Transcript
Speaker: Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. To Jay, we are joined by another artist. It's been a little while. I think the last one we had was Jeff Lowenstein during May for Mental Health Awareness Month. He was doing his Goblin Token a Day project for COVID. And so, you know, I had been talking to Ant a little bit just offline. We got started talking about proof. So if you remember the Grenzo episode from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned these connections that we can kind of make with
Speaker: the artist. I had reached out to him to ask these questions about some artist proofs that I wanted to get for the Grenzo deck. And from there, him and I just got to talking and pretty soon it was kind of like, wow, we need to have you on the show. And he was like, hey, I have an idea for your show. So it was just this, it's the synchronicity. And I think that it's that fact that
Speaker: We have these abilities to make connections with people in our community. And there is this, you know, as I said on that episode on Artist Proofs, kind of that way to get to know artists through the proofs and through, you know, meeting them at events. And well, we don't have events right now, so it's through email.
Speaker: But we have him on today, so Ant is going to be coming on. The broad topic we're going to be talking about is depression and kind of the art world. You know, we've previously discussed the topic of depression with Chase as it relates to Karn. Today, we're going to be talking about it a little more broadly and kind of also about, you know, where that might affect a person's art or their creativity and just kind of also just learn about Ant and his, you know, journey with art.
Speaker: I'm babbling a little bit right now because we were having some great conversation where I stupidly didn't hit record, as is pretty typical. And we're going to get back there. And I'm already very, very excited. Before we go any further, I just want to make sure that we thank the Grinding Coffee Company. So they are a minority owned LGBT ran coffee company that has been amazing in partnering with gamers. They've given us so much support. So we always want to say thank you to them.
Speaker: And then, yeah, so this is Hobbes Q. Pronouns are he, him. And, you know, you know, we kind of sometimes for the burning question we have artists on, we'll talk about, you know, like maybe our question will be one of our favorite arts from theirs.
Speaker: And I am struggling because there's a couple of them, but I'm going to go with circular logic. Uh, the, it really encompasses. I like the fact that it uses the madness keyword. And you know, once again, this will be something that maybe you can tell us a little bit more about, but I don't know what the art, uh, you know, like what the brief was that you were given, but that card just really captures this idea of madness in some ways. Oh, go ahead.
Speaker: Okay. Hi everybody. You picked an interesting card. That was all perfectly planned too. You knew! Dana Knitson was the art director at the time and the brief that I got, it was called Death Counter. And the brief that I got was, have a black spell being disrupted by a blue spell.
Speaker: But this is something that does go straight to my heart. One of the things that I love about creating illustrations or concept work is it's the romance of the blank space.
Speaker: the places that on earlier maps they just used to do a cool little doodle and say, here be dragons. I love being given blank slights to play with. And so I just started playing with abstract shapes since it was a spell that could be anything really.
Speaker: And so I decided I wanted a sort of watery shape erupting from the ground, tearing up something that had been cohesive, some black form that had been cohesive, but it shredded it. So if you look in there, you can see four or five faces sort of boiling away, disrupted by the blue spell. And I'm not sure
Speaker: exactly if this was meant to work out. If Dana planned this or we just started, it just worked out that way, but I ended up getting a lot of cards like that. Hey, here's another weird ass thing. Let's see what Anthony can do with it. And that ended up being, but that ended up, you know, that was Mist for Multimus. That was WANML.
Speaker: under cloud elemental stuff like that is is really near and dear to me. So I'm noticing that. I'm noticing noticing that going through kind of the describe false search for for your art because there's a few cards like momentary blink. How do you capture someone who's not there but then is back again? Things like that. Or a chameleon blur.
Speaker: which is a, I would, I don't feel like it's a wholly successful card, but I'm really happy with it as an illustration, which is contradictory. Because the whole point is it reads at card size, and I think it takes longer than it should to figure out the card. But I was having so much fun
Speaker: painting weird zombie ogre things and blending that elf into all their exposed bone and meat that I just kind of lost track of the fact that I did maybe a little too good of a job of blending him in. Whoops.
