I’m super happy of finally being able to post Electrostatic Blast, the second card I made for Magic the Gathering, which this time is set in Innistrad.

The first card I made, Glenn the Voice of Calm, was indeed for Magic the Gathering, but being it a license for The Walking Dead by AMC it kind of left me with the itch to work on the traditional setting.

This itch remained unscratched for almost a year. I had finished working on Glenn around February 2020 and never did anything else for Wizards of the Coast for the rest of the year.
My thought (and fear!) at the time was that Glenn would have been my only contribution to the franchise I’ve loved since the 90s.

Then at the beginning of 2021 I was contacted by Art Director Crystal Chang, with whom I already had the chance to work on Star Wars for Fantasy Flight Games.

She asked me if I was interested to draw Electrostatic Blast (uh, yes?), and from then on I had the huge pleasure of working steadily on Innistrad for the rest of the year.

Anyway, here it is.

For those unfamiliar with Innistrad, the setting is fairly dark and Gothic, with blood and Vampires and Werewolves, so don’t be surprised if the moods and colours reflect that.

In general I’m more comfortable with a slightly broader palette and definitely more saturation, but for Innistrad that’s the look that works.

Luckily there was plenty of reference made available by Wizards of the Coast, so I had an easy time remaining consistent with the visual language of the setting.

The one thing I LOVE about working for Wizards of the Coast (a part from, you know, working for Wizards of the Coast), is that for every assignment we are provided with a big chunky manual with all the information an artist would need. Background story, setting description, characters, environments and all that.

Compared to a brief I had once for another project, “there’s a castle in the background and a knight in heroic pose in the foreground”, this was like Christmas.

Anyway, since I had suffered some catastrophic loss of data early this year, for this assignment I made several incremental saves just to be on the safe side. Which gave me the chance to make this short video out of all the WIPs.

While re-watching it I realized that early in the process I had lit several windows of the surrounding buildings with a warm light. I later changed my mind and thought that they were taking too much attention away from the focus of the image, so I got rid of them in the final version.

So yes, I didn’t just forget to activate a layer:)

Anyway, this is how Electrostatic Blast looks like.

You can check it together with the other cards of its set at Alchemy:Innistrad here.

As you might notice, in that set there’s another card I made for this round of Innistrad illustrations (a Mythic, no less!), but I’ll be able to post it only next week.

by Paolo Puggioni