Kamigawa/Legends II Timeline Update

This was originally part of a larger article with a few updates and callbacks to earlier reviews, but when I actually wrote it all down it got a bit more extensive the other points. So rather than dominate that article I'm splitting it off here.

So, when I did the Kamigawa Trilogy Review Ethan Fleischer (who you all should be familiar with) commented that the upcoming War of the Spark art book might be relevant for the placement of those books. Well, by now that upcoming book has come up to my house, and while there isn't the clear "Tetsuo killed Bolas in [[year]]" date I was hoping for, there is certainly a bunch of stuff relevant to Kamigawa and the Legeds II trilogy to discuss here!

Oh, and just to be clear, I'm not going to go through the entire book, I've got Ravnica reviews to work on instead. For those interested in a review: just like all the other art books it is full of gorgeous art, and while it doesn't do the deep-dive into a specific world like the previous ones it does give an overview of just about every plane Bolas has even peripherally been involved in, all planeswalkers featured in War of the Spark, and even gives us some new facts, like finally explaining why Bolas wanted the Eldrazi freed (basically, he hoped their threat to the Multiverse would lure enough planeswalkers to Zendikar to use the Elder Spell there). All in all, another great book, heartily recommended!

Now, on to the timeline discussion!

There is a page on Kamigawa, which gives us the following quote:

"Like several other planes, Kamigawa was rocked by the time rifts that gradually proliferated on Dominaria and ultimately led to the Mending. Paradoxically, about a hundred years before the artificer Urza created a time rift by attempting to send the silver golem Karn back in time, that rift weakened the boundary between the spirit realm and the material realm of Kamigawa. This allowed the daimyo Konda to steal the divine essence of the Great Old Serpent, O-Kagachi, launching twenty years of war between mortals and spirits-The Kami War."

The book doesn't fit under my own scanner very well, and I'm not going back to the office just to scan something during a pandemic, so you'll have to make do with some homemade photographs.

The big change from what came before is of course that the weakening of the boundary was caused by Urza, rather than Ravi ringing the Apocalypse Chime! I'm guessing this was done because with both Teferi and Karn in War of the Spark they had to talk about Urza anyway, and with a huge number of planes already covered they didn't want to drag Ulgrotha into it as well. Understandable, but it is a bit unfortunate in my opinion. Between the involvement of Ravi, Eight-and-a-Half-Tails and Mochi the origin of the Kami War is complicated enough already without adding another layer onto it 15 years hence. I'm guessing the sequence now is that Ravi created the link between the Talon Gates and Kamigawa, Urza's trans-temporal disaster then weakened the barrier, then Konda asked Sensei Eight-and-a-Half-Tails to do his research, and then Mochi got involved? Or perhaps Mochi suggested the Sensei to Konda, who knows...

For the timeline though, nothing changes. Urza blew up his time machine in 3307 AR, so a hundred years before that is roughly 3200 AR, when Ravi rang the Chime. The implication seems to be that the Kami War happened shortly after that, but it still leaves us with the wiggle room we had before to say that it took a while after the boundary was weakened before anyone was stupid enough to go ahead and steal a kami. No, for new timeline info we have to dig a little deeper. Let's go to another quote.

"Over a thousand years ago, Ugin plotted with the sphinx Planeswalker Azor to destroy Bolas [...] Before the trap could be sprung, though, Bolas tracked Ugin to Tarkir and attacked him. The two dragons battled in the sky over Tarkir for hours, but in the end, Nicol Bolas proved too powerful. Ugin fell from the sky and crashed into the earth. Bolas left him for dead, but his life was preserved by another Planeswalker, Sarkhan Vol, who entombed him in a cocoon-like structure made from one of Nahiri's own hedrons. There he slumbered for over 1,200 years."

No new info here, I just wanted to mention how surprised I was by the vagueness of these dates. Previously we've been told Fate Reforged happened 1280 years ago, which is such a bizarre number that I've always thought it must be pretty specific. Could this loosening of the period be a hint that 1280 is an approximation? Could it be that it was actually only 1253 years, thus moving Fate Reforged to 3307, vindicating my "3307 is the one year in which time travel is possible" fan theory? Eh... the magic 8-ball says it's too early to tell. Since "1280 years ago" and "Over 1200 years ago" don't actually contradict one another I'm going to assume this is just a less specific way of writing it, and the 1280 date is still canonical, thus I will keep Fate Reforged at ~3280 on my timeline.

Now I can hear you asking, why on earth are you talking about Fate Reforged? I thought this article was about Kamigawa and Legends II? Well...

"Sometime around this deadly battle [between Bolas and Ugin], Bolas decided to take a more active role in affairs on Dominaria. During his absence from the plane, a nameless warrior-queen established an empire based in Madara, exploiting the same mana flows that Bolas had enjoyed. With barely a second thought, Bolas killed the so-called "god-empress" of Madara and claimed her throne for himself."

...and then later we hear...

