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!

The Last 6/15 Years (In/Out of story)

Okay, let's star with the big one. Since pretty much the beginning of this blog the backbone of my own timeline has been what I've simply been referring to as "the" official timeline. It hailed from The Duelist #34 and was updated up to Mirrodin on a fairly obscure corner of the old Wizard's website. Ever since then we've been in something of a wilderness though. We eventually learned that the current stories take place around 4560 AR, but even when we got a new timeline in the Dominaria Art Book it didn't go further than putting the Dominaria set in that specific year, leaving us to putz around with various temporal references within the stories to try and get more clarity. But now, finally(!), we have a new official timeline that clears everything up! So, what's on it?

• 56 ME / 4556 AR
• Agents of Artifice, The Purifying Fire, Shards of Alara Block & The Curse of the Chain Veil (the description of that last one covers the various Liliana & Garruk webcomics, not the scrapped novel of the same name!)
• 57 ME / 4557 AR
• Scars of Mirrodin & Zendikar blocks
• 58 ME / 4558 AR
• Innistrad block
• 59 ME / 4559 AR
• Return to Ravnica, Theros, Tarkir, Battle for Zendikar & Shadows over Innistrad blocks
• 60 ME / 4560 AR
• Kaladesh, Amonkhet & Ixalan blocks, Dominaria, Guilds of Ravnica/War of the Spark "block", Throne of Eldraine
• 61 ME / 4561 AR
• Theros: Beyond Death, Ikoria, Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim, Strixhaven, Innistrad 3 "block", Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
• 62 ME / 4562 AR
• New Capenna, Dominaria United, The Brothers' War (the modern day bits at least).

Eagle-eyed and photographic-memoried readers will have noticed that this is all slightly different from what I came up with in my own stab. I'll quickly go over the discrepancy before we can all forget about that forever and just start referencing back to this official list rather than my fan calculations.

The differences really aren't that big actually. I was happy to hear I got the relative times between stories exactly right! Where my version differs from Jay's is in the conversion of Ravnican to Dominarian years.

First, I assumed there was no way to know how Ravnican and Dominarian years matched up, and reasoned that it would be too big a coincidence for their new years days to line up perfectly. Here the years simply pass in parallel. Jay obviously has more insider knowledge than me, and maybe could even make the executive decision to make the two line up. This of course makes it much, much easier to calculate dates. It does still seem a bit coincidental, but maybe the years of planes are linked to some grand multiversal cycle we don't know about?

The other reason why our two timelines differed is due to a Guilds of Ravnica-era continuity error. The dates given in the story The Ledger of Hidden Fortunes puts the end of Ixalan and the beginning of The Gathering Storm around the start of the Ravnican year. Various other sources around Guilds of Ravnica "block" say it takes place in autumn though. For my timeline I used the dates from Ledger, because specific dates seemed more reliable and the autumn setting could be explained away more easily (Do we know what hemisphere the Tenth District is on? Plus there was the Thousand-Year Storm mucking up the weather.) Turns out that within Wizards they made the opposite pick when resolving the continuity issue though, and so the dates in the Visual Guide are about half a year out of step with my timeline.

The resulting difference is pretty minimal though. Some of the Ravnican dates get shifted up one year, and rather than having to put messy "4560 AR = +/- second half 10.076/first half 10.077 ZC" dates on my timeline I can simply just go with "4560 AR". Hurray for simplicity! And hurray in finally, finally, finally having an official source give us a clear timeline for the last 15 years of stories!

The Return of Very Specific Dates

Moving on from the monumental to the kinda funny.

Long ago, when I made my first timeline on the MTGSalvation forum (which you can still see a version of if you go to the oldest version of the Timeline page on the MTG Wiki) I simply took every given passage of time as gospel. Yawgmoth saying in 4205 that the Battle of Megiddo Defile happened 9000 years ago? Clearly that means said battle happened in exactly -4795, and from that date we can then calculate that the beginning of the novel The Thran happened in exactly -4804. Right?

This over-specificity was one of the big things I came to dislike about that first timeline, and thus when I began this blog I started working with much more approximate dates. All of The Thran ended up at simply ~-5000. A bit more vague, but I think it's more realistic that the characters were most likely rounding things off when talking about stuff happening years or even millennia ago.

