For Ravnican block there are once again Mini Sites, but for the first set we just don’t have much to discuss. It just has a quick description of the four Guilds featured, introducing them, their guild leaders, their guildhall, their power structure, etc. It’s cool to have such a succinct summary of all the guilds in a central place, but after many visits to Ravnica all this is all pretty much common knowledge, or covered in the novel review. The only thing that seems to have fallen by the wayside is that according to this information Vitu-Ghazi was "struck down years ago", but kept alive by dryadic magic. These summaries are also printed in the fatpack booklet.
There is also a trailer for the set which has a cool animation style, but does little beyond showing some shots of the world and hinting that there might be some kind of conflict coming.
The real meat of the online Ravnica source lies in the Feature Articles and the weekly Taste the Magic series.
FEATURE ARTICLES
Life in the Big City is our first introduction to the setting, which tells us all the basics. The city, the guilds, the war 10.000 years ago, the paruns, etc. It starts with a short showcase on the six guilds not in Ravnica before moving on to a more detailed view of the four that are. Again, most of the info here has since become general knowledge, so you'll not find anything here that's not on the wiki.
From the get go it is made clear that the guilds are horrible. They are all either cults or just power mad, and engaged in a cold war that tramples the common people underfoot. Yet Wizards did such a good job marrying their flavor to their gameplay that the guilds became the go-to names for two-color combinations and people started identifying with them, creating a weird and at times uncomfortable split where the story makes it clear these organizations are not to be liked... yet marketing would very much like you to buy Guild merchandise, and why not do a fun little "which Guild are you?"-quiz?
What I do find interesting is that there is no hint
that the Guildpact is magical. It's a just described as treaty and each guild accept it because if they go against it the others will band together to crush them. It's not a contradiction, but considering that in the novels the pact is described as a great spell right from the start, and later articles will also follow this, it seems like an odd omission.
Another not-quite continuity issue is that it is said here most people believe the Dimir died out ages ago, while other sources seem to suggest they think the Dimir never existed and are just a fairy tail. I guess there are multiple beliefs around the 10th guild around.
These looks
into the old workings of WotC keep surprising me. I mean…"For the first time,
we went beyond the normal Style Guide and supporting text documents and had a
pow-wow chat with the Creative Team."… Really? You just did Kamigawa, a topdown block, and while making it you never had a chat with the creative team? Whuh?
I guess this is all part of a trend of the Vorthos side of Magic becoming more integrated and professionalized, the long-term proces that really only started with Kamigawa. It's far from done though! We are further reminded of the long way we have to go when Jay mentions “Plot Thread” flavor texts (references to the actual storyline) being nearly extinct.
And... that's it for the important feature articles really. There's also The Essence of Basic Land, about artists finding what the essence of lands are so they could put mountains, forests etc. in urbanized Ravnica, which is interesting from an art fan perspective, but for the rest the feature article's don't touch on the flavor or story. That's all been moved into...
TASTE THE MAGIC
Taste the
Magic continues with a varied number of subjects. Sometimes you get an article talking about how everyone has their own “Golden Age” in which they thought Magic’s art was best, or about the joys of alliteration in naming Magic cards, at other
times Matt Cavotta is more focused on Ravnica, dealing with the flavor text of Selesnyan cards, or going over the various leaders of the Golgari over the
course of the first novel.
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| A recurring feature was the pronunciation guide. Perhaps Sekki should return from retirement one last time to talk about a certain Modern Horizons II cook... |
The articles that deal more with making the flavor are interesting looks into the mindset of the creative team at the time and I especially like that they cover more subjects than the recurring feature articles about how flavor text gets written, but there is basically no in-universe lore in them. The articles that specifically focus on Ravnica mostly cover the flavor you can get from looking at the cards, just grouping those belonging to certain guilds together for a clearer picture, and occasionally lifting some info from the novels. There are some interesting things of note though, which I will deal with below, but for the reasons just given I will not be linking to every single article. If you wanna go through everything, here's a link to the archives.
