This campaign marked my duties shifting away from managing the designers to being the point person to curate marketing art approaches and artist partners. After the success of the previous art commissions for Theros, the appetite for more creative expressions to use in marketing increased.

This time around I reached out to Dan Mumford due to his incredibly elaborate, meticulous, colorful illustration skills. He is great with monsters and ruins! And this set was all about that. I commissioned a teaser and release art and he was a joy to work with. Very exciting to see these come together:

My decision to steer towards artists who are boldly different from what fans perceive as classic Magic art was on purpose. I wanted to try selecting artists that looked wildly different and eye catching to aid our user acquisition. Much in the same way that I wanted to double our artists as influencers, I wanted the art to also reach out to audiences that might have different tastes and reel them in.

REGIONAL EXPRESSIONS

The increase in appetite for art was reflected on requests for marketing that we could use across regions around the world, while having a connection between all of them. In this case we used these commissions as teasers that featured each region’s key locations. For this project, I collaborated with Luca Viola and Myk Sanders for the 3D environments, with Mandi Huffman assisting with touching up and finishing the first two samples.