MTG

For the second of my three interviews during my time at PAX, I sat down with Head Designer Mark Rosewater! Beneath the cut, we talk Tumblr and the Blogatog experience, just what makes Kaladesh so special to the game as a whole, family life, the creative process, and how…being a horse veterinarian is like being a game designer?

Ten years ago today, I married my best friend. It was a fantastic day. 

For those of you considering getting married someday, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to brag just a little about something my wife and I decided when planning our wedding that I think was rather brilliant. 

We scheduled our marriage ceremony and our wedding reception three hours apart. 

I honestly can’t remember how we got this idea, but let me tell you why I think it was genius. After the ceremony, we spent about 30-45 minutes with the photographer and family taking wedding photos. THEN WE LEFT. We said goodbye to our family and guests and we went home.

We actually got to spend our first few hours as a married couple just BEING A MARRIED COUPLE. We could focus on each other, talk about how we were feeling, and just enjoy being married without anybody else around. We even had time to take a nap!

Then AFTER we had rested and had our own time together, we went to the reception ready to handle guests and food and photos and dancing and everything else. But for those first few hours, it was just us. And those were the best hours of the entire day.

Now, whether that decision is right for anyone else, I won’t say. I’d never tell someone else how to run their own wedding. (We certainly didn’t let anyone tell us how to run ours!) But I would pass along this one saying that helped my wife and I keep our sanity throughout the whole wedding process:

In the first of my three exclusive interviews with Wizards of the Coast employees, I sit down with Principle Designer for Worlds and IP (former artist and art director) Jeremy Jarvis! Beneath the cut, get some insight into the life of a creative lead and artist, see an insider perspective on the recent diversity push, and catch some sweet easter eggs and details hidden in the art of certain cards!

Zach: So, can you start by bringing some of the folks at home up to date on your job here at Wizards. You’re no longer the Senior Art Director anymore?

Jeremy: I am not. My current title is “Principle Designer: Worlds and IP” for Magic. So it’s kind of more vision and strategy about how we continue to grow the brand, how we continue to grow the game, what places we want to show, what stories we want to tell, what new characters we want to introduce. It’s a change from “art direct the world guide and commission all of the art”. I’ve actually been backfilled by three exceptionally talented people whose names you will recognize as Cynthia Sheppard, Mark Winters, and Dawn Murin. So two of them are obviously Magic artists and Dawn, if you don’t recognize her name, did an incredible amount of work on 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons. All of those sculpted covers and all the Todd Lockwood updating to Dungeons and Dragons, that was all Dawn. Fantastically talented, so we stole her for Magic. Those are our Art Directors.

Zach: And how did that transition go? What sort of skills and experience translated over from your previous job to this one?

Jeremy: If you rewind all the way back to my previous life as a freelance illustrator, Magic is one of the brands I painted for. If you’re not familiar with my work, check out Rakdos Guild Mage. That’s an okay one. *chuckles* The rest…maybe don’t google. Anyways, I was hired in-house as Lead Concept Artist, so that’s why I moved out to Seattle. I then moved to Art Director, then Senior Art Director, and now to Principal Designer. So that skillset as a freelancer has continuously formed what the job is and how we want Magic to be as a client. That is one of the strengths of having Art Directors who are previously freelancers. They understand what it’s like to be at the beck and call of a client, trying to do a good job every time, what it’s like to get feedback, to need the client to pay you. We try really hard to be a great client for illustrators and we want it to be as fun as possible. Yeah, it’s work, but we want it to be fun work as much as we can possibly effect that for illustrators. The things that I cared about as an illustrator translated to our philosophy around Art Direction. Beyond that, just having very visual people (whether it’s myself or it’s the AD’s) be in charge of the look of world guides…you know, we challenge ourselves and we’re coming from a place of being very familiar with what companies are doing, with what other artists are doing because we work with them and because we work with a lot of the other companies. We’re constantly trying to out-do what everyone else is doing. That’s probably the most direct contribution from my past life to what I do now.

Zach: Alright! Sticking to the topic of your job, what are the biggest challenges of being Principle Designer/a Creative Lead?

Jeremy: Being in a corporation. It can be hard to be a creative in a corporation, and I think Rosewater would tell you the same thing in the way that Design and even Development are creative. We constantly want to push the envelope, to do new things, to do things that no one has seen before. Sometimes it’s super hard to prove that, because it’s something no one has seen before, that it’s going to be successful. You need the organization to trust you. By and large, our track record is so good that when we’re like “We’re gonna do a new thing. I can’t prove to you, I can’t point to a movie like this, I can’t point to a series of fiction like this that’s been successful…but we’re gonna do a new thing, people are gonna love it. Trust me, trust me, trust me.” More times than not, they do trust us. That’s how we get Kaladesh. There’s nothing that looks like Kaladesh! Especially when you hear “Steampunk”, then see Kaladesh. It can be challenging to people. There’s a constant tension there of needing to prove that something is going to be successful when you’re trying to do brand new things for the Magic community.

