I’m a Magic: The Gathering player now. No, really, I carry two starter decks in my backpack at events now in the hope that someone will want to play. The journey to being one has been happening since The Lord of the Rings Universe Beyond set, but it’s been solidified after I spent the day at the Wizards of the Coast offices to see the horror-inspired Duskmourn prerelease. Sure, I had been reading the lore drops and collecting cards, but now I’m a player.
Steeped in modern horror, the Duskmourn set is hands down one of the most intricate and intriguing examinations of the genre in any medium. From colors to variants, the use of archetypes, and, of course, reverence for everything that makes us terrified, Duskmourn is wonderful. To dive even deeper into the horror of the set and how it artistically came to be, I spoke with Art Director Ovidio Cartagena.
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BUT WHY THO: Duskmourn is a solid horror set. I think a lot of people don’t understand that there’s so much overlap between people who you know would play Magic and love horror. And I wanted to ask how you all arrived at conceptualizing a horror deck, and then also what you leaned on to start the creative process for it, while kind of keeping horror fans in mind.
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: I’ll give you the cliffs notes. We’ve done horror before but it’s been very keyed into either classic themes or themes that are very unique to Magic—and specifically speaking about Innistrad and Phyrexia. With Phyrexia, there’s a lot we deal with, like an empire trying to take over everything, turning everything into machines, that horror of losing your identity and becoming a part of a mass. And there’s a lot of biomechanical horror in that setting. I was lead for the Phyrexia set last year, so I had to deal with that. And a few years ago, I supported the lead on Innistrad, which is more Gothic [horror] with werewolves, vampires, and spirits.
So we wanted to make something different. We wanted to connect with a different flavor of horror, and for me especially, it was important to make sure that the set felt like its own unique thing. It wasn’t riffing off other sets we’ve done before. I think there was a standing direction for me when making monsters, for example, that we should not make anything that looks sleek. You can’t have anything that’s been refined by evolution. It has to look like there is a designer’s hand in every monster that you see. It was especially challenging because [Duskmourn] is a house. I was a given at the beginning, “[Duskmourn] is the house.”
The house is endless, and it just moves around and you never find your way. You can’t find directions in the house, and those were ways in which we started giving [Duskmourn] its own identity by having the house feel like it’s a character and having the monsters be designed like that. We started getting a sense of a very unique setting that I haven’t seen Magic. I was very obsessed with how we’re going to make scary stuff here, rather than, well what is a dragon here, what’s a goblin here? I was confident we would figure that out later, and we did. But you know, there is whimsy too.
BUT WHY THO: Yeah! There is!
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: Especially like the Beasties. I showed those to my wife, and she was like, “Oh, my God, that’s so cute. I hadn’t seen that!”
BUT WHY THO: Oh, and the glimmers too!
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: There’s some interesting, original whimsy that kind of diffuses the overbearing horror for a lot of folks.
BUT WHY THO: The idea of different rooms felt really inspired. I was thinking about how we’ve seen this structure in horror movies. I’ve seen plenty of horror movies where you’re trapped in the house. You’re making your way, and each room is kind of different. You all adapted that really well in the Room Cards. I thought it was really interesting because it showcases different themes throughout each part of it, where I felt like you all were looking at the depth of horror as a genre. You know, some are dolls. How did you all design what those rooms were, and who—or what—is living in there?
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: Artistically? [Room Cards] were a tough nut to crack. When I did the concept art, I didn’t know how a card would look, but I did know they can’t all be hallways. Because every time you ask for an artist to give you a scary scene in the house, they’ll show you a hallway—that’s the first idea that comes to mind. But there’s way more than a hallway in the haunted house. Even The Shining ran out of spaces to play with, you know?
So, the concept was pushed when I worked with Leon at the beginning and the end. I remember telling him, alright, let’s do different rooms because the first thing we had to have was the language of the house. [We had to know] what black mana and red mana look like, but also what the motifs are—like the plants that have eyes in them, and they grow human parts we were thinking of, that’s the toolbox. But, even with that, we still don’t have a room.