So you can imagine my amusement when I figured out the following pattern with various events that Jay had given specific years but only had approximate placements on my timeline:

• -1273 ME / 3227 AR - The Kami War (aka Kamigawa block)
• The Kami War was said to have happened 100 years before the destruction of Tolaria in the War of the Spark Artbook, and lasted 20 years according to Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa. Tolaria blew up in 3307. And 3307-100+20 is 3227. So this year lines up the climax of the war perfectly with the timespans we were previously given.
• 3334 AR - The Legend of Jedit Ojanen (aka the Legends I cycle)
• In Johan it was said to be 400 years after the Ice Age. Freyalise ended the Ice Age in 2934, and 2934+400 is 3334.
• 3607 AR - Death of the God Emperor (aka Nicol Bolas, so the Legends II cycle)
• In Champion's Trial it was said that Umezawa manor had stood for almost 400 years "since the earliest days of Madara's first emperor". Then in Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa Toshi ends up in the recently founded Madara. In other words, Legends II happens 400 years after The Kami War. And 3227+400=... wait, actually, that one doesn't work, 3607 is exactly 400 years after the start of the war, not after the ending that puts Toshi on Dominaria! Well, I guess they did say "almost 400 years"...

At the top of the timeline from which the Kami War date comes it does say "most dates are approximate", but with such a specific number as -1273 ME and no explanation given about the calculations needed to get to that I think most readers will take that one as gospel. (As opposed to the more vague -6000 ME Sealing of the Eldrazi or -100 ME Mirrodin Crisis.) 

It's pretty funny to me to see these dates slip back into canon after I avoided them on my own timeline. Personally I'd have rolled a d20 to add or subtract a random number of years from them to give the timeline a bit more realistic feel, but let's be honest, most people wouldn't notice these events happening exactly a certain number of centuries after each other unless they really dug into how the timeline was constructed.

I do wonder whether putting Legends II in 3607 rather than 3627 was an oversight or whether I missed something myself, but it's the first published year we've got for those stories (two decades after their publication!), so I'm not going to second guess it.

A few minor points:

• Leaving Ravi ringing the Apocalypse Chime at ~3200 and putting the start of the Kami War at exactly 3207 leaves a neat little gap for Eight-and-a-Half-Tails to do the research Konda needed to steal That Which Was Taken.
• Johan and Jedit lead directly into one another, so we can probably assume those both happen in 3334. Hazezon starts 2 years after the beginning of Jedit, so I'm going to assume it happens in 3336. Originally I just had all of them at ~3330.
• There's no new word on the continuity fumble in the War of the Spark artbook that says Bolas reigned over Madara for 400 years. (He only took the place over about 150 years earlier according to the Legends II novels themselves).

Modern Dates

Since I'm going through the book now anyway I'm going to grab a few dates from it that cover events from post-Mending stories that have not yet been covered on the blog.

• "7000 years ago" (-2440 AR) 
• Humanoids arise on Archavios. At some point after that they warred for millennia in the Blood Age.
• Birth of Sorin Markov (well, approximately, he's said to be "over 7000 years old")
• -6000 ME (-1500 AR)
• The Sealing of the Eldrazi
• -1221 ME (3279 AR)
• Fate Reforged
• -940 ME (3560 AR)
• Sorin's betrayal of Nahiri
• "700 years ago" (3862 AR)
• Strixhaven founded.

Most of these dates are of course not new. For example, the Fate Reforged date is exactly 1280 years before Tarkir, which we've been told since the very first Fate Reforged story. A small part of me had kept hope that 1280 might have been another approximate, allowing us to put Fate Reforged at 3307 as well, making that the one year where all the time travel happens (after the Dominaria Art book tied Empress Galina's return to the timestream to the destruction of Tolaria), but I guess 1280 years was always such an oddly specific period it was never going to happen. And we've just gotten a time travel story that doesn't involve 3307 at all with The Brothers' War (2022 edition), so the whole point is now moot anyway.

Sorin's age has also come up before, at the very least it was mentioned in the recent Innistrad stories, but I'd like to quickly mention it clears up an old timeline question. Way back when Sorin's age was given as "around 6000", at the very least by Brady Dommermuth (and possibly also in some original Innistrad article I can't find on Wizard's website anymore...), but the date for the sealing of the Eldrazi was also always given as 6000 years ago, and when we finally got the story about that it said Sorin "was at least a thousand years old" already. For a while we could only explain that away by adding "~" in front of all the dates and say those error margins are actually centuries long, but if Sorin is 7000(ish), that whole issue is solved, and we no longer have to have a strange thousand year span of events sitting at "~-6000 AR". Hurray!

