Betrayers of Kamigawa Vignettes

Well, this needs no introduction. Just like last time, we get a bunch of vignettes on the Betrayers of Kamigawa minisite. Let’s take a look!

A Servant’s Mission, by Jay M. Salazar

Ink-Eyes is able to hear ghosts and kami, and from these voices from beyond she has received training to become the best ninja among the Nezumi. Muzan the Ogre took her in after she was cast out by her Nezumi kin and raised/trained her in the kind of horrifically abusive way we also saw with Hidetsugu and Kobo. He sends her to kill some Nezumi camped nearby to please his oni master Kuro. But at night she returns and kills Muzan instead. She then summons Kuro, who makes her his new servant, giving her new powers, including necromancy.

Champions of Kamigawa Player's Guide

Of course the top-down-ness of this set had to be sold in every way possible, so here we have the booklet that came with the Champions fatpack. Those usually contain just a quick introduction to the world or the story before moving on to talking about the coolest cards in the set and how the new mechanics work. Those introduction rarely have anything that isn’t also featured in online articles, so don’t expect me to review them for every single set going forward. But a few of them do contain interesting information, and the Kamigawa ones are certainly among that group. For those interested in checking them out, the lore related pages have been scanned and posted here.

Champions of Kamigawa Online

When we covered the Champions vignettes I linked to the Champions mini site, where you may have noticed a whole bunch of other links in addition to the short stories. Those links all go to various Feature Articles and Magic Arcanas on the main site. Not all of these are actually all that interesting from a lore perspective (Spiritual Combos just gives us some 2004 style Johnny tricks for example), but a decent number of them are. It’s a top-down set after all, you’ve got to showcase that! So let’s take a look on everything flavor and storyline related that WotC released online from the start of the Champion’s preview season to the start of that of Betrayers.  

Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa

Writer - Scott McGough
Cover Art - John Bolton
First Printing - September 2004

SUMMARY
We start with a prologue in which lady Pearl-Ear, a kitsune living at the royal court of Eiganjo delivers the daughter of daimyo Konda. When she goes to tell him, she finds him with general Takeno, headmaster Hisoka, soratami ambassador Meloku and a mysterious floating rock depicting a dragon curled in on itself, that he claims is a way to "secure the future".

We then skip to twenty years later, to a Kamigawa that has been ravaged by attacks from the spirit world. We follow the ochimusha Toshi, the titular outlaw, who uses kanji magic (as in, he draws kanji symbols to summon magical effects). He stumbles upon a bunch of soratami trying to make a deal with Marrow-Gnawer's gang of nezumi. He manages to escape, but the soratami follow him to his home to kill him. He escapes again, but sees the kanji for moon, iceberg, unstoppable and disaster or cataclysm appearing in some shadows and fallen bamboo. Wanting answers, he heads into the Sokenzan mountains to find Hidetsugu, an ogre shaman with whom he has made a blood pact called the Hyozan Reckoners. (Hyozan means iceberg. If you face one of them, you're also in trouble with those you can't see, get it?)

Champions of Kamigawa Vignettes

Let’s take our first steps into this new plane with some short stories! You can find a portal containing links to all of them here, but I’ll also include individual links below. I’ll give quick summaries for all of them, but I’d urge you to just go read them yourselves. They aren’t long, they’re free, and most of them are worth a look. Also, Magic’s short stories have a tendency towards twist endings, so those will all be spoiled if you read the reviews first.

Kamigawa Announcement

Did I really end that last review promising the next one would be up after a week or two, and then posted nothing for multiple months? How embarrassing. I don’t really have an excuse either. The world just has an annoying habit of having stuff happen (as I’m sure you’ve noticed these past few months), and between friends, family, work and other stuff the blog just always seems to be the last thing that gets incorporated into my new routine. So after the so manieth misfired attempt at a regular schedule I think I’ll just have to accept that this blog isn’t going to have one, and I’ll just put up an announcement whenever I’ve got a chunk of reviews ready.

Speaking of which… Announcement! Kamigawa reviews start this Saturday! Here’s what you can expect the coming weeks!

• September 5th - Champions of Kamigawa vignettes
• September 12th - Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa
• September 16th - Champions online
• September 19th - Champions fatpack booklet
• September 26th - Betrayers of Kamigawa vignettes
• October 3rd - Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa
• October 7th - Betrayers online
• October 10th - Betrayers fatpack booklet
• October 17th - Saviors of Kamigawa vignettes
• October 21st - Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa
• October 24th - Kamigawa trilogy review
• October 28th - Saviors online
• October 31st - Saviors fatpack booklet
• November 7th - Kamigawa block overview

You see, the first Kamigawa review was almost done when I put up the last Mirrodin one, and when I decided on this new way of doing things I first finished up all the others before doing the announcement. Couldn’t show up empty handed after all that time, could I?

As you’ve probably spotted already… this is quite a bit more stuff than a block usually gets! This is because Kamigawa is a top-down block, meaning it was made flavor-first, rather than mechanics-first, and to promote this WotC put out a lot more lore than usual, including a whole bunch of online stories. Which means more reviews, but also that I’m not going to do the usual order of looking at the books and then at the online stuff. The first of the short stories were released during spoiler season, making them the very first look at Kamigawa we ever got. So to keep things roughly chronological I’m going to cover them first for each set, then the novel second. Which does leave the articles on the rest of the online stuff fairly short, but that’s why you’ll be getting articles on the fatpack booklets (which normally don’t have anything worth talking about in them, but hey, top-down block!) in the same week.

Oh, and one more point of housekeeping: from this point on it seems Wizard’s has finally learned from Odyssey and Mirrodin block that having three different authors on your trilogy is courting trouble. So starting with Kamigawa each cycle has at least one writer working on all three books. This is great for the consistency of tone, quality and continuity, but a bit strange when it comes to writing reviews about them. When I’ve covered one book there isn’t much more to say about, for example, the writing style of the other two. So to keep me from repeating myself I’m going to cover the Kamigawa novels the same way I did Invasion novels way back when: the three reviews will just have the summary, trivia and continuity sections of the review, then in the same week as the third article I’ll also put up a review of the entire trilogy as a whole, where I will also cover the timeline stuff.

And with all that out of the way… see you Saturday for our first look at Kamigawa!