- Green Thumb, Black Heart says the Sisters of Stone Death are called Ludmilla, Lexya, and Lydya. The novel spells the last two slightly differently, as Lexia and Lydia. Matt links each sister to one of their card's abilities. Lydya is the one screaming in the background, goading enemies into attacking, Lexya petrifries them & Ludmilla, eldest and most powerful, turns the dead into "necrolithic servants". Ludmilla is the one that survived Savra's coup by the way.
- The House that Lies Built is Matt having some fun with the “the Dimir don’t exist” trope.
- In Metadwarfosis Matt tries to redesign red Dwarves and ends up inventing Goblins all over again, but this article has been ruined by link rot.
- Mythbashing is basically an entire article of comments and corrections. Also, it has a sketch of Protean Hulk, promising it will appear in Guildpact. He apologizes for it a week later, as the Hulk part of Flash-Hulk will not appear until Dissension.
- Holy War, the Boros Legion reveals the entire Boros military hierarchy, though it does so mostly using the cards. Would be cool to see where subsequently released Boros cards fit on the hierarchy. It does match up well with the novel though, mentioning stuff like Vict Gharti being Wojek Commander-General and namechecking other minor characters. It also creates a contradiction by saying that Parhelion occasionally docks on top of Sunhome, while the novel described Sunhome itself the angel's flying fortress. We'll talk more about that when Parhelion actually shows up in Dissension.
- Milk and Cookies with Anthony S. Waters is the first installment of the recurring Milk and Cookies segment, in which Matt sits down with a Magic artist to talk about their work. Again, cool for the art fans among the Vorthos community, but the one installment I'm particularly interested in is the one with Pete Venters, which also looks at his work as head of continuity back in the day. We'll get to that one eventually.
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| There is neat art in those articles though. Like this full art for Cinder Wall, which has a lot more cinders in it than what ended up on the card. |
One of the more interesting bits of lore-building is hidden in the article "A Little Home Town Pride", which looks at non-Guild related cards in the set, and provides some of those with surprising amounts of lore. Take Helldozer for example:
"They were created in a joint venture between the Golgari and Orzhov, the two most business-oriented guilds, to be used as one-giant demolition teams. They would be cut loose on decaying neighborhoods in need of “reclamation.” Sometimes, the inhabitants would be notified of the demolition. The Orzhov would control all contracts on the rebuilding of the reclamation zones and the Golgari would claim all dead that result from “accidental” loss of life during the demolition. Nasty, nasty guilds."
"The angry 'dozers stopped listening to the puny guildforemen barking orders at them. They stopped heeding the command of the guilds entirely. But, they did not stop smashing stuff. Their minds were twisted and bent on smashing stuff. Now they're uncontrollable and nearly mindless. Nearly. There is just enough left going on in their little tortured brains to take special pleasure in the smashing of guild properties. It is this tiny glimmer of anti-guildhall mentality that makes Helldozer a favorite antihero among downtrodden Ravnicans."
Quite a story, which makes me wonder: is all this from the style guide, or is Matt just making it up on the spot? The term "reclamation zone" will become important, though in a different context, in the Guildpact novel. And Matt does invoke the “lost” flavor text of Trophy Hunter:
"You will know that I reject your guild contract when the bones of your messenger hang from my belt."
…but on the other hand, the last part of the article is a Terraformer ranting about the Ravnican Art Museum, name checking the real world artists of the Ravnican basic lands.