Speaker: So, and Alex, I just realized too, since you popped in, yeah, we can have you introduce yourself before we turn things over to our, also let our guests introduce themselves. Yeah. So real quick, I'm Alex Newman, phoned on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler, pronouncing him. And yeah, I, I think for my favorite artists, I'm scrolling through and there's some cards like circular logic is a great one. I love using that card. Cryptid and the lid is a card that I love, but
Speaker: Honestly, I really like for art, the art, I really like the Spin Drift Drake. It's got a gorgeous, you got the sun sort of in the background and the wave as this Drake is coming through it. Some cool water effects with the wings on the Drake. It's like going a lot. Thank you very much. That was one of the last gouache paintings I ever did for Magic. It was around the time
Speaker: from real media to working in painter. Oh, so you've been digital for a while. The first deck where I went fully digital was apocalypse. And I talked to Dana at the time, because this was at a point where was he was still not really comfortable with digital art.
Speaker: Um, they had not seen a lot of illustrations made with it. And so they weren't, I mean, even though when I was working at Watsy, uh, Dermot Power turned in a number of paintings that he had done in painter and you know, it's Dermot Power. So they, they were gorgeous. Um, they look painted, um, but Dana was concerned. And so I said, look, I will, I will turn all of these paintings
Speaker: And he liked what he saw, and so I lucked out. And from that point forward, I either worked in Painter or in Photoshop. Wow, that's really early adoption of digital. I was not expecting that early at all. That's really cool to hear.
Speaker: We had that brief period where Therese Nielsen and when she was married to Chip, they did a lot of interesting sort of collage stuff together for the earlier decks. And I thought that was really cool, but there was a sense that that was too obviously digital. And it took a while. What's funny is that it's now, the needle has reversed and gone halfway back.
Speaker: because I remember there was a time when it's like, we don't want the Pasadena look. We don't want concept art for magic arts. And then suddenly Jamie Jones and a bunch of other people got on board and these were concept artists and they did these beautiful illustrations, but very much in that Pasadena style. And then everything became digital or it felt like very nearly everything became digital.
Speaker: And now people are doing real media again. And it's just it's just cool to see how things go back and forth. Well, I would say, too, you know, it's been interesting, somebody watching to see kind of the the original magic art kind of.
Speaker: within the last couple of years, there's been a much bigger market for original pieces. And them selling for large enough that even some people who have been traditionally and historically digital artists are doing at least some paintings in traditional medium because it's also something that can then be, you know, they have something to sell versus, you know, with the digital being a lot, you know, you might have some concept sketches, some prelims, but not really a final piece.
Speaker: Oh, and the market has just gone bananas. Yeah, yeah. And the cool thing about that, freelancing is the primary challenge of freelancing is to get enough clients rolling that the paychecks come in sequentially so that you've got work six months out, meaning that next month's rent is covered.
Speaker: and then the following month's rent is covered. If you do an illustration for magic for $1 ,200 or 15, whatever it's up to now, but then you sell the painting for $20 ,000, you probably just pay for two thirds of your year, you know? And that frees the artist up to maybe do some things that they wanna do, not to say that they don't wanna - Wait, whoa, whoa. You all like to actually do some of your own art for yourself and stuff? And like, yeah.
Speaker: Yes, I mean, it varies. There are artists who just absolutely love coming up with stuff for other people. And there are other people who really, like Ian Miller, someone who comes to mind, they absolutely 100 % look like themselves and they
Speaker: aren't really interested in adapting that look to try and chase down work. And it's a different way of going, but it's really cool to have some downtime in between assignments so that if you are interested in pursuing a graphic novel or a series of illustrations on a subject that you really did,
Speaker: It's a huge boon to be handed four months of downtime. I mean, that's that's brand new. That did not exist in the olden days. When I was young. So I realized we were we're a solid, you know, 12 minutes in and we haven't actually had you introduce yourself at all.
Speaker: I mean, I would hope by now people do know who they're talking to or hearing or listening, I guess, but yeah. Okay. Well, let me give a, I can give you a quick magic recap. Um, started doing magic and no, I'm going to stop there.