I said, let’s do a bunch of rooms. Give me an endless library in the style of the Mazères. I saw all the liminal artists like [Maurits Cornelis] Esher, like [Giovanni Battista] Piranesi. There are a lot of artists who love that type of in-between space, but that’s not their own thing. I looked at all that and thought, how can we turn this into a room?
By the time [we were done], we had 30 to 50 rooms. With rooms like a dentist’s office or a hospital. [Why a] hospital? Because many houses during the wars would be turned into hospitals. So now that we had the rooms, we had to figure out how the room would look. The best way to do it was horizontal. They experimented with a bunch of things. But we said, let’s do it horizontal [because] it’s a panning. You’re panning together [the rooms] like a movie. So, don’t put any design in the middle of them and have the artist draw it. That way, it doesn’t break that you’re in the art, and you don’t have to jump over a fence made of graphic design [borders].
[Ultimately], there are three parts to each room. Part number one is the divider. Part number two is the divider that forces you to think about what divides the room. In one case, it’s just a splatter of red paint across the room—it’s an Artist gallery on one side, a gallery on one side, and an artist studio on the other. In another case, you’re looking through the roof to just some hanging figures on the ledges. You start figuring out how to make this seem its own thing. [Part three is the other room]. But we started running out of rooms.
Most people who work as Wizards do not own a 50-bedroom house. Smoke room? No, no, no, no smoking. No. Game Room? Okay. Theater? Okay. We started coming up with a bunch of stuff and watching out for duplicates because sometimes you want to create a study room and then a studio. [But you have to ask] how are these two different? What do we do then? Okay, this is a ritual chamber, and then you start riffing on world-building because, at this point, all the groups exist: the monsters, the cult, everything. So now we start thinking, okay, where would the cult of Valgavoth hang out? There’s a room for that, you know. Where do the dolls get built? There’s a room for that and so on. We were top downing what rooms you would find in the house. If someone told me about a concert stage, I would say, “No, that doesn’t happen in the house.” But maybe a theater that’s kind of old-timey.
Another thing I wanted to do is make the house feel older than the stuff inside it because horror films always clash with intergenerational aesthetics. So that was my way of saying, “This house is older than you. It knows better than you.”
BUT WHY THO: It’s wonderful to hear you talk about [Duskmourn] because I think that there are so many layers that I found at first during the preview event and then later while opening up my boosters. Looking at each of the cards, one can see that there is such a reverence for the genre and an exploration of horror as more than just a slasher or a creature feature.
How did y’all decide on the different subgenres of horror to play in? What was that process like and what kinds of limitations were put on what you could include? We see cryptids in this set, which is awesome, especially given the rise of cryptid horror.
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: It’s difficult because, on the one end, we knew we didn’t want angels, for example. Because there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t start already. A werewolf? Can’t do a werewolf. You know vampires? No, let’s hold off on the vampires. We ended up putting a vampire, but it’s just a guy who, when he turns down his glasses, you can see that the eyes are bloodshot, like red. You know, it’s not like a regular vampire. It’s kind of an ‘80s type, like an association with someone who has had a rough life or maybe a little bit self-indulgent. It’s down to earth.
BUT WHY THO: So more punk?
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: Yeah! I thought that was great to have, but we were thinking a lot of ‘80s and ‘70s horror are just remixes of existing horror, which isn’t easy. You know, it’s hard. You’re thinking, this is just a haunted house movie. You’re haunted. If you watch The Thing, this is a haunted house. Yes, [Duskmourn] is a haunted house.
You’re trapped inside of this. You can’t go anywhere. There are smaller hallways, and it seems there are rooms where specific things happen. And once you step back, you see that much of it is the flavor of the thing rather than the genre. Or, I would say genre is a very controversial way of the narrative structure. When you think of the narrative structure, it’s been pretty much intact for about 300 years. So, there is a lot about the skin, you know? And just because it has a robot in it, doesn’t mean it’s sci-fi. So, if it has a monster, it doesn’t mean it’s horror; it just depends, and we always remix things [and include more than just the scares of horror].
I wanted many things to show that there’s hope. Have you ever seen that card where someone is holding a glimmer up, and it’s a pet hamster? That’s one of my favorite parts, you know, because it encapsulates what the set is about. The power of hope can get you through these horrific things.
