on the ground, you know, or in some way it clearly looks like it's not floating, or if we want to make sure, you know, it doesn't imply that it's floating, we sometimes won't show you the feet so you can't see the feet are off the ground, for example. But anyway, one of the things that you have to do in your card concept is you first have

to figure out the basics of, you know, what it is. Now, I've talked a lot about creature types, so let me jump into creature types real quick. It is the job of the card conceptor to figure out what creature it is. Now, there is one exception. When the card mechanically cares, like, let's say we have some theme in the set, some tribal theme, which every set has, we might say, like, in the file, we'll say, oh, well, this needs to be a goblin. This needs to be a warrior. This needs to be a wizard.

You know, that we have some something, or, you know, Kaladesh has to be an artificer. Yeah. That we specifically will reference things when mechanically we need to have a threshold of cards. But unless a card is called out by design development to be a specific thing for functional mechanical reasons, the card concept gets to pick whatever they want. So a lot of sort of figuring it out is, oh, I have a 3-3 ground creature in green. Okay. And something they do when they first start building a world.

So there's a whole world. One day I'll do a whole big thing on building a world, which is pretty cool. But one of the things they build during that is what they call a creature grid. And what a creature grid says is, okay, in every color, in every size, both flying and not flying, with a few exceptions, like green doesn't have big flyers. What are they? You know, if I make a large flying black creature, what could it be? If I make a small, you know, mid-sized green ground creature, what could it be?

And so they make a whole grid to make sure, because one of the things about Inhabiting Worlds is you have to make a card set out of it, you know. You have to have enough to be able to do what we need to do. And part of that is making sure that no matter what the card is, there's something in-world to concept by. So the creature grid is a very important part of making sure that the components

you need are there. That when I'm concepting, I go, okay, I have a mid-sized green creature. Okay, what are my options for mid-sized green creatures? And there are options. So the trick there is always making sure that you the card concept is to want to make sure that their bases are covered

and that no matter what it is, they can figure it out. Now, there's a lot of nuance to card concepting. Part of it is you want to create a balance, for example. That whatever we're doing, let's say for example, there's a lot of different kind of creatures on the world. You can't concept all of them to be this, you know, 90% of the

world can't be one creature type. And so, part of it is you want to balance things. Now, the interesting thing is not just balancing, I mean, obviously you want to balance creature types, but for example, we also have a lot of diversity issues we work with. Like, the card conceptors, we try really, really hard to concept

half the cards as male and half the cards as female. Because what we found is that if it's not specified, like, you know, one of our goals is we're trying to get equal representation of gender. Well, how do you do that? Well, you actually have to call it out. That things will drift if you don't. You know, that if you just leave it up to each individual artist to pick what they want,

you won't often get the equal representation that's important. Same on that line, diversity with your card concepting of like trying to make sure you have different kinds of people represented. And there's lots of vectors to play off of. But that's another big factor that they're working with. And one of the things, just a quick side note on this, is diversity. One of the things that we really want is magic. There's a lot of different people playing magic. Magic is not one homogenous group. There's a lot of different

people that play. And one of the things that we feel is really important is we want everybody playing to be able to look at a magic card and go, that's me. I see me in the cards. And if it isn't something that you're not used to, like if you're of a group where you're always represented, this might not seem like a big deal. But we hear time and time again from people who are in groups that don't normally get represented, especially like in fantasy and gaming. And it's a big deal to say, oh, that person looks like me or my brother or my mom. That you have things that you can directly relate to.

It's really, really powerful and very important. And so one of the goals of the creative team is to have that representation, have the diversity, make sure that everyone literally gets to see themselves in the game, that they get to see people like them. And so part of card concepting is keeping track of all that, keeping track of gender and of all sorts of body type and skin color and all sorts of different things to try to make sure that you're representing lots of different things.

