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Episode 21: Parun Spice Latte with Titus Lunter, Part I
106 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our twenty-first episode, the guys talk with Magic: the Gathering artist Titus Lunter, who not only has done plenty of illustrations for Magic cards – he also has been a member of the concept team for at least two sets (Amonkhet and Guilds of Ravnica). Titus discusses with us the purpose of nostalgia in establishing the mood of the set, and some of the coincidental real-world analogies in Ravnica this time around.
This is the first episode in a three-part series. Part II – a discussion of how Magic relates to its artist community – will release on November 9th, and Part III – our mailbag episode – will release on November 16th. You can also check out Titus's work here.
There may be "secret vault" audio of discussions about Titus's art and other elements of Ravnican design, so stay tuned for information on how to access that!
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Remember: we've reached 300 followers on Twitter, so we'll do our next giveaway soon! Keep the word of mouth going; another is up at 400!
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Goblin Lore is proud to be a member of the Geek Therapy Network (on Twitter at @GeekTherapy).
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by Joe Redemann.
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Transcript
Interview with Titus Lunter: Fantasy Art and Magic the Gathering
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore.
00:00:10
Speaker
This week we get a chance to talk to Titus Lunter, a Magic the Gathering and fantasy artist who has really come onto the scene in a big way over the last couple of years. Some of the things he's been most notably at the forefront of are the Amonkhet and Guilds of Ravnica concept pushes. In fact, Titus basically helped design Amonkhet from the ground up, which you'll hear more about in this episode.
00:00:37
Speaker
We're really lucky to have gotten a chance to talk to Titus this week about Guilds of Ravnica and how he, as part of the concept team, really worked to create a Ravnica that felt honest and real and true to its source material while still having his own creative and artistic input into it.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm also excited to let you all know that this is the first of three episodes in a series where we talk to Titus.
Titus Lunter's Creative Process and Artistic Influences
00:01:06
Speaker
The next three weeks will be our discussions with Titus Lenter and I'm excited to have gotten to listen to these over again. And I know that you're going to be excited to hear it. So without any further ado, let's get to the show.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This week we are joined by one of Magic's artists, a true gentleman and scholar as well as a tour de force in the Magic art over the last couple of years. We are of course speaking about Titus Lunter.
00:01:39
Speaker
But first, my lovely co-host will introduce ourselves, tell our listeners where they can find us on Twitter, and try to embarrass someone gracious enough to give up part of their Saturday morning and to call us from Europe by telling us what your favorite piece of art for magic he has done to date. My name is Titus Lunder.
00:01:59
Speaker
You can find me on Twitter at Titus Lenter or on my website which is Titus Lenter or basically you probably can just google Titus Lenter and you'll find me wherever you want. And I'm a Dutch illustrator and concept artist for magic and other projects. One of my favorite pieces of art and I think I'm not alone here is Cartographer by Donato Giancola and when I got to do Living Atlas for
00:02:27
Speaker
which is in the same as the primordial miss one. I thought, OK, well, there you have it. That's it. This is my chance to do a tribute to the cartographer. So the idea was that I just painted a living map that was seemingly endless. And I thought, OK, well, infinity is a really ridiculous concept that you can't represent fully in art.
00:02:48
Speaker
But what you can represent is magical qualities. So you can have a scroll that doesn't necessarily, in the literal sense, go on forever. But like a phone screen, you can keep swiping it forever, if that makes sense. So the actual art on the scroll is alive. So I tried to paint the scroll as dynamic as I could, which is not something that I often do. Most of my work is very kind of super well-defined, very crisp, very clean.
00:03:14
Speaker
And it's not something that I necessarily enjoy very much, but it is a great way of representing the environments that I need to represent on a very tiny frame. But for this, I kind of let that go out the window, and I was just doing whatever I felt like. So the piece is way less rendered than I normally would have it.
Art and Storyline Integration in Magic: The Gathering
00:03:31
Speaker
The usual amount of puns and gags is in there.
00:03:36
Speaker
I did this in a way more loose kind of way, which I enjoy a lot looking at it. So yeah, I'd have to go. I'd have to go with the endless Atlas on this one.
00:03:47
Speaker
My name is Joe Redemann. You can find me on Twitter at Fyndhorn. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. And I have to say, one of my favorite pieces that you've done so far, Titus, is one of your newest ones that's been released in Magic, which is Primordial Mist. That came out in the new Commander set for this past year.
