The Aftermath

This was going to be the Lorwyn review, but I ended up saying very little about that book and a whole lot about the aftermath of the Mending for both the storyline community in general and for me personally, so it works better as a separate article.

Too dramatic?

When it comes to people's least favorite stories there are a bunch of usual suspects. Prophecy. Scourge. Quest for Karn. War of the Spark: the Forsaken. If you've been reading this blog for a long time you may suspect that my list includes a few more obscure stories, like The Cursed Land. But I think most people will be surprised to hear that my least favorite of them all are the Lorwyn-to-Eventide quadrilogy. I don't think these are very high on most people's hate list, and to be honest a lot of my animosity comes from the context in which I first read them.

Now don't get me wrong, I think these books are very bad. Slow, padded, boring, lacking in interesting characters, just a real slog to get through. At least Prophecy had some insights in Keldon culture to entertain me. At least Scourge was terrible in bizarre and interesting ways. At least The Cursed Land had the decency of ending after one novel! But to really get my dislike, we need to go back a bit.

The years leading up to Time Spiral block had been pretty good for the storyline community. Kamigawa and Ravnica were very well received, the number of stories we were getting was slowly increasing again, and with Coldsnap and Time Spiral WotC seemed to be getting back to more continuity driven stories. Personally I was having a lot of fun as the moderator of the MTG Salvation storyline forum, where we were setting up the MTGSally wiki (which would eventually evolve into the current MTG Wiki) and which was visited frequently by the likes of Scott McGough, Cory Herndon, Will McDermott, and occasionally Brady Dommermuth, though he hung out more often on the official Magicthegathering.com forums.

Times were good...

...and then the Mending happened. 

The Mending

So. The Mending. Probably the most important event in all of Magic's storyline history, and certainly a contender for the most hated one. But we're now 15 years onward and the flames of anger seem to have dimmed in that time. Many people have left the fandom in those years, while others have joined, and in the meantime the community has found other things to hate (War of the Spark anyone?). So let's take a look back at the Mending from this distance, and see if all that vitriol we spilled over it was deserved.

CONTEXT

At the time this massive shake up of the status of planeswalkers took the community completely by surprise. I think everyone was still in the "the storyline is an afterthought for WotC" modus and thus expected it to coast for a while longer, guided by the same handful of authors who had done so over the previous years. But in hindsight, I think it was to be expected that there would be some kind of reappraisal of the supposed main characters of Magic.

A few years before Brady Dommermuth had wondered why the storyline stuck to Dominaria when the game was supposed to be about discovering new planes. That led to the planeshopping and world-building that proved so successful that WotC is doing it to this very day. Bill Rose's insistence on making Kamigawa a top-down set seemed to have rekindled a love for flavor and storytelling with people within the company, which led to the Taste the Magic articles and an increase in online stories. So change was in the air. A year after Future Sight, new CEO's at Hasbro and WotC moved Magic's focus away from the Pro Tour and towards "emotionally resonance" and marketable characters. (Here's a good article on that last bit.)

The timeline doesn't line up to simply say "a new CEO forced the change", but you can see how all these changes illustrate the environment in which Matt Cavotta asked the same question about planeswalkers that Brady Dommermuth had already asked about the planes: if they're what our game is all about... why are they not actually in the game?

...and I fully agree with him. It was weird that when a character became a planeswalker they suddenly couldn't be printed anymore. In my eyes the planeswalker type is a great addition to the game. But did they need to pair that with this in-continuity change?

Future Sight Player's Guide

After a bunch of less than interesting player's guides, this one actually has some important information. Not much of it, so we'll go through it quickly, but this is defintely one for the "why did they bury that information in such an obscure source?" pile.