The Brothers' War Annotations

The story of accompanying the new Brothers' War set had some surprisingly deep continuity references, so I thought it would be fun to do another round of annotations. Hopefully you'll also find it interesting. And hopefully I can get through the article without too many confusing sentences despite the set The Brothers' War having a story called The Brothers' War which frequently references the novel called The Brothers' War, all of them covering the in-universe event called the Brothers' War...

Before I get into the annotations, a quick review: I thought this story was amazing. Recent Magic stories have often been way too rushed, especially the ones covering planewide wars (Kaldheim, Dominaria United), and the Brothers' War is a complex multi-decade conflict, so I was wondering how it was going to go. Add to that the possible continuity snafu's that are always lurking with a time travel plot, and things could've gone pretty bad. Especially for me, as The Brothers' War is still my favorite Magic story of all time.

Luckily, and I think bravely, WotC decided not to retell the Brothers' War story at all, instead giving us a collection of much more personal stories that build on the established continuity! They cover all the characterization and character interaction I thought was sorely missing from Dominaria United, and go for a level of continuity references that's genuinely impressive. I also love how the ghost of Urza hangs over all the stories, even the ones where you wouldn't expect it (like with Tezzeret wondering about Karn's creator), which subtly but powerfully builds up to him finally appearing in person in the finale.

I do wonder if more casual fans feel cheated by not getting the whole story of the war though. If I were WotC I'd have plastered links to a discounted version of the e-book of The Brothers' War all over my sites and social media. (Or released it for free, but you know, that's not the world we're living in.)

Okay. Now let's dive into the specific references!

Shadowmoor

 

Shadowmoor
Editor - Philips Athans & Susan J. Morris

Cover Art - Adam Rex

First Printing - April 2008

The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor story didn't have enough plot to fill its three novels, so we're lucky they didn't try to stretch it to four. Instead the remaining set in the double-block gets an anthology, with one 88 page novella by Scott McGough and Cory Herndon which tangentially features some of the characters from the main story, and 8 short stories like the ones we've been getting in previous anthologies.

In theory I think giving us a bunch of short stories for each plane is a good idea. It allows you to showcase more of the setting without having to force it into the main story. In practice though I find that I usually prefer the main, more "important" stories. If a story has no connection to larger continuity, and doesn't feature any characters from the game or the main story, it has to really damn good for me to care about it. But if previous anthologies are anything to go by many writers seem to go "let's just bang out an extended fight scene or a Twilight Zone-style twist story and be done with it" when asked to contribute to one of these, rather than crafting a short masterpiece. Will that pattern hold? Well, let's dive in and see!

Lorwyn, Morningtide & Eventide

 

Writers - Cory J. Herndon & Scott McGough
Cover Artists - Mark Zug, Steve Prescott & Christopher Moeller
First Printing - August 2007, January 2008 & June 2008

SUMMARY

Lorwyn: There are a bunch of mysterious occurrences happening on Lorwyn. Magical creeping vines are killing elves, boggarts are being extra bloodthirsty, someone has razed the Murmuring Bosk, and a routine spell from elvish hunter Rhys blows up his whole hunting squadron (and his own horns).

Treefolk sage Colfenor has some idea what's going on. He's not telling anyone though, but he does have a plan, which involves getting Rhys, his former apprentice, to plant one of his seedcones in the remains of the Bosk, manipulating kithkin hero Bridgid into kidnapping flamekin pilgrim Ashling, and then using Ashling to lure a great elemental to set himself on fire. All of which is part of a ritual to be reborn in a "new world".

There's a bunch of other character tagging along, including the giant Brion, his brother Kiel, and the merfolk captain Sygg, but they add very little to the overarching story, so I'll give more detail on them below. The one important character is Maralen. In the prologue we see her mysteriously get killed by those vines, she then mysteriously shows up alive but amnesiac after Rhys's explosion. She eventually mysteriously gets control of the Vendilion Clique, after they discover she is unique in some mysterious but unexplained way and kidnap her for a mysterious meeting with Oona, the Queen of the Fae. Mysterious!

