Right, you know the deal by now, Feature Articles, Taste the Magic, Arcana's, and a mini-site that is probably not very intere- what's that? There's actually stories on the mini-site this time around? I guess we've got more to talk about then! (By the way, you might have to move about on the Wayback Machine timeline for a while before you find a version of the site where you can actually reach the Simic and Rakdos bits of the site...)
MINI-SITE STORIES
The guild descriptions have nothing new to tell you if you're even halfway familiar with Ravnica (there's a few cool pieces of art though), so let's quickly move onto the stories!
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| Is that thing on the left a Simic Grick? |
The Hussar’s Last Mission, by Doug Beyer
Modar Bejiri, an Azorius hussar, fights a shapeshifting murderer, but the Senate will not sanction an arrest due to the creature's (probable) membership of the Dimir. Modar then requests an order for his own arrest, tracks down the shapeshifter and tricks it into killing him and taking his shape, leading to it being arrested anyway.
Eh, it's an okay story in the "Ravnica is a horrible place" genre. You can see the ending coming a mile away, from the moment Modar requests his own arrest, but the final part of the story manages to drum up some sympathy for him and has him use a clever way to goad the shapeshifter in taking his shape, so it did not end up being the slog to a predictable ending I feared it might be.
The story opens "It was in the last days of the fraying Guildpact"... way to spoil the ending of the trilogy! That, and a reference to Augustin IV, does help us place it on the timeline though. "Last days" is a relative term of course, you could argue that Augstin's entire tenure from 9990 to 10.012 Z.C. counts as the "last days" of a 10.000+ year pact, but when stories are clearly linked to a specific set (and have no hints at a placement elsewhere on the timeline), I prefer to put them as close to that set as possible. This will be especially relevant for a few of the other stories we'll cover today. Some of them can technically fit anywhere after signing of the Guildpact, but I'm going to stick them in 10.012 Z.C., though probably with a big * next to them.
Life is Beautiful, by Rei Nakazawa
This story is presented as a journal from a Simic test subject. Starting out as a barely literate Tin Street gang member he gets smarter and stronger over time, until things start to go wrong...
Speaking of the "Ravnica is a horrible place" genre... brrr! This is a very effective horror story! At the beginning you might think this is going to be one of those "Flowers for Algernon" riffs where the main character returns to their original intelligence after learning being smart doesn't make them any happier, but no, it really embraces the dread of the characters degeneration and then starts piling up body horror on top of that, resulting in a sickening feeling of inevitability. The epilogue, written in the form of a research note to Momir Vig, ramps it all up even further, by revealing that even after becoming a cytoplastic blob the main character is still being tortured by electroshock experiments, and that this was the 99th round of human testing!
The diary entries tell us this story takes place in 9957 Z.C.. Weirdly they start in the month "Orzabin", which is not actually a Ravnican month. Looking at the calendar in the Guildmaster's Guide, it should be "Seleszeni" instead. This is probably just Rei working from an earlier list of months (when I asked Cory Herndon for a full list of names... 15 years ago... he said a few names had changed in the writing process.) Luckily we all the other months in the story do match what we know, so we can explain this away by saying the main character initially didn't know the names of the months and only learned them after his mental augmentations.
The Merrytown Massacre, by Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar
Two Boros officers investigate a burned down Rakdos tavern. The ogre bouncer tells them how the regulars tortured and killed some elves before setting the place on fire accidentally. Then it's revealed the ogre is actually a zombie. With the words "Party’s a flop if anybody lives to talk about it" he explodes, killing the officers and burning down a third of the neighborhood.
This one doesn't work for me. The last story was good horror, but this is just pointless gore. Too over the top to have any emotional impact, told too blandly to work as dark humor.
The Rakdos have always been a bit of a weird fit among the guilds. With most of the others their horrible side is tied to their role; sure the Izzet's experiments may also blow up innocents, but it might also result in some revolutionary new discovery. The Rakdos though are often portrayed as just horrible murderers. It's been stated that their role in the Guildpact is to work as miners, laborers and mercenaries, but since all the other guilds have their own minions and warriors, and can obviously just hire the Gateless, you wonder why they would bother with unreliable monsters like the Rakdos. No wonder the Dissension novel ended up saying they were only included to color-balance the Guildpact.
In later blocks the portrayal of the Rakdos will focus more on their entertainer side, and every art book and Planeswalkers'- or Guildmasters' Guide will give some description of their "civic duties" as required by the Guildpact, but in a way the Rakdos are emblematic of the problem of the guilds as a whole: they are in power because they are powerful, and nothing more. Any essential work they do is just an excuse.
