Wednesday, 28 October 2020

Saviors of Kamigawa Online

You know the drill by now. Some online articles and a whole bunch of (slightly) lore related Arcana shorts. Let’s just dive into them!

Feature Articles

Saving Grace is Rei Nakazawa’s introduction to the set. Like with the Betrayers article, he doesn’t add much though. He talks about how the weakened barrier between the utushiyo and kakuriyo has allowed the kirin, the spirits of great figures from Kamigawa’s past and the onna to cross over into the mortal realm, but this is really just namedropping a few cycles from the set rather than giving any real storyline info.

Tales From Beyond the Veil is Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar’s flavor text article. He says that from this point on, the flavor text writers could actually see the art for which they were writing text! Clearly this had already been possible on some occasions in the past (I want a banana this big!), but from now on it becomes standard practice, which seems like a very good development. Other than that, Jay points out that the “weakening of the veil between worlds” is more prominently featured in the set than in the novel, which is certainly true. Luckily this is not an inconsistency that causes any contradictions, just a matter of focus.

The only other feature article you might find interesting from a lore perspective is Setting the Standard, which has Bill Rose talking about Invasion. Just the card side of things, but there is some cool concept art in there.


Taste the Magic

So we don’t have much feature articles to discuss this time around. But then, a month before Ravnica previews start, we get Taste the Magic, a new weekly article series dedicated entirely to the flavor of Magic. I won’t link/discuss every single article, as there are too many to do so and not all of them are equally relevant (for example, the first one is mainly an introduction to the series talking about which parts of a card fall under “flavor”), but if you're interested in a look at a whole host of flavor related subjects, here’s a link to the article archive.

In the second article Matt Cavotta makes probably his most enduring addition to Magic culture by coining the term Vorthos for a flavor fan. (Apparently Vorthos’s real name is John, but to avoid confusion with Johnny he uses the name of his 16th level half-even Ranger/Warmage. How many people calling themselves Vorthoses do you think know that bit of trivia?). I like the description of Vorthos as understanding “that Magic can be fun even when you're not playing the game.” Which is a good understanding to have when you are, say, stuck at home for a couple of months.

Taste of Magic is a grab bag of features, explaining pronunciations and obscure words, highlighting cards Matt think are particularly flavorful, showing off the style guide… basically a more regular place to do the various stuff that had already been popping up in arcana’s from time to time, though he will delve into more orignal topics further down the line.

The look into the style guide gets cringy at times. Not for any in-world reason, more for the description of Magic as a whole…

“Magic is a head-to-head battle of wits in which two spellcasting warriors fight to the death with magic and armies of bad-ass creatures. Every card illustration should work in that context: active, aggressive, cool, wicked, “edgy.” The word “magepunk” works for us. Remember, your audience is BOYS 14 and up”

Wicked. Totally radical dudes. Did you have to write boys in caps lock AND bold? Matt may say directly afterwards that WotC is “sensitive to women and how they may feel as players and how they are represented on cards”, and the “No ridiculously exaggerated breasts”-rule is appreciate, but… come on man. It’s 2005. I had hoped we had progressed a bit further by now. (What’s that? It’s actually 2020 and people are still hoping for better representation in Magic? Well that’s depressing…)

It’s also… eh… funny isn’t the right word… striking? Yeah. It’s also striking that almost every early Taste of Magic article comes with retractions or rebuttals to complaints. The first article posits that the game wouldn’t be fun without flavor, the next says a bunch of people wrote in to complain that they are here just for the gameplay. The third article introduces the Style Guide, the fourth begins with arguing against people who say the style guide should go because it hinders the creativity of the artists… I guess some things never change in the Magic fandom, do they?

One final thing from Taste the Magic’s look at style guides: Mirrodin was called Mirroden in the style guide, and Leonin Lionen. Also, that article has a lot of pretty art.


That’s pretty much it for now. Like I said, the series started at the very end of Kamigawa’s time in the spotlight. But we’ll be seeing Matt Cavotta a lot more in times to come!

Magic Arcanas

  • A Kamigawa Glossary part 3 - This one gives a bit more than the previous two glossaries. Did you know Adamaro used to be a human warrior in life? That Kaho was Minamo’s historian specifically during the first half of the Kami War? That Kiyomaro is the kami of Kamigawa’s first Daimyo? It’s still one line descriptions, most of which tell you no more than the card already did, but it adds just enough that this is my favorite of the three.
  • Saviors Logo Concepts (which actually came out during Betrayers time in the limelight) shows some pretty great expansion symbol designs.
  • Soldev, the (sort of) Untold Story tells the story of Arcum Dagsson and Sorine Relicsbane through the various flavor texts attributed to them.
  • Legendology: Family Man contains a link to the long defunct website Legendology. It was intended as a place to put fiction from various WotC games, but I don’t think it ever took off. The only Magic related story ever put up on there was Family Man, which we’ve already covered when it was first released in the anthology The Secrets of Magic.

And of course we have more looks at various style guides and art showcases:

 Oh, and have some unreleased cards from Unglued 2 to wrap up.

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