1/9/14 Episode 191: World Building (Special guest Matt Cavotta)

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater and Matt Cavotta

I’m pulling out of Matt’s driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work. And, Matt Cavotta’s with us!

MC: Good times.

MR: So I thought I would see less of you. But we’re getting more Matt podcasts.

MC: Feast or famine.

MR: Okay. So today I thought we’d talk about another creative topic, something the creative team does, since in your distant past you were once a member of the creative team. What we called “world building.” Which is, Magic does this crazy, crazy thing. Where every year, we make a brand-new world from scratch. And we’re signing up to do two brand-new worlds from scratch. So I wanted to talk about, you and I have both been involved in… I mean, we’re not in charge of the process, but both of us have witnessed the process of what exactly do we do to come up with a brand new world you’ve never seen before?

MC: Well, from again my distant vantage point at this part of the process, it starts out with a very, very big and broad decision of, we need to make a new set that focuses on this type of card. Or this type of mechanic. Or we want to do another multicolor set. And from that could spawn an idea about a world that could house that structure.

MR: Yeah, I mean I think the key to building worlds is, usually a little bit of work is done on the set before the creative world’s completely defined. That’s not always true, depending on the world and stuff. But usually we do a little bit of design work before the world starts.

MC: For example, we knew we were doing a multicolor set before we attached the concept of guilds to Ravnica. 

MR: Correct. So what happened there, for people that don’t know the story, is we had penciled in to do another multicolor set. And the previous multicolor block had been Invasion. And Invasion really said, “Play lots of colors. Play four or five colors.” So I was trying to make the most not-Invasion multicolor block I could. So I came up with the idea of, well what if I make you play two colors? And not just ally two colors, but both the enemy and the ally. So any two colors you want, they’re all on equal footing, which was kind of a novel idea at the time. [MC: Right.] But we’re going to push you to play two, and the idea was just two colors. Obviously in draft some people started playing more than two. But so I went to Brady Dommermuth, who was the head of the creative team at the time, and I pitched my idea. I said, okay, it’s a world in which it’s two-color focused, they’re all on equal footing. And the great story is, Brady was like working out on his treadmill at home or something, and it just hit him the idea of guilds.

MC: He slipped on the toilet and hit his head, and that’s when he thought of flux capacitors.

MR: Right. So he came up with the idea of guilds, and then from the idea of guilds he said, “Oh, a city. It would need to take place in a city.” So he got the idea of a city world, city plane from the idea of the guilds. And then, I mean he came and talked to me about it, I said, “Oh, that sounds perfect,” and then I re-adapted what I was doing to have more of a guild focus. And that’s when we came up with the 4-3-3 thing. [MC: Right.] MR: But we’re not talking about design today. Today is world building. So what does he do at that point? So he has an idea for a city world that has these guilds in it.

MC: Well, what I remember, because I was involved in the world building process for the first go-round with Ravnica, is that we started working on the personalities of the individual guilds. [MR: Yeah.] At that point. The concept of a city world was mostly going to be realized in the concept art push.

MR: Mmm-hmm. So explain to people, what is the concept art push? Okay.

MC: Let’s get to that in a minute. [MR: Okay.] First, before we even got the artists working on concept art, we had to have some basis of the challenges they would be attempting to solve. So we had to have at last a baseline personality for each of the guilds. So at that time, Brady and Brandon Bozzi and I each set about to writing up whatever brain barf we could come up with on each of the individual guilds. Until we had enough meat to have the art director sic the artists on all the related concepts during the concept art push. Which is usually… I feel like we talked about this in one of our previous (???). [NLH—Not transcribed.]

MR: We did talk a little bit. But we can go into a little more detail than we did last time.

MC: It’s like a three- to four-week process where a handful of artists are brought in. Almost always those artists are existing Magic artists, but I think there are a few cases of artists being brought in because their particular experience and style was suited thematically to whatever that world was doing. For example, when we were doing Zendikar, a new artist was brought in who hadn’t done cards up to that point. His name was Vincent Proce. And the art director saw something in his style that was particularly good for the rough and tumble world of Zendikar.

MR: So some of what people don’t understand is that not every artist is good at conceptual art. Right? Maybe talk a little bit about what exactly that skill is.