FEATURE ARTICLES
The mini-site might have changed, but the feature articles still follow the expected formula. So... let's talk about Rei Nakazawa's introduction to the new set, Dissension in the Ranks. As expected we get a look at the last three guilds, but first he introduces "one of Ravnica's main oddities: its afterlife.” Ravnica's had loads of spirits hanging around since the beginning, but it didn't become a plot point until the epilogue of Guildpact. We've heard part of the explanation for it in the Dissension novel, but here we get a hint that there might be more too it than that:
“The Izzet have their own theory, one that few pay attention to and even fewer take seriously: the source of the world's spiritual troubles lies in another world entirely, in some flaw in the very fabric of time and space itself. But the nature of the flaw, and how it can be fixed (if it can be fixed at all) is a question they have yet to answer.”
I think that, given how episodic the storyline had become in the planeshopping era, most people barely registered this line. Okay, so there's some multiversal wonk going on behind Agyrem, whatever. That will probably never be expanded upon. In hindsight though, it is clear foreshadowing of Time Spiral block! Which makes me wonder... was the whole Agyrem plot added just to tie in to the upcoming event?
Now, it seems obvious that the high number of spirits in the block was an attempt to allow for some overlap with Kamigawa. WotC learned from the awkward handover between Odyssey and Onslaught that it wasn't the best idea to keep the tribes form your tribal set out of the surrounding sets. But I don't think there are that many spirits that it needed an explanation. And even if people had asked, the answer "Ravnica has a lot of weirdo's, we decided to focus on the spirits this time to allow for some Kamigawa cross pollination" would've been fine. But to add a whole plot around it, and one which is such an oddball...
In the first novel review I said I liked how broad and diverse Ravnica was from the start, and that is true, but you can also see how the various aspects of the setting evolved form one idea: guilds come with a medieval/Renaissance city aesthetic, so I get how the "plane covered in city" idea meshes with the "plane rules by guilds" idea. From the guilds we then get the theme's of oppression, politicking, the 10.000 year history and of course the different looks of the ten factions. From the planewide city come the supposed extinctions, the Cult of Yore resistance and the population of many species. But to then go "Oh, and the dead linger as ghosts" is a very out of left field addition. If it was added just to add a link to Time Spiral, that would also explain why the Ghost Quarter will be unceremoniously jettisoned from the plane next time we visit it.
Which is a shame really. I do feel Ravnica has lost something by focusing more and more on just the guilds and slowly dropping some other aspects of its design like the nephilim and Agyrem. I don't mind them introducing new stuff, like Azor's scavenger hunt the Implicit Maze and Nicol Bolas's invasion, at all. In fact I think it's great, it makes the plane's backstory bigger and bigger, which is the way Dominaria got the tangled history that I love so much. But it would be cool if every once in a while a visit to Ravnica would involve us picking up an already existing minor concept, like the nephilim or the Gateless, and make it the main plot this time around.
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| Watch Urgdar be the main character of the next Ravnica set! |
Other than we're pretty much done with the Feature Articles already. Rei only has one line I'd like to highlight as it gives us our first hint about Isperia/Hesperia's role:
“A wise and mysterious sphinx has served as a behind-the-scenes advisor for thousands of years, though only the Arbiters are capable of deciphering her strange, cryptic words.”
Further following the formula we have The Italicized World of Dissension, again by Doug Beyer this time. We've seen these articles so many times by now that I have nothing to say this time other than that I like this line-up of the ten guilds:
Other than those two there really isn’t much to discuss. Back in Kamigawa a large part of the setting seems to have been created by the flavor text team due to them having to come up with stories for the various legends, but with Ravnica the world was already built before the cards got made, so the flavor text team’s work was more about showcasing the existing world building than making new stuff. Which in turn makes these articles interesting, but less important.
TASTE THE MAGIC
As always, here is the link the the full archive, and I'll give links to individual articles that deserve mention below.
Let's start with Makin’ the Law, Makin’ the Law, which is our first Taste the Magic story of the set. It deals with the Azorius making the Leash Laws that require everybody to keep their pets on a leash, and a guy who runs afoul of that law, has his pets confiscated, and then makes a new pet from their leashes. It reads like it was written mostly to showcase what the Azorius are like, and to make the flavor text of Leashling make a bit more sense.
It's an odd story, but then again, Leashling is a very odd creature. It's fun enough as a little bonus story for the block. The only thing that annoys me is how it breaks character at one point and starts talking about how Azorius arcane legalese is like an NFL draft. I've complained in the past about "real world" references, like a sailor talking about Neptune, but this is really egregious!
But if you think that's bad... Vorthos Breaks Free is a story about “Vorthos Mandelbrot”, a wizard who gains some great insight in magic. The second part of the story is missing due to link rot, but the next article mentions him ascending to the Firemind, which was hinted at by the link to the second part of the story being the word “Welcome”.
