Another Look at The Duelist #1-3

As a little breather between Kamigawa and Ravnica… something completely different!

Four years ago, when the world was still young, I reviewed the first few issues of The Duelist. (Here and here) I didn’t, and still don’t, actually own the first three though. The first issues goes for upwards of 100 euros on Magiccardmarket, if there are even listings for it, and that’s just more money than I’m willing to spend on these curiosa. So I had to rely on scans from other people. And while I’m still very glad those were provided to me, eh… turns out they weren’t complete!

In the decades that have passed since 2016 the amazing Cary of mtglore.com has uploaded complete scans of these early issues, allowing us to actually go through them in their entirety, which has revealed a number of interesting little tidbits! So, check out the full issues here, or follow me to below the jump break for the highlights!

Kamigawa Overview

So, after looking at 3 novels, 3 fatbook booklets, 20 vignettes and loads of articles and arcana’s, what can we say about Kamigawa as a whole?

Well for one, it’s really good.

The worldbuilding and designs are, in my opinion at least, fantastic. Even the bizarre kami designs look great to me, even though some people seem to dislike them. Only the ororchi looking a bit goofy. But that's not a big surprise, flavorwise the set was always going to do fine. WotC had already shown of their worldbuilding chops with the popular setting of Mirrodin. Storywise though? Now there the quality is a very nice surprise!

WotC doing an entire block where the story was one of the main draws was rather a wild idea considering they had squandered so much of the story’s quality since the end of the Weatherlight Saga. Of the 12 books that had been published after Apocalypse, I actively dislike 9! The other 4 were written by Scott McGough though, so perhaps someone at WotC was paying attention to the reaction to these novels. Giving him this trilogy was certainly a good move. I've already covered why I like them so much, but let me reiterate it here: they tell a pretty splendid action story with loads of fun and engaging characters. Probably in my top 10 Magic stories, and that "probably" comes from the difficulty of deciding what counts as a "story" (for example, do you count "The Truth of Names" and "Release", or do you need to take the entirety of Tarkir and Kaladesh as entries?) Kamigawa is definitely in my top if we're counting trilogies as single entries.