For people who experience intense fears or phobias, carrying that weight wherever you go can feel like a ghost lurking over your shoulder, haunting you with its constant, persistent presence. The nature of our fears is unique to each of us, and communicating those deeply personal emotions can be just as challenging as living with them. But the latest expansion of Magic: the meetingthe horror theme Twilightaims to do just that: shine a light on and reveal the fears, stresses, and insecurities that the game’s characters carry with them as the world within that fiction unravels.
“With these cards you can feel the madness, you can see it by tilting the card,” said Wizards of the Coast production artist Nickii Pelletier in an interview with Polygon.
Since the introduction of Booster fun in 2019almost every subsequent one Magic set has had a selection of cards printed with a so-called ‘showcase’ treatment. These are cards that can appear in regular booster packs, but they serve as alternate versions of the cards that players would also find with the usual cards. Magic design.
When they first appeared in 2019 Throne of Eldraine, the showcase treatments resembled whimsical storybooks that evoked the feeling of reading an ancient fairy tale in an ornate tome. While each subsequent set’s showcase treatments have been different, the goal has always been to capture a set’s themes and world-building through unfamiliar artistic expressions.
“You can open a package and come across something that looks like nothing else in the package, but is still part of the set and that package and is in there and means something to it,” says Sarah Wassell, an art historian. director at Wizards of the Coast. “It’s exciting and it feels different, but it’s still completely related to all the other aspects that make the game great.”
Twilight includes several showcase treatments throughout the set. Some showcase cards replace the usual ones Magic frame with an alien, neon television set. Another group of cards highlights a new type of creature – animal spirits called glimmers – and has them leap through shimmering shapes of gold light and bounce off the card.
But the final showcase treatment, known as double exposure, is particularly arresting and uniquely personal to the subjects depicted on the cards.
“We were looking for a way to represent characters and creatures on set in a simplified portrait style, somehow incorporating a strong visual element of fear and/or psychological horror, or incorporating both a hero and their greatest fears were shown in the same image,” Pelletier explained in documents shared with Polygon. “We were drawn to the double exposure technique in film photography, used for ‘spirit’ photographs, and fine art photography: this gave us the opportunity to combine two images into a new image, which became more than the sum of its individual parts. ”
Once double exposure and mood shots were chosen as the showcase treatment for the set, a new challenge arose. Because this art style was meant to appear Magic cards, how would the artists and designers integrate a centuries-old approach of developing analog photographs onto digitally rendered trading cards?
“There’s a lot of testing involved…I wish I could tell you you can tell by looking at a screen, but a lot of times it’s printing out a glossy piece of paper and seeing what it feels and looks like in person,” said Pelletier. “I can count eight different specialized printing treatments we tried.”
As they continued to experiment, the set designers looked at the mechanics of actual photography and explored inverted images to create something that resembles a film negative. They also tested neon ink to capture the set’s retro ’80s horror theme with an extra pop of color.
Ultimately, the printing process tested and challenged some of the designers’ most ambitious ideas, as well as the thematic alignment these cards were intended to have with the rest of the set. The ultimate goal of the double exposure cards was ultimately to tell a story through two images stacked on top of each other, so capturing the relationship between those images was critical to conveying the emotion behind the cards to the players .
“The way each of the two images overlap is really key to the success of the final image,” explains Wassell. “There are a few (cards) with moths, and where the pattern of the moth wings overlaps with the character’s face, a lot can be done. So if you decide at that point to use neon and emphasize one image over the other, the interplay between the two images becomes more challenging and changes.”
For the designers and illustrators, this meant being acutely aware not only of the relationships between contrasting colors, but even of gestalt. In art and psychology, Gestalt describes people’s habit of finding patterns or shapes in complex images. In the case of double exposure cards, this highlights the challenge of using two different visual elements to tell a nuanced and emotional story.
“Your brain understands that it’s one plus one, but the answer becomes three because you’ve done a little more than adding two things together,” Wassell explained. “The way they interact, a third thing starts to happen and you start to see something different. It doesn’t look like a moth with a woman, it starts to look like a woman with a headdress.”
The final product utilizes the double exposure style for a variety of creature cards within the set, including the story’s heroes, villains, and some of the more menacing monsters that lurk in the halls of the haunted house realm known as Duskmourn. If you’re lucky enough to find one of these cards in a booster pack, don’t be afraid to use them in a deck. These horrors can’t hurt you… probably.
Twilight will be available for purchase at your local game stores on September 27th.
Disclosure: This article is based on a Magic: The Gathering – Duskmourn event held at Wizards of the Coast headquarters in Washington state. Wizards arranged our freelancer’s travel and accommodation for the event. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.