Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 22: Parun Spice Latte with Titus Lunter, Part II
102 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our twenty-second 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 elaborates on his own process of becoming an artist, the emotional toll this process has taken, and his vision for the future of artist involvement in Magic Grand Prix's and MagicFests.
This is the second episode in a three-part series. Part III – our mailbag episode – will release on November 30th. 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!
____________________________________________
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!
____________________________________________
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.
Recommended
Transcript
Welcome to Goblin Lore Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore.
Interview with Titus Lunter Part 2
00:00:11
Speaker
This episode is the second in our three-part discussion with Magic the Gathering artist Titus Lunter.
Titus's Artistic Journey
00:00:17
Speaker
We talk in this episode a bit about Titus's own experience and journey in his process of becoming an artist, as well as his opinions on the announcement of Magic Fest and what the Grand Prix scene should evolve into as we go forward.
Podcast's New Biweekly Schedule
00:00:35
Speaker
You also will have noticed that it's been about two weeks since our last episode published, and that's not an accident. Going forward, our regular publishing schedule is going to be every other week, a biweekly schedule, because we want to offer you the best quality of content and the best quality of publication. And we feel that that more spaced out publishing schedule will help us better achieve those ends with our busy schedules in our own personal lives.
Self-Taught Artist's Path
00:01:05
Speaker
So, without any further ado, let's get to the show. So, Titus, one of the things that we had kind of was a talk about, you and I and Alex were talking a little bit about this and I hope you don't have to repeat yourself too much, but just what your process has kind of been becoming an artist, because you mentioned, and we've seen this before, that you weren't
00:01:31
Speaker
Classically trained for art.
Mental Health and Artistic Challenges
00:01:33
Speaker
I mean this wasn't something that you Took schooling for is I mean you started off kind of self-taught and self-directed which has made your journey I think very interesting as you've been asking Wizards to push because You have focused initially on a very specific portion of your art and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that Well, I mean
00:01:59
Speaker
Sure, I think now is as good a time as any to talk about the actual reality of becoming an artist or at least my reality of becoming an artist, right? Which is probably in a way also cathartic for me, because I'm not hiding the fact, but I am in therapy because this job is really difficult and I've gone through some terrible during my time of being
Facing Rejections and Finding a Niche
00:02:25
Speaker
an artist. So
00:02:26
Speaker
first time on record, I'll talk about timelines of what happens, right? So this is my story, not for everybody else. But a lot of people say that I want to be an artist when I was six years old and I've been drawing since I was six years old, stuff like that. That wasn't me at all. I was incredibly lazy. My mom was an art teacher. My dad was an economist. And in high school, I failed most of
00:02:53
Speaker
Most of my classes that were, you know, math, economics, all that kind of stuff. I was, I was terrible at it. I wasn't applying myself. I wasn't really trying. So I figured, you know what? I suck at that. So I might as well do art. And then I tried to go to art school. I got rejection after rejection after I got 18 rejections in two years of every single art school. So I went into like, um, a middle, like a gap year where I went to the Foe art school, whatever, in preparation of going to the actual one.
00:03:22
Speaker
Didn't really put in any effort there either because I figured art is this personal, ethereal thing. So I can just do whatever I want, which is not the case. I failed to get into any art school again. So I went to a hybrid of art school and teaching. So I actually studied two years of
Passion for Concept Art
00:03:38
Speaker
becoming a teacher. And I thought, you know what? Why not? Why not? Why not become a teacher? Ain't so bad. Then a new school opened up, which was a game design school, which also did concept art.
00:03:50
Speaker
I had been enjoying concept art from the 90s from a Japanese artist called Yoshitaka Amano, who did the stuff for Final Fantasy. And I thought, you know, might as well, how hard can that be? So again, very half-assed and casual. I just switched education again, went to that school, learned a lot about 3D and a little bit more about discipline. And it wasn't until 2008, which was my second year in that school, so five years in total of just, you know, post high school, that I
00:04:20
Speaker
realized that I needed to really apply myself in order to get anywhere. And I was stuck because I had no formal training. I wasn't paying attention in art school and even the art school, which I went to was mostly focused on teaching anyway. So they never talked about any of the fundamentals, form, shape, lighting perspective, all that kind of stuff. So I started to teach myself that stuff, but you're coming from a point where you not have enough info. So you just kind of,
00:04:47
Speaker
get bits and pieces of information that you're trying to make something out of. And I managed to cobble together a portfolio that was good enough to allow me to go to one game company. I think I sent in access of 150 applications over the course of two years, trying to get anywhere. I graduated in 2010 after really busting my ass. I went from zero to industry ready for concert in two years. And that was not because I was that good of an artist.
