my 1980s INSPIRATIONS WITH TONY DITERLIZZI
It didn’t feel like a pivotal moment when an art director at Wizards of the Coast contacted illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi about creating a card for Adventures in Forgotten Realms, the new Magic: The Gathering set. Not at first, anyway.
The set celebrates the mash-up of M:TG and Dungeons & Dragons, and Tony worked on both fantasy games back in the 1990s. Since then, he’s become a world-leading author and illustrator creating his own fantasy worlds in The Spiderwick Chronicles and The Search for WondLa books. The former has already been adapted into a feature film and the latter will soon become a series on Apple TV. Why would he go back to illustrating fantasy games?
For Tony, it’s all about imagination. The more he found out about the Forgotten Realms set, the more it tweaked the young artist inside him. As you can see on page 72, the card he was asked to draw enabled him to reminisce about his childhood in Florida playing D&D with his
