Stuff Ethan Told Me

This is a quick little post covering some updates on a bunch of previous articles. It's all fairly minor things that don't merit reviews of their own, tenuously linked in that all this info comes from Ethan Fleischer (Tenuous as in, some of these things were brought to my attention by him but written by other people, some come from a set he was a designer for and some are from articles he wrote, so... eh, close enough). Originally I was going to include the Kamigawa/Legends II Timeline update as well, since it was Ethan who pointed out in the comments of the blog that there was relevant information in the (then) upcoming War of the Spark artbook, but luckily I spun that off in a separate article so I was able to get it out soon after the Kamigawa reviews themselves.

Well, on to the updates!

DRAGONS: Worlds Afire

 

Writer - Scott McGough (just the Magic story)

Cover Art - Duane O. Myers

Internal Art - Greg Staples (again, just for the Magic story)

First Printing - June 2006

SUMMARY

The story we're covering today is called Unnatural Predator.

A pixie called Vaan gathers a group of adventures to kill a dragon, despite being under a spell from the beast that prevents him from revealing all its secrets. During the battle it is revealed the dragon is actually a merger between a natural dragon and a dragon engine. The group seemingly manages to kill the creature despite heavy losses, including Vaan himself. In the epilogue though the beast regenerates and resurrects the pixie, who resigns himself to having to come up with an even better plan to kill the monster that has enslaved him.

I'd give a more detailed summary, but there's already one up on the Wiki so I wont bother. And if you think that is cheating... check out that article's history to see who wrote that summary in the first place.

Coldsnap Player's Guide & Theme Deck Inserts

Last week we saw that Magicthegathering.com had a number of articles setting up the Coldsnap story, but where the conclusion of that story would be told was a bit obscure. Well, it is right here, saved for everyone who bought a Coldsnap Fatpack!

The Fatpack also contained a novel, but that novel was The Gathering Dark. I wonder what people who weren't already deep into the storyline thought of that. Coldsnap is supposed to be set 3 of the Ice Age block, so... what is a The Dark book doing here? Wasn't Homelands the set originally considered the third part of the Ice Age block that got booted by Coldsnap? Reading the book wasn't going to make things much clearer either. Yes it is billed as "Ice Age cycle - Book 1", but the main thing linking it to the rest of the cycle are the characters of Jodah and Mairsil, neither of which is in the Coldsnap story. Personally I'd have put The Eternal Ice in the bundle. Yeah, it might be weird to only include "Ice Age cycle - Book 2", but at least that story is clearly tied to Coldsnap: it tells of the end of the Ice Age, thus setting up Heidar's grievances that kick off the new story.

But enough about a book I already reviewed a million years ago. If we want a new story, we have to look at the Player's Guide booklet also included in the fatpack. As always it includes a description of new mechanics in the set, a top 10 of Coolest Coldsnap Cards (Dark Depths at number 1 checks out, but Garza Zol at 2 and Zur only at 5? Lightning Serpent at 3? Rimefeather Owl gets in, but Counterbalance, Martyr of Sands and Rite of Flame don't?) and a visual guide to the entire set. There's also an article that talks about various snow creatures in the set that meanders from talking about card design to flavor, though you're not going to get much more than "Yeti's evolved to become the stealthiest creatures in Terisiare" or "Thermopods used to just be big slugs, but when the ice came they developed an internal furnace" from it.

Unique to this edition though are a storyline overview that doesn't just do some set up before pointing you to a novel, but which includes a conclusion, and an actual story, in the form of a monologue by Heidar, written by none other than Ice Age Cycle author Jeff Grubb!

Oddly the story summary is included on page 4 and 5, and the story on page 12 to 23. But the final battle isn't included in the story, so if you go through the booklet you first get a quick summary of how the story ends, before getting a deep dive into the psyche of the main villain... which is a bit odd, so I'm going to cover the story first, and then the summary. Let's dive in!