00:05:16
Speaker
was smart enough to understand what that job needed at the time, which was a lot of photo bashing and other stuff, just to get the environments done. I knew that there was a lot of people interested in painting characters on monsters, but not
Career Setbacks and Resilience
00:05:28
Speaker
environments. So I figured, OK, let's do that. It's probably easier anyway, because I don't have to learn anatomy. And that seems like a whole thing.
00:05:39
Speaker
So up until that point, I was still a little bit more disciplined, but still kind of casual and trying to figure all that out. And then I went to a job abroad in 2010 working for a company where we made the game Never Dead, which is by Konami, which is this ridiculously bad game. You should check it out. It's hilarious. You can get disembodied and your head is rolling and all that stuff, which is hilarious.
00:06:06
Speaker
I thought everything was kind of peachy and, uh, and me and Suzanne, we'd met each other a couple of months prior to that. And we thought, yeah, we know each other for seven months. Let's go abroad. Let's move together abroad. Um, and after the first day I come home, I was like, I had a pretty good first day and my inbox was spammed with emails. I had hundreds of emails. So I thought, okay, that's a little fishy. And I opened them up and most of them were death threats. And I thought, I have missed something.
00:06:34
Speaker
somebody online on one of the communities had accused me of plagiarism and within the span of an hour, everyone who I thought was my friend had disappeared. They were gone. I was about to lose my job over it. I was kicked out of every single community. Like my whole world came crashing down because somebody thought it would be prudent to do that, which caused a lot of grief and
00:07:03
Speaker
a lot of introspection that was required. I didn't paint for about six months. I managed to hold on to my job, but after six months of not painting and being in a strange country, you know, with no friends, not knowing anybody, trying to get through the day, I thought, you know, this is just not working. So I moved back to the Netherlands, which is when I started playing magic that was like, yeah, around 2010, 2011. And
00:07:33
Speaker
You know, through magic I made, I just ran into some old school friends and they had really not known what was going on. So they didn't really give a shit and they were still supporting me. I had gotten emails from the school that, you know, without asking me, they were, or asking my side of the story, they were considering canceling my diploma. And I was like, you know what? Just do whatever, man. I don't, I don't care anymore. This is ridiculous. And it took a lot of months and playing magic and taking a break from everything to.
00:08:02
Speaker
finally get back on that horse and start again. And the after effects of that accusation has lasted for years. I've lost jobs in 2012, 2013, got rejected for jobs in 2014. That's four years after simply because I now had that stigma, which then made me realize that this is not going to go
Turning Negatives into Motivation
00:08:23
Speaker
away. The only thing that I can do.
00:08:25
Speaker
Because you know your reputation is all that you have so I figured that if I don't have a reputation, then I might as well get really, really, really, really good at art. I might as well do that. So, you know, I set myself the goal that What is the most prestigious thing that I know magic. What do I enjoy magic. Okay, good. I'm going to work for magic and it took three years of
00:08:47
Speaker
scraping together portfolio pieces and finding a few minutes to do it and taking on jobs and moving abroad a million times. I think by the time it was 2016 me and Suzanne had moved 17 times, most of them abroad.
00:09:03
Speaker
Uh, I lost my father in the process. I lost most of my family in the process. I'd lost all of my friends in that process. I had to make new friends, teach myself all the new things. And this is not a story about how, how sad it is or how difficult it is, but it's a story about trying to change your own point of view. Like you're the only one who's responsible for how you move on from anything that
Art as Escape and Connection
00:09:25
Speaker
happens. You know, everybody who says, Oh, I can't do that. Or it's, it's, it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. Um, so.