And like I said, there's so many vectors there and it's something we're constantly striving on. The other thing is you have to be well versed in the world that you're representing because part of card concepting, like let's say for example, they do the world building for Kaladesh and they have all these neat things. Well, you have to make sure that all those neat things are equally, or not equally, but are represented in the card set. Like what you don't want to do is, you know, the artist builds a world and comes up with this really neat idea for a creature and then you never see the creature on the cards because if it doesn't appear on the cards then it's not there. You know, I mean, it's great that conceptually it exists, but until it's actually in the

cards. And so another big part of doing card concepting is figuring out the whole world and how to make sure all the world gets into what you're doing. And that is, so card concepting is not a card by card thing. It's not just like, oh, I only care in a vacuum. What does this card want? I have to think about all the cards together. Part of what you're trying to do,

and the reason that usually one person does the concepting for a set is they want to think of all the vectors they're trying to care about. They want to reference all the different parts of the world. They want to hit the diversity goals. They want to make sure they know that, oh, another big factor I even got into is the story spotlights. So one of the things that we've started doing now is

we tell the story in the set. The main beats of the story. We show you the and what we do is on the cards we actually mark them now. On the bottom, like where the legal text is, it'll say story spotlight. There'll be a planeswalker watermark behind the text in the legal text is, it'll say story spotlight. There'll be a planeswalker watermark behind the text in the rules text,

in the rules box, text box. And they will be numbered so you know what order the stories are told in. And so that's another thing is we want to make sure there's opportunities for story. Now, some of this, be aware that this is not all just on card concepting. One of the things that card concepting does is card concepting has to work with the design and development teams because, for example, the creative team will come up with

who the characters are, who are the legendary characters, and then we'll work with us, and who are the planeswalkers, and work with us so that we can design those cards. So story spotlights are a good example where they'll often come to us and say,

okay, we need to represent this thing. Can we try to make a card where that makes sense that we show that thing? So some of the time, like a lot of the time, card concepting is,

here's a card, you figure out what it is. But some of the time it's like, oh, I need this thing, can you design a card for it? That it can't, it will work both ways. And sometimes it's like, oh, I need this thing. Can you design a card for it? It will work both ways. Sometimes it's like, I really need to have a particular card concept.

Could you design to that card concept? And the place we do that most often is with characters and with story. Story spotlight stuff. Like, oh, we really need to show this moment. There's no card that really does that. Can you guys make me a card that does that? And so we work closely with them to make sure that we can do stuff like that.

Now, another big thing is not only are you trying to represent the story, trying to represent the environment, trying to represent all sort of the balance and stuff you're trying to do, but also you're trying to show off the set. We have mechanics in the set.

And so one of the things, now obviously the rules text will determine what card is what mechanic. But part of the thing that's important is understanding how those mechanics are represented. Energy is a really good example, which is

one of the things in Kaladesh was the idea that magic in Kaladesh was the idea that magic in Kaladesh was about devices, about the technology, that there's not outright normal magic. And a lot of places when you see, you know, we have magical spells that represent specifically by magic itself. Like I'm casting a magical spell. On Kaladesh, we wanted the effects to be more derivative of the technology.

So, on a normal world, if we're making a fireball, maybe you see a guy crafting fire out of the air and throwing a fireball. Here, on Kaladesh, a device would be making the fire. It's still a fireball, it's still doing damage like a fireball or a direct damage spell, but it's generated by this. That part of figuring out how things work in this world, and it's not just energy, is trying to show the technological aspect of it. And that's a big thing. In each world, you want to figure out

what is the beat of the world? What is the thing that's important that we're trying to represent? What are the mechanics? How do we show the mechanics? How do we represent that within the world? And so there's a lot of nuance. And one of the things that's tricky is that

some of the cards need to exist for mechanical reasons. Like, every once in a while, like, one of the things when I'm making a card is I'm conscious of how conceptable is it. Because if I make a creature that says, oh, I'm a tutu flyer, and when I attack, I get bigger or something. I'm like, oh, okay, well, I can kind of imagine what that might be. Something that in the heat of battle gets sort of roused up. Whatever, I can imagine that, but sometimes I

gotta make a card where it's like, destroy target artifact or flying creature. Okay, what destroys artifacts or flying creature? And I try not to get too, some of them have to exist. Sometimes there's cards that are like, well, we just need

this for the gameplay. We need some anti-flying in green. And we don't have spot for a normal plummet. So I'm going to combine the plummet with artifact destruction and like, oh, okay. But you want to be careful not to do too many of those. Because that is,

those are the kind of cards that are really beating to card concepting, which is okay, now I've got to figure out what is something that would kill artifacts and flying creatures, but not normal creatures, no, no, just flying creatures, you know, and those are the challenges, and you want to be careful how many of those you do. Like, you get some of it.