00:04:09
Speaker
and it's a really cool card for Commander in general, but I really love the sort of oozing, you know, Vaporous creatures that you don't exactly know what they are, which really evokes this idea of manifesting creatures in the mechanics of the card. I think that's a really cool matchup there because we've seen the various different ways that the Morph mechanic has been
00:04:39
Speaker
Relayed in art over the past 10 15 years, but I don't think we've seen really a Compelling way that manifest has shown itself and I like this idea that it's it's almost this This this creature made of vapor and mist that hasn't quite taken form yet So I really dig that one. I'm Alex Newman
00:05:02
Speaker
I can be phoned on Twitter at Alexander Newem. And sort of on the topic of vintage artists constructed in lands, I want to cheat just a little bit and say my favorite art that you did was the five basic lands from Battlebond. I love the world of Battlebond, the idea of this competition that everyone's a part of. And these five lands really captured the essence of each of the five basic land types.
00:05:30
Speaker
within an arena, and I just I love the perspective of them. I think it's a really cool cycle of lands. And now that you have all five basics, you can build a constructed bed. To be fair, he already had lots of lands, we just can't afford them.
00:05:46
Speaker
I am HobbsQ. I can be found on Twitter at HobbsQ. My favorite art is actually from the 2015 anniversary and it's because one of my favorite cards you got to update art for in such a way that played homage to the original and to the original storyline that went along with it.
00:06:09
Speaker
while making it your own. And that is a little bit of kind of what our topic of the day is going to be, but I will tell you that the art, when I saw it for Ensnaring Bridge, just absolutely blew my mind.
Ravnica: Nostalgia and New Designs
00:06:23
Speaker
We hadn't seen Gerard represented on a card in so long. Ensnaring Bridge has always been one of my favorite magic cards because of the effect, but also because it...
00:06:35
Speaker
because of how it fit with the Gerard storyline. So the hands actually growing out of the bridge, kind of stopping him from coming across. And I know that parts of this is stuff that gets added later on. The flavor text, because of the person who added that, the way your art did lent itself so well to this great kind of almost humorous
00:06:59
Speaker
which I always appreciate punny kind of flavor textiles. When I said I needed a hand, I didn't mean this. But Gerard standing there with the sword at his side, trying to get across this bridge and the hand growing up out of it, the colors in it, it really did transport me back to kind of looking at the original.
00:07:19
Speaker
but in a new twist and a new updated version of it. And I will say that when we opened up, we played a box of 25th for here for a draft, I was just really excited that my box had a copy of that card. Well, and that's a little bit of what we were hoping to talk about today, because we know that you've been kind of integrally involved in helping to draft and define what Ravnica looks and feels like this time around.
00:07:44
Speaker
from talking about concept art or just what the concept pushes for magic. We always have kind of this real world connection about how to express your own voice and individuality, but you need to also balance this other groups that you are working with and being true and respecting the work that came kind of before you.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. We were wondering if you could kind of talk a little bit about how that works with something like Ravnica, where we've now been there three times. We know that there are guilds. We know that there are certain aspects that we have to have. And you're trying to infuse yourself and your vision into it. Yeah, I mean, return to sets are difficult for a great many reasons. I think foremost of which with the more popular ones like Ravnica is that you're fighting nostalgia a lot.
00:08:36
Speaker
So one of the main issues is that people have memories of playing Ravnica, you know, the first booster pack they opened, the first mythic they got, that great pre-release they went to. That means that they don't look at Ravnica in an objective way. They look at Ravnica through an emotional lens, right? And when you're introducing a new product, there hasn't been any time yet for any new emotional connections to form. So you're balancing emotions,
00:09:04
Speaker
versus something new. And that's always very, very difficult. That's very difficult to win because if you do that in the wrong way, you immediately upset a whole bunch of people. You have to take into account how Ravnica was perceived, but also you can't go too far on that because if you do that, it'll feel like you're doing that and like you're ripping off something and not adding anything new. So it's a very fine line that you have to walk where most of the burden falls on properly identifying what makes Ravnica cool.
00:09:32
Speaker
and what allowed people to have that kind of fun. So a lot of that comes down to the stories that take place there. So you're looking at building a foundation for the story, in which case it's good that we're going to Ravnica, because as much as it is defined from a visual point of view, it's super recognizable, and as much story has been taken place there, Ravnica as a whole is not super defined yet, as in there are millions of buildings, but we don't know what every single building does.
