Anton’s Toy Box: Talking Dragons With WizKids’ Magellan Mulligan

Welcome to the table,

When I was young, using miniatures at the gaming table was a luxury that was rarely afforded to me. Playing in the weekly BattleTech games hosted by my local comic shop came with a rental fee for even the most basic unpainted miniatures. The idea of having enough minis for a whole adventuring party, along with the variety of friends and foes they would encounter, seemed like only someone with a Bruce Wayne level of wealth could afford.

We did have access to this little tray of random minis. Among its offerings were The Pope, a small pewter figure that looked like a cleric of some sort with a tall hat, a robe, and a staff with a cross on top; Cutter from ElfQuest, which was exactly what it sounds like, a little metal mini of Cutter from the ElfQuest comic; and Butt-Pants-Man, a miniature wearing what could only be described as pants with the cheeks cut out of them. These were not chaps. They were very clearly some kind of cheeks-out pants on this weird little guy.

The collection also included a mountain dwarf, half a centaur, and assorted bits and pieces. There was a cyber arm, a bolt gun, and a maybe-sword-maybe-spear-maybe-toothpick. As impressive as this collection was, most of the time we ended up using dice to represent whatever happened to be on the tables. The exception was when someone had goofed up badly enough to earn the role of Butt-Pants-Man. We were teenagers, we had no money, and we had to do what we could to entertain ourselves at the table while those around us played with massive 40k armies that cost as much as we spent on food in a year. So on those days, we had Butt-Pants-Man.

Eventually, companies like WizKids changed all of that. They began producing pre-painted and ready-to-paint miniatures at much more accessible price points, offering a huge variety of designs that matched the creatures found in our gaming books. Suddenly, we no longer had to rely on a tray of random minis, a tray I think once served as an ashtray for some ancient maritime sailor, mind you. With WizKids mins, we could actually represent the characters and monsters we imaged at the table we were playing at.

This is one of the reasons I have always been a fan of covering what WizKids makes. So it was a treat for me to get to sit down with Magellan Mulligan from the WizKids production team and talk about the latest addition to their Gem Dragons line, the Icons of the Realms: Adult Amethyst Dragon.

Anton: Hello and welcome! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I always feel like I have opportunities to hang out with the marketing and media side of the team, but it’s a treat to get time with production. I know you are all super busy cooking up the rad designs and magical minis we get, so I’m super appreciative of you taking the time to talk with me.

Before we dig in deeper on the newest of the Adult Gem Dragons to come to the table, I would love to know how you came to work on the team that brings us such wonderful miniatures. Has this been a lifelong passion or something you kind of fell into?

Magellan Mulligan: Weirdly, a bit of both. It was a childhood dream to be working on toys and collectibles, but the perceived impracticality of that dream resulted in me taking some more practical (and some even more impractical) paths in my education and career. A graphic design career eventually led to project management — initially at a different miniatures company — which, after a brief dalliance back in the world of commercial printing, culminated in my joining the WizKids RPG team in 2021; a team I took charge of last year.

I absolutely love what I do, and feel incredibly fortunate to be in the position I am; I actually only started getting heavily into D&D a couple of years before I found myself working in the industry.

Anton: Now, the Amethyst Dragon is the latest of the Adult Dragon minis coming to the table, and the reason we are here today. We have seen the adult Crystal, Emerald, Topaz, and Sapphire dragons, each with truly unique silhouettes and brilliantly executed semi-transparent sculpts.

The Amethyst dragon marks the last of the core Gem Dragons, based on the Dungeons & Dragons 5e/2014 art. How does it feel being part of the team that brings the last of these titans to the table?

Magellan: Honestly, it‘s kind of a dream come true; I’ve been like a dog with a bone trying to get this dragon made. Being able to finally release this as the capstone to a series started back in 2020 feels like a major accomplishment, and we couldn’t be more proud of how this dragon turned out; in many ways, it feels we saved the best for last — the execution of the amethyst dragon turned out absolutely incredible.

And this isn’t just the last of the gem dragons; this was the last adult dragon remaining from the 2014 edition of D&D 5e. The adult amethyst is intentionally scaled to fit with the previous series; we wanted to ensure it was a proper capstone dragon to fans’ existing collections.