Between all that the crew is also followed by Rhys's former superior Nath and his former friend Gryffid, who want him dead for what he did to his fellow elves. Rhys ends up killing Nath.

Book one ends with the crew back in the Bosk, where Colfenor's sapling has miraculously grown into a full treefolk already.

Updating the list of sources

A long, long time ago I made a list of storyline sources for this blog, which I've since been updating... veeeeeeery sporadically. Before I launch into the post-Mending storylines it seems like a good idea to do some housekeeping and finally give it a thorough update. With Magic's storyline being what it is we are once again dealing with a whole host of sources released in a variety of different media, so it'll be easy to miss something. This "article" is thus merely a list of everything I could find, and an open invitation to all of you to point out if I'm missing anything. 

For those of you who just want reviews: the next two weeks are very busy for me, but I'm aiming for July 16th to post the first Lorwyn coverage!

For those of you interested in the post-Mending sources list, do read on!

Figuring out the post-Mending timeline

WHY THIS ARTICLE IS A WEEK LATE...

This article was always going to end with a call for criticism. Figuring out a framework for the post-Mending timeline is a bit of a challenge as we don't have an official timeline to use as a base like we did before. Instead you have to piece it all together from in-story references, meaning everything is contingent on everything else. I'd hate to have to redo the entire thing in a few months or even years after I've already used it to place a whole lot of stories, so I was going to invite you all to comment on any mistakes I had made or important sources I had missed.

Then on the day I was going to post this, I was made aware of a Tumblr post made two months ago by Vorthos extraordinair and writer of the "Magic: a Visual History" books Jay Annelli, in which he gives an overview of the entire timeline I'm covering here. And guess what? On first glance, it didn't seem to line up with mine.

What to do with that information? Since Jay is a published Magic author these days I was tempted to chuck all my work in the bin and just declare his Tumblr post official canon, but it only covers in which years blocks happen, and the post-Mending timeline is so compressed that in order to place individual stories you have to work with references to months and sometimes even weeks. The timeline I came up with does go into that much detail, and re-reading it for the third time since finding that Tumblr post, I did still think my logic was sound. So I decided that the article was going to have to be delayed for a while so I could figure out how I could harmonize my timeline with Jay's.

It took a week for me to find a quiet moment to do so, but in the end all it came down to was some tricky conversion between ZC and AR dates. In fact, using Jay's timeline and one or two assumptions I could make my timeline even more detailed! So below you'll find the article I had intended to post last week, and then a short addendum where I put my results next to Jay's for an even more specificity.

All that said, the call for criticism still stands. I haven't re-read all the post-Mending sources for this article (I mean, obviously, the whole point of this was to create a framework for the future re-reading I'll do for the blog), so if you think I'm missing a crucial bit of information, please do share it with me so I can see how it fits with my conclusions thus far.

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.

Future Sight Online

Wrapping up the online coverage of the Time Spiral block, some articles on Future Sight. I'll be honest, there is a not a tremendous amount of interest here, though there is a very strange first appearance of a character who would go on to be very important, which is fun to look at.

As with the last two sets, we no longer have the minisite, though the Arcana articles advertising it only talk about "hints" and "insights" in the storyline, no actual stories, so I don't think we're missing much. Let's quickly move on to the Feature Articles.

Future Sight

 

Author - Scott McGough & John Delaney

Cover art - Aleksi Briclot

First printing - April 2007

SUMMARY

We start on the shores of Madara, where Leshrac (did you guess it was him?) is approached by the Myojin of Night's Reach. She offers him a mask with the power to steal powers, in the hope that he will use it against Nicol Bolas, who is currently hunting her for dropping off the Umezawa clan on Madara centuries ago. Leshrec then heads to Urborg where he recruits the Weaver King's foremost killer, Dinne il-Vec, sending him to find Radha. After that he begins to manipulate Jeska, hoping to bring Phage out in her.

