Magic: The Gathering’s new set is trying to capture the hope of The Lord of the Rings
At age 17, Ovidio Cartagena started his art career with The Lord of the Rings by creating a bad fan calendar. As he told me, everything about it was off: The days for the months were mislabeled and so was each weekday. His peers were supportive, but even the art looked off. Cartagena’s warm chuckle filled an empty conference room as he recalled those early stumbles. “I’m not gonna say it was great, because it wasn’t.”
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. 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. 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. This time around, Cartagena and his team are going all in, and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earthis coming to Magic as a full product line with hundreds of new cards and all original art this June.
Polygon spoke with Cartagena recently in an exclusive interview at MagicCon in Minneapolis. 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.
Cartagena told Polygon his team of artists started very purposefully from scratch and weren’t inspired by any specific film, adaptation, or previous illustrations. Instead, they worked directly with the source material — Tolkien’s original texts — and used them to draft
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