00:10:02
Speaker
we're assuming there are bakeries and schools and all that kind of stuff. And with some, it's easy to say, you know, courthouses, you think Azorius, like, okay, that's a solve, but there's a whole gray area. And in that gray area, it's where we get to play around. So when we came to Ravnica and I got told that this was now going to be cold war and high tension between the guilds, that immediately gives the sense of, okay, I need to build a visual base
00:10:29
Speaker
in that gray area where people can then have that story. And what does that mean? That means the unexplored parts of Ravica. That means the alleyways, the tiny dark streets, the archways, because we haven't had a focus on that before. So that's where I started off of. And then obviously you run into a whole bunch of problems immediately based off of that because Cold War has its visual roots in film noir.
00:10:53
Speaker
and Gothic horror has its visual roots in Filmora. So that meant that from an archetype point of view, Innistrad and Ravnica were very close together. There are these stereotypes and archetypes that we have to work with that after 25 years of magic, there are a lot of similarities between the two. So we have to be more and more refined in order to tell the story that we want to tell. And if you want to be more refined, you need a broader vocabulary.
00:11:22
Speaker
right from the get-go we understood that there were pitfalls, but what would solve it is to have as broad as possible a vocabulary in describing exactly what we wanted to say. So that meant that we needed to treat Ravnica as multiple individual parts that we could then massage into place. So I'm thinking the sky
00:11:43
Speaker
buildings, the trees and the ground plane. Those are then the pieces that we get to work with and that's where we differentiate how Ramnica feels different from Innistrad and how Cold War Ramnica will be its own unique recognizable set and not just
00:12:01
Speaker
a season on Ravnica. We needed to trump it. We needed to redefine Ravnica that people no longer think of it in the old sense, but only in that new sense. Because if we do that, then people will be much more strongly connected to the set and identify stronger to the plane, which is ultimately great because it increases their engagement and activities.
Emotional Layers and Player Connection in Ravnica
00:12:26
Speaker
Well, I know that one thing that you kind of started off with there. So we did a previous Ravnica episode that was about, it was about expectations in general and returning to planes. And I know that for me, I could see myself getting really worked up with, well, I'm going to let people down. I'm going to let people down, especially depending on the type of personality that you might be. It can be very easy to get almost stuck because you're worried about what people are going to think coming into that.
00:12:51
Speaker
And I'm wondering what you kind of maybe used to battle some of that to be able to say, okay, I want my voice to be heard. I respect Ravnica. I want it to grow and not become the same thing that it was before. Many of the parts of the question that you're asking have overlap. And another question that I get a lot is, as a professional artist, do you often have an art block? And the question is no, because you simply, you can't have one.
00:13:19
Speaker
You have to keep working. You don't have the luxury to have an art block. So while I understand that, and I definitely feel the pressure when working on something like Ravnica, and you don't want to mess up, you do want to make sure that you're hitting all the right notes and you're getting all the people who are skeptical on board, there's simply not any luxury to linger in that fact for too long. You have to have confidence in yourself that the research that you're doing will lead you to the right answers and conclusions.
00:13:48
Speaker
The main question here is if I want to add my own flavor to Ravnica, I first need to really thoroughly understand what Ravnica is. And that doesn't mean how it looks like it means how the plane is perceived. Right. So you're talking about that emotional connection that people have. Ravnica is super relatable because it's a city plane. Many of us understand what it is to live in a city. Many of us understand how it feels like to be one voice in a city where you can get lost.
00:14:14
Speaker
but also find places where you can engage with others, right? You can feel as much ungilded, guildless, and alone as much as you can feel part of a guild. So that was one thing that's always been in the back of my mind where you go like, okay, I need to make sure that you feel like you're insignificant as much as you're part of something greater. You need to feel like you can disappear into the shadows of these streets only to find a door that will lead you to this amazing new group of people, you know?
