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?

POWER LEVELS

Planeswalkers couldn't be printed because they were too powerful. It's a truism that was repeated over and over (not just for planeswalkers by the way, also for characters like Yawgmoth), but just how true is it? There has always been a gameplay/storyline gap. Remember when Song of Time tried to convince us that Cockatrice was the worst, most apocalyptic monster in Magic? Heck, just a few years earlier Karona was printed as a card, despite being so powerful she could summon and dismiss planeswalkers at will!

Initially, the lack of planeswalkers just seems to simply have been grandfathered in. Richard Garfield had not intended for Magic to have a storyline beyond "you are a planeswalker traveling the Multiverse". The players were planeswalkers, so no need to print cards for them. Obviously a storyline was developed anyway, but it was mostly build on top of the cards. You had to read the novels and comics to get it, not the cards. Planeswalkers who were relevant in the stories weren't even mentioned on the cards until Ice Age (Urza and Serra were named in Alpha, but they weren't established as characters, let alone planeswalkers, until later). And to get to a planeswalker so well known that more people than just hardcore storyline fans were asking why they never got a card... well, it's hard to say, but I expect that didn't happen until Urza block.

By that time planeswalkers had been established as exceptionally powerful, and it's true that that made them hard to print as creatures. If they were just a generic creature they would be tremendously disappointing, and if they deliberately made them very overpowered they would be hurting the game overall. I think that's where the "planeswalkers are to powerful to print" idea comes from. But does depowering planeswalkers in-continuity really fix this? Is saying "Hey, we're now printing planeswalkers as generic creatures, but don't worry, it's storyline accurate!" really going to make people excited for them? I highly doubt it.

What you need instead is a unique mechanic for them. One that sets them apart from creatures and makes them their own new and exciting thing. Which is exactly what we got! The current planeswalkers perfectly capture the flavor of a "mini-player" who pops in to help you out. But the thing is... you didn't need to depower them to do so!

The moment the loyalty mechanic was unveiled, the storyline community went "So how much power they give you is based on how loyal they are to you? Well, that's your explanation for why they're not super powerful!" And sure enough, years down the line we would get pre-Mending 'walkers printed with that exact justification. No in-story depowering needed.

Now, to play devil's advocate, we don't know the entire development of the planeswalker cards. We know they were tinkered with for a long time, so long that they weren't ready by the time Future Sight was printed and thus their debut was moved to Lorwyn (with Tarmogoyf taking their place among the future-shifted cards). Perhaps an earlier version of them would only make sense if they were powered down. Plus maybe it felt easier to justify that the new planeswakers weren't hilariously overpowered if the loyalty ability was combined with the in-story explanation.

Still, I find the needs of the game a pretty weak reason for the Mending, especially after a dozen pre-Mending 'walkers have been printed. But perhaps we'll find better reasons when we turn to the storyline itself.

RELATABILITY

Ever since the introduction of the first planeswalkers into the game we've heard a lot about Magic needing it's own flagship characters. Jace being "Magic's Mickey Mouse" and all that. And flagship characters need that nebulous quality of "relatability". Which the pre-Mending 'walkers supposedly lacked due to their godlike nature.

Some people have tried to counter this argument by saying that this godlike nature has been very much overstated. That Teferi's talk in Time Spiral about his nigh-omnipotence was creating a problem that didn't exist before, but I don't think that's quite true. Way back in Arena we already had Kuthuman described as an unkillable and all-powerful being who only had a body at his won convenience, and in Final Sacrifice Greensleeves started seeing her companions as ants and forgot the concept of love the moment she ascended. The planeswalkers as aloof gods have been with us since the start.

It's true that their power has been portrayed very inconsistently at times, most notably in the Homelands comic when someone claiming to be a planeswalker killed Serra only to be taken out himself by a malnourished monk with a stick, but since then stories like Planeswalker and the Ice Age trilogy had very well established that planeswalkers should be immensely powerful and creatures of pure mind.

So if we do need to have our relatable main characters, a shift in the use of planeswalkers was necessary. That said, I don't think power and relatability are completely incompatibel. It's much more in how they are written. Bo Levar or Sandruu are much more relatable to me than Ashiok, to take an (admittedly extreme) example. People still gravitate towards characters like Jhoira or Jodah, despite them being immortal wizards. Magic could've taken it's planeswalkers down the road of Doctor Who, and have them shift between very much human and awe-inspiringly cosmic depending on the situation. That would've required something of a shift in how they were written, but not some cosmic reset button like the Mending.

There is something that tells me that would be easier said than done though. And for that, lets turn to one final justification given for the Mending, and do some statistics.