Matt Cavotta's habit of merging in-universe and real life is really testing me. Some people might disregard this story purely from the name of the main character, but I keep coming back to the fact that this really isn't any weirder than Commodore Guff or Chef's Surprise. The Vorthos name is just a reference, and while I'll criticize the NFL reference as immersion breaking and thus, in my eyes, bad writing, I'm not chucking an entire story out over it. Matt Cavotta was asked to write a new article every week, and sometimes he decided to mix it up by writing a story instead, which was very welcome at a time when we were only just getting used to getting more storyline content than just the three novels each year. So I'll gladly accept those and won't be too harsh on his habit of leaning on the fourth wall (by presenting such stories as, for example, voice mails).
Actually, Matt has something to say about canon as well, but before we get to that we must quickly cover the article The Incredible Hulk, which gives us some background info on Protean Hulks. Turns out they contain the genetics of every living thing they eat, thereby keeping the weirder species on Ravnica (Groodions are an example given here) from extinction in the city-covered world. Matt speculates that the Simic decided to protect the Hulks as the last vestige of their original role of preservers of nature. There is also a brilliant bit about Niv-Mizzet keeping a few around and ordering his guild to feed himself to them in case of his death, so he might be reborn through them! Imagine if that Chekov’s Gun had gone off War of the Spark, 13 years later! Oh, and this is of course also our Get Out of Jail Free card to explain why there were suddenly more gorgons, dragons, solifuges and Simic elves around!
This discussion leads to Greg Krajenta aksing Matt a question in the article The Great and Powerful Oz: how much of this info was pre-created and how much does Matt make up on the spot? The answer: most of it is made up by him. The article says that this might make the work of the creative team seem less impressive, but this is exactly what I think the relationship should be between the creative team’s world building and the Taste the Magic series. I’ve mentioned before that it is kind of ridiculous for WotC to be making up a whole bunch of lore stuff that then gets unused. It seems like a lot of wasted time and effort, and it leads to weird “shadow continuity” issues (Like how Barl and Lord Ith were always seperate characters according to people within WotC even though the printed flavor text suggested they were one and the same). But leaving a lot of cards' flavor as “It’s just a big green beastie” is also a shame, so it’s great to have someone like Matt filling in a bunch more details after the set has come out.
We don’t fully agree on matters of canonicity though. Matt cites Richard Garfield’s intro to the Art of Magic: the Gathering: The Rath Cycle, about not wanting tell a story though the cards, instead encouraging people to make their own stories with them, and Matt now does the same, even giving this as a reason for why cards and storyline were diverged back during the Otaria Saga.
“So what does that mean for the Incredible Hulk, and for Precious Gold, for that matter? Are the ideas expressed in these articles official, or completely irrelevant? There was a time when I would have said that they are absolutely official, like the death of [REDACTED]. I won't do that today. But I won't say they're irrelevant either. You might have your own ideas for the future of Niv-Mizzet. Maybe you think Rusalkas are mindless spirits of the dead. Maybe you think the Simic used Protean Hulk amnions to derive cytoplasts. Or, maybe you like the ideas put forth in The Incredible Hulk and you want to roll with them. Whatever the scene is, I don't want to nip your creativity in the bud.”
(I've redacted the name of a very minor character who dies in a Coldsnap story... sort off. We’ll cover that bit of weirdness next time.)
So basically the message is “you make your own story”. Well Matt, I will. By diligently collecting all your stories and trying to fashion them into one big continuity!
In all seriousness though, I don’t think you need to divorce cards and storyline to encourage people’s creativity. Restriction breeds creativity and all that. In my eyes Matt’s own backstory for the Hulk has much more cool hooks to hang a story on than just the “it’s a big monster with eggs on its back” flavor you get from the card. And even if you want to make up a story that goes against that specific depiction, there is still nothing stopping you from doing so. You could go with a whole alternate continuity, or even just say “Oh, by the way, there is also a different breed of Hulk around”. WotC themselves does it all the time. Thrulls and saprolings were very specific creatures hanging around on Sarpadia during the Fallen Empires period, but then Ravnica came around and broadened their definition.
I like that Matt took the time to discuss the question of the canonicity of his own article, but ultimately I like having a set continuity even more. There is also a lot of fun in collecting stories, rediscovering old ones, and seeing how everything fits together. And sure I sometimes come up with story ideas that don’t quite fit established canon, but those can just go into my own fan-continuity, which goes all out with complete rewrites of Invasion and Time Spiral block anyway… (Well… “rethinks" might be more appropriate than “rewrites”. Maybe I’ll actually write them out. Someday. Maybe.)