00:09:33
Speaker
my road to becoming a professional artist was fueled as much by not caring as caring too much about not being invested to being invested way too much about sadness as much as anger and you know you can ignore it for as much as you want but at some point that does kind of creep into your work
00:09:55
Speaker
where I wanted to hide so much from the world around me that the only thing I wanted to get good at was making pictures that made people immediately feel like they were in that place. Because if I could paint that and if I could look at my own work and be in that place and not be in the world where I didn't have any friends or got ridiculously burned for no reason, then maybe somebody else could have that too. Then I started thinking, that's actually a good point.
00:10:24
Speaker
If if I can give some of that kindness back, it doesn't matter if I get it back, because I already went through the thing I could possibly go through. So, you know, it doesn't really matter to me. But if I could take some of that energy and put that out there and have people, you know, feel a little bit better or provide them a window into another place where they can feel better, then let's do that. And ever since then, my art has become more about just the illustrations that I do and I'm trying to incorporate that.
00:10:54
Speaker
you know, the meta world, trying to make people feel better, trying to give people this connection to a place that they can relate to, where they're going to escape into, where they can make new friends. And, you know, moving forward from there from now, it's good days, bad days, you know, strikes and gutters, as the dude would say. But at least it's clearing out what I, you know, what I want to do. So when people talk to me like, oh, cool, you're so positive, it's like, yeah, because
00:11:24
Speaker
I know I know the negative and let's not do that. That's not let's not go there again. So it's contrast my long winded story. It's contrast. Absolutely. Yeah. We talked a lot about here about things being not just simply dichotomies, but being spectrums. And the effort that has to be put in, you know,
00:11:46
Speaker
to be positive, you know, to make that effort, to make that decision that you were going to try to put that out in the world, or you're going to make an effort to try to at least brighten somebody else's day or, or, uh, it just, your story just resonates so much with me. Um, I really appreciate you kind of opening up and talking about it. No problem. I mean, for whatever reason magic was there and I latched onto it, it might've been anything else, you know, but it was.
00:12:16
Speaker
I was so angry and so sad and I had this skill of painting, which was terrible, but now I had an excuse to put in 100 hours a week and escape from the world. And then when I finally got out of that cocoon, out of that escapism, which I'm still in, I figured that you can turn some of that into a positive as well.
00:12:38
Speaker
So that's, but that's, you know, you see the outcomes of it, but the process is so long and, and, you know, what's at the heart of it is so hidden. You don't always see it. And even if we ask, you don't always get the answer. So I figured that I will never know where some people are coming from. I will never know their stories. What I do know is that my outcome can be something that they can latch onto.
00:13:03
Speaker
And that's not some sort of delusion of grandeur. It's not thinking that my work can change the life of somebody. And that's not the point of what I'm trying to do. But from experience, I know that if you're really, really down and you get even a iota of positivity in your life, that can make so much of a difference. And for some people, that's magic. For some people, that's the lore in magic. For other people, that's an artist who listens or somebody who sends them a kind note. So if I can take a few minutes or hours out of my schedule and incorporate any of that,
00:13:33
Speaker
that's me then adding something to the world in a positive way. And if everybody does that, then, you know, less people would feel shitty.
Magic Fest Rebranding Debate
00:13:40
Speaker
It doesn't eliminate the problem. And that's not the point of eliminating the problem. But, you know, at least it's adding something positive rather than taking away, you know? Yeah. But positivity gives them a place to sort of rest. It gives them a thing to build from. Right. Yeah.
00:13:55
Speaker
Exactly. And, you know, if that's a basic land with a gag on it, if that's, you know, the best I can do then that's, I mean, I will do that and I will do that a million times over if I have to. One of my favorite artists in my medium of theater is, you know,
00:14:12
Speaker
Charlie Chaplin is who I've learned a lot of life lessons from and he talks about, this is one of my favorite stories about him, but he talks about somebody asking him about the tired slipping on a banana peel gag and he's like, how do you still make that funny? How do you make somebody slipping on a banana peel funny? And he's like, well, you can't just by itself. But what you can show is that person almost slipping on the banana peel
00:14:38
Speaker
and instead avoiding it and stepping into an open manhole and you know it's it's that whole thing of like constantly though you're you slip you fall you pick yourself back up you keep doing it over and over again and then finally when you overcome that hurdle
00:14:53
Speaker
there's gonna be another hurdle you're gonna fall down a manhole but then you're gonna climb out of that and you're gonna figure it out and it's all ridiculous and I mean you know that's it's kind of it's great to hear that you have taken those things and rebounded from that and used and really I mean use that to fuel your work that's that's another thing too is we talk a lot about how I mean how
00:15:19
Speaker
You can have, Hobbes has said many times, you can have emotions that are destructive. You can have, you know, sort of moments in your life that can be constructive or destructive. There aren't positive or negative emotions. It's how you use them, how you interpret them, and how you put them into your life or let them go. And it sounds like a lot of what you did is
00:15:43
Speaker
put it back in.