Zach: Speaking of Kaladesh, Mark Rosewater has often said that he wants to keep Magic firmly planted in the realm of fantasy. He wants to keep it separate from science-fiction. So what’s the line between fantasy and science-fiction in regards to Kaladesh?

Jeremy: The line moves, right? One of the knobs we turn constantly is how high-magic or low-magic a setting is. Innistrad for example is pretty low-magic. People aren’t walking down the streets whipping fireballs at each other. It’s part of the tone of the set, part of that genre that it’s the monsters that are fantastical and not the magic users. Then you look at something like Esper where we introduced colored artifact creatures as a mechanical basis for them and it’s like “Okay, this needs to be meaningful. This needs to be a little more sci-fi than we normally do”. The amount of technology, how high or low-magic a setting is, tonal brightness/darkness; these are all knobs that we turn constantly. Those lines continue to move based on the product’s need or the genre we’re working in. But at the end of the day, to Mark’s point, the back of the card says “Magic” and we can only challenge that so much. *laughter from Jeremy and Zach*

Zach: (After laughter dies down) Of course. So, Magic has been ahead of the curve on representation for a pretty long time but it wasn’t until recently that the public has seen it become a core tenant of how the game is made. What internally prompted this push of public awareness of “this is what we’re doing and this is why”?

Jeremy: There was, and this was not formalized, but there was an old unspoken attitude of “We know who our audience is, we have our God Book studies, we know who the target market is. Just make things for that target market.” We DO NOT believe that. We want to grow the community. We want women to know that they should be playing Magic. We want people of color to know that this game is for them. Basically, if you have the interest to be a Magic player, nothing else matters. We want you to be able to see yourself in the product. We want to tell stories that include you. You can call that marketing if you want, but this was grass-roots. Like Theros was a recommitment of “You know what? No blonde-haired and blue-eyed people. Nowhere here”. Heliod’s the sun god, the arrogant sun god is a thing here. The sun is hot, so people are darker. No Scandinavian looking people. That could be challenging for a Western Fantasy property. You know who goes on the posters of movies, and their hair is blonde and their eyes are blue. Luckily, the organization has supported this thinking and we’re working together to just do more things and try to grow the community into a more diverse, broader community rather than just sitting back an accepting that “oh, the people that want to play Magic are already playing and we know who those people are”. We think there are people out there that should be Magic players and don’t know it yet, and whatever barriers to entry that we can remove for anyone, we want to remove those things. We make a good game. It’s a really fun property. We want people to know that. To me, you have to at least try that approach.

Zach: Thank you for that insight! On a different note, in Shadows over Innistrad block, there’s been some artists that have taken to including classical art references in pieces like the new art for Ride Down or Sigarda’s Aid. Was that a direction that the creative team has taken note of? Was that something that they pushed for from within, or was that all on the artists?

Jeremy: It depends. In those particular cases, it was all on the artists. But in Theros, anyone with the Heroic mechanic, I was asking for them to be portrayed as if they were sculptures, living sculptures. You end up with a lot of contrapposto and those classical feelings. That was the art direction back in Theros, but for Shadows over Innistrad it was all on the artist. They found a fun angle and wanted to approach it that way.

Zach: Oh wow, that’s actually fascinating! I never noticed that about the Theros stuff.

Jeremy: Yeah, it comes through in some places stronger than others, but it’s something that we actively pushed for to try and give it a classical feeling.

Zach: I’m sure all my artist friends were internally *flails arms* AAAAAA! Look what they’ve done!  

*laughter from Jeremy*

Zach: Alright, so for the last question here. People seem to miss that you’ve done a lot of very iconic and prominent artwork for the game yourself. Ad Nauseam was you! Lightning Greaves! Walk the Aeons! Commander players have a lot to thank you for with this iconic artwork in the format! *laughter from Jeremy* What’s your favorite piece that you’ve done and why?

Jeremy: So, I’ve got a couple answers there. A lot of times, I think my ideas were better than my executions were. Ad Nauseam was pretty good for both idea and execution, in my opinion. When that card came to me, because I like to approach cards in weird ways, it was just called “Bring Back One Last Time” and it was like “Jeremy, here’s what the card does. Do something”. That entire gag of the guy who’s rewritten the same sigil over and over again until his hands are gone and he’s inking with his own blood, I pitched that, they accepted it, and I think I painted it pretty well. I think my best executed painting is probably Rakdos Guildmage, but then cards like Sift and Plagiarize both tickle me a lot from the concept. The art description for Sift was “Show a wizard digging through a pile of broken glass and finding a diamond”. I was like, “I am a watercolorist. I will tell you what I am not going to spend 50 years painting, and that’s a diamond against a pile of broken glass”. *laughter from both of us* So I pitched the idea of a guy playing Three-Card Monte with his own head, they went for it. Plagiarize is just off-putting in a way that tickles me. I enjoy it.

Zach: Alright! Well thank you so much for these answers, this lovely insight, this look into the world of creative and the world of a Magic artist.