POWER LEVELS (BUT IN-CONTINUITY THIS TIME)

Another truism: Characters with as much power as the pre-Mending 'walkers are very difficult to write. This truism I find a lot harder to dismiss. Not just because of all the inconsistencies we've seen in how they were written, but also because of just how little they were actually used. Let's look at all the novels we've covered up to this point. (I can't be bothered to add links to all these, but here's the blog's table of contents)

• Arena: a planeswalker as the final "man behind the man" bad guy who shows up in the last few chapters.
• Whispering Woods: A "planeswalker" (later pretty much stated to be just a wizard) as the bad guy.
• Shattered Chains: Same as Whispering Woods.
• Final Sacrifice: Same as the last two until the finale, in which Greensleeves ascends to godlike status for a few moments before giving up her power.
• The Cursed Land: a planeswalker as plot instigator, who only shows up in the epilogue.
• The Prodigal Sorcerer: No planeswalkers.
• Ashes of the Sun: No planeswalkers.
• Song of Time: No planeswalkers.
• And Peace Shall Sleep: No planeswalkers.
• Dark Legacy: No planeswalkers.
• Rath and Storm: Urza makes an enigmatic cameo at the end.
• The Brothers' War: No planeswalkers until someone ascends in the epilogue.
• Planeswalker: A planeswalker as a main character, but apart from the pro- and epilogue, the entire book is written from the point of view of their non-omnipotent companion.
• Time Streams: Same, but now even the pro- and epilogue are from a mortal pov.
• Bloodlines: Same as the Time Streams.
• The Gathering Dark: No planeswalkers.
• The Eternal Ice: Planeswalkers as plot instigators who occasionally show up, but mostly just stick to their own, off-camera, plots.
• The Shattered Alliance: Planeswalkers as behind the scenes plot instigators, an ascension in the finale, and a cameo in the epilogue.
• Mercadian Masques: No planeswalkers (unless you count Urza as a behind the scenes plot instigator)
• Nemesis: Same as Masques.
• Prophecy: Teferi has a few cameos and then shows up as a deus ex machina.
• The Thran: Dyfed is needed to move an otherwise planeswalkerless plot along.
• Invasion: Finally, some planeswalkers as main & pov characters! In a cast of thousands though.
• Planeshift: Same as Invasion.
• Apocalypse: Same as the last two.
• Johan: No planeswalkers.
• Jedit: No planeswalkers.
• Hazezon: No planeswalkers.
• Odyssey: No planeswalkers (unless you count Karn as a behind the scenes instigator, but that's not made apparent until Scourge)
• Chainer's Torment: No planeswalkers.
• Judgment: No planeswalkers.
• Onslaught: No planeswalkers.
• Legions: No planeswalkers.
• Scourge: A few planeswalker cameos, and someone ascends in the finale. (Though maybe you can count Karona as just planeswalker-ish enough to count)
• Assassin's Blade: A planeswalker as a cameo, and as a plot instigator, though you don't know that second bit until the epilogue of the next novel.
• Emperor's Fist: A planeswalker as a plot instigator, though you don't know that until the epilogue.
• Champion's Trial: A planeswalker as the final "man behind the man" bad guy.
• The Moons of Mirrodin:  No planeswalkers after they instigate the plot in the prologue.
• The Darksteel Eye: No planeswalkers, though they are behind the scenes plot instigators.
• The Fifth Dawn:  No planeswalkers until the finale (with once again someone ascending and then giving up their power)
• Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa: No planeswalkers.
• Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa: No planeswalkers.
• Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa: No planeswalkers. (Though Night's Reach says she can planeswalk... in the epilogue)
• Ravnica: No planeswalkers.
• Guildpact: No planeswalkers.
• Dissension: No planeswalkers. They are mention in one paragraph of backstory.

There's of course a lot missing from this list, most notably the Armada comics which did use planeswalkers as the main characters for large part of their series, but I think it illustrates the issue pretty well. We've got 46 novels, 24 of which feature no planeswalkers at all! When they do it's usually a minor role of a last minute ascension (which may or may not be reversed), or at best as the final villain. Only Urza's block and Invasion block actually feature them as main characters, and even there Urza's barely gets pov time in his own trilogy, while in the Invasion books they are relegated to a handful of chapters. Looking back, it seems many people writing for WotC had no idea what to do with planeswalkers as their main characters.

So while I don't think the desire of printing planeswalkers on cardboard, or their use as company mascots, required their complete overhaul, this list does seem to be a good reason to me. Over time they had drifted further and further from the limelight. For planeswalkers to take center stage in the storyline again, they needed to be reworked so authors actually felt comfortable using them.

CONCLUSION?

In the end it's hard to argue with the results of the Mending. Planeswalkers did finally become the main characters of the story, started appearing in the sets, and partially because of this the storyline got a much higher profile within the fandom. So I guess I should accept it with hindsight?

