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.  

Magicthegathering.com Feature Articles

We Are the Champions, My Friends

First, let’s cover the expected. Just like with all previous sets since Torment we get a Rei Nakazawa article introducing the setting and the story to us. Only this time the Kumano and Takeno stories had already been released, so we actually already had a pretty good feel of Kamigawa’s tone and flavor through actual stories! I think having a few stories out before doing an article like this is a great way to introduce a world, as a story will have much more of an impact than an article with a quick overview of a world.

The article gives us just what you’d expect: it tells of the Kami War and the Konda family, does a quick tour of the color wheel, introducing the various species and locales, and gives us Konda himself as a preview card. There are a few points of interest here though.

• We get a vague sense of a timeframe we are in with the line “The time: long before Mirrodin was a gleam in its creator’s eye.” We've seen "flashback" sets before, like Urza's block and technically everything from Antiquities to Alliances, but Kamigawa will prove the last time Magic sets will be published out of chronological order (outside of time travel plots). We'll delve deeper into the timeline after we've covered all the novels.
• The article establishes the Reito Massacre as the start of the war, while the flavor texts only mention it as “one of the first battles”.
• It gives us some info on the orochi, revealing their reaching out to the Jukai monks happened decades before the war, and that “some hotheaded youths started to question the truce between orochi and human. After all, must not the humans have been responsible for the kami’s outrage…?”
• We hear that Toshiro is a descendant of “one of Kamigawa’s most honored families.”
• Oh, and it says the Kitsune live in the susuki-grass fields surrounding Eiganjo, while in the novel they live in the Jukai forest. Ah well, there are probably multiple kitsune societies.

Behind the Scenes: Creating the World of Kamigawa

The next feature article gives us some info on the background of the world design. It’s cool that they brought over a lead concept artist from Japan, Ittoku Seta, who apparently did sword practice every day before working on the set. I think Kamigawa is a very cool world, so maybe all concept artists should get some weapon training. The article says Kamigawa is based on the Sengku Jidai period, which even with my limited knowledge of Japanese I can tell is a misspelling of the Sengoku Jidai, or Warring States, period. Which shouldn’t be surprising, as that period seems to be the one thing that westerners who know just one thing about Japanese history have heard of.

We also get some really cool concept art here. I really like all the species of Kamigawa, except for the orochi… actually, the concept art given for them here is also pretty badass, but hair and 6 limbs always felt strange for a species based on scaled and limbless animals. I think the design was better suited for a more generic reptilian species, and I prefer the much flatter face we see in this art to the more snakelike designs in the set.

And it is certainly a cooler picture than the infamous boobed snake that was actually used in the very first announcement of Kamigawa block!

Land of Ten-Thousand Legends

This article gives us more behind the scenes info on the creation of the setting, this time from the perspective of the flavor text and name writing team. Here we learn Kamigawa was originally called Inrekai. But what I find really interesting is that apparently it was the flavor text writers who came up with the Order of the Sacred Bell and their destruction in the Battle of Silk, and that in the process the five Kodama’s were created. Two cards already designed to be legendary creatures, but apparently without specific backstories, were changed into the Kodama’s of the North and South Trees. So it seems the legendary creatures in the set were designed mostly as more generic creatures, and then the flavor team could make up stories and personalities for them. The same happened with Horobi. This seems really late in the process for a top-down set, but I actually think it’s a good idea. From behind the scenes articles on later sets we will learn the names of Lorwyn treefolk heroes or New Phyrexian Thanes that never made it into the card game, which always felt weird to me. Why design so much stuff that you’re not going to use, while at the same time putting out legendary creatures without any story behind them? By giving the job of designing the story to the flavor text writers you are making sure that all your legendary creatures have an actual legend (however short) behind them.  Or, at least, that would be the case, if you released the stories you made up for them to the public…

Perhaps this is a good moment to take a quick detour to one of Mark Rosewater’s design articles on Champions of Kamigawa, and specifically the following bit:

"At this point, very little in the way of mechanics had been worked out. The team wanted to first get a sense of the world and then have the mechanics flow from it. The design team used this time to examine what previous mechanics lent themselves well to flavor. After weeks of examination, it became clear that one mechanic stood heads and tails above the rest as a flavor-based vehicle – legends!"

I actually don’t really agree with this. A legendary creature (or other permanent) isn’t inherently more flavorful than a non-legendary one. Take… I dunno, which legendary creature have we been seeing a lot of lately… Yorion. (This article was in the works for a while...) It’s legendary, but between the unexplained blinking mechanic and the very abstract “gotta have 20 extra cards in your deck” companion requirement that card isn’t flavorful to me at all. I would argue Ram Through and Offspring’s Revenge are the standout flavorful cards of Ikoria. Those actually tell a clear story of what is going on when you use them. The legendary supertype isn’t flavorful, it’s a promise of flavor. It’s an indicator that a certain creature or item is important to the story. It piques people’s interest and sends them to wiki’s, storyline forums or, these days, Twitter, to discover said story. And thus it is very disappointing to discover certain legends do not live up to that promise.

The only “story” for Yorion is a note in Vivien’s diary about how she heard a rumor about it. For Champions of Kamigawa we will get a glossary of names (which I’ll cover below), but that one doesn’t even cover all the legends, and gives very minor descriptions for some others. (“Kuro (KOO-roh) A greater oni.” Ah, thanks. I would never have been able to tell from his card…)

I guess it’s always a kind of compliment when my complaint ends up being “give me more”, but it is a shame that for Kamigawa, the first top-down block and the block with more legends than any other, we have barely any story on a lot of the characters introduced. I get that there wasn’t time and space to cover every single one of them in an online vignette or a novel, but even a short blurb for each one, like those diary entries we got for Ikoria, would have been greatly appreciated.

