Guildpact Online

And we are back for the online coverage of Guildpact. It will start out pretty much the same as last time, with a fairly basic mini-site, and a feature article by Rei Nakazawa, but when we get closer to the release of Dissension Matt Cavotta will get a storytelling bug and we'll have some actual stories to cover!

But let's start at the beginning: Like last time, there is little to say about the Guildpact mini-site. Once again it is just a quick introduction to the three guilds in the set. It eschews the structure we saw with the first set of talking about the guildleaders, the guildhalls, etc., but it spices things up with some neat art from the style guides, which is always nice. No trailer this time though.

FEATURE ARTICLES

In Signing Onto the Guildpact Rei Nakazawa gives us a bit more insight in Ravnica as a whole, and the three guilds featured in this set. He starts with explaining that the Guildpact itself is a massively powerful spell, bringing "automatic magical consequences on those who defy them", which was apparent in the novels from the get go, but curiously absent from his previous feature article. It's good that he mentions it now, as these articles had a much wider reach than the books. He also really leans into the horribleness of the guilds:

“The majority of Ravnican citizens are not part of the guilds. Thanks to the Guildpact, though, their numbers cannot break their oppression. To the guilds, the common man, woman, and child are merely customers, worshipers, slaves, or experimental subjects – in other words, tools.”

Ravnica has been horrible from the start, which is where we run into an interesting story/card dichotomy which we haven’t seen since… eh… the earliest Harper Prism stories where the planeswalkers were the bad guys I guess? The cards have you playing with the guilds and the advertisement thus pushes these to the point where people even start identifying themselves with their favorite ones. But what they see is mostly the sweet aesthetics designed for them, and the first point of entry into the guilds is the cool gameplay made for them. Yet across the story/card gulf there is a whole other aspect to them. Sure the nastiness of the guilds was also communicated in a few flavor texts like Caregiver, or Quickchange but if you give the guildless cards like that and the guilds stuff like Glimpse the Unthinkable and Lightning Helix, it should be pretty obvious who are the cool kids that people will gravitate towards...

The fact that they keep playing up the bad side of the guilds and that the last set is named "Dissension" makes me wonder if the dissolution of the guilds was intended as the block's happy ending. We'll see in the Dissension review whether that really works though.

Speaking of stuff that people perhaps unintentionally gravitated towards, here's an interesting quote:

“The Cult of Yore, a faction of militant druids, is one such force. Another mysterious group worships the Nephilim, said to be ancient beings of godlike power forced underground by the cities and the guilds. But do they truly understand the forces they are meddling with?”

With the nephilim, the first 4-color cards in the game's history, as one of the most eye-catching parts of the set, storyline fans grabbed onto this short line as somehow important, but of course nothing ever came from it. It was just another case of Rei Nakazawa highlighting a cool part of the set, like he did with Darksteel in, well, Darksteel and the Kirin and Maro's in Saviors of Kamigawa. The nephilim will become more prominent in the Dissension story (taking a page from the book of that other eye-catching multi-color cycle which had barely any storyline significance in the set they were introduced in: the Invasion Primeval Dragons), but that will not involve the Cult of Yore. Despite the next Ravnica block featuring the Gateless and the third one bringing up the Gruul End-Raze, the Cult of Yore, who sound like they would be interested in getting involved with both, will not show up again.

Well, there is this one card, but her smudged eye-liner made everyone think she was Phyrexian instead.

Let's quickly go through a few more minor bits of info given here:

• This is also where we learn Razia, Niv-Mizzet, Szadek and Rakdos are the last Paruns still around.
• Rei says “Certain species deemed dangerous, such as dragons, have been hunted virtually to extinction.” Let's cling to that "virtually" to explain all those species that were reported as having only one member left in the original block but turned out to be more numerous when we return to Ravnica.
• Borborygmos is rumored to be a descendant of Cizarim, the Gruul Parun.
• The Izzet know, or at least seem to know, about the Multiverse, which is interesting in the light of future stories involving Project Lightning Bug and the Interplanar Beacon.

