Just Add Milk: Second Helpings (3)
Part 3 of an all encompassing look at the sequel to my favorite project...
9 - Tricks are for Kids
The 2023 Winter Superdrop has ended, and with it Just Add Milk: Second Helpings is no longer available for purchase. On the bright-side however, customers have already begun receiving their orders…including me!
But what’s that in the middle? Could it be…a coveted prize at the bottom of the cereal box?
That’s right! I created a bonus secret card for this set. Now that folks are receiving their orders, the new card is out in the wild and I can finally talk about it here…
10 - Coveted Jewel
From the start, we knew the card would be Coveted Jewel but how we depicted it was open-ended. My Art Director Jacob Covey kicked things off with a few suggestions of possible options including:
A papercraft model.
A short comic gag featuring a cereal mascot (ala something you’d find in a Crackerjacks box).
Mail-in order form for a decoder ring.
There are a lot of fun ideas we could have done here. I would love to have attempted them all, but unfortunately there was only 1 slot to fill.
It was decided that this card would remain single-sided, and considering the amount of rules text we needed to include, it felt like a mail-in form with the image of the prize up top would make for the most fun and cleanest read of the ideas, so I started with exploring that.
I thought this would be a great opportunity to tie-in another fan-favorite MTG character, and a Fblthp-tracker felt like a fun twist on the decoder ring concept. The big challenge for the mail-in form was that most of these forms look very generic and boring, and I wanted this card to have some personality. Imitating the look of a Box Top felt really fun right down to the detail of a little scissors icon along the dotted-line where you would cut it out. This felt like just the right balance of everything so we went ahead with that option.
One more idea I tried out was depicting the “jewel” as a toy that came in it’s own unique packaging and painted to look as if it were wrapped in plastic, with the rules box mimicking candy packaged with a paper label stapled shut. There’s a lot of elements to this that I really like about this concept, but it proved to have a few problems as well…one of which being be a bit too disconnected from cereal boxes. While the styling is a fun solution to the rules box / illustration problem, it doesn’t read the clearest so we passed on it.
11 - Full Belly
And with that, Just Add Milk: Second Helpings has been covered 100% in-full! It’s nice to finally have the full spread of cards revealed and arriving into the hands of players.
Secret Lair is such a fun space to play in and I’m eager for another chance to do so. Thanks again to everyone who bought the set and/or shared such nice words about the cards. It’s clear that the people who like these cards REALLY like them and it really means a lot to see that.
Thanks for reading!
-Mike