The Misbegotten Mascot | A History of Hurloon Minotaur
This article traces a vignette of Hurloon Minotaur – Magic’s first mascot – and its uneven role in marketing the game through the early years.
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“There is a big bull’s head hanging above the stairs in Seattle’s Wizards of the Coast Game Center. It is round and brown and plastic and terribly ugly…In a face-to-face encounter with the beast, Richard Garfield, a man who looks remarkably like Kermit the Frog, grimaces, as would the amphibian. This was not my idea, his face says.”
So wrote Jeff Pearlman for Sports Illustrated in November 1997. Four years into its life, Magic was making waves in the mainstream media, hostile waters hungry to devour the growing little fish. The rest of the article, as you can imagine, paints a fairly disingenuous portrait of those who frequented The Game Center. At their expense, Pearlman deified the likes of Mike Long and Shawn “Hammer” Regnier, a former professional arm wrestler turned Pro Tour Champion. This was a magazine for football dads and lifelong jocks, after all.
Marketing Magic in the mid-90’s was tricky. One method involved running sidebars and full-page features in periodicals like InQuest, a publication infamous for its raunchy and disrespectful tone. Another approach was renting tournament space in swanky New York City hotels and calling in the press for coverage. “The Gathering I” was the first event of its kind, an oversized Prerelease for Homelands that featured an immersive installation of Dominia, a chance to battle the game’s designers with all new cards, and the appearance of select artists who gave shape to this whole phenomenon.
“So Ronnie came up with the idea for ‘The Gathering.’ And I think it might have even technically been The Gathering I, since the idea that there'd be many ‘The Gatherings,’ and this was the first one. So she decided to go all out. She rented this space in this nice building in New York, like downtown New York, which was not cheap. I believe, at the time, this event cost, I believe, a million dollars…This was way above the scale of anything we'd ever done back in the day.”
Included in this ambitious budget was the commission of Magic’s first cosplay, a full-scale realization of Hurloon Minotaur. Hurloon Minotaur was beloved by Wizards of the Coast. It was a homemade icon, a one-trick pony for the marketing department and the de facto mascot of the company. Hurloon Minotaur was born out of necessity to advertise the game before it was ready for production. Jesper Myrfors recounted to me the deadlines that forced his hand:
“I was working in the office, at that point a basement in a house, and it was getting late. I was told that we needed to get an ad ready for our first foray into advertising the game in a magazine. The problem was that the game was not finished and we had no cards to show. I chose an Anson Maddocks piece for the ad, but looking at it, the text box was pretty empty. So I decided it needed a bit of flavor text to fill it out.”
The back cover of Cryptych Issue #1 may have been the final landing spot for this writeup, but Myrfors could not verify. Here, we find the first drafts of Magic, a fantasy card game and collectable trading set releasing in the summer of 1993. Anson Maddocks’ Minotaur was front and center. Beneath the mysterious illustration was Myrfors’ impromptu flavor text written in the office-basement of Peter Adkison, the first CEO of Wizards of the Coast.
By June of 1994, the ravenous demand for Magic was outpacing production and extending beyond the cards. Requests for merchandise poured in – Wizards responded with pins, posters, t-shirts, and calendars. They returned to the Minotaur as representative: “The Hurloon Minotaur pin is antiqued gold-color metal and retails at $4.95. We hope the Minotaur pin will help Magic players identify one another.” (p.54, The Duelist Issue #2)
That Fall, Wizards followed the pin initiative with a wall calendar for the upcoming year. Hurloon Minotaur appeared on the cover and as the featured illustration for August with insight from Anson Maddocks: “I wanted to draw something I’ve never seen before…something that reflected the culture of the minotaur. I chose them to be ritualistic and used totem scarring. I think the picture is more evocative of a mood than an action – more like a powerful serenity.”
Maddocks’ painting is entrancing. The stoic portrait of a shamanic beast with decorative patterns carved into its face and horns is backdropped by a pale crimson. Thick, white fur glows against the flat plane as a slight breath of cold air emerges from its flared muzzle. No wonder everyone at Wizards was so hypnotized by the piece. It held an aura, a mystique. Myrfors recognized Maddocks as a “unique artistic visionary,” and considered himself “very, very lucky to have him involved with the project.”