"In fact, they're the only ones who understand how and why magic itself functions, knowledge that led to their “planar universes” theory, and speculation on how it's affected life and death on Ravnica."

• Niv-Mizzet’s portrayal here (and in the Dissension novel) seems a bit more impatient and impulsive that the more general mastermind with long term plans he later appears as.
• The Orzhov are said to have once followed a genuine religion, but by now they only care about power and wealth. In the novel it was said greed and ambition were holy to them though. I think it would be interested to lean into that a bit more and showcase an Orzhov who genuinely believes in the religion of greed and ambition, rather than just saying it's all a money making scam.
• Tesya is introduced as someone who will "defy the powers that unite the entire planet", which seems a bit overblown. She goes against the Ghost Council and the Izzet, sure, but not against the entire Guildpact. Later stories will have her end up pretty much in line with the Orzhov goals, just with the intent of replacing the Ghost Council.
• Oh, and apparently “Her ability to remove creatures from the game speaks to her skill at manipulating the law, not to mention her powerful family heritage.” I never would have guessed that!

Apparently there is precedent for the law being represented with an exile ability. 

Designing Guildpact gives us another quick look at the continuing integration of card design and creative:

“We kicked off Guildpact design by inviting Magic Creative Director Brady Dommermuth to present a run-down on the 3 guilds' flavor so we could design to match it. In older sets like Prophecy, the cards were designed in a flavor-vacuum, with all creative elements like names, card concepts and art postponed until after design … This allowed us to integrate the guilds' flavor with mechanics throughout our designs. In their comments to me, that integration seems to be what many players enjoy most about the block so far.”

It's certainly what I enjoyed the most about the original Ravnica sets, and seems to have been a big influence into how sets where made down the line.

As always we get an article on flavor text, but The Italicized World of Guildpact is not written by Jay-Moldenhauer Salazar, who did all the previous ones, but by Doug Beyer, who we will be hearing a lot more from in the future. It's an interesting enough look at the proces, though we're still in the days when flavor text has very little impact on the story at large. The only sort-off relevant bit of info we get is that the Ravnica sets don't take place sequentially but all at the same time (despite the name of the last set suggesting a kind of ending)

That's all the flavor/lore relevant Feature Articles, but there's one more I'd like to highlight real quick: You Decide!: The Top 4. You see, around this time WotC did a voting bracket to figure out which was the most popular Legendary Creature, without telling anyone why. Eventually Akroma, Angel of Wrath won, which resulted in her, her alternate universe counterpart and her memorial being printed in Time Spiral block. The reason I bring it up is that the top four existed of Akroma, Ink-Eyes, Visara the Dreadful and Reya Dawnbringer... half of whom don't even have story! And of the two that do, Ink-Eyes had only one short story, and Akroma's story sucked!

That shouldn't come as a surprise of course, the storyline community was a lot smaller back in the day, so obviously the coolest cards were going to win, but it still feels odd that even when it comes to Legendary Creatures, storyline barely mattered. Also, it's too bad that runner-ups like Visara and Reya never got a story as a reward for their popularity.

TASTE THE MAGIC

Again, I'm not going to cover every single article here, since some of them are simply not relevant to us. They cover stuff like digital artwork, the way Ravnican art portray city life, a list of websites of all the (then current) Magic artists. Interesting, but it says little about the storyline. So I'll once more give you a link to the Taste the Magic archive in case you want to read them all yourself, and highlight the ones interesting from a storyline perspective beneath.