Jeska has been brought up to date by Jhoira, Teferi & Venser, but didn't like their plans and went off to look into the rifts on her own. Leshrac tells her the Otaria and Yavimaya rifts are very complex, and that sacrificing their own sparks might not even work on them, but that they could use Venser & Radha's link to the rifts in a way adapted from how Bolas used Venser to bring himself back to life in Time Spiral. Jeska goes to inspect Radha, but Leshrac interferes by having Dinne attack the Keldon warhost just as Jeska is talking to Radha, making the half-elf mistrust her. Some fighting later (during which Jeska seems to subconsciously use a minor version of Phage's touch) Radha is beaten and claimed by Jeska.

Planar Chaos Online

Unfortunately the Planar Chaos mini-site, like the one for Time Spiral before it, has fallen off the edge of the internet. And this one actually had a story! Luckily it has been saved from oblivion, so let's start looking into that before delving into the articles!

Destiny, by Michael J. Ryan

Yup. That's the summary alright!

Okay, okay, I'll take this seriously.

In the Stronghold of another timeline, Death Stroke doesn't show Crovax killing Selenia, but Mirri doing so instead. As a result, she is the one who ends up with the curse of vampirism. The two of them fall overboard during the final battle with the Predator in Exodus, but the Weatherlight comes back and Crovax escapes. The story is book-ended with Crovax and Gerrard discussing destiny.

Planar Chaos

 Writer - Scott McGough & Timothy Sanders
Cover Artist - Daren Bader

First Printing - January 2007

SUMMARY

With Rahda back in Keld and Teferi dealing with his sudden lack of godliness, Venser and Jhoira come to the fore in this book. Jhoira creates a barrier of glass shards to protect them form the angry Shivans that attacked the crew at the end of Time Spiral, but mana-surges of the returned Shiv cause it to go out of control and shred the attackers. This makes their last companion Corus go mad, which leads to him breaking an artifact Teferi gave him, blowing himself up in the proces. Eventually they make it to a Ghitu tribe though, where they build an ambulator over the course of several weeks. Unfortunately, there's also a strange giggly voice who starts talking to Venser, trying to distract him in dangerous situations.

Time Spiral Online

So, Time Spiral online... unfortunately we're now in a period when even the Wayback Machine can't make every page visible (or legible), so it's possible I'm missing some stuff here. Most notably I couldn't access the Time Spiral mini-site. Luckily I don't think there were any unique stories on there, just some general introductions to the world and the old characters that finally got cards in this set.

Oh, and, eh... the Antiquities War & Urza-Mishra War comics, from 1996. What an utterly bizarre thing to include! I guess the Ice Age comics that were put online for Coldsnap were very well received and thus they wanted to include something similar. And yeah, off all the Armada comics these are the closest related to the Time Spiral story since the Sylex Blast created one of the rifts, but... a) these comics have long been chucked out of continuity by The Brothers War, and b) the comics are unfinished as the Armada line was cancelled before the final miniseries in the trilogy could be released! Which means that the Sylex Blast isn't in these issues. I can only imagine how bizarre this must've read to people unfamiliar with the history of the comics...

The actual last panel of the comic.

Well, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the pages we can still access.

Time Spiral

 

Writer - Scott McGough

Cover Artist - Scott M. Fisher

First Published - September 2006

SUMMARY

Teferi and Jhoira are living in a bubble outside of the timestream since Invasion. Shiv begins returning, but it wont fit (metaphysically, somehow) in the gap where it used to be, and the resulting crash could destroy Dominaria and with it the entire Multiverse. So the two of them return to the regular world to smooth out the landing. To figure out how to do that, they go to visit Freyalise in Skyshroud, as Teferi is very impressed by her putting that forest in Keld during the Rathi overlay and wants to learn how she did it to apply that knowledge to Shiv. They take along two viashino and two Ghitu as a retinue. Unfortunately there are time rifts everywhere, through which Dominaria's mana is being drained, and time is already so out of wonk that they appear on Dominaria 300 years after they left, even though our Master of Time thought it was only 100.