Speaker: a few minutes of story time. So I go to normal last time, which is a local convention up here, right? I go there in the late 80s, early 90s, and I end up befriending someone in a figure drawing class afterwards. I met him briefly at the con, and then I ended up in a figure drawing class and there's Rob Alexander. And so we get to talking and talking a lot of shots
Speaker: making it as an illustrator now. And he said, you know what? There's someone I think you should meet. Can you be down in the Renton area or Kent area, you know, at such and such a date? It's like, okay, yeah, I can come down there. I come down there to this guy's house and he's got his garage door open. And you know those A -frame racks that are used for like magazines or you see them in,
Speaker: in stores where they don't have a lot of shelf space and they'll have stuff in holders on that A -frame rack. Is this making any sense? I can picture this, yes. Okay, so imagine all of the alpha and beta deck artwork arrayed on these four racks. This was Peter Atkinson's
Speaker: garage. And he was showcasing the work and trying to get people to buy into the company. And Rob brought me up to Jesper Mirfors and said, here's the art director for magic. And I said, OK, well, what's magic? And he said, well, explain it. He said, do you want to do some work?
Speaker: Here's some colored pencil stuff. At that point, I was really into colored pencil art. He said, well, we can't use that stuff because the wax messes with the scanners. Can you paint? I had taken one watercolor class at that point. I said, sure. The answer is obviously yes, I can.
Speaker: And the first deck I worked on was Ice Age. R &D pulled it because they did not like what they had created. And so the first deck that I had work published in was Legends. And then Ice Age got, I think, published right after that. I worked in a number of decks, Fallen Empires.
Speaker: And during that time, one of the concept jobs that I had, concept art jobs, was working for a company called Daedalus Entertainment. They had a card game called Shadowfist, which was briefly one of the very few competitors to Magic. And they had another property, Daedalus Games, that they wanted to work on. And so they brought in Anson Maddox and Mark Tedin, and Jesper suggested me. And so we spent
Speaker: about two or three months spitballing on what would have been a role playing environment that was really intriguing and really fun. And then the company caught fire, rolled down a hill into a ravine, drowned
Speaker: got crushed. And then the previous owner ran away to Canada to avoid taxes. So then I went looking for more work. And I was about to accept a job at a kid's interactive game company when I got this call from Jesper Marifers saying,
Speaker: You know, we're setting up a concept team at Wizards of the Coast. I'm art director again. And Anson and Mark were here, are here working on the Wrath Cycle, and they asked if I wanted to join them. And so, you know, to do a James Joyce on you, I said yes.
Speaker: And I said, yes. And I said, yes. And for the next two years, I worked in -house on seven or eight decks for Magic the Gathering, including Urza Saga. And I became known as Tree Boy because I was the one who loved working in natural environments and architecture. Everyone still, to this day, in concept art, you want to do characters because character is a cool thing, right?
Speaker: I love environments. I feel really strongly that if you want an idea of what your character should look like, you should figure out what culture they come from first. There are other people who reverse engineer. They design the character first and then design the cultural realm. To me, it's a lot easier to do the reverse, and I probably almost directly plugs into my ADHD. But I was put in charge of Argoth, and so I developed
Speaker: with their elven culture looked like. The dwarf, the human, not dwarf, the human druids who lived in Argoth. And then, of course, it got blown up. And we had Yavamaya then for the Phyrexian invasion, and it was put in charge of developing that island as an island with a Gaia -like intelligence that became aware from magical
Speaker: what was coming and decided it was going to turn this Australian -sized continent into a giant machine that cranked out Phyrexian killing creatures. And I had just an absolute ball designing that. I worked on Mercadian masks, doing a bunch of stuff. Again, another forest, as well as designing the merfolk, which was a ton of fun.
Speaker: And for the next few years, I worked on a number of decks as a concept artist. I was a principal concept artist on Kamigawa. I worked on Mirrodin. I was a previs artist for Ravnica, but a lot of my stuff got kept, which was really exciting to see. You always get excited when you crank out some ideas and they end up entering that world in a largely unvarnished state.
