Ravnica: Uprising [Part 2]

So, anyway, I started blasting.

Found a website called playgroundai.com that let me create up to one thousand images per day, all for free. I went head on to create the first card on my list. Quickly, I realized something that I have been repeating to friends and family for months "It's easy to create great things, but impossible to create what you want." Which kind of sumps up my whole history with creative endeavor. Coherence and style, which I thought at first were going to be the main obstacles, were quite easy to figure out. But to create intent, that was hard. To solve this, I doodled things with another AI, stable diffusion, and use the product of that to serve as baseline for the another AI the create pretty, awe-stroking images. Awe is something I encountered a lot. Sometimes AI creates something that leaves you almost paralyzed. You look close and the image it's shit, it has inconsistencies, defects, visual garbage. But you look at the whole and it just works. It gets it, even when you didn't even knew before starting with that particular image what "it" was. Then, you work from that.

All and all, I spend about twenty minutes with each image. Creating variations, changing ideas. More and more, I started to get new ideas and modifying cards. I got better at creating them. I switched baseline models, using an improved version of stable diffusion in the same webpage. I created collections of keyboards that gave each guild a feel and motif. I created an architecture for each one of them, defined in a few words. I scouted dozens of artists I had never heard about to expand the range of styles and ideas to use. Better and better stuff was coming out, and a lingering feeling that I had to step up the overall design of the cards started to emerge. Specially when creating for the Dimir, that guild blue and black that portrayed the more obscure part of the oppressive state, in which secrets and contradiction were foundational ideas. Contradiction was at the hearth of it all. When I started, I made some cards about ministries and slogans directly taken from the 1984 book, almost as a joke. I was looking back at those more and more, and started thinking. Bad sign. Because creating images was kind of interesting but grueling repetitive work, my attention started to drift. I was already months deep into this hole, and I needed a distraction, so I went out the house. It turns out it was a national holiday, and the main street of my town was flooded with roses and books. I approached the one that sells second hand ones for one euro (the only one I go to year after tear, honestly) and found a damaged copy of, guess what, 1984. Neat, I though. I mean, I like doing versions, working or talking about things I only remember loosely, but if there was a moment to reread the best book I have never reread, it was that one. So I started right away.

Holy shit.

Every chapter I read gave me ideas for a dozen cards. But that was the least of my troubles. The book evidenced the lack of depth of my work, the lack of subtlety and bluntness. Never compare yourself to classics, they are classics for a reason, after all. I had to redo the cards. I had to. I had to expand the edition and be more ambitious. In my impulse to get the job done and actually do something, I had fallen into doing exactly what I didn't want to do, bunch of cards that did nothing but convince you they are magic cards. Every one of those was a missed opportunity to explore vital aspects of the conflict, of the contradiction, of the world. And I didn't stop reading there. I read about the Spanish civil war (which I had never done, despite being born, raised and living in Spain) and spent lots of hours in wikipedia and arguing with ChatGPT. So, when I had already finished the images for half of the cards, I opened the first guild I started with and started, once again.

There's a certain order in my creative chaos that I think many people can resonate with. I have no trouble with ideas, never feared a white page. First a have a foundational one that interests me, I feel I have something to say about or I am familiar with. When, I expand on that idea for it to fill the shape of the container or art form I'm trying to make. Then, I have a finished product that's explicative of my worldview. Then I decide it's shallow, pedantic and only scratches the surface of everything I realized or started to suspect while doing it. So I rewrite it for the ground up. A couple of things start to click and I have an explosion of ideas that need to be introduced into the thing all at once. Now, instead of filling the shape, they get constrained by it. So, against the best of my efforts I surrender my initial vision and expand the project in order to fit all the awesome shit. Eventually, if ever, I have everything again. Then I realize it's overworked, has lost it's identity and shape, it's huge but not powerful. It's a mess. I think about it during sleepless nights, procrastinate in order to avoid working on it at any cost. A couple of existential crisis later, I surrender again. This time in the other direction. The project will never be what it should be. I drift from expansionist exposition to evocative background. Well, evocative it's more a desire than a fact. But one has to have faith. Then, still not wanting to work in what in my eyes is a dignified failure, I scrape the rests and put them together with duct tape, praying to God that a sensible, smart or unwilling costumer will indirectly perceive the depth of the ideas through the paper (cartboard, in this case) and be as awe struck as I am to the complexity of creation of how we can only scratch it's surface though art.