BUT WHY THO: If I was talking to a horror fan and I wanted to get them into Magic: The Gathering with this set, was there anything that felt like you had to put in there to reach out to them?
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: Well, I wanted very high-contrast lighting with a lot of color. That happens a lot in horror, like light, and the whole scene is in red light, or it’s like strobe lights. So, you want that lighting to communicate to the audience that this is not normal. You wouldn’t put that lighting on to relax. One of the rules was that I didn’t want any white light—no white. I think someone snuck a couple in there, but not a lot. The doll card has it, but it’s so scary that I’m like, okay, that’s fine. You get it just once.
One other thing that I wanted to have was demons. We wanted them to be very different from what we’ve seen in Magic. Normally, it’s a demon that’s a riff on humanity. It’s not this time. You don’t know if it’s a costume that someone’s wearing or that’s what they are.
The first thing I illustrated was a piece of early concept art with a ghost coming out of a screen, and the ghost was made of TV static. So that was one thing that I said: Okay, this ghost really looks like nothing we’ve done before in magic. It is also set in a [genre’s time period] that we haven’t seen enough of. I would love to see this fleshed out, and I would like to know what it could look like because there are many illustrators better than me that I was thinking about.
I showed it to the other artists, and we started riffing on it, but I was worried about the static and how they would paint it because static is very hard to paint—especially if you’re a digital artist. So, I gave some of them to oil painters. That was one of the things I thought would be cool, that the static was the spirit world. It’s a texture you wanted in the set to communicate the time period and the genre. But also, you’re using something we know in a way that we don’t understand.
We also did that a lot of times with the Fear. I wrote a long post on the artistic influences and the fears of magic. With the fears, I was doing the same. You just grab familiar stuff, symbols that you understand, and then you give them a new function. And then, you think you should understand what it means, but you don’t because it’s combined in a way that makes it a little scary. It’s a little unsettling. It helps if you put some big mouth or teeth or something like that in it.
BUT WHY THO: Well, good job, Ovidio, those are my nightmares! I think one of the things that I wanted to ask you was, what is your favorite card or concept that you brought into [Duskmourn]? And then also, what is something that you think that when players find it they’ll be surprised?
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: For the first one, what is my favorite concept? That’s very hard because it’s an extensive set, and it has a lot of cards. But I especially loved The Fears because of their wackiness, and that’s kind of surreal. I like that type of stuff, so I paid a lot of attention to that. Some look more like monsters than others, and they’re all unsettling. I even designed some myself, so I like that. But that’s a back-end thing. I think on the front, there’s a ton of good stuff, but on the back. There’s stuff that I like because I got a chance to do it—and I don’t do concept art.
I’ll say that I don’t think anyone’s noticed, but there is a cycle of lands that is linked, and it only works if you have 13 lands that if you have 13 life [or less] enters tapped. [Those Land cards] have 13 open windows to match, but nobody has called it out. Nobody’s noticed that. I counted the windows, and I would say, “No, you need to, you need to shut that window down because it’s not part of the 13 open windows in every one of those cards.” And it’s ten cards, you know, it’s a whole cycle. Nobody noticed what we were doing there.
So there’s a lot of stuff that you hide a lot of in there. For example, nobody noticed The Rendlesham Forest incident, but it was something I loved. People did notice the Fresno night crawlers. You know, they were hit! That’s the type of thing I like fans calling out. But there are a lot of little things that, if nobody says anything, I’ll probably say publicly.
BUT WHY THO: Well, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been wild for me because my first magic game ever was with you [at Summer Game Fest 2023]. I feel like [Magic has had] this stretch of sets that have been built to “get Kate into her magic era.” From Ixalan to Assassin’s Creed, and now Duskmourn, I’m just like, gosh! Duskmourn has really blewn me away. I was playing a magic game with my friend who was here at the festival, and two people made comments about joining. And I’m realizing how beautiful Magic is and how it is a connective device with so many people. So, I just wanted to say thank you for bringing me into this.
OVIDIO CARTAGENA: Thank you for playing the game. We put a lot into it.