Speaker: they come up with some way to make it even cooler. It was exciting to have people look
Speaker: Yeah, I mean it's just looking at your basics from Ravnica in particular, the swamp. I mean it just evokes that feel. Like I'm really glad to hear that because it's just – it is such a – that's a world to me. The world -building piece, I know that when we had Titus Lunter on, that was one of the things he talked about. I mean he's been – I mean he did a lot of the concepts for Ravnica later on and different pieces of the city world.
Speaker: you kind of even talked about with this sci -fi interest. It's the landscapes. It's kind of creating the world around where everything is then going to be placed into. And it's such a cool idea. I love that. Just like the actual building of it. It was exciting because when Jeremy approached me, Jeremy Cranford was the art director at the time. And he approached me and said, I've got this idea for the next deck. I want it to be a planet sized city, magical city.
Speaker: And that was such a cool idea. I was so excited. What do forests look like in that environment? What do swamps look like in that environment? And he gave me free reign. Just let me play. And I pulled out my Mobius reference and
Speaker: I've got some really kind of grim books on some grim subjects that were inspirational for like the swamp area. And then he turned to me and said, do you want to do a set of land cards for them? And I go, oh, yes. Oh, yes. Let me paint those paintings, please. And they were among the biggest paintings I've ever attempted. They are huge and they're really, really deep.
Speaker: Um, it's funny you could you're thinking about when you mentioned having these grotesque books of grotesque things. It always makes me think, you know, right now I know we're talking about kind of some individual cards more than your, your actual just art journey as a person, but
Speaker: It really makes me think of Graven Cairns, which is just a card that's always stood out to me, especially given that it was this, you know, it's interesting because it was future site. It was like supposed to be a card that was going to be printed at some point, but hadn't yet, you know, like a cycle of cards that you were getting to see one of instead of what we were used to seeing all five of a cycle. And I remember seeing that in that frame and just, you know, knowing that the set was made to be that.
Speaker: that art has always just been grotesque in such an amazing way to me. Oh, thank you so much. I the direction that I got was vampire landscape. Okay, I can do that. I just give you a second. I can I can do that. Um,
Speaker: with the idea this is I use that phrase a lot I love and sometimes it's in context that I think back afterwards it's like should I have said that I actually love that when exactly does that say about me um I really got excited about the prospect of doing what a landscape would look like if a vampire culture had lived there for thousands of years what would they build
Speaker: that would carve totems to tell you if you were traveling upriver. It's like, okay, you're in our backyard now. There's always a set of rules that's associated with that. There's an etiquette that one must engage in if you want to pass
Speaker: for vampires. Lakes of blood. You go around the tree, up over the hill, over the other hill, and then you encounter the lake of blood when you're in the vampire territory.
Speaker: Just to make you think, do blood rivers flow north to south? I'm trying to picture the correct directionality of blood rivers now. I guess it depends on if the planet's awake or asleep. You know, the grim direction we could go is it depends on where the heart is.
Speaker: Wow. That's not even grim. That's just that's deep. What is it? Where's the heart? What is it? Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe there's like the great great grandfather god of the of the vampires who is now so old and grown so large that he's mountain sized. And he wakes up once every 10 ,000 years to say, put the kettle on and then goes back to sleep. But
Speaker: In the meantime, the vampires have put a stint into his heart so that the blood flows out of that heart and down a river that will then define some chunk of their territory. Again, it's the kind of thing that it's really evocative. So there's an awful lot you can do
Speaker: the concept of a vampire landscape. Yeah, and do some very stark that definitely fit very well for that set of sort of different visions of different futures, because it was very starkly different from other things around it in that set. One of the things that I really liked about that set was it was kind of a
Speaker: where storylines had not been so defined. And so people could play, it's like, what's a behemoth? What is that in the context? You know, a Leviathan, what's that in the context of magic? I forget the name of the card, but there's a card by Mark Dean that is like a seascape and it's got this gigantic creature looming over it.
