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.

And that's all the interesting Feature Articles. Well, unless you count The New Magicthegathering.com, which announces a big revamping of the website, which I've been dreading since I've started covering the online articles. Up to this point all article-urls ended in a serial number, so I could just keep adding 1 to find the next article. From this point on the urls contain the article names, meaning I'll be forced to use the current website archive. I'll try to keep my complaining about that to a minimum, but I can't promise complete silence on the subject. I mean, going through the Doug Beyer articles was doable, but covering the Feature Articles... someone decided it was a good idea to take a whole load of assets that were inserted in other articles, from banners to decklists, and label all of them as "Feature Articles"! Which is the sort wanton abuse of databases that makes archivists see red!

TASTE THE MAGIC // SAVOR THE FLAVOR

The article has a name change near the end of this period, for the better I think.

Doug kicks off with The Shadowy Pendulum, in which he admits that all the pushing of Lorwyn as a lighter and softer world than Magic usually visits was all to set up for the big switch with the Great Aurora. I do wonder whether WotC has some regrets in doing this whole switcheroo, as there does seem to be a lot of fans who prefer the less grim worlds.

Saving the Queen previews Oona and talks a bit about who she is, but doesn't reveal she's the big bad behind everything. Just that she remembers Lorwyn, "and that she is a powerful focal point for much of the plane's magic" without whom much would change. Dougs answer to the readers question that week reveals that Reflecting Pool showcases what has happened to Velis Vel, the home of the changelings, after the Aurora. 

"The new art of ***CENSORED*** depicts Velis Vel, the ancestral home of the changelings, but in its Shadowmoor version, it's filled with water. Reflected in its surface is a magical "echo" of a forgotten world, a sunlit world of green trees and blue sky. No changelings appear to be about, but maybe they've just gone deep underground, either literally or metaphorically."

You Can't Handle the Reaper King is our best source of lore on the scarecrow and their king, but unfortunately there's not much of it. It says the scarecrow were created by kithkin to help with basic tasks, who hung around after the kithkin in question passed away. Which seems to contradict the Shadowmoor novel in which Mistmeadow Jack was surprised to see a scarecrow he build come to life. Perhaps it's only true for an original batch of scarecrows, who then went around animating the rest of their kind? When Doug finally gets to the Reaper King he only talks about the card's design, how the weirdness ("wrongness") of its mana cost fits with the creepy character. But what the King is, where he came from, what his goal are? No info on any of that.

On the whole Doug seems to be moving more towards "this is why we designed it like this" type articles than "this is the flavor of X" ones. "Here's some facts about faeries and how that is reflected in the Oona card", "design needed artifact creatures so creative came up with the scarecrows", "here's how we justify green having wither", that sort of stuff. For example, How to Design a Hellion and More is all about obscure Magic-only creature types, but for hellions the only real lore we get is that they are "manifestations of nature's blind rage", whatever that means. Other than that he talks about how they should be 3/3 or greater and should impact the battlefield the moment they come into play. There's a little bit of Fallen Empires lore with the thallids and thrulls, but nothing we didn't know already.

In A Tasty Buffet of -1/-1 Counters a reader asks about Kar-Sengir, but Doug just confirms the Sengirs aren't on Shadowmoor despite the Graven Cairns reprint.

Planeswalkers and the Written Page announces the new publishing format, and Allies in Conflict answers readers question about new novels. It's a rare bit of clear communication about publication plans, as we'll see a lot of books disappear from solicitations or just not get follow ups without any comment in the future. For now though, we hear that instead of the "one book per set" format WotC had been following for years we will be getting a Planeswalker's Guide (a project that was based on a poll about whether people would buy the style guide if it was made available), novels dedicated to specific planeswalkers, starting with Jace, and then one novel for the entire Alara block. We'll see how this all goes eventually.

Merfolk Resurfaced talks about how problems with representing aquatic species interacting with nonaquatic ones let to the replacement of the merfolk with vedalken and soratami, only for people to really miss merfolk and ask to bring them back. Selkies and Subtypes talks about finding the balance between having oddball one-off creature types like lammasu and brushwagg and consolidating stuff for tribal gameplay. That last one also has a question about where all the news species in Shadowmoor and Eventide came from, and suggests that all the hags and trolls were in hiding somewhere, perhaps underground, during the plane's Lorwyn days. This seems to tie in with the previous statement that all the changelings might be hiding underground while the plane is in Shadowmoor mode.

And now we're off to the modern archives. Let me just search for all the Savor the Flavor articles from august 2008 onward, sort by oldest first, and... Oh for crap's sake, why is every single one entered twice in the database!?

There are also a handful of actual stories here, but they're pretty strange this time around.