In the five years following the printing of Alpha, the image of the Minotaur appeared on countless trinkets and peripherals. There were cardboard life counters and oversized cards and pewter miniatures and even more calendars. January 1st, 1997 was dedicated to the “creature that has been the company mascot since the early days of Magic,” a choice statement to kick off the new year. The Minotaur was used as key art on 4th Edition booster packs. The Minotaur was transformed into a full-frame sculpture by Randy Bowen for Dark Horse Comics and sold in a limited run of 5000 numbered statues. And The Minotaur made a cameo appearance battling Serra Angel in the promotional shoot for Homelands. This video debuted as a Virtual Reality Immersive Experience at ‘The Gathering I’ in New York City. I wonder if that costume was repurposed for the cosplayer posing with Richard Garfield at the same event.
Behind the scenes, Wizards of the Coast was donning its employees in company-exclusive gear. Hurloon Minotaur t-shirts and denim jackets were supplied to those working in the building and offered as prize support for the 1995 World Championships, but were never sold to the public. It is rumored that branded backpacks and knapsacks also accompanied these clothes. Such items will always attract dedicated collectors and enthusiasts of early Magic, like Magnus De Laval. Through some digging, he found the existence of a second, rarely-seen denim jacket, as well as the traces of a prototype for an embroidered petticoat. He later acquired a Hurly jacket of his own, then asked Anson Maddocks for a signature under the lapel.
Although a certain following has formed now, rosy admiration for The Minotaur was not shared by all back then. Rather, it marked a significant disconnect between the small staff in Renton and the growing player-base at large.
“But there was a big confusion where people confused Wizards’ adoption of Hurloon Minotaur the mascot to that the players liked the Hurloon Minotaur. And it took us years to explain to them that it was a bad card, that players tended to fall in love with good cards. Yes it was a pretty picture, and yes Wizards like it. But Hurloon Minotaur was never really beloved by the players because it was kind of a sucky card…Where Serra Angel was a powerful card. People liked it. It was a powerful card.”
During the development of Homelands, R&D incorporated minotaurs into the set’s world-building due to Hurloon’s falsely-perceived influence. This resulted in five cards and eight illustrations of the Anaba Minotaurs, all done by Maddocks. Anson extended the tattoo motif onto these depictions, even though the Anaba were a separate tribe from a different plane. Homelands also put forth the strange concept of summoning minotaurs with the sound of Didgeridoos. This idea felt like a tonal departure from Myrfors’ original characterization of the creatures.
“For some reason, on Ulgrotha the minotaurs have an Australian influence”
Homelands failed for more reasons than one, but hubris was chief among the symptoms. Homelands was made for the company out of obligations within the company. The million-dollar Homelands Prerelease was also, in major part, for the company – marketing wanted the media attention, but they intentionally kept the players far from the cameras’ line of sight:
“Not only was there not a lot of people who understood Magic players early on, there actually was this feeling by some of the employees that like, the Magic players were an embarrassment. Like, they literally ran the tournament on a different floor because they didn’t want the press to see the players.”
All of this marked a significant divide between the main parties involved. You get the sense listening to Rosewater that selling Magic to the outsiders was frustrating and insulting to those who cared most from within. Magic wasn’t “cool” to them. It was a weird card game played by weird people in weird places. There was this weird bull mounted above the staircase that led to all their weird tournaments. When their stores finally went under, Steve Bard, a weird guy, took the 13-foot monster to his weird house and propped it firmly in the garden. There, it still sits, an enigmatic totem of a time long gone. Low, haunting sounds fill the alleys over Beacon Hill, a hymn to the dead decade of the 1990’s.
Eventually, the game outgrew Hurloon Minotaur, and the company came to their senses about marketing Magic with good cards. Serra Angel was the hero all along, not that 2/3 vanilla in red. By 2000, external competition was putting real pressure on Wizards of the Coast’s monopoly over trading card games. A yellow mouse was on the horizon, ushering in the next millennium and defining new laws for iconographic design. The age of “esoteric” was over, the time of “cute” had come.
And yet, in spite of everything, Hurloon Minotaur endures. Anson Maddocks’ painting still possesses the same magnetic force that swayed the inaugural staff of Wizards of the Coast. There is a timelessness here; Myrfors was right. Old school players would never register Hurly in their decks, but they covet the keepsakes onto which his face was printed and stitched. The collectible pin that ran for 5 bucks in 1995 cost me $150 in 2024; to say nothing of the statues that sell for hundreds more. But I’m partial to ephemera like this. I wonder if this pin ever promoted a pick-up game of Magic between strangers like The Duelist proposed.