Speaker: from early magic? Yeah, I think it's, I think it's from one of the first four decks. I think it's, yeah, there's like this big island. It's a behemoth that is the size of an island. Yes. It's a blue curse on it. Yeah, and the way he illustrated it just perfectly conveyed just how gigantic the thing
Speaker: And that to me is good fantasy right there.
Speaker: And I think that there is kind of this, the fact that magic is, this is something that I think is always awesome. When we talk about the different axes that magic can be enjoyed along, it is a card game, right? Like first and foremost, it is a card game. And then we kind of think about, we have the art portion to it. Then we have the flavor text that can just be on the card. All of these are just,
Speaker: different ways to engage with the world. So we had Hunter Pence came on the show. So he's a former baseball player, played for the San Francisco Giants, and he owns a game store. He really had only played kind of through Arena and learned to play kind of in paper. So he had almost no exposure to
Speaker: to the actual story and to some of that element. So what he knew of character, so if we're talking about Nicol Bolas, everything that he had kind of developed of knowledge about Nicol Bolas,
Speaker: was through the actual just physical planeswalker cards that were out, right? So he thought about how that card felt when it hit the table to see it across the table and how hard it was to beat. And so that gave him some element of knowing the idea of Nicol Bolas, right? And then I think like that's how he picked up story versus we have people who are really into story that then, okay, we'll do the card mechanics even match and just all these different ways to kind of have these entry places into it. And you know,
Speaker: You even mentioned kind of this old versus new world. And I think that there is kind of this discussion of, you know, nebulous story. So did the art draw drive more versus now? Do they have more of a marriage? I don't it just to me is always fascinating to think about these different ways that we are interacting with. It's the heart of it again. Yeah, with the at the end of the day, it's the mechanics that make it work and make it fun.
Speaker: introducing cart -specific art was a really cool idea, and then introducing story -specific art and mechanics was a really cool idea, and it combined a bunch of media that I don't know if it had ever been done before quite that way. Certainly there hadn't been collectible cart games before, but to incorporate
Speaker: a story and game mechanics. Well, I think Legend of the Five Rings did a bunch of stuff that was a lot like that. But it feels like magic really took it.
Speaker: in all sorts of astonishing directions. And, oh, go ahead, go ahead. And it's something where the game has not, over the years, has changed its approaches. I mean, you're saying like the early set and in a lot of ways, I think you're right, the future side, even the whole time spiral block, which for me was one of my favorite, favorite like groupings because all three sets because
Speaker: I played so much early magic and a lot of the cards in those sets were references to the early game. But there's a lot of parallels where it felt like the earliest sets of the games were built more on a card by card level. You know, you have a couple of cards that are sort of thematic together, but you're not building the entire set from a single story tapestry when there's advantages to both. But you know, like doing the future site and kind of going back to that older style.
Speaker: It's nice. Yeah, and it's magic at the beginning was a free for all. I grew up 19 years looking at the artwork from D &D, from advanced D &D, the work of people like Errol Otis and Keith Parkinson.
Speaker: And just loving the wild, semi -cartoony, bizarre concepts that they came up with. I should categorize, it's like they would come up with really strange and wonderful monsters and they would render them often in a way that was very similar to comics at the time.
Speaker: and the concepts will be neat. It really stimulated my imagination and then magic comes along and you've got 25 different artists who look radically different from each other.
Speaker: Drew Tucker versus Anson Maddox versus Quentin Hoover, who's one of my all -time favorites, to Melissa Benson and Amy Weber and Ron Alexander and Jesper himself, Daniel Jelen. You didn't throw the Foglios in the mix there. I mean, because we talked about their art a lot on here.
Speaker: From a goofy goblin perspective. Yeah. As we're recording this at my computer disc, I have a Christopher Rush playmat just sitting in front of me. So, you know, talking about those old magic artists. Yeah. So many different approaches and the folios brought a sense of humor to magic that I thought was really fun.