You know, reading back your own writings about what is and ins't canon is very weird. At some point you're thinking "Am I seriously talking about which fictional stories are real fiction and which are fake fiction?" So to wrap up, let me bring this back to basics: having these stories come together to form one big Multiverse is fun. The more stories we include, the more there is to discover, the more fun it is. If you think certain stuff is too silly to include, feel free to chuck it out, but I prefer a little weirdness if it means expanding the Multiverse further.
Right. With that essay out of the way, let's conclude our Ravnica retrospective with a quickfire round of Arcana articles. As always we have some looks at the Style Guides...
...Sketches...
- Kraj: Sketches and Lore
- Omnibian
- How Loaming Shaman got his Legs Back
- Minister of Impediments
- Behind the Art of Rakdos Guildmage
- Walking Archive
- Dissension Sketch Quickies
- Artists to the Resque
- Behind Ignorant Bliss
- Rakdos 1-2-3s
- Gone but not Forgotten Ancient
...and some more art showcases.
- Ravnica Block Mural
- When Concepts Meet Art
- Dissension Token Art
- A Mutant Vedalken on Ravnica
- Akroma’s Beginnings
- Beatdown Comic Mural
Towers of Urza Looks back at the Antiquities story though the most mana rich part of the Urzatron. It really focusses on the cards, only stating that the towers were build to extract mana, not that the first one was Urza's hideout after the destruction of Kroog, like in The Brothers' War. But it doesn't contradict anything either, and it's nice to remind people of the older storylines, especially while we're gearing up for Time Spiral.
Finally we have the article “Create Your Own Magic” Fiction Winner, in which Magicthegathering.com continues to test the limits of what “keep as much in continuity as possible” actually means. It's a story, or really just the first chapter of a story, that was written for a contest during Magic Weekend 2006. It's about Monterra, a world where there are kingdoms based on each of the five colors, with each of them denying the existence of the other four. There's also a group of Rogue Wizards who use all five colors of mana, and it is them who discover the Phyrexians are about to invade.
Re-reading this for the first time in 15 years I was bracing myself for having to reopen the discussion above and to decide whether being printed on Magicthegathering.com counted as being published by WotC, but then I got to the line "Twenty years had passed since that blasted planeswalker, Teferi, had killed Yawgmoth and scattered his armies."
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| No wonder they call him "Hero of Dominaria"! |
eah, that's quite a contradiction of what happened in the Invasion trilogy, so at best this is an alternate timeline. I'm just going to ignore this one, though I do think it would be funny if Monterra got a namecheck in one of those planeswalking montages we get every once in a while!
(NO) FINAL THOUGHTS
Ravnica is generally seen as the end of the planeshopping era. After all, the next block will end with the Mending, and then Lorwyn will introduce the planeswalkers who will become the defining feature of the next era of Magic, right? So you might be expecting a wrap-up article here like I did for the Weatherlight Saga and the Otaria Saga. But the thing is... Lorwyn's story will follow the planeshopping formula to T; focused entirely on plane, no planeswalker in sight, with only a minor link to the larger continuity revealed in the final set. The Lorwyn set may have introduced the first planeswalker cards, but those characters wouldn't appear in the stories until a year later. And while Time Spiral block's continuity-heavy story sticks out like a sore thumb in the insular planeshopping era, it also does its best to do what TvTropes calls Arc Welding by tying all stories in this era into a larger plot (some in more tenuous ways than others).
With that in mind, I'm going to save my planeshopping overview until after Lorwyn. For now a quick look back at Ravnica will have to suffice.
Luckily that means looking back on a very nice vista. The fact that not all 10 guilds fitted in one set and were spread out over all three instead proved to be a blessing in disguise for Ravnica's lore. It meant that there was much more time and space to develop these organizations and their world, which ment that of all the planes introduced in this era Ravnica hit the stage the most deeply developed. Add to that some of the best flavor/gameplay integration Magic had ever done, and it's no wonder this became one of the most well-loved settings in the game.
You'd think that three sets introducing bits of the setting, rather then one introducing the whole thing and then the other two moving on with the plot as usual, might be detrimental to the storyline. "Luckily" we're still in an era when the story wasn't very central to Magic (though no longer the complete afterthought it was in the past) so Cory J. Herndon was free to write some very fun stories anyway. They had some dangling plotlines and a few minor inconsistencies (the amount of dragons in the world, Lyzolda/Isolda) but they are still very much recommended. Add to that the bonus stories we got through the mini-sites and the Taste the Magic column, and we've got another great step in the rehabilitation of the storyline.
Next week we'll see the next step with Coldsnap: a dive into old continuity that was quite unprecedented at the time, considering that Magic had let its older stories fade from memory for a long time.
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