Anyway, having finished that detour… this article mentions Netflix. Which is weird for me, as that company didn’t come to the Netherlands till 2013. In the last online article I did Cory Herndon was making jokes about “electronic post” as if the internet was still fairly newfangled! This is very disorientating!

Let's wrap up with a shorter look at two other feature articles. 

• A Series of Fortunate Events: Kamigawa World Design once again covers behind the scenes info on the set’s creation. It covers lots of cool design stuff, but nothing specifically about the storyline. I bring it up because I found it interesting to learn that the idea of a top-down set, the “earthlike” location, and even the specific Japanese setting were all ideas from Bill Rose.
• Finally there is Demons! Demons! D3m0nZ!!1! (yes, that is the actual name of the article), in which Brady Dommermuth talks about bringing the demon creature type back to Magic after a period of absence. It has a cool style guide picture of one, and the mention that they are “physical manifestations of the evil parts of people's souls, given shape by an infusion of black mana when a greatly wicked human perishes” (although that also comes from the unpublished style guide, so we don’t know if that is still considered canon), and gives an art preview for Gutwrencher Oni.

Magic Book Archive

That covers the feature articles, let’s move on to the Magic Book Archive. Here we get two things. The first is an author profile on Scott McGough, which doesn’t give us anything to discuss we haven’t already covered when he got an author profile and an interview around the time Assassin’s Blade came out. The second is a character profile on Daimyo Konda. This gives us Konda’s origin story with the founding of Eiganjo and the subjugation of the Towabara plains, though it obviously keeps what happened to start the Kami War a secret. Most of this info is also given in a more piecemeal fashion in the novels, though here we get a clear statement of his desire to set up a “single, supreme nation that would ensure peace and prosperity for all who dwelled within”. This comes across less clearly in the novels, because there he has slowly been going insane for 20 years, thus it is not always clear whether he is thinking of some greater good or just lusting for power and glory.

And that is it for the Magic Book Archive. There would be one more Magic related update, a call for novel proposals which would eventually lead to the selection of the co-writers for the Planar Chaos and Future Sight novels. We’ll cover that eventually. For now though the period of multiple websites has come to an end. While there will still be mini-sites for sets, these will be announced and updated through feature articles and arcana posts, so they are still very much tied to the main Daily MTG website, making them much less obscure sources than say the MagicInvasion.com animated comics, or the Nemesis short story. Which makes my job a lot easier!

Magic Arcana

Let’s finish our Champion’s covering with a quick round-up of interesting Magic Arcana’s from this era, starting with a whole bunch of Kamigawa concept art features:

• Konda and Eiganjo Concept art
• The Araba: Kamigawa’s Crater Plains
• Kami “Energy Objects”
• Orochi art previews
• Building Heroes
• Soratami in Art
• Spirit Sketches
• “Rend” Renderings
• Nezumi in Art
• John Avon Land Sketches
• Sketches: Orochi Hatchery
• Sketches of Uyo
• Sinister White?

Other than that, the only important Kamigawa related Arcana is the Glossary. I'll cover it here, but it is also found inside the Champions fatpack booklet which we'll take a look at later this week.

On first viewing this might seem a very interesting article, as it has a whole list of Kamigawa characters with descriptive blurbs, but the blurbs are so short that there is very little attraction beyond the pronunciation guide. Did you know Hayato, master sailor, from the flavor text of River Kaijin and Eye of Nowhere… is a master mariner? Did you know Hoto, Temple Guardian, from the flavor text of Kami of the Hunt… is a budoka temple guard? I mean… if you’re just going to restate their profession with slightly different wording you’re not adding much, are you?

 It’s not all like that though. We get translations for the names of various locations, learn Dosan is the oldest living kannushi on Kamigawa, that Hisoka’s first name is Iki, that Kiku leaves camellia flowers on the bodies of her victims after killing them by turning their shadows against them, that Kumano’s first name is Junzo… Wait, hold up… Kumano’s name was given as Ryusaki in his vignette… and Kiku uses magical flowers to kill in the novels, not shadows!

So, yeah… it’s cool, but it could have been much cooler if we had gotten some actual information on those story-less legendary creatures, and if someone had made sure the information here matched with what was given elsewhere. I suspect someone was working from an earlier draft of a style guide or something.

Moving on from Kamigawa, here's some other random stuff I thought was cool:

• Censorship Uncensored tells the story of the art for Keeper of the Mind & Censorship and shows a pixelated version of the full art. My teenage self obviously immediately started googling for the unpixelated version. Having found it I get why they didn’t want it on their cards, but I must also say it looks much, much more explicit with the pixelation than without it!
• And while we're talking about Censorship, here are two more Arcana's covering Unglued 2 and Unhinged:
• Unglued 2 Veggie Creatures
• Tijuana Nights
• Check out these absolutely awesome Myr Sculptures. I want one!
• This Arcana showcases a piece of Time Twister art that I genuinely don’t remember ever having seen before.
• And at the very end, we get Ravnica Revealed. We've only just started covering Kamigawa, but already we get to see our first glimpse what the next block will look like! These were the days before the infinite spoiler season and yet they didn't keep this back until after they had two more Kamigawa sets to sell!