Speaker: Yeah, it looked very different from everyone else's stuff, but it was fun. And that sense of art, I've never thought of it that way, but that the different artists with very different styles fits how they built the game too with all these different game pieces because there weren't published lists for what cards exist. People at the time, they wanted players to just discover new cards by playing with new people.
Speaker: And so you, as a player at that time, I can say I had no idea. You know, there was this sense of wonder every time I sat down to play with someone new. It's like, what type of cards do they have? What did they find and collect? Well, that's a tough thing to carry forward after 27 years. Oh, yeah. I mean, and the internet makes that.
Speaker: this it kind of was a was a perfect age for the game to be able to do that for a few years because there was an internet so people could kind of talk but it was not really what it is today so information didn't move around as easily as it does now cut that is a that is something we could talk about for an hour just on its own the how artwork and how games and and how the keep gaming community has changed pre -internet to post -internet
Speaker: I mean, yeah, you know, it's the things that I think about the pandemic is something that's really highlighted this for me, though, to think back to, you know, you know, I'm going to out myself as a little bit older here. So, you know, I am of the era that in high school, I did not have the Internet until probably my senior year. So, you know, for me, where I found communities was very different than where I think a lot of people maybe do now.
Speaker: And it's that double edged sword of the internet. And it is kind of, you know, with during this pandemic, I've been able to stay so connected to the magic community, simply because the internet has made that possible. But I think there is some of this stuff like Alex kind of mentions where there is some loss of discovery that we have to give up for that. And loss of the community does take a hit.
Speaker: It's like we were talking about before the program started. Magic has a genuine community. And again, I don't mean the way I frame this. I sometimes think it's a disparaging of people who are really passionate about Monopoly or some other board games. No, those things are cool. And they rule the roost in their own coop.
Speaker: Magic has a different kind of community. It's unique to itself. And we got split up for a long time. We didn't get to hang out. And one of the things I was talking about before we were on mic is that in general, illustrators and concept artists
Speaker: generally kind of operate in the vacuum. We produce the art, it goes out, especially if you're in the video game industry, you know, you produce one of maybe 10 ,000 pieces of art, and it goes out in the form of this game that hopefully people really enjoy playing, but there's no place in that game where you can point to, you can't pause World of Warcraft
Speaker: I made that tree, you know? And I had them be really excited. It's like, oh, that's my favorite tree in World of Warcraft. You know, I love hiding behind those rocks. It's so great. I actually now picture that though on a map, like really being like, I really love this outcropping and I need to find the person who did it. I mean, it is the truth. It's like there are, there's an army of people behind games like that who their job is to produce
Speaker: And I'm not kidding, 10, 15, 20 ,000 pieces of art that will then seamlessly blend into a player's experience. On the one hand, that means you've won, you've done your job, you walk into that world and you get lost in it. That's what we want for a player. But when you work on magic and you get to go to an event,
Speaker: Suddenly you get to talk to people who have been directly touched by the artwork that you've created. I can't tell you the number of times people have come up to me with cards that I've illustrated and the cards suck. They're just not useful, but they love the art.
Speaker: interact with fans most of the time. If you go to a convention like, I think I mentioned Worldcon or Dragoncon, you might get a chance to rub shoulders with people who are like, oh, I really love that book cover you did. But if you do the Magic Circuit, you get a chance to not only find out that the work that you did had a direct and immediate and even visceral impact
Speaker: on somebody, you get to talk to that person face to face and even spend some, hopefully spend some time, you can get to know them as a person. And so there's this connection that is so powerful compared to creating artwork that just goes out and do the void. And then you get a paycheck and you move on to the next job. I think it was mentioning John Avon,
Speaker: There's a card that he has done. I don't think it's a land card, but it's this really beautiful illustration that has the shaft of light going straight up, splitting this thunderstorm. And somebody approached him at one event and showed him that card and he said, I lost my dad last year. And
Speaker: the artwork for this card makes me think of my dad. It makes me think of where my dad is right now. And the most important thing about art, the thing that is fundamental to it and the goal of art is to touch people, to give them some kind of meaningful emotional experience. You know, you do achieve that with video games.