00:14:44
Speaker
Once I understood that that is what I needed to tell, I could find my way of telling those stories. And it, you know, it goes in broad strokes and it goes in for us in terms like, you know, what kind of sky color do we want it to be? Do we want to have cool tones? Do we want to have warm tones? But the whole buildup to that and ultimately the thing that pushes you to either one answer is the other is how will this register to people? And is this idea what I have for Ravnica
00:15:14
Speaker
syncing up with the color choices that I'm making. So you're talking really broad and you're sort of trying to narrow it down further and further and further and further until you reach a choice that seems so incredibly obvious that people don't really question it anymore. Because if we do our jobs really well, people won't notice that we've made a change.
00:15:33
Speaker
If we do our jobs poorly, then people know that we've made a poor decision. So there's so many things that are happening behind the scenes in Ravnica and all the subtleties that people haven't noticed, haven't commented on. And that is perfect because that means that we've hit the right note in such a way that it feels like a natural progression.
00:15:50
Speaker
of the plane.
00:16:07
Speaker
autumn that feel of just even the simple seasonal change on Ravnica to sort of make it feel like it is this natural evolving world. I'm curious, Titus, you mentioned this a little bit off air to us, but what is the logic behind that
00:16:26
Speaker
autumn that season change. You mentioned a little bit some of that went into some of the decision making behind that went into the psychology of what autumn means to people and how that kind of fits in with the storyline that we see coming up. Right. Whether or not because that was obviously world building who who decided that before I got there. So I can't comment on whether or not they base that decision on the psychological impact of
00:16:53
Speaker
uh autumn on on people but it was certainly a really nice bonus uh the set was going to be released on autumn great but autumn also invokes uh the greatest sense of nostalgia of any other season which which syncs up great with the fact that we're going back to you know rapidly again in in a return set so you have a season that is perceived as being nostalgic people feel very nostalgic in autumn they think about all the good memories that they've had
00:17:21
Speaker
in the real world. So when those two kind of collided either on purpose or by happenstance, you kind of have really nice solid base to build from already. So we figured that, or I figured at least that, okay, I got to lean into that as much as I can. Who doesn't love, you know,
00:17:45
Speaker
sitting in a coffee shop that's nice with ambiance, with friends, with rain pelting the window, or coming home from the rain and going like, I'm just going to have a nice drink and relax for a little bit. It's a place that you feel at home. And the more you feel at home at a place, the more you can immerse yourself in stories that take place. So you have this great dichotomy between
00:18:11
Speaker
the feeling of being at home and cozy and the distant feeling of a cold war with a lot of uh tension you know and you you think that okay are those two actually happy mix and yeah they are they actually fit together really well
00:18:26
Speaker
That's kind of a cool paradox that you mentioned a little bit too, that feeling of, that general feeling of being insignificant while being a part of these large groups, being at home while feeling the tension, you know, cozy at home while you feel the tension outside the walls. And that's, that to me, I think makes that world that much
00:18:52
Speaker
richer you know we have we do get that sense from some of this art already you know even though we haven't seen even a bit of the guilds of Ravnica story yet we're already getting this sense that something big is happening even though we're we're all excited to be here we're all excited to go back we're like ah this is something dark is happening but it's not the same you know sort of you compared Ravnica
00:19:16
Speaker
and the noir sense to Innistrad. It's not the same sort of juxtaposition as we had in Amonkhet, which was a very, that was a very different tonal, you know, cognitive dissonance, where it was bright, happy, sunshiny, but something dark is behind the scenes. Well, we're always in world building looking for contrast, you know, same for an actual painting. If you want to pull focus to something, you put the most contrast there. So contrast is light versus dark.
00:19:44
Speaker
hard edges versus soft edges you know anything you can think of that gives contrast and in Amonkhet the contrast was between the beautiful safe haven within the Hekma and literally everything outside of it and here the contrast feels more subtle in Ravnica but it's not the contrast is way greater because you you're mixing a feeling of coziness and being at home and nostalgia
00:20:06
Speaker
with the tension of Cold War and everybody knows that if the Cold War did not fizzle, the outcome would be absolutely disastrous. We were talking about nuclear proliferation. So the stakes are incredibly high. So if you mix your feeling of cozy at home and sitting with a cup of tea and watching the rain hit the window and absolute total destruction, the conscious doesn't get any greater than that. So that was an amazing field to sort of like play around in.
00:20:36
Speaker
Again, if you do it right, even in the smallest things, you have people wondering like, oh, this is nice, but it sort of feels, you know, the tension is there and not like, you know, there's an Eldrazi about to rip through everybody because people are getting tentacles kind of tension, but more of this unspoken thing. Like, I don't know what I'm afraid of, but I definitely feel like I'm fearing something. This tension doesn't feel quite right.
