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.

More spectacularly is the quality of the short stories. Which is perhaps more important, as they have a far wider reach. None of them reach the quality of "Loran’s Smile", "Truth of Names" or "Release", but almost all of them get at least a “yeah, pretty good” from me, which for Magic short stories is a minor miracle. I’ve gone through my reviews of the various Magic anthologies that have been put out over the years to see how they ranked, and the scores are not good. Looking at how many got a "yeah, pretty good" or better...

• Tapestries: 8 of 17
• Distant Planes: 11 of 15
• The Colors of Magic: 5 of 11
• The Myths of Magic: 4 of 10
• The Dragons of Magic: 4 of 12
• The Secrets of Magic: 8 of 10
• The Monster of Magic: 6 of 11
• Kamigawa Vignettes: 15 of 20

I haven't gone thoroughly through all the anthologies for this, just re-read my old reviews, but even this cursory glance tells a clear story. These vignettes have more good stories than any short story collection before, and score pretty high percentage-wise as well. Oh, and keep in mind that some of the Saviors vignettes got bad reviews from me because they were so samey to what had come before, even though they were pretty okay by themselves. The Champions stories really worked hard to establish the world and its mystery, the second two batches then doubled down on character work, and pretty much all of them succeeded in actually telling a story with the little space they had. Even the ones that used old short story standby's like twist endings or setting up a sequel we were never going to get still managed to be satastfying stories on their own.

The second way in which Kamigawa is commendable is in its continuity. Not its use of larger continuity, of which there is practically none (just Scott McGough tying two of his main characters together by making one a descendant of the other), but its internal continuity. The decision to diverge cards and storyline led to some truly weird stuff in the last two blocks. The online articles around Onslaught block told a completely different story from the novels, to the point where Rei Nakazawa was actively making stuff up to explain Karona’s appearance in the last set. With Mirrodin things were not as bad, but there was still a whole lot of talk about Glissa going on a quest to uncover the truth about her world, while in the novels she was motivated by revenge. And the less said about all the timeline inconsistencies the better!

With Kamigawa though, the online articles actually represent the novels they are designed to sell you very well, and all the surrounding arcana’s expand the world and its history without contradicting anything major. The only continuity issues I’ve been able to spy are an instance or two where someone was clearly using an older list on names for various peoples or places, and some stuff like the depiction of Shinka and the death of Michiko’s mother, but those are just details. Annoying for storyline purists like myself, but if I’m really honest, the kind of stuff you’ll always run into when you’re dealing with a collaborative universe.

This all damning with faint praise of course. I’m complimenting a writing team for not contradicting themselves too much. But after the last few sets, this is a fantastic improvement!

That said, it is a shame that there is still so little story/card integration. The main characters get legendary creatures, and there is a single “storyline spotlight” card in Final Judgment, but that’s it. No cards for secondary characters like Kobo, Choryu or Sharp-Ear, no story for half the legendary creatures in the set. And this isn’t just me haggling for more ways to improve my Sisay “only cards that have actually appeared in the stories” Commander deck, I think more story/card integration could have helped greatly with WotC’s “third set problem”.

You see, when WotC moved away from the three set structure, they said it has always been difficult to make the third set of a block interesting. Change too much and it doesn’t feel connected to what came before. Change too little and you’re just giving people more of what you’ve been giving them the rest of the year. I had noticed that myself as well. Some of my favorite three-set blocks are Alara and Scars of Mirrodin, which made very good use of their three sets to tell a three act story. Introduce the shards -> Show the conflict when they meet -> Show the integration when we move beyond the initial conflict. Show the Phyrexian infiltration -> Show the Mirran-Phyrexian War -> Show what the Phyrexians do to the plane after they’ve won. In contrast, in blocks like Zendikar, Innistrad and to a lesser extend the original Mirrodin the second set provides the same as the first set, just more of it, before the third sets does something completely different. And blocks like Theros and especially Kamigawa just do the same thing three times. But after an entire year that feels a little stale.