Speaker: There are people who get very involved and find all sorts of, have all sorts of extraordinary experiences because of video games. But that goes for tabletop and role -playing too. But in magic, you actually get to meet the person who you've touched. And that is powerful motivating energy. We go back, artists, I will speak again in sweeping terms.
Speaker: You come back, I challenge you, you come back to your studio and you're energized because somebody told you, I mean, it is one amazing thing to be told, I love this artwork. I am so excited because this card helped me win this event, but I absolutely love this artwork too. It's even more powerful to have someone come up to you and say, you know what, when I was in college, I was going through
Speaker: and I got into magic and I really loved this set of lands. And it gave me an escape route for when things were really bad. It gave me something to imagine walking into this forest that you created, wandering around this island that you painted. I think I mentioned that artwork is very much a dialogue.
Speaker: Most of the time, we only get third -party information back. We get the paycheck, which is very important, but we only get amorphous hints of how the game was received and beyond that, so what was the player experience? What did they get out of it? Magic, it is immediate, and that is one of the most important things about it as far as I'm concerned as an artist. I get to meet people.
Speaker: who have been moved by my heart. You know, I think of that as kind of getting to go to events and, you know, this, you know, I'd had the opportunity to meet a couple of people at some smaller GPs prior to the big Vegas explosion. But I remember, you know, like I got to meet, you know, that's how I got to meet RK post because he was at like everything, you know, then that man does not stop traveling basically.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's what's what's was amazing to me is like so I met him that way and then you know that I would see him in a few events and then you know pretty soon he actually you know he remembered something about me you know what I mean like and I think that that's as a as a as a fan to to then have that kind of like you said it is a reciprocal it actually is a it can be a development of a relationship and not just
Speaker: kind of a one -way transactional kind of thing, which a lot of dialogue can be if you're just putting art out there in the world and then moving on. You know, the fact that there are events that, you know, I think of like things like Gen Con and Comic Con where artists have boots and that is a big part of that world, but for a game to have artists, I mean, I remember the GP getting to go to one of the Vegas's where,
Speaker: Byron Wackowitz was at and getting to sit down and hear from his own mouth that Angus Mackenzie from Legends really was based on Tim the Enchanter, which had been my whole head cannon for it anyway.
Speaker: I brought it up to him and he's like, Oh yeah, actually, you know, I had gotten that, um, gotten that card with what they wanted for art right after having watched it. And it was kind of like, okay, like I'm not like, it was just to know that, that you like to see that my mindset was right. And then to get to actually share that experience with him was just like, it was, it was, it was mind blowing to me to be like, wow, like this is, this is.
Speaker: This is a conversation. This is, you know, I don't know. It's just, it is amazing to me to get to have that relational piece to it.
Speaker: Tim. Right. And that was one of those ones where, you know, I was getting the card signed by him and, you know, I had a whole Magic the Gathering deck built around the idea. It was an enchantment style deck based around the idea that the art looks like Tim the Enchanter. I mean, that was the whole basis for starting the deck. And then to have it kind of confirmed, it was just, it was really just awesome and reaffirming. But, you know, as you said,
Speaker: I chose to base a deck off of a piece of art. That's something that can be done. One thing that Alex and I have talked about a lot on the show is, one of the things that happened at a few GPs is Mike Lineman being the art person that he is, him and some other people developed a format called Vintage Artist Constructed. Do you know about this at all, Ant, by the way?
Speaker: It rings a bell, but please, please walk me through it. So Alex, you've played it more than I have, so yeah. So the basic idea is it uses the vintage card rules for deck construction, which is like the most open, you can play anything, but there's a few rules to it. But the most important part is every single card in your deck, including your basic lands, the illustrations have to be from the same artist.
Speaker: Oh, wow. It creates some very interesting deck construction choices. I mean, and also it allows for a lot of, you know, you find that artist to really like and especially when the artists it, when you're someone who is like playing this format, things that are normally not a big deal become really important to you. Like who gets the basic lands this next set? Because all of a sudden that can open up an entirely new deck.