Rage Against the Machine is, as you've already guessed from the name, an introduction to the Gruul. It tries to answer the question of how the Gruul fit into Ravnica by saying... they don't. The mini-site introduction and the Rei Nakazawa article made it clear the Gruul were once strong and now shattered into various clans, but here it is explicitly stated for the first time that the Gruul failed the task they were allotted in the Guildpact:

“Let's rewind 10,000 years to when the Guildpact was signed. The Gruul were a different story then. They were the guild of the wild, a noble guild charged with keeping civilization in check and maintaining the wilderness spaces where many of the (then) Ravnican races made their homes. Well, we all know how that ended."

"Over the next 10 millennia, the unstoppable inertia of civilization, progress, and nine greedy guilds pushed the Gruul aside and mowed down the wilds. The other Green guilds began to scavenge on the Gruul's piece of the Guildpact pie, claiming bits of “nature” as their own. The Simic claimed to be stewards of nature's future, while the Selesnya preached about nature in attempts to pull the last remnants of the wilds into their fold. The old Gruul identity was slowly wrested from their hands- leaving them with no official duty to the Guildpact. Without a part to play, they were seen only as outlanders and savages by the other nine. The Azorius began to exclude them from written law and official guild conventions, and the Boros began to see them as rabble-rousers to be put in their place. The worst came from the Orzhov, who took advantage of their falling status and put many to labor and others into slavery. The new laws did not include them, and therefore could not protect them. They were ostracized.”

So it's the Gruul's failure that led to Ravnica becoming entirely covered in city (after the Izzet created the central City of Ravnica, if their myths as told to us in the Guildpact novel are to be believed). No wonder they want to raze it all down! Now I want to know what the Cult of Yore thinks of the Gruul... do they see them as potential allies, or resent them? And if it's the later, what do they think is worse, their failure to protect nature, or them joining into the Guildpact in the first place? (I just really want to know more about the Cult of Yore!)

Some minor info we learn here is that the Scab-Clan is made up entirely by people mutilated by the other nine guilds, and that the Gruul holiday Rauck-Chauv is basically a riot they hold on the same day as other guild holidays. 

"Today is the Azorius sponsored Festival of the Guildpact? Rauck-Chauv! It's Congregation day at Vitu-Ghazi? Rauck-Chauv!”

What I find more interesting though is that it is named after the two-headed leader of the Ghor Clan! Could that be Ruric Thar's ancestor? (Ancestors?)

The Royal Bloodline (Emphasis on the blood) leaves Ravnica for a week to look at the Sengir bloodline. This is where we learn some interesting lore that will be referenced in the Dominaria Art Book, like how the appearance and powers of Sengir vampires change from lineage to lineage:

“The abilities and physical characteristics of a Sengir vampire are difficult to define because, with each new generation, the breed diverges from the appearance and traits of its originator. Ironically, the first look at a Sengir Vampire way back in Alpha was the furthest, most aberrant the bloodline has ever been. It is a hairless, translucent-skinned horror with little mystical power and absolutely none of that old George Hamilton charisma. These distant relatives of the originator drink the blood of their victims, but their bite does not confer vampirism."

"The further back we go, and the closer to the originator we get, Sengir Vampires begin to look almost humanoid. Their skin is still a bit creepy and pale, and then there's the whole fangs and drinking blood thing, but they do actually wear clothes and carry a bit of vampiric mystique. With no flappy skin wings to speak of, their flight is made possible through magical powers- though they do not turn into bats or puffs of smoke. Still, they are yet a mere figment of their powerful undead progenitor.”

Clearly Sengir Nosferatu hadn't been designed yet when he wrote that "they don't turn into bats" line.

Matt says Baron Sengir got so powerful he was noticed by planeswalkers who took him “on journeys to planes outside of Dominaria", leading to him spreading his lineages throughout the Multiverse, until he got stuck on Ulgrotha. This fits remarkably well with the previously established history of Sengir, even though the Homelands comic was pretty old and obscure by 2005. The one potential revelation here is that that planeswalkers took Sengir “outside of Dominaria”, hinting that Sengir originated on that plane.