Coldsnap Online

I've been saying that Kamigawa started a trend of the storyline mattering more and more, a trend that would last for years. There was another trend starting around the same time though; the trend of WotC asking themselves "But what is we printed even more cards?"

See, back in the day we got 3 standard sets per year, and a Core set every other year, which left a gap in the schedule every non-Core year. In 2004 it was filled with the non-tournament Unhinged, in 2006 they made their first extra Standard legal set with Coldsnap, in 2008 they just made a 4 set block with Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, as well as the first From the Vault and Duel Decks... and so the curve trends upwards to today where a set that came out a month ago already feels like ancient history because we've gone through 2 spoiler seasons since it's release!

Ow, that was dangerously topical for this blog! Quickly, back to 2006! So... Coldsnap! What a weird set! Nowadays all the extra sets have clear audiences, Modern Horizons is for Modern, Vintage Masters is for Vintage, Conspiracy is for draft fans (give me Conspiracy 3 Wizards! Pleeeeeeease!), everything is for Commander... even the original "fourth set", Unhinged, had a clear audience in the people who had been asking for a second silver-bordered set ever since Unglued had come out. But a third Ice Age set? Who was asking for that? Reading through some of the articles announcing it you get the idea that this was more about WotC having an in-joke about a missing set than catering to a specific audience.

I'm not going to complain though! Bizarre though it may be, Coldsnap gave the storyline a unique opportunity to revisit a previous era and I'm totally there for it! As much as I love the way early Magic set jumped centuries or even millennia apart and thus created a long and varied timeline, it is a bit sad this meant settings and characters would never be used again (a few immortals here and there notwithstanding). So when, after years of seemingly treating continuity as something to be avoided since it would just lead to obsessive fans complaining about it, WotC suddenly did such a deep dive there was a lot of excitement! And also some anxiety from obsessive fans about possible continuity issues.

Well... let's see what they've made of it!

Dissension Online

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!

Is that thing on the left a Simic Grick?

Dissension

 

Writer - Cory J. Herndon
Cover Art - Zoltan Boros & Gabor Szikszai
First Printing - May 2006

SUMMARY

Three weeks after Guildpact ended the master thief Capobar is hired to go into the ruins of the Cauldron and retrieve cerebral fluid of the dragons Zomaj Hauc brought to life. He finds the third dragon, thought dead when part of the building collapsed on its egg, begging for death while being eaten by some nephilim. After retrieving the fluid Capobar is kidnapped by his own "shadewalker" accoplices. The nephilim grow to enormous sizes and start destroying the Utvara township. Master Engineer Crixizix rescues as many people as she can (Crix was granted a promotion and some new syllables by Niv-Mizzet for her conduct last novel) and requests aid from Niv-Mizzet himself. The dragon shows up and kills two nephilim before getting either bored or scared and flying off. Crixizix sends Pivlic to the main city to warn Teysa. Unfortunately, the nephilim also start moving that way. All of this is watched by one of the lupul shapeshifters.

Teysa was summoned to the city because a badly beaten Feather showed up at Prahv, the Azorius headquarters, and turned herself in for desertion, striking a superior, oathbreaking, failure to attend to her guild duties... and guild-matricide, then requested the baroness Karlov as her advokist.

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.

Guildpact

Writer - Cory J. Herndon
Cover Art - Todd Lockwood
First Printing - January 2006

SUMMARY

We begin a few decades befor the last book, with Izzet Magelord Zomaj Hauc exploding some sort of bomb above the plague ridden "Utvara Reclamation Zone" that is supposed to kill all life while leaving the buildings so its Orzhov owners can start redeveloping it. The machine kills all the local Gruul with an implosion, but doesn't explode. Instead it creates a strange fold in space called the Schism that starts sucking up all the ghosts of those who die in Utvara...