I mean, like I said, magic does have a lot of mechanical needs, and there are times in which, in order to make something work, you have to stretch things mechanically. Just like the reverse is true. Sometimes they come to us with a story spotlight, and they're like, okay, we really need to show this, but wow, this does not easily mechanically fit. Can you guys sort of bend things?

A good example of that was Trapped in the Moon. The one where Tamiyo traps Emrakul in the moon. That was a big story point. We really needed to show it. But the problem and Tamiyo is based blue. They really wanted to show it in blue.

Okay, what does blue do? We really struggled to try to find something because we wanted Tamiyo show it in blue. Okay, how do I, what? What does blue do? You know, and we really struggled to try to find something because we wanted Tamiyo to be in blue. We wanted, like, there's a lot of constraints to that card, and we really had to make, we really had to stretch ourselves to fit mechanically. So if not, it goes both ways. It's not like design's the only one to make card crafting

ever have to sort of work hard. The reverse will also happen. But once again, part of the process, like I always talk about magic as a collaborative process. Part of the collaborative process is thinking about who's upstream from you and even more importantly, who's downstream from you. Who's work do you affect? Now in design, everybody's downstream of us pretty much.

That any work I do is going to affect everybody. And so I have to think about things. Like, I talk about this a lot, but one of the things we have to do all the time is we got to check in with all the different parts of people who are going to use the card set and have to work with the card set, because we got to make sure that they can make what they need to make with it. You know, is it developable? Is it editable? Does the rules work? I mean, there's all these different things we have to check one of them and I don't talk too much about this but I will today is is this conceptible like one of the things that we will have do is we'll have the creative team normally on a design team we have a representative of the creative team and the reason they're there is usually the person who's on the team is the

person who's concepting the the set and the reason that they're on the design team is if we come up with something that just doesn't fit, they have to jump in and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? And they will at least defend when there's problems that we understand, like, okay, well, in this world, blah, blah, blah, you know,

let's say we made a giant red flyer, but we happen to be in a world without dragons, let's say, there's a lot of worlds without dragons, but let's say we happen to be in one. They're going to say, oh, okay, guys, we've got to figure out what this giant red creature is. There's not dragons in this world. Are there phoenixes? It could be a phoenix, but if it's a phoenix, then it has mechanical replications.

And so one of the reasons we have the creative depth on the team is to try to bring up the issues at design level. And one of the things that will happen a lot when I'm in meetings and redesign the car, I'll say to the creative team member, okay, I need you to name this. What is this? And not that the name that comes on the spot is going to be the final name, but at least sort of says,

okay, is this in the ballpark? In a couple of minutes, can you come up with a name that at least is a spitting distance of what it could be? But, you know, and this has changed over time. Interesting for me is I actually did the card concepting for two sets. I did the card concepting for Unglued, and I did the

card concepting for Urza's Legacy. What happened with Urza's Legacy was during I guess they, something happened and the team was light of people. And so I was, I don't know, I was free or something. And they asked me if I could write the card concept, which I'd never done before. And it was very illuminating. So let me talk a little bit about some of the challenges of card concepting. So first off is not only are you trying to make sense of it, you want to, first off, you want to pick something that like explains what the card is and what the

card does and makes sense of it. Okay, I'm this. Well, this is why I'm that. The second thing you have to do is you have to hand off to the art director. So what's going to happen is you're making, you're writing up the card concept and then the art director is going to take that and turn it into the art description. And ideally, the more work you do in card concept, and the more work you kind of make in art description, the more you concept such that it can easily be drawn, then the easier your work is on the art directors.