00:21:03
Speaker
And I think that dichotomy really helps engagement, because that feels like real life. I mean, we go home, you don't have one emotional state at any given time. You're at comfortable at home, but work sucked this week. I can say that from experience. You have things like that. You might have some, you don't go hang out with friends and things, but you're having troubles in a different relationship. You have this dichotomy, and I think that probably increases a player engagement.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, like you're saying, Alex, it's what we go through on kind of a daily basis. I, for the most part, live my day-to-day life. I'm married, I'm happy, I come home, I have this, and there's a ton of stuff going on in the world around me that makes me fearful and anxious while also trying to be enjoying and be present in the moment. Ravnica has always been for us about the guilt, and I
00:22:01
Speaker
say this almost every week now that we're in Ravnica, but the guilds are actually a very small portion of the plane. I mean, they're not actually the populace. And I think that we've seen in flavor text and in my own
00:22:19
Speaker
theories that the guild lists are going to be more important because of this Cold War situation that we don't know.
Inclusive Storytelling and Ravnica's Power Dynamics
00:22:27
Speaker
And I understand you may know stuff that we don't or can't talk about or know yet because you have worked on further ahead. But from us, what we're seeing so far from this first one,
00:22:39
Speaker
I think that this is not being too far out there is we are seeing the rest of Ravnica, whereas in the past, I feel like we have really seen the gilts and they have been the focus. You see, I don't know everything there is to know about the about the lore on Ravnica. So correct me if I'm wrong. But what I find really interesting about this part and how I tried to tailor the environment to it is that for the first time,
00:23:07
Speaker
the guild-less, the actual populace, gets to make a choice. They were a 2D kind of abstract, flat character. They had no depth because there was nothing really at stake for them. There were no real choices for them to make. It was all the guilds doing that stuff and everything went way over their head. But now we are so low to the ground for the first time. Everybody on the plane is feeling the tension and everybody needs to make a choice.
00:23:37
Speaker
Are you going to participate or are you going to hide? You can't stay in the middle anymore. This is not going to go over your head. You're in it now. And I think that feels incredibly relatable to people, where all these big machines are moving around us. And we understand that, for the most part, we have no influence. We're not the planeswalkers of our world.
00:24:01
Speaker
we do get a choice and we do know how it feels like when we get a choice because even though we don't as individuals necessarily matter that much as soon as we get to voice what we actually feel things get interesting. Yeah and sort of dovetailing onto that it
00:24:20
Speaker
it seems like there is a lot that does really match up with where the world is at large right now and this is I mean this is always the purpose of this podcast is to tie things into the real world from Magic the Gathering I mean this is Magic the Gathering is a great medium by which we can help
00:24:41
Speaker
you know, escape our world or process our world or take lessons to take back into the real world. And this, I think, does bring home in a really understandable, chewable way some of the things that are going on. I'm curious, Titus, how much you how much of those decisions were made about these
00:25:01
Speaker
story points or concept ideas that do tie into this big tension that's going on worldwide right now. Prior to you, how much were you involved in that? How much can you even sort of talk about that, you know, to this at this point? Well, anything relating to the story of lore. I wasn't involved in coming up with, you know, that's the world building team doing that. And obviously, we're doing the work so far ahead and the world building team even further ahead that I think, you know, when
00:25:31
Speaker
When the story was made up, the world was in a much better place than it is now. So I can speculate only, but I think how it's matching up with the real world now is more coincidence than actually planned. With products, with actual products, it's really difficult to make any sort of political statement or stance because you're not making it for one specific region. This is a global product.
00:25:58
Speaker
the stories have to resonate globally. I think a really good thing actually that it's matching up better now because hopefully it'll get people to talk about it a little bit more and offer them sort of reflection that. Yeah, even though you're part of this bigger hole that you don't have a lot of influence on, maybe through this card game you can see that your voice can be heard and you can take action to make your own world better.