Chapter two moves us to 12 years after the Decamillennial. Advokist Teysa Karlov is pulled from her job by her uncle, the owner of Utvara, to help him with that redevelopment, of which she will become baroness once her uncle dies and takes his place on the Ghost Council. We learn that there is now a township for prospectors (who are mining for gold in long-forgotten banks, and seen as squatters by Uncle) in the middle of Utvara. The plague wasn't eradicated by Hauc's experiment though, it instead mutated into a much more deadly, airborne version of itself. Selesnyans have set up a huge tree called Vitar Yescu (still minuscule compared to Vitu Ghazi) which keeps the plague outside of the village, prospectors have to wear protective gear when journeying out, and the Gruul clans that have moved into the outskirts grow antigen fungus on their body, but still live short and brutal lives. 

This is her years later of course, but showing her Guildpact art when it's already on the cover you've just seen would be odd.

Ravnica: City of Guilds Online

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. 

Ravnica

Writer - Cory J. Herndon

Cover Art - Donato Giancola

First Printing - September 2005

(Well, I think it’s just called Ravnica. The cover and the colofon say that, but there is another title page that uses the “City of Guilds” tagline that they brushed out from the cover, so... who knows?)

SUMMARY

The story opens with Boros officer Agrus Kos and his lieutenant Myczil Zunich investigating a group of Rakdos killers. Kos and Zunich start to chase after their priestess… and we move 57 years further in time, to that last days of the year 9999. Ravnica is gearing up for a celebration of the Decamillenial of the signing of the Guildpact, and Kos is now an old man, drinking too much, divorced several times over and still bitter over whatever happened to Zunich all those years ago. In fact, he thinks he sees the ghost of Zunich at one point. Which should be impossible: ghosts linger on Ravnica, but without something like an Orzhov contract they don't last that long.

The plot really kicks off when this supposed ghost leads Kos into an alley where a Rakdos goblin just killed a little girl that used to live at the orphanage Kos grew up in. Kos chases the goblin to a bar where it blows itself up, killing, among others, Kos's partner Bell Borca (which is odd: Kos left him with the corpse of the little girl) and a prominent Selesnyan, the loxodon Living Saint Bayul. When Kos wakes up in the hospital he learns that Bayul's bodyguard, who is now missing, was Fonn Zunich, his old partner's daughter. Kos promised to take care of the Zunich family, but could never bring himself to face them.

Ravnica & Coldsnap Announcement!

Today I'm reviewing moving house during a lockdown. 

It sucks. Don't do it.

You can't have many people over to help, so you'll end up spending an entire month on it full-time. Especially since the amount of people allowed will get altered by the government several times during that month, requiring you to alter your plans time and again. It sucks extra hard if in the last week of that month, right before everything has to be finished up, there's a code red weather warning due to a snowstorm. Oh, and hardware and furniture stores are either closed or have limited assortiment, so you'll be living in an unfinished house doing all sorts of chores for a long time after you've moved. It'll completely derail all your plans to, say, write some book reviews. Do not recommend!

Luckily, between all that nonsense, I did find time to take a look at all the Ravnica stories, and by now I've finally finished the reviews! So... announcement time!

Ravnica dials back the amount of sources a bit from Kamigawa. No maps, nothing of note in the player's guides, and far fewer online stories (initially none at all, but a few more pop up for the later sets). We do have a few more online articles to look at, thanks to the launch of the Taste the Flavor series at the tail-end of Kamigawa block, and while all three novels are written by Cory Herndon, they are much more stand alone than the previous trilogy was, so each of them warrants their own review, rather than a mere summary followed by a combined review. So starting next Saturday there'll be six weeks of Ravnica content; 3 novel reviews alternated with 3 reviews of the online articles & short stories.

And then, as a little bonus, I'll immediately go on with two more reviews. You see, Coldsnap was released while Magicthegathering.com was still doing its Dissenssion coverage, so to make sure I had everything relating to Ravnica I had to go through all Coldsnap articles as well. I figured I might as well take a look at that set as well, in the form of 1 article covering the online stuff, and 1 covering the short story and lore summary in the player's guide.

I hope you all understand I needed to get that little rant at the beginning of my chest, and you will join me next week for our first look at Magic's most popular plane!