Anton: What I’ve always been so impressed by is how WizKids manages to elevate their incorporation of the semi-transparent plastic into the sculpts to truly make the minis feel like something so beyond the pitted pewter and plastic minis we played with when I was a kid. It’s like each color, spine, and wing feels so intentional and true to the art from the core books.

Could you please talk me through the process of taking a piece of art that the team is basing a mini on, from choosing the colorways, pose, and size, all the way to the final steps that lead to the product on the shelf?

Magellan: The process can vary a bit; sometimes there’s a singular source, sometimes we pull from several and combine elements to try and find a sort of Platonic ideal form of a creature. The RPG producer puts together the initial reference doc, which we then discuss in a meeting with the rest of our team and the sculpting team to ensure we agree on the best direction to go with the sculpt. Our sculpting team usually then works with a contracted sculptor to execute on the reference, the producer gives any last notes on adjustments, and then it goes to the licensor for final approval.

As for pose, we’ve made a lot of dragons, so we try to remain cognizant of what poses we’ve used before to avoid any dragon feeling like it’s posed identically to any others that came before it. On the amethyst dragon, there was a fairly late addition to the deco — a pearlescent powder which reflects light while maintaining translucence. The sculpt now looks fantastic under any lighting condition.

Anton: What does a typical production cycle clock in at? How long does it normally take the team to go from concept to creation?

Magellan: It’s typically an 11-month process to go from product inception to store shelves. It can be a bit less on proprietary products, but when working on a licensed product, there’s a lot of review time built into the timeline for reviews to ensure we’re doing our partner’s designs justice as we translate two-dimensional artwork into three-dimensional minis.

Anton: Now that we have seen the five core Adult Gem Dragons, with offerings in their smaller-sized counterparts tucked into various Icons of the Realms sets, it feels like the chapter on these icons is coming to a close.

I’m only asking this because you guys produced one of my favorite D&D deep cuts, Miska the Wolf-Spider in miniature form, something I thought I would never see in my lifetime, so on the subject of Gem Dragons, is there any chance Sardior, the ruby dragon god, might be lurking around the fringes waiting to be formed by the team’s well-honed hands?

Magellan: I mean, never say never; Sardior did recently have artwork featured in The Book of Dragons by DK Publishing. Sardior is quite literally not as present in D&D as Bahamut and Tiamat, but if the great ruby dragon ever makes their presence known within the realms in the future, you can be sure we’ll be gauging fans’ interest in adding the gem dragon god to their pantheon.

Anton: The recent Icons of the Realms Ghost Light set has had some of my favorite minis in recent years, and the Monsters Menagerie Revisted set is shaping up to be absolutely next-level, so please tell me, what is next for the team on the D&D front that you can talk aboutf? I feel like I’m checking the WizKids website daily to see if any new previews have been added for pre-order, so I can start plotting how I’m going to bring them to the table in upcoming adventures.

Magellan: That’s great to hear. We certainly have a lot cooking, and I hope to have a great deal to reveal in the not-too-distant future. We’re working to make sure boosters offer broadly appealing minis at rarity levels that take their CR and quantity needed for encounters into account, and the team is seeking to offer the best brick opening experience we can manage.

I’ve been aware that some of our large minis are a bit too common, so I’ve been pushing us to do alt-decos to introduce another level of variety. We’ve managed to do a few throwback colorways that reference older edition artwork with some of these alt-decos, which is always a fun homage. You’ll also start seeing some chase figures start appearing again; I prefer to avoid making anything too desirable locked away as an ultra-rare chase, but with Monster Menagerie Revisited, we did include a chase invisible as a nod to the previous Monster Menagerie sets.

Keep an eye out for similar things in sets to come; perhaps you’ll be lucky and encounter a shadowy creature variant in a booster that we’ll be announcing soon.

Anton: Thank you all so much for taking the time with me! It has been a real treat, and I can’t wait to see what wonders you craft next!

Until next time, we have so many cool releases on the horizon from WizKids as we move into summer 2026. You can be sure I will get you all the news and more as soon as it lands on my desk, so keep an eye on Comicon.com and our social media channels as more is soon to come!