The Monsters of Magic

The Monsters of Magic
Editor - J. Robert King
Cover art - Ron Spears
First printing - August 2003

This is the final installment of the anthology series, and it is pretty much like all the others. By now the creators have figured out that it's a good idea to tie all the stories into either the cards themselves or to the rest of continuity, so there are no completely random stories anymore, but the quality is still very variable. The monsters featured range from very famous Magic creatures (Lhurgoyf, Atog, Morphling) to some also-rans (Vampiric Dragon, Phantom Monster), but curiously the four on the cover weren't included for some reason, even though they are pretty iconic Magic monsters! (Okay, Two-Headed Dragon isn't quite in the same league as Sliver Queen, Hypnotic Specter and Masticore, but it was played as a finisher back in the day!)

The stories are divided up into three parts: Ancient Monsters, Modern Monsters and Otherworldly Monsters, with four stories each. This is a bit less useful than the more specific time periods from The Secrets of Magic, as the division between "Ancient" and "Modern" is actually just "Pre-Invasion" or "Post-Invasion" and everything in the Otherworldly section fits in the "Pre-Invasion" bit as well. We'll have to see if the stories themselves guide us to a clearer placement.

The circulair continuity of Legends I, Legends II and Greensleeves

During the Legends I and Legends II reviews, and heck, all the way back in the Greensleeves trilogy reviews from 2015, I've said that I would eventually do an article about the multiple incarnations of the Legends Legends set that appear in the Magic canon. Time to cross another long promised project off the list!

I must warn you though, if you're hoping for another Lat-Nam Kerfuffle where I try to make all of this fit together somehow, do temper your hopes a little. It's simply impossible to make all these references fit without creating some sort of circulair timeline where one character appears first in Legends I and then in Legends II, while another character goes the other way. Even with less egregious examples you can end up with characters who have apparently been around for thousands of years. To solve this without making up a whole lot of fan fiction involving outlandish time travel plots we need to assume there are multiple characters with the same name in the canon. Madarans especially seems to have a habit of naming their children after ancient legends in this fix. It's probably a cultural thing.

As for why this happened... well, Clayton Emery and Scott McGough have pretty much told us. Calyton has said several times, most recently in the comment section of this blog, that Xira was a late addition to the book, originally another minor character that was changed to incorporate more Legends from the set. Only nobody told Scott, who was putting the same characters in his own story. There was no editor keeping this straight, so it should come as no surprise that there was also no one making sure the new books worked with the old Harper Prism stuff.

I have speculated before on why continuity was such a mess at the time. Remember that the two Legends trilogies were published at the same time as the Otaria Saga, which was also a complete continuity trainwreck both internally and with regards to the rest of Magic's continuity. We'll probably never learn exactly what was going on inside WotC at the time, but this was clearly a time when the storyline, and especially a consistent continuity, were very low down on the list of priorities. Well, at least it's left us with an interesting puzzle...