00:15:58
Speaker
received in many different ways, I would say, from extreme hatred to, I mean, it's just fear of the unknown, the idea that the naming, I mean, Titus, I love mentioning the fact that fest does not necessarily mean the same thing to him as it might to us that think festival. And with the nature of, we've talked about this before, we, social media especially tends to breed extreme viewpoints and
00:16:24
Speaker
So, but the overall concept behind this is something that we've talked about on the show way back in our GP episode is that GPs for us especially, we want to see morph. We want to see less emphasis on the main event and more emphasis on the community.
00:16:43
Speaker
And we've seen that already with as much as people would like to harp on the fact that main event attendance is down, side event attendance is actually up and through the roof and side events are being run.
00:16:56
Speaker
nonstop while you're at an event. We recorded at GP Minneapolis and one of the hardest things we had was overhead announcements of rounds starting and events starting because there were so many side events firing the entire time. And I think for a long time it's, well not for a long time, the last year or two it has been the fact that Wizards, Channel Fireball, all of them have recognized that side events and other things going on at GPs are actually probably the business model that they want to run to. Now
00:17:27
Speaker
To date, what that has meant, though, is the part of the communities that have made this possible have been largely fan-driven or self-driven by, say, the artist who are responsible to get themselves there, to even pay for booths, which is very different than what we know of as the convention model where
00:17:47
Speaker
artists are paid to be there. You are special honored guests. Certain cosplayers may be, I mean we had this with Sprankles in the past where she really came as an honored guest of Wizards for certain events. But the cosplayers that we interviewed, they're responsible. They get themselves there, they do their costuming, they may get some packs, they may get some stuff for walking around the site, but it's really not
00:18:16
Speaker
done. And there's there's there is fear among the community that magic fest is kind of that idea of I said yesterday, slapping lipstick on a pig. It's a new name, but without real changes. And I was hoping Titus that you could talk about could you you've mentioned kind of reaching out and trying to get this change for artists what the experience is like for you right now to go to an event. All right, well, first off, I'm firmly right in the
00:18:44
Speaker
lipstick on a pig camp. The idea of Magic Fest right now has not been defined at all.
Challenges for Artists at Events
00:18:51
Speaker
The idea what people think and hope it'll be, I'm totally on board. I love that. And if that means keeping the name, then fine, keep the name. The issue right now is that you're trying to consolidate two things which are not compatible at all. GPs are about competitive magic.
00:19:11
Speaker
The Magic Fest is about casual magic, right? There is no, the gap between them is simply too great. Either a game is about competitiveness and about tiny margins and making money, or it is about a celebration. There is no competitive Dungeons and Dragons, right? There is no competitive Comic Con. It simply doesn't matter. So I think what you're fighting against is
00:19:41
Speaker
On the one hand, a push to make magic as a game, a scene where there are serious competitors fighting for prizes because that's interesting to watch. First is a place where people come together, hang out, celebrate their hobby and the planes and the stories that they like and the artists and cosplay that goes along with it. The two are so far apart that when they say magic fest, I have no idea what they mean. If it's a Comic Con, then what room is there for competitive magic
00:20:11
Speaker
to be there at all. Either it's a celebration or not, and trying to smush the two together requires a really good plan of how you're going to do it. How are you going to celebrate these people coming there? Right now, they've provided us with no answers whatsoever.
00:20:30
Speaker
which is making me highly skeptical. Like, am I for the idea of turning it more into the Comic Con model? Absolutely. Because right now, we have to sign up on a schedule. So we get a schedule from Channel Fireball. And I know that not every artist receives this invite. So some artists, they deem not cool enough to get an invite to the GP scene to begin with, which is probably more of a good thing than a bad thing, because you don't want to show up to a GP where nobody knows who you are.