And the art directors are really busy. We make a lot of art with a lot of people, and the card conceptor can come up with something that works because what happens is the card conceptor says okay to this thing and then they do their take because not only do you the card conceptor isn't just what is it but how is it represented and then what happens is the art director will look at things

and just make sure that that's possible sometimes there's things that you think oh this will be cool and the art director goes well you know you're like a very common problem for like beginning card conceptors is they put too much in the frame there's just too much going on you got to remember magic cards are tiny they're not that big and so you really have room for one central image people can focus on one thing so you have to figure out what your one thing is and And it's so easy to want to say, well, I just want to represent this and this and this,

and all of a sudden it's a really messy, complicated, ugly picture that doesn't convey anything because it's not clean and clear. So a big part of card concepting is figuring out how to get one, like, where's the focus being pulled? What are people looking at? And you want to make sure

that you're giving the artist something, like, once again, the art descriptions, you know, car concept is such an art description, is not about telling the artist exactly how to draw it. It's not like saying, oh, I want to see this and make sure this is in the foreground and this is in the background and this is to the left side. Like, you set up what you want and then let them,

you know, the artist figures out sort of the framing of it. Like, what will look pretty? You know, that's up to you want and then let them, you know, the artist figures out sort of the framing of it. Like, what will look pretty? You know, that's up to the artist to figure out. But what the card conceptor is figuring out, along with the art director, is, okay, what's a compelling image? You know, this represents whatever. How are we going to convey that in a way that is cool? And so a lot of what card concepting is, is not just figuring out what it is, but how it's going to be represented. You know, like, for example, with it is, but how it's going to be represented. You know,

like, for example, with magical spells, which can be very tricky, is it the person casting the magical spell? Is it the victim of the magical spell? Is it, you know,

is it the spell in flight? Like, what exactly are you showing? And you need to be concrete. Like, the last thing you want to say to an artist is, there's magic and magical things happen. You know, like what?

What is the magic? How does it work? What's going on? And then what happens is for the artists, the artists have the world guide which shows all the detail of the world. Then they have their art description which is borrowed heavily from the card concepting

to say, okay, this is the kind of thing you need to draw. This is what we want. And the reason the card concepting sits in the creative team is, A, they're the ones that have all the knowledge of the world building, and they're the ones who work closely with the art team to make sure that what they're creating can be executed on. that what they're creating can be executed on. Now, the other thing that you'll figure out, remember, kind of keep in mind that I'm bringing things up. Like, they're showing off the world.

They're showing off the story. They're trying to make sure the mechanical things that need to get represented get represented. They're trying to hit some diversity goals. They're trying to make sure that they're lending stuff that can be art directed. They're showing off environment. That's another big one I didn't get into, which is not only are they

showing off the creatures of the world, they're showing off the world. So what happens is we have a team come in that does the world building. They come in for three to five weeks. They build a world. In the end, there's a guide we make for the artist that has all these pretty pictures. It shows all these different aspects of the world so the artist can draw within the world. Another big goal of the card concept person is there's all these neat things in the style guide.

Anything that you don't show, anything that you don't get represented on a card, is for all intents and purposes, not there. One of the things to remember is, we make a world, but then the windows by which you see the world is the cards. If the cards don't show something, I mean, we do do short

story. I'm not saying there aren't a few other places to show off stuff, but really the cards are the main place. And if something's important, you know I talk all the time about if your theme's not common, it'm not saying there aren't a few other places to show off stuff, but really the cards are the main place. And if something's important, you know, I talk all the time about if your theme's not a comment, it's not your theme. If something's important to your story and it's not visually in the cards, well, it's not that important to your story because nobody's going to know about it. And so you want to make sure that when you're crafting your story and when you're crafting

your cards, that you're reinforcing all of the things you want to show off um so this is a pretty hardy task and this is a a tough task um and by the way you have to do all the card concepts so like the way card concept works by the way is normally for a large set we do two waves what that means is we have um a set we pick some portion of the set. Let's say half. It might not be always a half. But you pick half the set and you send it off to the artist. I think artists get like seven weeks or so to do their illustrations. And along the way, there's, you know, sketches. Like, they have so much time before they send in a sketch.

