ENDURANCE MTG FULL ART SERIES

Layer on the logistics of work and the fact that Cartagena and the team had to bear the weight that came with making a new Lord of the Rings product, and it became a hard needle to thread.

And that’s part of what we were doing as we were developing the world.” So getting the assumptions out of the way, and getting to the core of what this means, what this book means, was a process in itself. “It’s easy to assume that you understand Lord of the Rings, when in actuality you are remembering other artists’ depictions. Many of us have directed our own graphics as we read. We will try to learn Lord of the Rings, try to learn the text, and see where it goes from there. But the approach we had was, We will try to learn this world. And it’s easy to say, We’re just gonna evoke everything that’s been done before. “It would have been easy to say, We’re just gonna plaster Magic on top of this. On the other hand, it presented a unique challenge: How does one grow the conversation around Middle-earth without being influenced by such iconic existing media? On one hand, these visualizations gave Cartagena and the team a place to start working from - other sets in Magic have little or no basic lore, so at least the team wasn’t starting from zero. But, at the end of the year, that work was just beginning.Įvery generation has its own adaptation of Tolkien’s novels, from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated film to Peter Jackson’s beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy to the more recent Amazon show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. “You have to become a scholar for a while, just like you’re doing a thesis,” he said. He filled up a bookshelf with tomes, concordances, and maps in order to craft a world that felt true to both Tolkien’s texts and the multi-planar world of Magic. Already a fan of The Lord of the Rings, Cartagena said he spent around a full year studying the original books closely, hoping to become an expert. Instead, they worked directly with the source material - Tolkien’s original texts - and used them to draft unique concept art. In addition to the incredible art, which you can view below, we chatted about how art is made, approaching one of the world’s most iconic fantasy franchises, and how values of diversity informed his hopes for the upcoming set.Īpproaching Lord of the Rings with fresh eyesĬartagena told Polygon his team of artists started very purposefully from scratch and weren’t inspired by any specific film, adaptation, or previous illustrations. Polygon spoke with Cartagena recently in an exclusive interview at MagicCon in Minneapolis. This time around, Cartagena and his team are going all in, and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is coming to Magic as a full product line with hundreds of new cards and all original art this June.

ENDURANCE MTG FULL ART SERIES

In the recent past, many other big series have come to Magic through its budding Universes Beyond initiative, but not at this level of detail.

As senior art director at Wizards of the Coast, he was tapped to bring one of the most popular fantasy franchises to one of the world’s most popular card games: Magic: The Gathering. More than a few career changes and decades later, he’s now responsible for one of the largest crossovers in tabletop gaming history, and Lord of the Rings is once again at the center of that project. “I’m not gonna say it was great, because it wasn’t.” Cartagena’s warm chuckle filled an empty conference room as he recalled those early stumbles. His peers were supportive, but even the art looked off. As he told me, everything about it was off: The days for the months were mislabeled and so was each weekday. At age 17, Ovidio Cartagena started his art career with The Lord of the Rings by creating a bad fan calendar.

Endurance mtg full art