00:20:58
Speaker
it does leave you with a little bit of a bad taste in your mouth. So we sign up for that and then we get told we can go to X or Y GP and whether or not we get sponsorship and sponsorship used to mean a whole bunch of things and now the only thing that it means is that you get your hotel paid for. And they will say, look, you can go to this other GP if you want, but you have to give up your sponsorship for this GP that you signed up for. And
00:21:23
Speaker
The problem is we're just seen as vendors. We are seen as people who go there to make money and we're not. We go there to make money because we have to spend so much money to go there in the first place. So it's a vicious cycle.
00:21:38
Speaker
People say that, I mean, now it's a norm that we charge for signatures and we didn't. So why are you charging for signatures? Because we have to pay for our flight and sometimes our hotel, definitely all of the merchandising and sometimes a booth to go along with it. I was at a GP where they ran out of water. They brought me a bottle of water and said, this is the last bottle of water that we have for you. If it's empty, just go to the bathroom and fill it back up.
00:22:04
Speaker
And now they talk about magic fest being a celebration like, all right, cool, show me, show me some changes because I've been pushing for this for such a long time. I had been planning on doing a big celebration for GP Amsterdam last year where, because of my wife and other magic artists, Suzanne.
00:22:24
Speaker
We know a reenactment group, and this was for Ixalan, so they had a bunch of pirate outfits. They had one of those giant walking dinosaurs. We would get the works. We would put sand there, treasures, have them walking around as cosplay, have a giant dinosaur over there, all of that stuff. I had contacted a few friends of mine from Sweden who have a professional film crew. They were going to come out. I had a cosplay photographer friend of mine from London. I was going to fly her out.
00:22:50
Speaker
And it was going to cost me an absolute fortune. But I was like, I don't really care because I want to show them how it's done right. Talk is cheap. I'm done with that. Just show me the stuff. Don't talk about it. Show me the stuff. And I got no response from them whatsoever, whether I either could do it, could not do it. It was a little tentative. I asked for a bigger spot to do it. And the whole thing was such a mess where I for.
00:23:16
Speaker
I don't know, seven months was trying to plan this and I got nothing back. And in the end, I canceled GP Amsterdam and went on a early honeymoon with my wife. I thought, you know what, nevermind, this is ridiculous.
00:23:30
Speaker
I'm trying to make all of this stuff happen, and it's just not working out. So every time somebody says to me, oh yeah, we're reinvesting this into the artist, show me. We have these great plans. Don't tell me, show me the plans. Because as long as you're not showing me this, all I can see is me spending 1,500 bucks traveling for four or five days. And I'm not even calculating the cost of not being able to work, right? Because we have a day rate, and I'm losing Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday.
00:23:58
Speaker
if I'm being, you know, or, and Friday, if I'm saying that I'm not working in the weekend, which I shouldn't, but am. So I'll, I'll give them as a freebie. So I'm losing three days worth of work. I pay 1500 bucks at the beginning, um, you know, for merchandise and all that other stuff. And then they have no water for me.
00:24:16
Speaker
and I sit there for 10 hours a day. And I have to be friendly to every single person who comes to my booth because if you're not friendly one time, you'll be none of the asshole who was rude to a person. And I don't want to be rude to people. I want to make sure that every single person who comes to my booth has a good time.
00:24:31
Speaker
You know, because I know what that means. I was at the other side of the booth before as well. And when I go to other artists that I haven't seen before, I'm friends with and I like their art, I want to make sure that they have a good time too. But you are stuck with all this baggage that you bring with you and you're trying to have a good time. And now here comes this announcement saying we're going to make everything better, but there's no details on how. And then they expect me to be positive. You know, I'm all for being the voice of positivity and I'll fight for it every time.
00:24:58
Speaker
But I'm just so done with talk. Just show me. It's been four years. Right. It's the action piece. And that's one of the things I think that I've been concerned about. That's been my thing is that this announcement is I want to be hopeful because I've seen a shift for when I've gone to GPs, but it's also been largely fan driven for those aspects.