And then the art director looks at the sketch. And usually the card conceptor will double check the sketch as well. And just do sign off and like, oh, okay. Or, oh, no, no, no. You're missing something or you're forgetting something or go look on this page or whatever. And so you are trying to make sure that, oh, sorry, I'm off some waves. So the first wave happens. So one of the reasons the waves are important is

sometimes what you want to do is not everything can be figured out by the world building. We bring a team of artists to do world building for three to five weeks. They come up with a lot of stuff. They don't come up with everything. So one of the things we do from time to time is we'll send something out to an artist in the first wave

knowing that what that artist does we can let other people riff off of later on. Or maybe even that artist gets to then work on that. But the idea is, sometimes what we'll do is we'll pick out, for example, let's say we have some major characters in the story. We will always have the major characters illustrated in the first wave. And the reason for it is, let's say there's a character that's important to the story, that they're part of the story. They need to show up on other cards. Well, we'll let the artist who's doing the legendary

card draw them and that helps define what the character looks like. And then when they represent elsewhere, we can send the artist the pictures from the first wave so they can see what certain characters look like. So they have some sense of reference. Major, major characters we will obviously draw some some sense of reference. Major, major characters we will obviously

draw some stuff ahead of time but sometimes there's more minor characters that we don't know as much or even we have some idea and then the person

we assign to do the character does an amazing job and adds some amazing details that we want to make sure are represented elsewhere. But anyway, so there's two ways on large sets

and so like part of what happens is the development team they figure out you know they what we call wave cards

and say okay of my set I'll choose which ones go in the first half to be illustrated and usually lands go in the first half characters go in the first half

things that either we know what they have to look like or we need them so we can show them to other people for wave two. And then the other thing that tends to go in are just stuff that development mechanically has confidence in. Okay, you can draw this card. I'm convinced this card is going to stay. Go ahead and draw this card. Where cards that design is unsure of will stay in the second wave. Like, I don't quite know about this yet. Let me hold off. I don't want to make the card yet. Because once we make a card, that's another important thing.

Once there's an illustration, you can change what the card mechanically does, but it still has to match the illustration. And the illustration, for example, as I said before, if I have a creature that is flying on it, well, that creature's going to fly. The art shows it flies.

You can't take flying off it. And so sometimes, and we do this infrequently, we'll do art swaps. We're like, okay, let's turn this concept into that card and then we'll make the new card the other concept. So, you know,

we have a flyer in second wave. You know what? We'll make that flyer be this card that's already illustrated. And instead we'll have a new illustration for this other card. That happens. Not as much as it used to, but it happens from time to time. And so

what happens is development will say, okay, here are the cards I need. And then the card conceptor has, actually I don't know the timeline, a couple weeks, maybe a little bit more than that. But they have to go through the set and say, okay, what does this card do? What does that card do? And they sit at their desk and say,

okay, first card, it's this. Okay, that could be, you know, and they have to figure out what it is. And usually what happens is some cards are pretty easy. They're very straightforward. And then some cards are really tough, like the artifact or flying creature. Like, okay, what is that? You know, and so some of them, what will happen is they'll sort of get done all the ones that they know, and then they'll come back to the tricky ones.

And sometimes they'll go back to the design team and say, okay, do you really need to do this? You know, this is really problematic. Can we tweak something about it? And if it's not fundamental to the design and development, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could change this part about it. You know, they could work out some agreement. Every once in a while there's something that's needed mechanically that's awkward, but we try to avoid that.

We try to make sure that we don't have very many awkward cards where it's like, oh, that's the hardest thing to concept. But anyway, they then concept those things. Once they're done, it goes to the art director for the stat, and the art director looks them over, makes sure that they think the card concepts will lead to good art descriptions. And then that gets sent out. And then it comes back an X amount of time in sketch stage

where the art director and the card conceptor look at it and say, oh, okay, this is neat what they did. Was there something they misunderstood? This is a classic case like, we got an artist for the first time. There's a really good artist, but we'd never used them before.

And the art director's description was, show a drake being hidden by a lightning bolt. So obviously a drake's kind of like a dragon, but they weren't used to fantasy. So they drew a drake as in a male duck being hit by a lightning bolt. Now that was sketch stage, so when we saw it, they were like,

oh, oh, oh, okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. This is what a drake, when we say a drake, in fantasy, this is what a drake is. And there's a bunch of classic examples where someone would draw something, and they just miss something. Or they'll put a

sword in their hand, but they didn't really look closely to how the swords look in this world. They're like, oh, that's fine to have a sword, but please check page 22. The swords look more like that. And so they'll give feedback on that, and then eventually the art will come in.

Along the way, design might change things, but once the art is locked in, any changes will then match the art. So I'm almost to school. The thing I'm hoping you understand today is how many moving pieces there are to do in card concepting. There's a lot going on and there's a lot of knowledge. In fact, to be able to do the card concepting, you need to understand the world really well. You need to know how the world works, the visuals of the world, what needs to be represented.