"After four centuries of rule, God-Emperor Bolas faced an uprising against his authority in the Edemi Islands, a small chain to the west of the Madaran mainland."

So, that solves that, right? Eh... unfortunately there is a little continuity error here. Champion's Trial makes it clear that while the empire of Madara is 400 years old, and the Umezawa's have been around for that long, Bolas only took over about 150 years ago, after generations of decline. So we've got some weighing of sources to do before we can update the timeline. But what we can say already, is that the "dream" of keeping up Scott McGough's original intention of having the Legends II cycle take place roughly around the time of Mirage is dead. Even if we take "over 1200 years ago" as a retcon of "1280 years ago", then interpret the "sometime around that deadly battle" statement really broadly and say Bolas took Madara 200 years later, and then take the 400 year rule over the 150 year rule, we're still 40 years of from Teferi phasing out his island, and almost two and a half century out from the actual Mirage War. And that is with making huge concessions. A more sensible approach to the timeline only enlarges the gap between the two stories. So sorry mr. McGough! I tried to keep that idea in-continuity on my timeline because I couldn't find sources contradicting it, but I guess that was its last hurrah!

So, with that out of the way... what happened? Is this a ret-con, and is the new continuity that Bolas killed the god-empress shortly after she took over Madara? Or do we consider this an error? With the art book being the newer and more widely available source, it's quite likely that this is the version that will become accepted within the community. On the other hand, the book does hedge its bets over very clear canonical points at various points. For example, rather than giving a straight account of Chronicle of Bolas, it says there are stories about Elder Dragons that may or may not be true, like how Ugin might be Bolas's brother, perhaps even his twin. So if you preferred the original version of the story (I dunno, maybe someone really likes god-empresses?) you can easily see this as a distorted version of events.

This one has nothing to do with Kamigawa. Just needed another picture to break up the text.

Now, for the timeline we have essentially two possibilities:

Option 1 is to assume Kamigawa happens so close to ~3200 AR that the 20 years of war disappear into the "~", then add the 400 years the Umezawa's live on Madara to put Legends II at ~3600 AR. You can then either subtract 150 to get the date Bolas conquered the place, or assume the art book info to be a ret-con and put that slightly after Toshi's arrival as well. This does mean that "sometime around this deadly battle" becomes either "80 years before this deadly battle" or "170 years after this deadly battle", but for someone as old as Bolas I'd say such periods counts as "around this time".

Option 2 is to assume "sometime around this deadly battle" means Bolas's conquering of Madara happens so close to the events of Fate Reforged that it fits into the "~" of "~3280", add 400 years of Bolas rule to that and place Legends II in ~3680, then subtract 400 years of Umezawa's again to put Kamigawa at ~3280 as well. This puts a gap of 80 years between ~3200 and Toshi arriving in Madara, but that is easily filled up. 20 of those years are needed for the Kami War itself anyway, and the rest can easily be taken up by the time it would take for the deteriorating barrier between worlds to become noticeable, the time Konda's researchers needed to figure out how to use this deterioration, and just simple the error margins around "~3200" and "~3280".

The one thing you can't do is take ~3280, add 150 years of Bolas rule and then subtract 400 years of Umezawa's, as that would put you almost two centuries too early for Ravi ringing the Chime or "a century before Urza blows up his time machine". The error margins aren't that flexible! So if you really want to use canon to save Madara's god-empress from Bolas, you have to go with option 1.

With all that said, it should be obvious that this timeline discussion is a bit of a storm in a teacup. Yeah, it's a shame this new source gives us info that conflicts with what we already knew, and thus we still haven't gotten a clear answer, but... whichever option you choose, each of them falls within the error margins of the other.

If I have to choose though, option 2 seems the weaker one. 3280 and 3680 sound very specific, even if you put that "~" in front of them, and it's clear we simply do not have that specificity. Furthermore, it relies on using both the 400 years reference from Legends II and the one from the art book, and since the second one is so clearly a misreading of the first, that just feels wrong. Option 1 doesn't have these issues. It also has the added benefit that those dates are already fairly well accepted in the community. The Timeline on the Wiki has been using the 3600 date for Legends II for over two years now. 

Since both options require an assumption (either that Kamigawa happens very close to 3200, or that Bolas taking over Madara happens very close to 3280), I don't think it's worth reopening the debate on the canonical weight of novels vs. art books. I'm going to use the more general sounding ~3200 and ~3600 dates for my timeline, and the discussion link back to this article should make it clear that there are error margins of about 80 years there.

Timekeeping Nicol Bolas himself would approve of!

So The Art of Magic: the Gathering: War of the Spark wasn't the blade to cut the Kamigawa-Madaran knot that I had hoped it would be, but ultimately it did tidy up the timeline. It allows me to remove the embarrassing 600 year error margins from both events, reducing them to under a century, which is really quite tidy.

Next time, that updates and callbacks article I was actually writing!

I needed a closing picture for the article, so I asked my girlfriend (who has played about 3 games of Magic ever and knows none of the characters) to pick her favorite art in the book, and she chose Jaya!