00:26:28
Speaker
It is a hero story, but the hero is not necessarily just the planeswalkers here. It's also the voice of the people, which becomes much more clear. And I think that's something that we've kind of been lacking for the last several years in Magic Storyline and the shift that we saw. We're trying to work on kind of creating a more cohesive group, kind of creating our own Avengers in some way. The storyline seemed to focus on the planeswalkers and less about
00:26:58
Speaker
the people of certain planes. I know at times it felt like that to me versus the old storylines when planeswalkers didn't have cards and they were also incredibly powerful beings that almost didn't have time for the day-to-day other than to try to oversee Rube Goldberg type machines like Urza. The heroes were the cast of the weather light. They were the people of the plane.
00:27:27
Speaker
And I'm feeling with Ravnica that that's where, and Dominaria actually, I feel like we started kind of seeing this again. And now moving into Ravnica, we're seeing that the planeswalkers are going to be important, but the story is larger than that.
00:27:44
Speaker
And it's cool too, just to tie into that a little bit. There's three levels in Ravnica. There's three levels of power. There's planeswalkers and these interplaner beings who do crazy things at high levels that not a lot of people have a chance to interact with. Then you have the guilds, which, like you were mentioning, Titus, seem like these impenetrable machines that, again,
00:28:05
Speaker
the momentum goes on and on and the guild lists or the day-to-day people or even, you know, the grunts of the guilds, even the, you know, entry-level guild mages people can't really do a ton to shift. And then you have everybody else. And everybody else is a much larger category than the other two combined.
00:28:23
Speaker
And so it is fascinating to see that interplay already starting in the art, already starting in the flavor text, already starting in all of this stuff that we're getting that's just the sort of vibe, the ether around the set, you know, before we even get to any of the meaty storyline yet. Yeah, absolutely. I think with the Rise of the Legends, you know, the legendary cards in the game itself getting a lot more weight to them in Dominaria.
Designing Ravnica's Mood and Aesthetic
00:28:53
Speaker
there's certainly more room for that category to take more influence. And in the card game itself, I don't think you'll see the actual populace, but in the storyline, definitely, which is more relatable to people. So I think it's a really good shift. I think it's good to have some sets where it's all about the grand scheme and these ridiculous beings that transcend time and space. And then the other, it's about the people. You're narrowing the scope of your story again. Just in real life, you need a little bit of
00:29:22
Speaker
different flavors, you need to mix it up a little. And Ravnica is obviously the perfect place to show that side of the people a little bit more. Now, so from what your work was with Ravnica, did you have is this the set that you've had more or the block that you've had more kind of involvement with when it comes to the concept? So I'm a kid I built from the ground up.
00:29:49
Speaker
So in terms of actually hands-on being able to influence most of the things that go on there from a design point of view, I think Amaket would be greater. But because Amaket was a much simpler story to tell, it felt also a little easier and more scripted. The challenge with Ravnica was definitely greater because my role there was to come up with the color and mood.
00:30:15
Speaker
What you're effectively saying is that what you're trying to come up with is one single stylized way of doing things that immediately puts people in the right mindset and makes them feel like they are there. So there's a lot more theory that is kind of required to construct images that way than when you're just saying, oh, this is a happy place and it just needs like an Egyptian vibe. That's a different kind of research and a different kind of approach.
00:30:43
Speaker
So the difficult thing always is with environments is that they have to be done so well that you immediately can feel like you're there. You know, you can practically hear the wind, but it is still the background. So it doesn't take over. It doesn't hog too much attention away from the people who are there because, you know, as much as I don't like to admit it, people are the main storyteller.
00:31:07
Speaker
So I have to set the other parts of the story up for success as much as I can. And with Ravnica, that brought with it a whole bunch of problems because they said, OK, we're going to go autumn on Ravnica. And I asked them, OK, so what does that mean for Golgari and Demir? And they said, yeah, what does that mean for Golgari and Demir?
00:31:26
Speaker
For us. So it's like that. So you have to answer really tough questions like, what does autumn in underground look like? And that means that your definition of traditional autumn goes right out the window. So you're redefining autumn on Ravnica, which was no simple concept. The solution in the end is quite simple. And people go, yeah, of course that's how you do it. But when you're starting from scratch, reaching that conclusion and building the foundation that that can live off,
00:31:54
Speaker
is not as easy. So for like the Golgari, one of the things that we did is we're adding a lot of mushrooms and fungi within that warmer kind of color tones, right? The warmer browns, yellow ochres, because those are the colors that we associate with the changing of the leaves in autumn. And then there's way of treating the fog that is there that's reminiscent of how fog would form
00:32:18
Speaker
and reflections with the Demir, with how, you know, wet streets would be. So, yeah, there is room to play with, but my involvement there was really trying to figure out what these abstract terms of, you know, autumn, what does that mean? And that's where a lot of that had to come from. So it was a completely different approach than Amonkhet.