Nahiri being awoken, going to Innistrad and getting stuck in the Hellvault have always been described as having happened 1000 years ago. That story was released between Tarkir and Battle for Zendikar, and the 1000 years was repeated in a Shadows over Innistrad story, all of which happened in 59 ME, so if we take 1000 literally we'd end up in 3559 rather than 3560. A bit odd to not go with the specific here when it was used for the Kamigawa/Legends dates above, but I'm going to just stick a "~" on the date and not worry too much about this. In fact, I'll do the same for all these dates except the Fate Reforged one.

Dating Ob Nixilis (No not like that)

The book gives the ages off all planeswalkers it covers (well, most of them, Ashiok's gotta Ashiok and keep secrets of course). Ob's age is given as "over 1000", and it's said he was "trapped without his spark for a millennia" (Millennia in the singular, rather than millennium, tripped me up there initially). Since the "over..." ages given for Bolas, Ugin and Sorin match up with ages that they were given in other sources, it seems like that would go for Ob as well, which means he would have been pretty young when he got stuck on Zendikar. Relatively speaking that is, it must've taken a while to go "conquering plane after plane" before getting stuck.

That has big implications though, as before he got to Zendikar, Ob messed with the Chain Veil on Shandalar. Of course, in 2946 the Great Barrier was erected on Shandalar, preventing any planeswalkers from getting in. We knew the barrier was down in modern times since Liliana and Garruk could get to the plane, but we never learned just when it collapsed. But unless Ob took a page from Arzakon's book and got some people to cast a Spell of Dominion (read my review of the Microprose game if you have no idea what I'm talking about!), that means the barrier must have already been down around 3560!

This is entirely possible. The only thing we knew about the placement of the Shandalar game was that the Wizards' War happened generations (probably centuries, since it's generations of powerful wizards we're talking about here) after the barrier was put up, and that there were again generations/centuries between the Wizards' War and the game. If we assume Ob's age is indeed about 1000 years old, that gives us a gap of 600ish years to fit the Wizards' War and the game in, which should be enough.

That placement is still pretty vague, and there is the conflicting source of Dreams of the Damned, which says Ob was imprisoned on Zendikar "thousands of years ago". That would put his contact with the Chain Veil, and by association the destruction of the Onnake, way further back in time, to before the Great Barrier was created. Ob being "over 1000" leaves that option open of course, but it would be odd that he would be so much older than that when Sorin is just called "over 7000" and Nicol Bolas "over 25.000".

For now I'm going to stick Ob's origin, his dealings with the Veil and his imprisonment in Zendikar all on ~3560. I'm pretty happy to have at least some kind of demarcation to put on the Shandalar events. But hopefully we'll one day get a bit more clarity. Ideally in a story that also clears up who blew up the Onnake. (I'd also be happy if that story pushed Ob and the Veil back to an earlier date, because then it could use my old theory it was actually Kenan Sharmal who kersploded the Onnake. His motive? Stealing the "putting spirits in an artifact" magic they used to create the Chain Veil, so he could later use that same magic to put Lim-Dûl's soul in the magical artifact used to power the Great Barrier! I mean, those two instances of powerful spirits trapped in artifacts on Shandalar have to be connected somehow, right?)

I thought the Chain Veil story had been dumped, but then this guy showed up again in Dominaria United, so who knows!

Other Ages

Now we're talking about ages, let's quickly list how old everybody is.

• Over 25.000 - Nicol Bolas & Ugin
• Over 7000 - Sorin
• Over 6000 - Nahiri
• Over 1200 - Karn, Teferi
• Over 1000 - Ob Nixilis
• Over 200 - Liliana
• Over 60 - Nissa
• Mid-50's - Narset
• Early 50's - Daretti
• Late 40's - Angrath
• Mid-40's - Ajani, Arlinn, Ral, Davriel
• Early 40's - Tezzeret, Vraska, Sarkhan ("objectively over 1200 or under 10"), Kasmina ("appears to be" that age)
• Late 30's - Koth, Garruk (Said to be 10 in his origin story), Estrid
• Mid-30's - Tamiyo (another "appears")
• Late 20's - Elspeth, Kaya, Jace, Gideon, Vivien
• Mid-20's - Chandra, Saheeli, The Wanderer, Oko (Again, only an "appears")
• Early 20's - Basri Ket, Samut, Will & Rowan, Huatli, Kaito, Kiora
• Late Teens - Tyvar, Niko
• Preteen - Aminatou
• 1 - Calix (Well, the text says "Appears mid-30's, actually only a few years old", but it's now 4562 and Theros Beyond Death was only in 4561, so...)

