Some thoughts on the Phyrexia arc

Now I'm blogging again I might as well get some thoughts about the most recent arc of Magic Story off my chest. The gist of which is that if the finance people at WotC won't make more money available for longer stories, and the cardmakers don't want to stick around on a plane for more than one set, I really think the story people at WotC should leave the planar invasions and global catastrophes of the table for a while. It's just really disappointing that Kaldheim, Dominaria United, All Will Be One and March of the Machine have been duds to me because of the exact same issues every time.

In all of these cases the story felt rushed and didn't manage to convey the grand scale necessary for its plot. Often the worlds felt very small, stories seemed to lurch from one mandated plot point to another, and since they didn't have the space for character development they often leaned heavily on shock value instead, hoping that any sympathy the reader has build up for characters from their previous appearances would be enough to tug the heartstrings when something terrible happens to them. To little effect, at least in my case.

Some examples:

Kaldheim is a mini-Multiverse with ten interconnected planes. Ethan Fleischer described it as one of WotC's most ambitious worlds. Yet the story doesn't do this justice at all. When all we see of what caused the interplanar war is Tibalt talking to a handful of trolls and then leaving some holes in Immersturm, when the whole thing can apparently be resolved by a single battle on a bridge and Tyvar talking to his brother off panel, and in the end Niko and the rest of the B-plot randomly fall from the sky to meet Kaya... the effect is not so much "one of the most ambitious worlds Magic has ever done", more "A LARP organizer wanting to do an epic story despite not having the people nor the space to pull it off."

Other examples of rushed plot points would be Ertai being alive without any explanation, the battle of Yavimaya ending because Meria spots a random Thran machine the bad guys just happen to plow up, or Tibalt's big ruse of pretending to be Valki lasting all of one paragraph.

Shadowmoor/Eventide Online

A quick note to start with: almost all of this was written before the lasts move of WotC's website, which I've already complained about last week. This week there is some complaining in my post about the WotC websites archives. It's no longer really relevant to writing the blog since I'm now using a Wayback Machine crawl to access articles, but I've left in my comments because as an archivist by trade I couldn't let the awfulness of that website's database go unmentioned.

FEATURE ARTICLES

As always we have the introductory articles: The Deepening Shadowmoor, by Rei Nakazawa, and The Mysteries of Eventide, with Doug Beyer taking over from Rei (who had been doing this since Torment!) In the first we learn how the tribes have changed (or have stayed the same, in the case of the faeries) from Lorwyn to Shadowmoor. The second talks about the main characters of the novels. It's just a quick introduction, not giving us any extra information. Though I noticed that once again Din of the Fireherd is used to illustrate Ashling's elemental despite it looking nothing like that skeletal horse in the novels.

Of course we also get the usual articles about flavor text, this time it's The Two-Sided Coin by Garret Baumgartner and The Language of Myth by Nik Davidson.

Shadowmoor Pays Off! is Jeremy Jarvis talking about designing Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. I'm mostly sharing the link for the art showcase he gives.

Lorwyn/Morningtide Online & the Lorwyn Player's Guide

You know the deal about these online articles by now. We get some feature articles and a whole bunch of Taste the Magic entries describing the world of the current set, with maybe a few excursions talking about older story stuff or behind the scenes looks at the work of the creative team. I'll list those I found interesting below, but I don't want to get to deep into them. There's nothing too shocking there and it's all there for you to read if you're really into Lorwyn. Instead I want to look closer at a handful or online articles, the Lorwyn Player's Guide and a short webcomic, which together form everything the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor era had to offer on the poster people of the post-Future Sight era: Planeswalkers!

[edit from much-later-Squirle]All of this was written before WotC's latest website move, so I hope it's all still "there for you to read". Most of the links I used go to the Internet Archive anyway, so those should be okay. If you also want to go through the articles I haven't covered, I think your best bet is to look up the article names on the wiki, and then search for those on MaxMakesMagic's Internet Archive datebase.[/edit]

Magic: the Gathering - The Visual Guide

Hey everyone! Been a while! While writing the reviews of the Lorwyn-to-Eventide online coverage I reached the point where WotC revamped their website, when their weekly articles stopped using easy serial numbers in their url's, putting in the name of the individual articles instead. Which meant I had to start using the actual website's less-than-stellar archive to find articles rather than merely simply increasing the number in a Wayback Machine url. This was already quite the hassle, but then while I was struggling with that, WotC changed their website again and erased loads of old articles! That took the wind out of my sails altogether. I eventually found that MaxMakesMagic on Twitter was working on a script to fish articles out of the Wayback Machine, so who knows, maybe I may be able to cover all of Uncharted Realms after all, but by that time I was just not in the mood to work on the blog anymore...

Still, if you've been building a Magic timeline since 2015 there are some things you just have to cover. A while back I did an article in which I tried to figure out the post-Mending timeline. I reached out to Jay Annelli for comment afterwards, and he let me know that there was an upcoming publication I would find very interesting in this endeavor. Well, it's here, and boy was Jay correct! It still took me a while before I felt like writing about Magic again, but I'm here now, so let's go!

First of all, this book is amazing! It's closer in size to the "Art of Magic: the Gathering" series than to Jay's previous "A Visual History" books, which does more justice to the art, and allows for a lot more information as well. The book gives an overview of all the main planes and planeswalkers. Unfortunately there wasn't space to give an entry to every single one, but this is very much a "I wish there was more of this" comment, not a criticism! And... actually, I think that'll do it for the review part of this article. There's no story to summarize and critique after all. This is just a great book, both for people who are new to the storyline and want a good primer, and for long time fans who just want to revel in the gorgeous art and trawl through the text for flavor references and neat bits of continuity!

Of those continuity bits, obviously the timeline related ones immediately grabbed my attention. The book has an 8 page timeline going from the Elder Dragon War to the Brothers' War (the set from last year, not the original war. The timeline does go beyond 64 AR!), and a bunch more references later, mostly in the Dominaria section. The timeline is given in ME, or "Mending Era", but the dates given in the Dominaria section are in good old Argivian Reckoning, and make it very clear that 0 ME = 4500 AR, giving us an easy conversion. For the rest of this article I'd like to go through all the dates given to finally put the issues raised by my earlier stab at a post-Mending timeline to rest, as well as nail down some other odds and ends!