Speaker: if some artist who hasn't done lands before gets a swamp, now all of a sudden we get to build, you know, you can build that. Yeah, so like it sets up, you know, that you have to find these artists that maybe have a balance for, you know, having done lands and non lands. And then, you know, the idea being that this is a 60 card deck, that every card in that deck has to be by the same artist. That's something that could be done in this game. Yeah.
Speaker: And it's a small but incredibly passionate community that cares about art, and it loves building decks and doing some goofy things with the card game, but loves the art. And so there's a community that talks about this, that looks at which artists have lands and which artists have other things, and people building different decks and making guides for people who are interested so they can try to get in and some places to look.
Speaker: good resources like even a few years ago before Scryfall became really big like it was hard to find resources that helped you to find all the versions of cards for different artists because Wizards has a pretty good card searcher on their engine but it doesn't get as granular as you'd like for certain things.
Speaker: So like we could take we could take, you know, and for example, you have a hinder that is a promo card. Yep. So it's, you know, that then opens up to we can play that card in the deck. But if we don't have a good way to search for it, you have to just happen to know that that art is by you in a promo set. Yep. And that, because that sets it apart from every that's one of the like the major difference between it and every other like actual sanction format is that in other formats,
Speaker: The specific printing doesn't matter. A forest is a forest is a forest from any set. A hinder is the same hinder as every set except in this format. You've got to get the hinder promo that Ant did if you want to put it in that deck. I didn't realize that they didn't have that level of differentiation.
Speaker: So yeah, so there's this great website called Scryfall now, and you can pull up and do a search that, you know, it's a very, very powerful search engine that has incorporated all of promos and every printing of a card. So you could search by an artist and it'll bring up every single card that that artist has done, promos, non -promos, et cetera. Oh, that's cool. That is very cool.
Speaker: But it is these ways to be able to interact and to play magic that is beyond just...
Speaker: a competition or the competitive side of things. And that's where those events that kind of set magic apart from other sort of fandoms and other hobbies. And there's a lot of other things. I enjoy playing games in a lot of different environments, but none of them really have anything quite like those Grand Prixs, the Magic Fest, whatever we want to call them these days.
Speaker: And so that's been a real loss, as you've been saying, Ant. It's been a real loss for us this last year and a half. But that's a thing we've talked about in our podcast about. Unfortunately, last year, right at the beginning of March, we posted an episode talking about how to go to these events and how even if you have some social anxiety or things like that, there's some good tips to get into these events. And then, of course,
Speaker: We literally posted it a week before most lockdowns started across the US. Hey, you should go to your next big GP and meet people.
Speaker: There's ways to overcome if maybe you have some difficulty with being in crowds and being out going. Okay, now don't listen to us at all. Stay away from everyone. Yeah, we had to do a follow up on that one. Here's some ways to not feel super isolated when you're in isolation.
Speaker: Oh, you know, Alex is kind of bringing us over to this anxiety piece to it, you know, it does kind of transition us to the other thing that you and I talked a little bit about, you know, when we, we started talking about this, which is
Speaker: You know, this shows a lot about kind of mental health, and I've been very open with my own kind of depression and anxiety, and I know that talking about that, even within the field of psychology, it's often kind of, you know, it doesn't get talked about, right? Like prescribers or providers or therapists having mental health issues is something that's generally kind of skirted around, much like most mental health is in our own community. And when you and I were talking, you kind of were like, well, you know, like,
Speaker: As I would expect, there is mental health concerns, I am sure, in the art community.
Speaker: And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HopsQ can be found at HopsQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel .com. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter, or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at email .com. If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the cast can be found at patreon .com slash goblinmoorpod.
Speaker: Opening and closing music by Vindergarten, who can be found on Twitter at Vindergarten, or online at vindergarten .bandcamp .com. Logo art by Steven Raffaele, who can be found on Twitter at Steve Raffel. Babylon Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vorthos content, as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg, or online at hipstersofthecoast .com.
Speaker: Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.