MC: So some artists are excellent craftsmen. And if you tell them, “Show me a scene with two warrior battling, and each one has a giant axe,” or whatever, [MR: Mmm-hmm.] They will be able to assume the role of the cinematographer and come up with the right angle and the right lighting. And then they have the skill to expertly render that scene. But if you were to say to that same artist, “Ehh, we just need a battle between two kinds of warriors that we’ve never seen before, like have at it,” that person might just be paralyzed because they don’t feel comfortable solving the “What is it?” problem as much as the “What does it look like?” problem. [MR: Mmm-hmm.] So there are some artists who thrive in that blank canvas territory. The couple names that come to my mind are Steve Prescott and Wayne Reynolds. Both of those guys, when they come in for concept pushes, they will produce sixty percent of the art on the wall. They just, they’re prolific. And any time their pencil touches the paper, something like meaty and usable comes out. I’ve been involved in concept pushes, and I know how hard it is to come up with whole cloth new ideas. And I am blown away every time I see what those two guys do.

MR: So the key to the process is, you get artists in. There’s been some work ahead of time. I’ve talked before how currently the creative team is split into two separate teams. There is the story team, and there’s the art team. Usually what happens is, the story team preps, like writes about what’s going on, and what are the civilizations like. [MC: Right.] Like, enough of a sense of the world that when the artists show up, that there’s something to tell them. Right? [MC: Yeah.] You have to know something, in order to build the world, you have to have some idea. I know that Ravnica was built around the guilds and a sense of the city feel. I know Zendikar was trying to be an adventure world. [MC: Yeah.] There’s always some germ of an idea that they can build around. And then, what happens is, they come in, and Jeremy—Jeremy’s the art director, Jeremy Jarvis. And he’ll say, “Here’s what we’re looking for,” and give them his material. [MC: Right.] And then they just go to town. They draw whatever they can come up with. And then at the end of each day I think, he looks at what’s been produced and sort of says, “I like this, this is maybe not the direction we want.” [MC: Right.] Like he guides them. Right?

MC: So I’m going to digress for a minute and talk about what life is like as a young artist.

MR: Okay. Life as a young artist.

MC: When I was in art college, I had this idiotic thought that whatever I drew, or whatever I was thinking of, that was a great idea. That is so, so wrong. And I imagine that there are people out there who might think that when these concept artists come to town and they start drawing, that whatever they draw, we use. That is not the case. There is so much material on the cutting room floor. And it doesn’t even mean that those things are bad. It just means that they are on the fringes or outside of the realm of what the intended goal was. Hundreds. At least hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings for each concept push. And it gets whittled down to the tightest and rightest, I don't know, hundred or so pictures.

MR: So here’s one of the cool… this is my experience. I have never, I’m always a bit afar from the process. So let me explain how I experience the process. Which is, there’s a wall near R&D. Which whenever there’s the concepting. They just start putting things up on this wall. And just you’ll walk by, there’s all these pictures, and all this different stuff going on. And you’re like, “Ooh, that looks cool. And that looks cool.” And every day they’re like taking things down and putting things up. [MC: Yep.] And little by little they start clumping things together and labeling things. And you can slowly sort of see it taking shape.

MC: Yep. It’s really cool to see, like on the first couple days there will be a bunch of drawings. In all sorts of different directions. And there will be one picture somewhere. Someone will hit on a concept, whether it’s a theme for costuming or a particular look for a kind of goblin race, or something. That the next day, when you get there, there will be all these other similar drawings orbiting around that one. [MC: Yeah.] And the good ideas tend to have a gravity of their own. And they end up forming whole themes or in some cases, unplanned themes. A great example is when we were doing the concept push for Zendikar, there was very little prewriting given to the artists other than, “Lands are going to matter here.” And Mark Tedin and Vincent and I were sort of doodling around, trying to find an answer for something, anything, and Tedin drew what we now know of as the hedrons. [MR: Yes.] MC: The eight-sided like diamond-shaped things. We were so excited that there was anything, anything that seemed cool, that we started putting it in everything we did. We’re like, “You need a tree? How about I stick that thing in a tree? You need a guy? I’m going to put that thing on the guy’s club.” Like, it was everywhere. And it ended up becoming an important part of both Zendikar and other worlds. It’s (???) how organically that happened.