Missing from the article is any discussion of Song for the Plague Rats, the Ravi/Sengir story from The Secrets of Magic. When we discussed that story I suggested that maybe the Baron wasn't dropped off by a planeswalker at all, but that Ravi might have summoned him in her despair. If we're sticking with the "he's stuck after his planeswalker died" story I would say this does pretty much necessitate the idea that Ravi introduced Sengir to whatever planeswalker took him along and that this planeswalker was a Tolgath who missed the big war with the Ancients only to return to their base at Ulgrotha later. Otherwise it would be far too great a coincidence that Ravi and Sengir would each end up stranded on Ulgrotha out off all planes in the multiverse! 

In the description of Grandmother Sengir Matt does mention her Homelands backstory (though just calling her a wizard, not a planeswalker!), but not her previous connection to the Baron. Since we have a number of sets with a lot of flashbacks to old continuity coming up (Coldsnap, Time Spiral block), I’m assuming Matt took all this info from internal documents like “The Forgotten Archive”, which we know were used in making those sets but stopped being updated long before Secrets of Magic came out. Soon a few of the Armada comics will be posted up on Magicthegathering.com in their entirety and not long after that all comics will turn up as a torrent somewhere on the internet. This article could thus be seen as the first indication that the old Armada comics were becoming less obscure and, ironically, that the much more recent WotC anthology books were being forgotten.

Bizarrely this article is also the "official" source for a bunch of information of Homelands. Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford, the people behind Homelands, were all about the storyline, and made up far too many details to communicate it all through the cards. Bits of it were shared through The Duelist, the comic and various calendars of course, but even those didn't have space for everything. Kyle and Scott thought us even more through non-WotC sources, like the Musings Magic Special and the Homelands Document which does cover just about everything but does leave all that lore in an easily contradicted state of "shadow continuity" (my term for information that the creators consider canon but which was not shared with the fans in any official way, or even not made public at all). The Homelands Document makes things even weirder by clearly being a work in progress, having different names for various characters and even a few contradictions to what was published.

So if you're looking for an official, WotC published source of how the dwarves fought three great battles to get their castle back? Or about Irini not just being an evil vampire, but completely insane as well? This is actually the article in which that information was first shared! I even think this is where we get the description of the Dark Barony being made up of villages raised from the swamp on barges and stilts, a depiction that would make it onto the Planechase card!

After that diversion to Ulgrotha we return to Ravnica for Wake Up Call, and our first actual story! Or is it? It is introduced as a voicemail from a member of the Cult of Yore about the rise of the nephilim, but after that it’s really just a short story about how the Cult noticed the nephilim waking up, which doesn't hinge on being a supposed phone call at all. Matt reins in any desire to lean on the fourth wall further and gives us a completely in-universe sermon that says nature is dying on Ravnica and the guilds have set up false gods, but now something has caused the Old Gods to rise again. It does a great job of drumming up interest in the nephilim (especially for people who were already intrigued by them by that Rei Nakazawa quote mentioned above). In fact, it maybe hypes things up a little too much, as the Cult links the awakening of the nephilim to nature reclaiming Ravnica and perhaps even the end of the guild system. We'll see in the Dissension novel that their appearance is... a bit more prosaic.

The next article, “An In-depth Look At The Izze-Hey, Look At That!” is also supposedly written in-universe, this time by Trivaz of the Izzet, but they’re talking about being asked by Matt to write the article and refer to the flavor text for Cerebral Vortex originally being written for Izzet Boilerworks, so it's not much of a story. It is a pretty good illustration of how the Izzet work, and has some interesting bits about what joining the Firemind is actually like, but I’m not putting it on the timeline!

Then we get to Precious Gold, another story! This one is a lot more interesting than the voice mail from the Cult of Yore, so go read it if you don’t want to be spoiled! For those who do not mind, read on...