First up there is Choose Your Own Shadowmoor Adventure, which I thought had died, but which actually made it across the various server migrations the website has had. (Note from later-Squirle: following the latest server move it's actually dead. It's still on the Wayback Machine, though all the images are missing. The version in MaxMakesMagic's crawl has all the images but there the links don't work...)

You play an elf wandering through Shadowmoor. Just like in the anthology everything is out to kill you. Even attempting to cast a spell can lead to you tapping into the Canker that usually plagues treefolk, killing you. Each scene only gets a handful of lines, so don't expect anything too deep, you are mostly just stumbling from one danger to the next. The most memorable bit is when you find the Reflecting Pool showing you what looks like a more lovely version of your world. If you dive in, you're torn apart by merrow and the game calls you dumb. It's a bit cheap I guess, but it works well within the set-up created by the dualistic plane.

Then there is The Seer's Parables, an in-world ballad about the Demigod cycle. A kithkin asks a seer questions like how the world will end, why there is war, why it's always night, et cetera. Each answer involves one of the gods, from the Overbeing of Myth creating the world to the moon being the eye of the Godhead of Awe. It has an interesting structure, though the answers get a bit same-y. There is a twist at the end though.

It's neat to see these creatures get a story of their own, though it's a shame that it seems to be just an in-universe myth, since we know Shadowmoor was actually "created" by Oona messing with the plane's day/night cycle.

Finally there is Spark, which breaks the fourth wall, but does answer the question what happens to planeswalkers caught in the Great Aurora. They get changed, though not so much as the planebound inhabitants of the world. Clearly it's not a "canonical" story, but perhaps we can put it in a second "here our earth is part of the Multiverse" canon alongside the letters page of Arabian Nights #2 which stated Islam made it to Rabiah thanks to a planeswalker.

Clearly I'm not putting that last story on the timeline, the other two I'll put in between Morningtide and Shadowmoor, though with the entire plane having altered memories it's hard to tell which stories actually happened and which were made up (well, more made up!)

ARCANA

Among the Arcana articlets there are links to the Shadowmoor Minisite and Eventide Minisite, though the Wayback Machine can't find those actual sites anymore. According the article this Taste the Magic article there were parts of The Seer's Parables shared on the Eventide site (see the reader's question at bottom), but luckily we later got the entire thing, so we're not missing anything.

Other than that the arcana's give us the usual art showcased and sketches...

• Wallpaper of the Week: Shadowmoor
• Wallpaper of the Week: Eventide Fat Pack
• Sketches: Mirrorweave
• Sketches: Wilt-Leaf Liege
• Sketches by Request: Toil to Renown
• Bloodshed Rage!
• Sun and Moon Sketches
• The Gaping Doom
• Figuring the Destiny
• Shadowmoor Terrain
• Lorwyn to Shadowmoor: Elves
• Lorwyn to Shadowmoor: Giants
• The Secrets of the Cat People! (the secret has to do with how many nipples they have. No really.)

...and some other random cool stuff

• The Face of the Game, a look back at the time Hurloon Minotaur was the most important creature in Magic, just by virtue of having a cool design.
• The Shadowmoor Web: Behind the Scenes
• Ouphe! There It Is!
• The Children Are Our Future, where the kids of WotC employees make some pretty grimdark cards.

And a blast from the past for us storyline fans, with a look at the Invasion Coalition Contest that came with the Invasion minisite.

FINAL THOUGHTS

And with that we've covered the last bit of Lorwyn-Moor block. Next up: Alara. Some warning ahead of time: I'm not yet sure how deep the dive for online articles is going to be from now on. Going through all the Savor the Flavors might be doable, but the arcanas and feature articles will probably be left off from now on. Unless someone feels like dredging all of them up from the Wayback Machine and putting them in a nice, easy to navigate list. It's a shame, but I've got to do something to keep my motivation. And my sanity.

But I promise I've said my piece about the state of the WotC website archives now, so you'll no longer have to put up with my complaining from now on!

...

I mean really, using the "Feature Article" category as a dumping ground for stuff you couldn't fit elsewhere?! Who on earth came up with that idea!? Yeah, archivists and record managers look down on "other" and "varia" categories, but I think we would all agree that using those would've been preferable in this case! And putting stuff in categories that weren't made for them... it's a terrible compromise, but hey, I've worked for organizations where the underfunded and understaffed IT team never got around to our wishes to extend the database so that we were better off filing stuff in an unrelated category and hoping we could set up a recategorization script somewhere down the line, but for gods' sakes, pick an unimportant category you otherwise barely use! Not bloody "Feature Articles", where you store your flagship articles, like those from high profile guest writers, or the first looks at your new sets! AND ANOTHER THING-