MR: Yeah, let me explain something so people understand this. The Eldrazi did not exist as a story point when they started creating it. When they made the hedrons, they were just cool-looking hedrons. And then the story people said, “These hedrons look awesome! Why are there hedrons?” And so they started having to figure this thing out. And that from that, they came upon the idea of these creatures, these ancient creatures trapped in the world. And that one of the reasons the world was so crazy was it’s reacting to this. And like originally, the plan for Zendikar was, there was going to be a large set and a  small set, so Zendikar and Worldwake, and then what you guys all know as Rise of the Eldrazi was going to be set in a completely different world. Not even set in Zendikar. And then once the creative team came up with this idea of the Eldrazi trapped within, they were like, “Oh, instead of going to a new world, what if we just released the Eldrazi? That’s the third set?” [MC: Right.] And so like these little hedron doodles ended up being like a major Magic story point.

MC: Yes. Most of the time, the stuff that we see developed on cards is intentional. It’s absolutely intentional. But every once in a while, you do get something that is the random brainchild of one of the concept artists that ends up gaining a little fandom of its own.

MR: So the other thing that happens is, not only are they trying to build a world, but… usually Jeremy, whoever the art director for the project is, is also giving them assignments. For example, sometimes, like I know in Innistrad, we knew we wanted werewolves. So like, one of the things was, okay. We knew there were werewolves, we knew there were vampires, we knew there were zombies. We knew there were spirits and humans. We knew that. But it’s like, oh, well we wanted zombies in both black and blue, but we wanted them to look different. And so we had come across the idea of, well, maybe black zombies are necromantic, zombies raised from the dead, where blue might be more Frankenstein, like science-made zombies. But that’s all we had. And so we said, “Okay.” And then during the creative push, like the skaabs, which were the Frankensteiny ones, they went out and figured out how to make that look. And we knew we needed the werewolves to have a distinctive look that matched the world, but felt like Magic’s take. Let’s talk about that for a second. The idea of Magic’s take on blank.

MC: Right. Well, that’s super important during world building. Not only just to set the Magic take apart from the concept that you’re used to seeing outside of Magic, but Magic has to leave space for itself to reiterate on that concept, so that we can make another kind of zombie the next time we go to the world we haven’t invented yet. And then another kind of zombie on the world after that. And we can’t go blindly into using up all the good concepts all at once. In a lot of cases we have to use a painful amount of restraint to say, “That is so awesome! But we’re not going to use it yet.”

MR: The other thing that happens is, they always sort of ask us what our needs are. Because for example, one of the things about making a Magic world which is quirky, is—and it’s not literal always, but there is a Plains and an Island [MC: Yes.] And a Mountain and a Swamp and a Forest on every world. Something that at least evokes each of the five colors. It might not literally be those five things. But that sense of ecosystem really forces Magic to go to places that other worlds might not do.

MC: Well, there’s also a very difficult construct, and that is, not only do you have to have those five kinds of land, those five colors, but you have to have a medium-sized flier in that color. No matter what. And like let’s say you have a concept for a world where everything’s tiny. Well, guess what? You can’t do that. [MR: Correct.] You just can’t do it. You can’t support a whole….

MR: Right. It’s why we never…

MC: …set without beefy creatures.

MR: Why we never visit Segovia.

MC: Yes.

MR: So we make a thing called a “creature grid.” Creative team makes what’s called a “creature grid.” So what a creature grid is is, all the colors and all the sizes and then flying or not. So it’s sort of like, for each color, you need a small flier, a small non-flier, medium flier, medium non-flier, large flier, large non-flier. [MC: Right.] Now, there’s some holes sometimes. Like, green large flier usually isn’t necessary, so they don’t have to worry about that. But part of doing the creative thing is saying, “Okay. Well, what are in these spaces?” And sometimes, when the artists come in, it’s like, “Okay guys, we need to figure out what the big white flying thing is in this world.” [MC: Right.] Do you have any ideas?

MC: Right. And that gets really challenging when you think about, okay, we’re in a city world. What is the giant green land creature? Well, what’s it doing in the city? [MR: Yeah.] What is that for? So that takes some real creative thinking. If there’s any notion that I would want people to know about the world-building process, it’s that it is not like a whimsical journey through random ideas. There is a lot of rigor and requirement to it that… it is an equal balance of creativity and discipline, really.