So, that's what happened. I expanded the project and decided to finish only half of it (but finish that half). I sit now at five completed guilds of about fifty cards each, all with "original" images attached to them (we can talk about authorship of AI created art another day). I showed them to former magic players and, they confirmed that indeed, they are magic cards. Well, that's a first step. I guess. But do they accomplish the task of communicating though the limitations and mechanics of a casual game the conflicts and complexities of the world? Dude, I don't know, leave me alone. Ok? Give me a break.

I will name this The Minotaur Problem. Think about a minotaur card. It's there. It's a magic card. For some reason, you are convinced you need to make a creature that belongs to a certain guild. Maybe you want to cover more creature types, maybe you accidentally created a cool image. It doesn't matter. In your mind, that creature has a clear position within the guild and a position within the conflict. It makes sense that our minotaur is against the government and part of the uprising. Maybe because he is a beast, and feral. It makes thematic sense that can hate civilization. He is angry. That's self-evident to you. But why? What problem does he actually have? Why is his reaction this and not another? What characteristics does he have or what part of society conveys, being an angry minotaur? How do you expand on that idea without making it a character in itself, without personalizing it too much? Without those things, the card already makes sense, but explains nothing, explores nothing. There's no conflict. It's just a magic card.

On the other side, imagine you have an idea. It can be anything. A nuance about the conflict of good versus evil. A reinterpretation of moral values as necessary lies. About social behavior being driven by convenience instead of ideology. It doesn't matter.

Now make that a card about a Minotaur.

Well, that's every design problem ever.

How to portray contradiction? What are the internal psychological mechanisms that keep an status quo stable and how are they subverted? Are these subversions maybe part of a deeper game? How do factions keep balance but still present inner conflict? I started to make much more literal references to the book, and watching documentaries about revolutions and alternative history channels. How do you explain in a handful of words a minotaur to an artificial inteligence that for some reason knows what "Luciano Pavarotti singing to a capybara" means but doesn't know about minotaurs? I got lost, inside my mind, in what I call the abyss. Not a single card remained in it's original form since I started changing one of them.

Better that keep talking about abstract stuff, I decided to better show you a piece of the though process that goes behind creating a card. Which is one of my favorites of the set, I confess, but the process itself is not so different from any other one. Let's start.

Orzhov. White and black guild.

In the official lore and past editions, they are supposed to be about corruption, religion and wealth; which translates well into what we are trying to do. They make sense as a part of the coalition that conforms the Azorian state. They are contiguous to them in the color wheel, share the color white and would have reasons to want to stay in power. No doubt there in their position. I decided that they benefited from the uprising at first, thinking it wasn't a big deal and just using it as an opportunity to enrich themselves, but then got cold feet, realized it was snowballing and when they tried to back down the damage was already done. In a sense, their inner conflict is about how much greed they would have, and about how much they should be accountable for the consequences of their own actions, even if they didn't rebel themselves. That's just a bit of exposition.

The leader of the guild is a council of ghosts, everything likes to religiosity and spirituality. Their Ministry is the one of Virtue, or Loyalty; which they transform into a thing about money. Somehow communicating the process of commodification of virtue in modern societies. They are powerful but scared, rich but corrupt, with lots of resources but without exactly the means or will to actually use them if society doesn't function in a certain specific way. The problem is: religious institutions are not that important in modern societies. The mixture of them and wealth and corruption is great, but not enough. What mechanisms, emotions, figures, represent this kind of behavior or takes that role of indirect spiritual control in our world? What part of religious societies have been taken in modern urban conflict by what? Spiritual and moral decadence couldn't be the manufactured product of an evil organization, but the byproduct of the infinite amount of interactions and ambitions of every single citizen in a system that has drifted it's original curse.

I did some thinking. Religion, specially religious institutions are not only about faith. They are about idolatry. In the novel, as well as in totalitarian regimes, that is redirected to figures of the state, but it didn't really fit for me that a guild started to worship the leader of another guild. I maybe could make a card about the cult of personality, but not much more. The solution was other. I had to create an object of worship that encapsulated the same idea of idolatry and idols and belonged to the Orzhov themselves. I was going to create a modern idol. A celebrity, with legions of fanatic followers, that represented modernity and... vanity. That was the word I was looking for.

