Inside Magic: The Gathering’s Lost Caverns of Ixalan, a set driven by a love of Latin America

27.10.2023 - 16:16 / polygon.com

Long before Wizards of the Coast senior art director Ovidio Cartagena and his team of artists conjured up cavernous depths populated with jade merfolk and fungal tyrants, he would ride the bus back and forth to school each day in his hometown in Guatemala. In his day-to-day life, Cartagena saw Mayan pyramids and statues of warriors who fought the conquistadors. Fast forward several years, and he’s now living in the United States, but those experiences live on through the art of Magic: The Gathering in the Lost Caverns of Ixalan set.

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is Magic’s 98th expansion. Set for global release on Nov. 17, this new expansion will bring players back to the plane of Ixalan, a land inspired by Latin America filled with explorers looking for a lost city of gold. This time around, rather than explore the jungles on the surface, the set explores a vast underground world filled with gods and thriving cultures. In anticipation of the release of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Cartagena sat down with Polygon via video chat to talk about the creation of the set and reveal the art for eight never-before-seen cards. In our conversation, he talked about building a colorful, vibrant world that served as a love letter to Latin America.

For Cartagena, the idea for The Lost Caverns of Ixalan set has been in the making “for years.” He played the first Ixalan set when it was released in 2017, which inspired him to work as a Magic artist. He eventually applied for a job at Wizards of the Coast. When he interviewed for the position, he pitched a set that followed the concept of going underground based on the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya K’iche’ people. Though it was just a pitch for an interview, a few years later, he found himself working on a Wizards team that was looking to create an underground world.

“We were thinking: Should it be on the original new plane or should it be an existing plane? And so on,” Cartagena told Polygon. “About halfway in the process or something we were like, Well, you know what? It makes sense that it’s Ixalan, and the vision team went with that. Doug Beyer was a creative director at the time and Jessica Lanzillo, the other creative director at the time, went, ‘OK, OK, you know what? You get your Ixalan.’ And I was very lucky that I had been thinking about many ideas for a long time. I had a lot of ideas.”

Ixalan is about the thrill that comes from riding dinosaurs and taking names. It’s also about conquest. The original set told a story where factions competed to discover a mythological city of gold. As far as stories go, the first visit to Ixalan portrayed a standard colonial narrative where outsiders descend upon a dark and mysterious land with the intent of