All of this is a too vague for me to put on the timeline, but it's good to have all these ages listed together somewhere. You never know when you'll need the info to place an event. We'll definitely need the info on Garruk when it comes to placing the webcomic that has his origin story for example. Maybe we'll talk more about these if I ever cover the Duels of the Planeswalkers character bio's which gave much more specific ages.

I think Narset's age is the most surprising. She did look a bit older in her Ikoria art, but I'd never be able to tell from her Parter of Veils art.

One Mistake?

The Legends II placement was a bit odd, but there is only one entry in the book I'm confident in calling a mistake. Unfortunately it is the very first date given...

While the ages of Nicol Bolas & Ugin are given as "over 25.000 years old", lining up with other sources, and the Dominaria sections puts its Mythohistory "between -20.000 and -15.000 AR", which is straight out of the Dominaria Art Book, the timeline at the start of the book puts the Elder Dragon War at -15.000 ME. Which would be around -10.500 AR. At which point Bolas has already been a planeswalker for centuries, while the blurb in that same timeline says the war ends with his ascension. It's an easy mistake to make while converting AR and ME dates, similar to the timeline in the Dominaria Players' Guide putting the Thran at 5000 years ago instead of 5000 years before the birth of Urza.

While we're talking about the Mythohistory, my timeline currently has a weird overlap between the Elder Dragons and the Primeval Dragons. Because the dates given for the former in Chronicle of Bolas and those for the later given in the Dominaria Story Podcasts overlap, it looks like the Primevals and Numena ruled during some weird interval in the Elder Dragon War. The Visual Guide doesn't explicitly address this issue, though the way it's blurb on the Mythohistory is written does sound like the Primevals come after the Elder Dragon War. It mentions "all but a handful" of Elders being killed in the war and then moves on to "Five of their progeny" (of the Elders or just of the survivors?) becoming the Primevals.

I'd like to use this space to ask Jay, Ethan, and whoever else might be reading this who has an in at Wizards, to please, please, pleasepleaseplease, give us a clear timeline of this period of history at the first possible opportunity. Recent publications (including the one we're covering today!) have done wonders at untying ancient continuity snarls that I never imagined would ever be addressed, and those pesky Primevals might be the last big issue standing. (And they have been problematic since they were first introduced!)

Some Minor Points

• The book places the signing of the Guildpact at -10.017 ME, which would be -5517 AR. My timeline had it one year later, but that's either a result of the previously mentioned Ravnican/Dominarian year conversion, or a an artifact from calculating back from the Ravnica novel, which begins in 9999 ZC and ends in 10.000 ZC.
• Similarly, the breaking of the Guildpact is put at -17 ME, while my timeline had the novel at 4483-4484 AR. That'll become 4482-4483 when we calculate from the signing of the Guildpact. The same shift happens to all the other Ravnican dates.
• Yavimaya is said to be "born from the wreckage of Argoth", which reinforces the by now well established connection between the two while neatly sidestepping the recurring issue of people saying Yavimaya is actually in the same location as where Argoth used to be.
• The Mirage War & The Planeswalker War are both placed at 4196. We've known the date of the Mirage War from the original official timeline, and could figure that it happened concurrently to the Planeswalker War from both Teferi and Kaervek showing up in the Battlemage game, but this is finally some official confirmation. The Dominaria Art Book only put them, and the Prophecy War, in a period of 4195 to 4205, dubbed "The War Years".
• The Mirrodin Crisis is put at -100 ME, giving us a bit more clarity that just Karn saying "There had not been a major conflict or crisis in Mirrodin for over one hundred years" in Planar Chaos.

Well, that is all! There are more dates given of course, and I guess I could go on about stuff like how The Brothers' War is placed specifically at 63 AR (Well, -4437 ME) in the timeline and then 0-64 AR in the Dominaria section, but that's just the kind of considerations you make when you sometimes want to be specific and sometimes prioritize a more readable sentence. I won't bore you with that.

So... What Now?

I'm not sure what I'm going to do next with this blog. Now the Visual Guide has made it possible for my timeline to cover all of Magic's story, I do feel the urge to do just that and puzzle out where all the webcomics and Uncharted Realms stuff has to go in between the dates Jay's given for the sets. Having to deal with the current state of the Wizards website still feels horribly demotivating though. The Lorwyn & Shadowmoor online coverage was almost done, so I think I'll wrap those up as quickly best as I can and put them up in the coming weeks, which will give me some time to see just how bad the situation is and how much Max's work can mitigate the annoyance. So check back in a while, there might just be something new to read here.