MR: And the thing to remember is, the thing that gets created out of this process is what we call a world guide. Which is samples of the different… here are the different races on the world, and the costuming, and the weapons, and the location, and [MC: Right.] now once that is done, there is still… our freelance artists have some freedom to extrapolate from what the world guide is doing. [MC: Yes.] And so some of the things, one of the neat things sometimes is we make a world guide, and then other artists who were never even in the building during that, because they see what was done, like could sort make new things but that fit the tone of the world.

MC: In general, the material that’s put into the world guide is not the corner cases. It’s the staple creatures and races and themes that will play out a number of times on cards illustrated by other people. And that those fringe elements, sometimes really interesting and really compelling, those don’t end up getting hooked into the world building or the world guide. Those spring forth from the material at the heart of that, like the theme or the general look and feel that’s established in the world guide.

MR: And sometimes, one of the things that happens is, the design team will look through the world guide and go, “What’s that? We’ve got to make a card for that! That looks awesome.” [MC: Sure.] And we’ll do that. But like I said, the story I always tell is, so Zendikar comes out. And then, I don't know, six months later maybe, Avatar the movie came out. [MC: Yeah.] And I mean obviously, neither had anything to do with the other. But there were a lot of similarities. Zendikar had the floating mountains and stuff. And then we found out that the people who worked on Pandora, which is the world of Avatar, spent five years on it. And that the fact that our creative team does something of that quality every year... [MC: Yeah.] Is quite amazing.

MC: It is. It is. Pretty cool.

MR: And now we’ve signed up and said, “Eh, one a year? Let’s try two a year.” Let me talk for a second about something very important. So sometimes we go back to places. And I think people feel like, “Oh, do they take the year off? We’re going back someplace.” And I’m like, “No, no no, not at all.” In fact, when you go back, I mean, talk a little bit about like when you revisit something. What has to get done?

MC: Well, first of all, no one is perfect. And the first time you do something, in realizing that whole creative effort through start to finish, you might say, “X, Y and Z are working really well. But A, B and C, ehh, not so much.” But when you revisit, you can tighten up A, B and C, or you can remove them and double down on X, Y and Z.

MR: So Ravnica’s a really good example. When we went back to Ravnica. The creative team was happy with most of the guilds. [MC: Right.] But a few of the guilds, I mean for different reasons, didn’t quite nail what they wanted. And so I know when we went back, they’re like, “Here’s the guilds we really want to focus on,” because they feel like they really needed a little more love. That we didn’t quite nail these ones last time. [MC: Right.] And for different reasons. One of the things—or here’s something that I didn’t bring up before. Another problem Magic has is, you are in between sets. In between worlds. So whatever the previous world did, you kind of bend to get away from it. And so I know for example, Simic had this problem in the original Ravnica, which is the set before Ravnica was Kamigawa. And Kamigawa had a lot of animal hybrid-type things. Well, the Simic, they love animal hybrid-type things! But because we had just done that in so much volume, they pushed Simic a different direction.

MC: Jelly bubbles.

MR: Yes. And then when we came back, we’re like, you know what? What just… now that we’re not next to Kamigawa, let’s get Simic more into the animal hybrid things. Which is what Simic really wanted to be. [MC: Right. Right.] And the other example of this is, Innistrad followed Scars of Mirrodin. Innistrad followed Scars of Mirrodin. Well, the Phyrexians are very much horror-like. So we were going from something that was very much horror-inspired to something else that was horror-inspired. That’s a tricky word to say correctly. So what we decided was, we had to carve it up. So what we did was, the creative team made the choice that New Phyrexia was more science-fictiony in its horror. And that Innistrad was more Gothic in its horror. And so to pull them apart, so even when they both had a horror quality to them, they felt and looked different.

MC: Right. Right. If you think about the second swing at Ravnica or Mirrodin, for example, it’s almost like you get to imagine what the creative team would have been able to accomplish if they had two years to do the project instead of one. [MR: Yeah.] But like you said, the Pandora people had five. [MR: Yes. Yeah.] So how tight and awesome would things get if you have more time?

MR: I’ve talked to the creative team about this. I mean, although they’re doing a lot of crazy work, one of the things that’s fun for the creative team, and one where I have a lot of fun in design too is, Magic lets you constantly do different things. And so I don't know if five years in or some point you’re like, “I’m sick of drawing this plant!”

MC: Yes. You go insane. You’d start having nightmares about the plant.