00:32:42
Speaker
I think what's interesting there is you just said that at this point, people seeing it now might be like, Oh yeah, yeah, that's simple. It makes sense. But I think that's only because it worked. If it hadn't have worked, I don't think people would have said that. I mean, I think that it seems simple because of the work that you guys did to bring it together. Right. It was the same thing. You know, it's like, Oh, we have to go to Egypt. We have to do pyramids. Um, sure. Okay. You know, pyramids already exist.
00:33:09
Speaker
And what's the second most popular shape in Egypt was the trapezoid, but we couldn't use a trapezoid because Abzan had already used that on Tarkir. So it was like, okay.
00:33:21
Speaker
There's only so much shapes there are in the world. After 25 years of doing different planes, you kind of run out of shapes. Which is a joke that we haven't gone back to Vryn because Vryn took the circle. And then we haven't actually been back to Vryn, and we can't use the circle because of the majoring. So please go to Vryn so we can use the damn circle because we're missing one of the core geometric shapes here. It's frustrating.
00:33:46
Speaker
Who would have thought that shapes would be such a limited resource for art? Right. They are. They really, really
Worldbuilding: Infrastructure and Realism
00:33:52
Speaker
limited. So when they tasked me for Omiket, I come up with something that's original, that reminiscent of pyramids and trapezoids, but is not trapezoids and is not pyramids, and it's also not Abzan. You go, OK. That's OK. So eventually, I ended up with
00:34:15
Speaker
you know, what feels really natural now, oh, you just have part of the building float. Yeah, okay. But there's a way, there's a construction in the house that can float and which parts can float or not. So we came up with the term load-bearing air.
00:34:29
Speaker
The air in between the buildings has to feel structurally sense. So there's actually a very, very strict ratio of air versus building and where that can be placed. It can't be too far to the top. And if it is too far to the top, it has to be all the way to the top. So just that uppermost pyramid is separated.
00:34:50
Speaker
Um, so I've seen a few cards where that's not the case and that's very frustrating because it looks off, but in general, it was great. And then it lent itself fantastic for a set item, which is a pyramid, but it's a magic pyramid because part of it is floating and people go, Oh yeah, it's floating. And I'm like, well, no, it's not.
00:35:07
Speaker
Look, it's not just floating. This is actually pretty complicated, right? It's not easy. There's load-bearing error and weight division and ratios of balance. And so now Titus is telling us that he understands what it means to feel like God. Look at the elegant stuff I made all around us. Yeah, it's always been. Damn it.
00:35:30
Speaker
What I'm picturing now is actually I'm ready for a new reality show where it's like House Hunters on Amonkhet. You just walk in and you're like, well, I want to knock out this air here to make an open concept kitchen. It's a load-bearing air. And I wouldn't watch it.
00:35:54
Speaker
Um, the rabbit hole, we can go way, way too far down. So at some point you do have to say, look, it's just magic and this is the way it is. But from my point of view, almost every building that I did on Amaket has a function, right? You can't just have. Functionless buildings, which was the one thing that ticked me off on Ravnica. And then obviously, you know, I get to go back to Ravnica.
00:36:13
Speaker
Um, so in the concepts, I did concept, you know, bakeries and all that kind of stuff. Like, look, this is what the people interact with, you know, but none of that will ever see the light of day. We have, you know, we have internally during, during the concept pushes, we've had very, very lengthy discussions about how does the infrastructure for that, that city world even work? You know, how would the plumbing work? How would the.
00:36:41
Speaker
You know, there's there's in our day to day life, there's so much infrastructure. I have not seen a single field of grain on Ravnica. Where does all the food come from? How is it transported? How does any of the infrastructure required to support millions and millions of people? How is that done? So we've had great discussions about it. And then, you know, an art director would come in and was like, what are you talking about?