Emilya is a young girl hanged, supposedly for sport, by Rakdos cultists. A devout Orzhov follower she believes she’ll end up in the ghostly palace of the patriarchs, but instead she enters Agyrem, the city of ghosts. Over time she finds out why: at the moment of her death she saw a number of thrulls, which made her realize her death was a set-up: some Orzhov higher ups hired the Rakdos to make a martyr so the Orzhov could collect money for a “vengeance campaign” (and then embezzle the money of course). She is then brought back to life, 125 years later, by a Yore-Tiller Nephilim and heads out to keep more people away from the Orzhov.

It's a sad, but quite good story. It's also quite a good done-in-one, though seeing a reference to Emilya in a future story, to learn if she did manage to strike a significant blow to the Orzhov, would be cool to see someday. It's also an interesting early mention of Agyrem, which was shown but not named or explained in the epilogue of the Guidlpact novel. Finally I like it for the way it ties in to the Dissension novel that would be released two months later. There we never see the Yore-Tiller Nephilim resurrect people, but considering all the chaos surrounding it it may very well have done without us noticing. So I'm saying this is great crossmedia integration. It also makes it a lot easier to place this story on the timeline: wherever Dissension ends up, so does Precious Gold! And that goes for Wake-Up Call as well. That one is a bit more vague, who knows how long ago the Cult of Yore had their vision, but it clearly ties into the nephilim storyline in Dissension, so that's the most logical place to put it.

And finally another round of quickfire references:

• Niv-Mizzet the Fountainhead has an interesting tidbit about the creation of Mizzium: “Long ago, Niv-Mizzet invented a light, strong yet malleable, fireproof metal while he was etching the entire Guildpact text from memory onto a single droplet of water.”
• The Tournament of Signets Parade is just really just an excuse to look at cool art, but it does share the details that apparently on the Festival of the Guildpact they give out Tournament of Signets awards.
• Cage Match with the Stars writes out a few battles from the You Decide brackets as if they really happened. And... okay, you got me. Last time I chucked the "story" of a Terraformer ranting about basic land art into canon because it wasn't any sillier than the story of Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar, or any more fourth-wall breaking than Commodore Guff, but I've got to draw a line somewhere! This contradicts other stories and thus has to go!

It also comes with some very disturbing illustrations, which doesn't endear it to me either!

ARCANA

The Arcana articles become slightly less interesting from a lore perspective, since all that info has moved into the Taste the Magic articles. But there's still some stuff that is just cool to look at.

For example, some Style Guide articless:

• Guildpact style guide: Gruul
• Guildpact style guide: Izzet
• Guildpact style guide: Orzhov
• Building on Rumbling Slum
• The Gruul Troll
• Return of Thrulls

…Sketches... 

• Scab-Clan Mauler
• Skeletal Vampire
• Goblin Forkomancer 
• Swaps of the Faultless 
• Populating the Twister
• Terror and Mortify
• Blind Hunter

...and more art stuff.

• Alternate Chinese Art in Guildpact, Part 1 & Part 2
• Guildpact token art 1 is odd, since Guildpact Token Art 2 never seems to have materialized. And Magic Librarities seems to have stopped tracking Magic Online tokens after Kamigawa. I've found this MTGSally thread talking about the Sand token art, but for the Bat I can seemingly only find mock-ups and later version of the token that were actually printed. (Though perhaps they've reused the Guildpact online art for the later Guild Kit tokens, like they did with the Spirit token for the original Ravnica set?)
• Pretty Little Angel Eyes covers the fixing of the eyes in the artwork of Angel of Despair
• Lurker of Nivix shows the original version of Nivix which featured Niv-Mizzet himself in the art.

And finally there is the article Crovax the Cursed which tells the story of Crovax via a number of arts he appears in. It's nothing new for us, but I highlight it mainly because it refers people to the Storyline Summary page. Which hadn't been updated since Mirrodin! It's nice that they've remembered those, but personally I would've been embarrassed to add that link!