Kamigawa could really have done with incorporating more story into cards to differentiate the sets. Maybe have the first set introduce the world, save the war breaking out for the second set, and show the ravages at the end of the war in the third? Or keep the first set as it is, but show things getting much worse in the second (perhaps because of some kind of, you know, betrayal in Betrayers of Kamigawa?) and then showing the punishment or Konda and O-Kagachi and the attempts at rebuilding in the third set? It is named “Saviors” after all. This would also require some adjustments to the story as is of course. My main complaint about the Saviors' vignettes was that they just gave us more of the same. But if those had wrapped up some of the set-up from previous short stories and given us just one or two looks at the rebuilding of Kamigawa...

This is all pointless spit balling of course, especially after the three set blocks have been discontinued. But the fact that Kamigawa, the quintessential top-down block, is also the block that did the least to show the story’s progress over the course of its sets shows that there was still a long way to go for the storyline, despite all the good things here.

Luckily, there are quite a few more good things coming up.

You see, the last thing I have to say about Kamigawa is that it is the turning point where the storyline became revitalized. We’ve all heard that the Otaria/Mirrodin era was full of bad stories, but as I’ve pointed out before, this was just the nadir of a much, much longer development. From about halfway into the Weatherlight Saga we started to see a slow drifting apart of cards and sets and a rise in continuity issues. The end of that saga only accelerated this. Mirrodin can be seen as the bottoming out of this trend. The story wasn’t as bad as the previous block, and the new style of worldbuilding was actually pretty great, but there were still the numerous continuity issues, the apparent lack of coordination between various writers and creative team members, and the cancellation of the secondary novel line and the anthologies that did not promise anything good for the storyline.

But then came Kamigawa.

I don’t know if the response to the flavor & story driven approach was so great, or if people inside WotC just discovered that they liked working on those things, but from this point on we see a rising trend in the importance of the story that will do nothing but go up for years to come. By the end of the block there was a dedicated flavor column on Magicthegathering.com. It was probably too late to do much for Ravnica, but for Guildpact we get short stories again, and from that point on those would occasionally pop up in that flavor column, until they replaced that column with Uncharted Realms so we’d get nothing but stories. And after Ravnica we get Coldsnap and Time Spiral blocks, where WotC actually starts mining Magic’s continuity for ideas!

Heck, let me get controversial here for a moment… say what you will about the Mending (and I will, by the time we get to it), but the fact that WotC cared enough about the storyline not just to finally start incorporating planeswalkers into the cardgame, but also to dedicate an entire block to giving an in-universe reason for this change, just a few years after seemingly hanging the entire storyline out to dry, is a big damn deal!

Now I’m not putting all of this solely on Kamigawa of course. A.D. Jameson has written a very interesting article in which he traces WotC’s move away from trying to sell the game through pro players to selling it through marketable characters, and the importance of them being bought by Hasbro in that change. And I’m sure MaRo’s statements on the importance of emotional resonance in the fifth age of design, something else that I feel also led to the further integration of flavor and gameplay, are completely true. But while there were undoubtedly many causes for the continuing rise of the Magic storyline (and more than a few hiccups on the way) fact remains that the start of these improvements happened around Kamigawa block. After a depressingly long stretch of reviews where the importance, quality and consistency of both stories and continuity were in steady decline, we’ve finally turned the corner for the better, and I can’t thank Kamigawa enough for that!

So, that was Kamigawa! Now what? Well, I'm not quite done with the Ravnica novels yet, so you'll have a wait a little longer for those. But I've got a few short, half-done articles that I can easily finish without any more reading or research to tide you over. So in two weeks time I'll have a quick look at the first three issues of The Duelist for you (apparently we missed a few important bits during my original reviews!). After that, well, we'll see if Ravnica is finished or if I need to placate you all with another retro review like that. But don't worry, our trip to the big city is coming soon!