00:25:24
Speaker
Right. So when we did GP Minneapolis, we had, you know, barbecue at my house. We organized the cube event offsite at an art gallery. We, you know, set up recordings. We did all this planning from us, you know, and the class players chose to come, a lot of them, because it was close and they're friends and they came.
00:25:44
Speaker
So we've seen that it can work. And so to me, part of me heard the announcement, I'm excited. And then as that kind of wore off, and we've had a lot of discussions about this because I think there has been a lot of negativity in our community lately, and it seemed like just one more thing.
Community Efforts vs Corporate Support
00:26:02
Speaker
I want to know the plan. Does this mean that we are going to have a separate room
00:26:10
Speaker
for panels and artists I mean Do we have the main hall where we have the the main event and we have side events because that is I understand their business that's Side events are going to make them money their high profit margin and they do fire and I think there is a place to have that outside of say the the really the GP because the GP to me is becoming less and less
00:26:36
Speaker
reasonable prices have gone up. The ability to cash and make prizes. I mean, I've made one day too and I knew I had no chance at prizes and I played magic for 10 hours. I might as well just grind a bunch of side events and get some packs. So can we do that? If we do though, we have to have a separate space. So I'm thinking that when we were in GP Minneapolis, there was the hall next to the one that we were in. If that hall was specific to
00:27:05
Speaker
artists and cosplayers and casual play this can work but like you said it needs to be we need to know the plan we need to know that this is not just a rebrand name
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, even thinking back to when we were on site at GP Minneapolis, just listening to some of the cosplayers saying, you know, Turbo Town, where you had a lot of the cosplayers posting up to play, you know, a round of modern with somebody who wanted to play or a commander pod or whatever, you know, that was not there was not even really a sign. There wasn't really a lot there to say, like, hey, come on over and play casual like we're here to do things. But, you know, this is just casual zone.
00:27:50
Speaker
Like, you know, there is, I think there is a huge part of
00:27:59
Speaker
Uh, the, the casual or non-competitive part of the magic community that, you know, doesn't feel as included with some things. And so it would be nice to believe that this means that this means those people are going to be brought in roped in even, even harder and brought into the tight embrace of what a GP can be. But we don't know yet. We really, we have no idea, like you're saying.
00:28:22
Speaker
I've pitched ideas where you could play against an artist with a challenger deck. Like, you wouldn't bring your own deck, you'd have a challenger deck, and if you win, you get a signed card.
00:28:31
Speaker
You know, you could do the same thing. Play against somebody who cosplays as Nissa, get a signed copy of Nissa, you know, all that stuff. It's so easy. And what they do instead is they set up their own booth where they sell their own prints and their own stuff via Ultra Pro, where they have a play mat with my artwork on it that they can send for $10 because they bought 20,000 of them. Or you could go to the artist booth where you buy mine for 45.
00:29:16
Speaker
Right.
00:29:16
Speaker
There are a million cool ideas. I pitched to them the Spouse House, where you
Brand Investments vs Immediate Profits
00:29:22
Speaker
have a dedicated area where spouses of people who are there and kids get to play Magic, get to introduce the game in a completely different way, where the kid sees a planeswalker, you know, this person, you want to take a picture, you want to play a game, you want to have a coffee, this is where you sit and you relax, you want to get to know about Magic, okay, that's here. You don't want to get to know about Magic, fine, we'll have some board games, we'll have other stuff for you to do, you know, we'll just keep you
00:29:22
Speaker
Right.
00:29:45
Speaker
in the area because that's what make people feel welcome. You walk into a GP Amonkhet, let's have a giant sand sculpture pyramid there. That's cool. But a literal sandbox for the kids. I mean, there's a million ideas. But the problem is those cost money. Those are intangible as in you can't put the metric on it and how much money it brings back. So it's just a cost. And it's about the GP aspect anyway, which is the main event. So
00:30:13
Speaker
And this is what I'm talking about. They have not talked about the fact on how they're going to consolidate the casual aspect of magic with the competitive part of magic. Creating that split is great. That was already there, though. You just gave it a name. Right. And I'm glad you wanted to come on and give us that perspective, too. Because from my standpoint, there's a lot of implications that I kind of wasn't seeing. And based on people's reactions, I knew I wasn't seeing them.