I feel I’ve done a lot of musing about canonicity lately, from the art description of Isao, Enlightened Bushi that ended up on a wiki as canonical, to the plane of Antausia that was made up in an early article in The Duelist for an early form of Chaos Magic to take place in, so perhaps it’s time to be a bit more clear: This is all canon to me. Magic’s storyline has been published in so many weird ways over the years that it’s ridiculous to say something doesn’t count because it was revealed in an article, a game or a Duel Deck insert. Go down that road and soon enough you’ll find you’ve accidentally thrown out the entire story of Mirage. Heck, I'll even take Brady Dommermuth posting an old Pete Venters document on a forum if it lets me put the earliest Harper Prism novels on the timeline. Whether Matt Cavotta intended for the Helldozer story to be in continuity or not is an interesting question (one he himself will cover in a future Taste the Magic article) but not really important for determining canonicity. It’s an official Magic article published on Magicthegathering.com. Stuff with much vaguer pedigree has been shown to be accepted canon before, from The Shattered Alliance referencing the unpublished Alliances comic, to the Elder Dragon War we previously only knew through Jeff Lee turning out to be real, to even the name of the southern continent of Dominaria being “The Frozen Reaches” even though nobody knows where the earliest fan map using that name took it from!
The only real rule is "does it contradict anything?". There are simply too many contradictions to declare everything canon without embracing a
DC-Hypertime/Discworld-Thief of Time style “time is broken” approach. Sure, that would "explain" why The Thran happened in -5000 AR, -4000 AR, -3000 AR AND -1000 AR according to various sources, but… I
don’t find that very satisfying, and it's my timeline project, right?
And that Terraformer piece? Sure, let's throw it in. No, I don't know why an in-world character would know who Christopher Moeller or Anthony S. Waters are, but if Commodore Guff counts, or Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar can receive fanmail in the underworld, I'm not going to throw this out for being silly or leaning on the fourth wall. It's a joke, but also completely inconsequential. So sure, let's have some fun and leave it in the canon.
ARCANAS
Finally, let's have a quick run through of a bunch of short Arcana articles. First up, a whole bunch of arcana's showing off parts of the Ravnica Style Guide:
- Anthony S. Waters Land Concepts
- Saprolings
- Selesnya
- Golgari
- Dimir
- Boros
- And "The Boros Beam" has some style guide images of Dimir “Critters” that get blasted on Cleansing Beam.
- Ravnica Preview Sketches
- Ravnica Sketch Choices
- Autochthon Wurm
- Keening Banshee
- Ravnica Avon Sketches
- Doubling Viashino has a brilliant sketch for Doubling Season that was completely scrapped! I'd love to see that one finished and put on a new version of Doubling Season at some point!
- The Moroii has some art and background on one of Magic's more bizarre vampires.
- Vision’s Triangle of War has a little flashback to years ago to highlight the Zhalfirin symbol of war.
- Balthor the Dwarf flashbacks to a little less far back to tell the story of Balthor. Neither adds anything we didn't already know, but it's cool to see old storylines aren't entirely forgotten in the insular planeshopping days.
- Leech of the Undercity focusses on the art of Mindleech Mass. It doesn't mention the Lupul/Lurkers from the novels, and of course the Mass isn't a shapeshifter, yet somehow it will become accepted fact that the card is a representation of the creature in the novel. Maybe we'll come across the source for that in a later Taste of Magic article.
- The Bake a Cake Example tries to explain the flavorful difference between cards in your hand, library and graveyard using cake. They do this in response to an answer given in the Ask Wizards feature, which... oh damn, do I have to go through the entire Ask Wizards archive for flavor stuff as well? I doubt we'll find much, but maybe I'll go through the entire archive quickly when we're at the point where it is retired. That'll be easier than doing it in little chunks.
- Finally there are Alternate Chinese Art in Ravnica, Part 2 and Part 3, showcasing art that needed to be altered for the Chinese market. (Where is part 1? Well, all I can find is a "Service Unavailable" page…) They used to alter art in China a lot, so we'll be seeing a few more Arcana's like this, until we reach Shards of Alara when it was decided it was no longer necessary. At least for a while, as various cards on Arena have their arts altered again these days.
- EDIT: Thanks to @Count_Telperion on Twitter for unearthing part one of the series, which can be found here!
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