MR: I mean, obviously that world was very, very realized. But I mean, the thing I like about Magic is, we’re constantly sort of I call it “pushing the pendulum.” That it’s really neat that one year, we’re in adventure world. The next year, we’re back on Mirrodin and it’s these creepy Phyrexians. And the next year we’re on Gothic horror. And the next year we’re in Greek-inspired. And that we’re constantly changing things around. And that one of the things that’s interesting, we didn’t even get to this is, the idea of inspiration. [MC: Yep.] That every year, sometimes it’s more direct than others, but no matter what we do, there always is some real-world inspiration to draw from. Ravnica for example, what, Eastern Europe?

MC: Yeah. Prague. The model.

MR: So one of the things that gets done, I don’t think people really think about this, is there’s research done. I know that Jeremy and his team will like go through magazines and pull pictures, and like when the artists come up, they’ll have slideshows of, here’s images that are real-world images that are a jumping off point. [MC: Yeah.]  Something you can think about.

MC: Well, there are at least two reasons for that. One is that having inspiration will put a creative ship in the water and moving. Whereas having nothing leaves you at the beach wondering what you’re supposed to do next. But the other thing is that when you start with something that is a recognizable beginning, that’s the heart of resonant concept. And what Magic has been trying to do more of lately is iterate on resonant concepts, things that people know and love and already have a sort of a geek appreciation for, rather than inventing whole cloth some weird esoteric thing. Sometimes that’s fun. But for the most part, we have been reaping the rewards of seeing our creative that’s based upon a broad concept like Gothic horror or Greek mythology, and people really, really love that.

MR: And also Khans, because that’s the current set. As an example. So what we do with Khans of Tarkir was, there were five factions. And each faction had a different real-world influence. And the thing that’s important is, it wasn’t that they were trying to recreate the exact versions of them, but they just needed something that was a jumping-off point. [MC: Yeah.] MR: And one of the reasons that the factions I think really work is, they feel very different. That when you look at the Temur and compare them to the Jeskai, they’re really different. They’re different things. But they all came from a similar geographic sort of… you know. [MC: Sure.] That there was something that kind of linked them together so they felt connected. [MC: Right.] I think that was important.

MC: Yeah. It’s almost like as a fan, you decide do you like Conan movies more, or do you like kung fu movies more? And that will tell you which of these is going to resonate with you more.

MR: And one of the things that we do, obviously we’re almost out of time here, we just got to work. No traffic today. One of the things that I notice as we move forward is that definitely the creative is starting to take more and more the lead in the world building, meaning it used to be, we’re doing a set all about gold. What’s that going to be? [MC: Right.] And now, creative’s coming to us and we’re working much earlier to say, “Here is a concept we’re playing around with,” and we’re like, “Okay, well here’s our themes.” And we are marrying much, much earlier what those things are. [MC: Yeah.] And that the worlds are becoming more and more realized, because we have ingrained the creative process even earlier into what we’re doing. We now have what we call “exploratory design,” which is super early, and so we’ll actually talk with the creative team like before design even begins, and it is very, very fun to watch sort of ideas. Although it’s funny, because a lot of times people will pitch things early, and until you can see them they sound crazy sometimes. [MC: Yes, yes.] Like, Jeremy will say, “I see such-and-such,” and you’re like, “What?” And he’s like, (???) show you later” Until you see it you can’t get it. But anyway, we are now here at work, so Matt, thank you very much for joining me. I hope you guys learned a bit today about… I don't know, any final thoughts on world-building? Any final takeaways?

MC:  No.

MR: No. The thing I will say is that I believe that if you’ve never really taken the time to do this, and hopefully you have, just take one of the books of all the cards, or go on Gatherer or something, and just take time to look at the art. Just look at sort of the background, and like look at the world. It’s amazing when you see all the stuff that’s going on, that sometimes when you play, and you don’t take the moment to stop and focus, you don’t see some of the detail. And the amount of detail is really amazing. That the world building that the creative team does is truly, truly remarkable. And I think one of the big assets the game has is that we create really interesting, amazing worlds. I think the game’s a great game. But the fact that we layer this great game on top of this amazing creative, I think is one of Magic’s greatest strengths. [MC: Yep.] So anyway, I have now parked my car. So we all know what that means. It means it’s time for me to end my drive to work. So I’m off, and Matt and I will be making Magic. And I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.