00:37:04
Speaker
and then we'd explain them like why that doesn't matter at all look this is gonna go on a tiny frame of a card just make it cool for that and move on we have built with help of Jonas he built the bulk of Ravnica and we have actually built one of the districts in Sketchup the whole thing to scale with all the buildings in the right position oh my god
00:37:26
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. And we can't show it. And we can't show it. And we won't show it. And it's not actually been used as a resource because they don't want to tie people down too much. Because again, it is about getting
Balancing Personal Passion and Professional Detachment
00:37:41
Speaker
the best shot possible for a car, not about the accuracy of where buildings are. That's irrelevant.
00:37:47
Speaker
If you're in a movie, that's great. We're not designing a movie. We're designing stills. And for the story point of view, what does it matter if a building is one block, two blocks, 100 blocks away from the other one? It doesn't matter. That's not the way that stories are constructed. So coming from a very analytical and left brain point of view, that is always a very difficult one because I want stuff to make sense. But that's not our job. Our job is something to make anything look as cool as possible and move on.
00:38:17
Speaker
And like you're saying, you don't want to nail people down because if we come back to Ravnica and other people are working on it, they need the freedom to do their work. So where you think that, oh, you know, what kind of weather it is seems to be way more kind of like casual than where buildings are and how the buildings function. Like, no, no, no, it's the other way around here. What kind of weather it is, it's way more important than where the buildings actually are. So Ravnica has load-bearing weather right now.
00:38:43
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah For you I have to ask is a person I mean as a creator and an artist if we went if and I would probably guess when we return to Ravnica is That going to affect your expectations of the world knowing what you know or what you guys have talked about outside of this I mean Do you think that that will affect how you approach it or see it if you're not the one doing this world building at that point? absolutely, you know and and
00:39:12
Speaker
you talked about before that you want to make this podcast more about how the personal relationship is. And actually, as much as I enjoyed working on Ravnica, seeing it now in cart form is quite difficult for me because I went through an internal struggle with Wizards of the Coast at the time of Ravnica commissions, which meant that
00:39:35
Speaker
Because I made my push for creatures in different kinds of cards, it also inevitably meant that I could not work on some of the designs that I really wanted to work on, even though I told them that would take priority from me. So I'm seeing a lot of designs that I've done that are truly my baby. And you know, you say, you know, they tell you not to get connected too much, but that's impossible. If you worked on something for a year or more, you put everything you have of yourself into it.
00:40:00
Speaker
you're going to have an emotional response to it. So it's very bittersweet knowing that some people have worked on designs that have made, which I'm incredibly proud of and would have loved to have done the card art as well, kind of as a, you know, emotional closing off of my involvement on Radnica because, you know, at some point it's done and we're moving on and we're going to the next set. So that was kind of a very, very bittersweet moment. You know, the Tower on Steam vents is something that I designed.
00:40:29
Speaker
And I was very proud of it. And we're seeing in its early stages, and it's going to have an important part in the story. So we're going to come back there. Yet I did not do a very significant card for it. And the professional in me says, it's fine. It's just a job we're moving on. But as a person, and I've talked to wizards about this before, it just feels bad. It makes me actual sad that I did not do that card. Not because it would be a good card or anything like that.
00:40:59
Speaker
you know, that's much more irrelevant.
Conclusion and Social Media Contacts
00:41:01
Speaker
It's just that you then get to work on your baby. And Amonkhet did have that. Amonkhet, I got to do, I was really proud of the buildings and I got to do all of the buildings on the Basic Lands. I got to rip them apart on Sundar, which was really, really cool to do. So, you know, it was kind of like a complete process. And with Ravnica, I will always feel like it's left hanging on that final note, because I didn't get to,
00:41:28
Speaker
illustrate my designs. You know, that's a real part of the job. That's our show. The show can be found on Twitter at goblinloropod or you can email us any questions, comments or concerns at goblinloropodcast at gmail.com. Titus Lunter can be found at Titus Lunter. That's L-U-N-T-E-R.
00:41:56
Speaker
Joe Redman can be found on Twitter at Findhorn. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. Hobbs Q can be found at Hobbs Q. And Alex Newman can be found at Alexander New M.
00:42:09
Speaker
Goblin Lore is a member of the Geek Therapy Network. Geek Therapy celebrates how geek culture can save the world through podcasts, videos, blog posts, community outreach, education, and convention appearances. It's a network of like-minded creators who believe that all different facets of nerd culture are important to understanding how our minds and communities work. Check them out at geektherapy.com or at geektherapy on Twitter.
00:42:39
Speaker
Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.