You need to know the story so you can represent the story. You need to have a good understanding of what the mechanics are and how the set works. That's why, for example, we normally have them on the design team. You need all this different knowledge because it all has to come together. I think when someone does a wonderful job with card concepting, it seems, it is so easy.

I talk about this, the paperclip effect. When, you know, we see a paperclip for the first time, you know, you're like, well, that's the thing of beauty. How else could you possibly paperclip papers together? And I think good card concepting does that. Like you see it and you're like, well, this is no other concept. This is the only concept that could be. So how hard was that? And like, no, that was really hard. You know, getting the perfect idea that seems so natural that you can't imagine anything but that being the concept is really hard to do. Much like inventing the paperclip, which, you know, seems obvious, but it wasn't when you don't know that ahead of time.

And so one of the things that I would say is, you know, take a set, look at, I don't know, Kaladesh or whatever set is recent for you, and take a set to look at the cards and think about what the cards represent. I know it's very easy to sort of like, ah, I see the art that's pretty and move on by. But it's fun sometimes to actually take and go, let me think about what this actually represents, look at the art and figure it out. And there's a lot of details and a lot of cool things you'll realize when you actually go,

okay, well this says it does three damage. Oh, I see. Okay, this is how they're damaging them. That's an obvious one. But sometimes little subtler things. Now be aware that the person who's doing the card concepting isn't necessarily the person doing names and flavor text, but they'll

work closely with them because the whole card is a package. The idea is what you want is you want the name and the art and the creature type and the rules text and the power toughness and all those aspects come together to make a cohesive whole. The goal is you want them all to feel like they're one singular item. And a lot of that all hinges upon, like kind of the glue that holds everything together is the art and the card concept. What is it? Because if the card concept brings to life the mechanics, then the art and mechanics feel tied together.

You know, if it gives the names and flavor text something to work off so they can give really evocative names and flavor text, you know, it ties the flavor together. You know, if it gives the names and flavor text something to work off so they can give really evocative names and flavor text, you know, it ties the flavor together. And so, I mean, part of what I'm talking about today is this is a skill that's really hard. It takes a lot of time. I mean, it's one of the things where, like I said, I've done a few sets so I have a rough idea. I did it long ago, too. There's a lot more constraints now. You know, I mean, when I did Urza's Legacy, I mean, there was a story being told and I tried to make sure we hit some of the

stories in the card set, but it's not as integrated as it is right now. And so, you know, it is I know it's funny that it's one of those things that the good card conceptors really take time to learn the craft. It is very much a skill. And it's something that you can really appreciate when you see it. That when you get a final product and the cards just kind of sing, when the whole cards pull together, a lot of that is card concepting. The holisticness of a card very much is card concepting.

And so take some time. artisticness of a card very much as card concepting and so take some time i really like i don't think enough people ever sit down with the cards and really go okay why is it this picture what does that represent how is that the mechanic uh and you'll see a lot of neat things that there's a lot of detail that gets stuck in that i think it's glossed over some of the time just because you know i mean people look at the picture and go okay it's a bird i get it but they don't always think of oh okay well why does the bird get bigger when you attack? Why, oh, I see, it represents this. And sometimes, by the way, the names and flavor text will help with that flavor, you know, because all the pieces need to be worked together. But anyway, so today's to the card crafting out there. It is, I think, a very unspoken skill.

It's something that's fundamental to the card set, makes the cards look really good, and really ties everything together. And a lot of you probably, before I started this podcast today, didn't even really think about, I mean, even maybe on some level you knew somebody had to draw something, but like I bet you a lot of people thought that the artist just came up with it, versus no, no, no. Somebody figures out what it is and then tells the artist how to make it so it maximizes what it needs to be. So anyway, that, my friends, is card crafting. I'm sorry, yeah, card concepting.

And it's a very interesting thing. So I hope you guys, I don't know, I hope you learned some stuff today. It is something, I'm fascinated by all the different components of making cards. So I try to share with you some aspects you might not know. But anyway, I'm now at my daughter's school. So we all know what that means. It means this is my end of drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make magic.

See you guys next time. Bye-bye.