Well... personally I still prefer the pre-Mending storyline to the current one. It feels more unique, and the sprawling, millennia long timelines are like catnip to me. Something like the Artifact Cycle, with it's timelines in front of the books and dates at the start of each section, will get me much more hyped than the current planeswalkers as magical superheroes set up. Of course there have been fantastic individual stories since the Mending, and this blog has covered some complete clunkers from the pre-Mending days, but if WotC wanted to cater specifically to me, give me those timelines, maps, and sprawling "histories of the immortal" type story arcs. 

Now, I could complain about WotC not catering just to me, about the overabundance of superhero style stories in our current media culture, or go real big picture and wail about capitalism incentivising WotC and Hasbro to go for what's popular rather than sticking to their more quirky original concept, but I don't feel like yelling at those clouds. Magic is always going to be a card game first and a storyline (at best) second, and you've got to come to terms with that.

So, okay, after all those years, I kind off get why they wanted to do the Mending, and I can accept that it was probably the right move for Magic in the long run.

BUT...

...I STILL ABSOLUTELY DESPISE THE EXECUTION.

We all know fandoms are quite resistant to change, so even if the Mending was unequivocally a fantastic idea there was going to be pushback from the storyline community. Yet I do think that if WotC had presented it well they could've sold the idea. That's not what happened though.

The first bar to clear would be to present this change in an actually good story. Which the Time Spiral trilogy just wasn't. I've spend the last weeks covering why. But perhaps more importantly than the quality of the story is that it does absolutely nothing to sell us on the new status quo. It introduces a grand total of two new model planeswalkers, doesn't showcase how they could be used in future stories in a way that the old 'walkers couldn't, and then burns out the spark of Radha, who I would say is the more interesting of the two. So we're not actually introduced to a new generations of interesting characters, we're just given a little taster of one in Venser, who promptly disappears form the storyline for the next three years. These books don't exactly make me excited to see what's coming next.

Furthermore, if you want the storyline community to stick around for your new vision, it would probably be a good idea to assure them that it's not a complete reboot, and that it will build on established continuity. Which is a hard sell when you kill off or otherwise write-out all the still extant planeswalkers!

I've said in the Planar Chaos review that Freyalise and Windgrace get better send off that the Armada planeswalkers did in Planeshift, but better still isn't great. And when you then kill of a bunch more characters in Future Sight, and just declare Jaya dead in a way that sounds very "we needed to kill her off but just didn't have space for her in the story", it really starts to feel more like a mandated deck clearing exercise than a story-driven decision to have them die.

Would the reception of the new 'walkers have been as bad if they hadn't been introduced via a slaughter of the old guard? Wouldn't it have been cool to see some of the oldies stick around in a depowered state but still as a planeswalker, dealing with what had happened? You could even just have them stick around in their original state! Have them continue to play the role of ultimate bad guy or behind the scenes plot instigator that they were mostly used for during the past decade anyway! It's not like the choice was just between having the original 'walkers or the new 'walkers as your main characters, the storyline community had gotten quite used to stories focusing on mortals with planeswalkers kept in the backgrounds and epilogues, that's the kind of story WotC had been telling since 2001!

You're first response to that previous paragraph might be that I'm clutching at straws to keep my favorite characters around, but actually it's kind of what WotC did. The very first set story to majorly involve the new planeswalkers was Alara block, in which they brought back Nicol Bolas from supposedly having left the Multiverse, gave him a massive power-up, which maybe didn't bring him back to his previous state all together but which did put him so far above the regular planeswalkers for it to not really matter! And what did they do with him after that? They put him in the behind the scenes manipulator role for the next few years! 

Finally, they really botched the landing. Instead of launching into the new status quo to really sell us these new characters, we got a year of threading water with the Lorwyn story, which doesn't feature any planeswalkers at all. All that time the "Lorwyn Five" remained almost complete ciphers for disgruntled fans to project their anger upon. It feels a bit odd looking back, but for quite a while Chandra had no character at all. So they killed off a beloved female pyromancer character only to immediately introduce a new female pyromancer character whose main defining feature was being a blank slate. That really feels like they were just trying to get rid of any old continuity so they no longer had to worry about that. And remember that after the continuity car crashes of Onslaught and Mirrodin blocks and the continuity-light Kamigawa and Ravnica blocks the storyline community was already increadibly sceptical of WotC's ability to handle continuity. 

Eventually the new planeswalkers got their introductions, and eventually they did grab people's hearts, but by handling the Mending itself as badly as they did WotC made that much harder for themselves. And while it's hard to get a clear picture of course, it feels like a large part of the storyline old guards never got on board and left the fandom. Looking back, it feels like they couldn't have written a better story to kill the community with if they tried.

Well, that's the Mending for you. Still infuriating me after all these years. Next time I'll talk a bit more about the impact it had on the storyline community as a whole, and on me personally. Because this is was all leading into my several year hiatus from the storyline, and that is going to have some impact on this blog going forward...