Last year, to celebrate the game’s 30th anniversary, Tiziano Antognozzi and I hosted an exhibition on the history of Magic in Italy at Lucca Comics and Games. Peter Adkison was there. He wore his denim jacket.
Sources
https://www.originalmagicart.store/blogs/oma-blog/the-original-face-of-magic-hurloon-minotaur - The Original Face of Magic (Paul J. Comeau)
https://oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com/2016/11/swagic-and-denimwalk.html - Swagic and Denimwalk - Magnus de Laval
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/face-cards-part-2-2018-12-03 - Mark Rosewater on Creating the Weatherlight Crew
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/65646686839/how-was-a-card-as-dull-as-hurloon-minotaur-ever - Blogatog - Hurloon Minotaur (2013)
https://www.printables.com/model/342346-hurloon-minotaur-and-hurloon-wrangler - Hurloon Wrangler / Hurloon Minotaur Miniatures - StormCrow13 (2022)
https://magicuntapped.com/index.php/articles/nothing-but-a-heartbreaker-magics-first-miniatures - Magic’s First Miniatures (2021)
https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/balance-of-powers/ - Hurloon vs Serra by Michael Whelan (1996)
https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1560387 - Hurloon vs Pikachu - InQuest #61
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/199ysqp/bought_this_jacket_at_my_local_comic_book_store/ - Minotaur Denim Jacket - Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1916tp8/cool_thing_that_showed_up_at_my_lgs/ - Minotaur statue at LGS - Reddit
https://web.archive.org/web/19961219090312/http://www.wizards.com/Marketing/MTG/MTG1_Follow.html - The Gathering 1 Press Release (Oct 1995)
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/1072-rarities-mtg-calendars-english-cards-magic-the-gathering-1995-calendar.html - 1995 Magic Calendar
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/1073-rarities-magic-calendars-english-cards-1996-calendar-magic-the-gathering.html - 1996 Magic Calendar
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/1075-17270-rarities-wednesday-january-1-zoom-card.html#return - 1997 365 Days in Dominia Calendar, Jan 1
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/1074-rarities-mtg-calendars-english-cards-magic-the-gathering-calendar-1997.html - 1997 Magic Calendar
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/does-anyone-here-remember-that-wizards-of-the-coast-had-a-retail-store-and.629992/ - WotC Store Sculptures
https://tinyurl.com/3xv6pwzj - Minotaur Garden - Steve Bard
https://bohonus.com/hosted/steves-weird-house/ - Steve Bard’s Weird House
https://vault.si.com/vault/1997/11/17/revenge-of-the-nerds-magic-is-played-with-cards-its-wildly-popular-its-tough-to-explain - Jeff Pearlman - Revenge of the Nerds (November 1997, Sports Illustrated)
https://podscripts.co/podcasts/magic-the-gathering-drive-to-work-podcast/drive-to-work-338-the-gathering - Mark Rosewater Drive to Work 338 - Homelands / The Gathering I
https://www.cardboardherald.com/podcasts/2017/8/14/episode-41-anson-maddocks-classic-magic-the-gathering-artist - Anson Maddocks Interview
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PRdr4sbB0o/XFnrPuHnQNI/AAAAAAAAIMc/a80-ahXWB-0UO2ntNwkTUmUew3dPoykcwCLcBGAs/s1600/hurloonmino1.png - Anson Maddocks Hurloon Full Pose (1995)
https://www.deviantart.com/barbarroc/art/05-Hurloon-Minotaur-A-577190071 - Hurloon Minotaur Fan Art - Barbarroc - Deviantart
https://www.eternalcentral.com/cleveland-rocs-02-2019-old-school-93-94-coverage/ - Cleveland Old School Tournament, Hurloon Denim Jacket (2019)
https://twitter.com/Top8Games/status/1152033450217447424 - BDM - Was Hurloon Magic’s First Cosplay?
https://x.com/MTGHistory/status/1494689819406094338 - Anson Maddocks sketches
https://x.com/Goldsabertooth/status/1536197419230167040 - Homelands prerelease Tweet
https://twitter.com/GavinVerhey/status/593074897238261761 - Labyrinth Minotaur 1997 Calendar
https://x.com/StrangeOil/status/1494660434267357191 - Hurloon AP by Anson Maddocks
https://x.com/MTGHistory/status/1522963817571184640 - Shawn “Hammer” Regnier - PT LA 1996