00:30:43
Speaker
My first reaction was that they're just giving a name to something that already existed, which I thought was a good step. I know people who've been playing Magic for many, many years who didn't know you can just walk into the floor. They thought that the GP main event cost was the cost to enter the GP because we used the same name for both things. So I liked that differentiation, but there is a lot more going on there.
00:31:24
Speaker
I mean, magic and wizards and Hasbro are corporations that function in a capitalist society.
Magic's Untapped Brand Potential
00:31:33
Speaker
They have to operate in a capitalist system, and like you're saying, Titus, those things that provide the flavor, the environment, the things that intangibly keep people, you know, for lack of a better term, in the store,
00:31:36
Speaker
I'm glad to get that perspective.
00:31:45
Speaker
Can't really be quantified yet or at least the way that Wizards is looking at things or Hasbro is looking at things right now cannot be quantified yet But we know we know at least You know from stories from personal experiences that it would engage us that much more and by by you know association would probably bring people in new customers who
00:32:10
Speaker
would want to purchase more, would want to purchase their first deck or their first card or their first piece of art. But it's bigger than that as well. I've been saying it for years that magic is the best unknown brand in the world. Everybody knows magic. Nobody knows what it actually is or what it's about or what the characters are in it. And that point of brand awareness and brand building has never gotten enough attention from them.
00:32:35
Speaker
You say, yeah, it costs so much money building that up. Yes, it does. And we don't want everybody, we don't know how many people are going to play the game. Like it's irrelevant. The game, the card game is not your product. Your brand is the product. You want to sell t-shirts. You want to sell bobbleheads. You want to sell everything, but the actual cards. Cause you're not making a profit off a cardboard and you're not going to make profit off a cardboard much longer. Where are you going to make profit off of?
00:33:01
Speaker
is your brand, right? So what they needed to do 10 years ago is invest more into GPs as a venue for creating brand awareness, right? So if they're doing that now with Magic Fest, that's perfect, but they don't half-ass it. Make sure that a Magic Fest is an actual fest. Spend money, and I'm skeptical because it's Channel Fireball running it.
00:33:24
Speaker
They have a completely different, they're not tied to magic's brand identity, right? They're it's not their responsibility. So if channel fireball would run the main event and wizards would organize the magic fest part of it, then you get my attention. Cause then I see a possibility for them to spend a lot of money on it. Now what I see is the cheapest bidder getting permission to run the events for profit. Right. That's not, that's not what we're looking for.
00:33:50
Speaker
Right. It's the bottom line of the bottom line again. Right. I will say that I used to work at Comic Con in San Diego and one of the things that we had was a magic room. And part of that was we had booth set up outside where we were teaching all comers because we were at an event that was people that were interested in other
00:34:10
Speaker
IPs and other things to do with nerd them and they would come and we would have the starter decks and we would teach people how to play and sit there and teach them and then there was a room right behind us with Events going on and you could buy a starter deck and there was a league going on where you've just played starter decks against other people with starter decks and That was you know, that was
00:34:32
Speaker
Ten years ago. I mean that was all right. I mean so it's I Don't want to look at a huge comic-con and Gen Con have gotten I mean honestly that that willingness to embrace The like you're saying tight as the brand investment that that baseline Foundation has really made them into icons I'll say this
00:34:58
Speaker
15 years ago when you talked about superheroes you thought about nerds sitting in their basement reading comics. Now t-shirts are everywhere. When you talk about magic the gathering you think about nerds who smell bad because the one image went viral on reddit and that is it. You're not going to buy an 800 statue because you're the association is so bad. You know superhero and comics did it. Magic can do it too but they have to invest in it. They had to invest in this a long time ago but
00:35:25
Speaker
You know, we're here now so we might as well do it now, but you can't talk about it. You
Conclusion and Contact Info
00:35:29
Speaker
have to do it. Yeah So I think our message here is being Nike Give us action. Just do it That's our show
00:35:49
Speaker
The show can be found on Twitter at goblinlurepod, or you can email us any questions, comments, or concerns at goblinlurepodcast at gmail.com. Titus Lunder can be found at Titus Lunder. That's L-U-N-T-E-R. Joel 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.
00:36:18
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.
00:36:47
Speaker
Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.