First, I though about creating an Avatar. A card just named Vanity that loosely represented the concept or emotion in an ethereal way. The same way I created avatars for the Golgari (Hunger) or the Gruul (Pride) but the problem was that I already had an avatar for the Orzhov, named Avarice, that I really liked. So I had to search for another solution. But I really wanted to use the word Vanity, because it was perfect for it. One way could be for it to be a "title" for the creature, spelled in it's name. For example something like "Cavalier, Vanity Champion" and for it to be a knight surrounded by mirrors of something like that. That would be a good solution, but I kept thinking. About celebrities, influencers, rock stars. Eventually, it came to me. What if Vanity was a stage name? What name could I give it to make it obvious that's a stage name and not just a flowery name I came up with? It has to feel like he or she gave it himself. It has to contain elements of Orzhov identity but it has to be a name you could plaster on a screen, or a ticket, or a stage. After some iterations I came up with Vanity Nethervoid. I gave it a mana cost and color identity of two white mana and one black, came up with an ability, and rewrote the flavor text about a hundred times until I was satisfied. It was something about how the council of ghosts were old fools and how she was the new thing and how thing would be from there on now. Should it be an angel? A demonic angel? A vampiric angel? All those have implications in lore and meaning. But maybe over defining it could be bad. It has to have an air of simplicity. Black space has as much meaning (sometimes more) than text. Whatever, let's decide it later.

Now, I only needed the image.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't remember exactly how I created this image and don't have the exact prompt. I'm just using it to walk you though the process. It went something like that:

Close-Up Portrait of Vanity Nethervoid. Portrait of a beautiful female idol, abstract painting. Ravnica City, Orzhov. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork. Revivalist Gothic Architecture. _____ style.

dynamic lighting, splash art, trending on Artstation, soft natural volumetric lighting.

orwellian, wealth, corruption, spiritual decadence, oppression, loneliness, monumental architecture, black and gold palette. shadows, duality.

Let me explain.

The first part is the more intuitive one. A description of what you want. But the way you use language there matters, a lot. I can't explain it. Just trust me. Then, I repeat always the part about "Ravnica City" followed by whatever guild we are talking about. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork is mandatory, and found it though trial and error. I think I used it in every single card. Then, the architecture I designated for that guild. When I start a guild, that is the first thing I do. Sometimes you use real stuff you find on wikipedia and look at hundreds of images of fucking buildings on google, sometimes you make up something and the AI does cool stuff. Either way, let's continue. The part about the style is for when (if) you want to use the style of a particular artist for the card. Not all artists are recognized by the AI so you have to experiment first. You can also combine. The possibilities are pretty much endless. The stuff about lighting and all that is something that essentially tells it "make it cool". Not much no analyze here. Then, I use the keywords of the edition and mix them with the keywords of the guild. They are not direct descriptions of anything in particular but are meant to portray the overall "vibe", in an effort to maintain a certain thematic consistency across the art of the edition and inside every guild.

Then, there's a bunch of negative prompting, things you don't want in the image. Sometimes you don't want specific things, sometimes when generating a particular thing you notice that for some reason the AI is trying to create, I don't know, teddy bears. So you drop the hammer and say, dude, don't create teddy bears. Also useful for colors. Another world to explore. Colors have meaning inside the machine, with free associations to concepts and ideas, they aren't only a functional thing.

After all that, I probably generated about thirty or more images with or without slight variations in the prompt, select a few ones and start to make variations of them, with more or less faithfulness to the variation I am using as a base for the next one.

About twenty to thirty minutes after, I am moderately happy with one, and I ship it. Here's the result. 

That's it. So much talk, so much thinking. So much conceptual nonsense. It's this. Only this.

I could have learned how to bake a cake. Go to the beach with some friends. Exercise. Look for a job. Be a captain. Finish the physics career I left ten years ago. Marry my girlfriend of that time. But instead, I chose to do this. I don't know why. I don't know when.

And that's with EVERY SINGLE ONE.

I'm tired and done and don't want to do it anymore. But here they are. Half of the guilds completed. about two hundred images and cards. I have no idea of that to do with it. I should share it in magic communities, show it to friends, send it to rito, post it in social media. I don't know. I don't want to know. I create things, I overcreate things, and they stay in a folder, created. What I would like to do is find a project, with people, where all this work of abstraction is shared to create something big. Cards, films, games, books. I don't care. Things that have depth, things that need of interaction and esoteric discussions about the nature of idolatry in modern societies. Maybe I don't communicate them properly, maybe I overthink them and this is just supposed to be a card game and not that much though is meant to be put into it. What can I say. You can keep the cardboard, I prefer the Magic.