Planeshopping era retrospective, Planeswalker era preview

Back in the Dissension Online review I said I was saving the planeshopping era overview until after Eventide. Well, now we're finally there, let's see what typifies this era, and how well it preformed. And let's also look ahead a little to see what's coming up.

Looking Back

The first thing to notice is the differences from previous periods we've covered.

The Armada comics, the Weatherlight Saga and the Otaria Saga were of course all story arcs first and foremost, which gave them a certain momentum that kept them on a single course until that story was done. We've seen that near the end of the Weatherlight Saga there were some red flags in regards to quality and continuity, but on the whole it barreled along nicely, not making any drastic changes. Only when the saga ended did quality and continuity take a sudden plunge. As a result we can tell a pretty coherent story about each saga's story, quality and continuity.

With the planeshopping era though, things are all over the place. You've got Mirodin continuing a lot of issues of the Otaria period, Kamigawa suddenly doubling down on story and flavor, Ravnica dialing that back to tell the trilogy most isolated from larger continuity of all (at the time at least), only for Coldsnap and Time Spiral to go deeper into continuity than ever before, with Lorwyn then doing a complete U-turn and aping Ravnica in its self contained-ness. Quality also varies wildly, with the Mirrodin cycle being pretty universally panned, but Kamigawa and Ravnica often being highly praised. And reviewing the era as a story... well, good luck. Technically Time Spiral block ties it all together, but only does so through a few stray hints in Doug Beyer articles on Dissension and a list in the Future Sight Players' Guide. If you read the novels the only connection is the reappearance of Night's Reach, as the Time Spiral trilogy is much more a sequel to the Weatherlight Saga, and the Ice Age & Legends II cycles.

This is of course a result of the "hopping" nature of the planeshopping era. Every trilogy covers a different world, thus making it possible to do stories very different from one another. Heck, if it all tied together too tightly it might result in making the multiverse feel unrealistically small.

With all that said though, there are certain common threads in this era, though we need to look beyond the content of the stories to see them.

For instance, there is certainly a standard story structure that comes to mind for the era: a self-contained story entirely located on a single plane, with only a very minor link to larger continuity, usually hidden somewhere in the last novel. Yes, the massive myth arc-welding continuity mountain that is Time Spiral block right in the middle of the planeshopping is a big diversion from this stereotype, but all the other blocks clearly follow that formula. Time Spiral seems to be a last bone thrown to the storyline of old before the mandated soft reboot.

To this day I'm still ambivalent about this change. On the one hand it allowed the Multiverse to expand significantly, finally tapping into the potential Magic's setting had been ignoring since the very beginning. On the other, it got rid of all that lovely interconnected continuity I like so much. Getting only a single link to the rest of continuity every three novels, and sometimes an extremely minute one (looking at you Ravnica), is a real shame. As long as the stories were good I could live with that though. When the stories weren't (looking at you, Lorwyn quadrilogy), it meant there was nothing else there to keep my interest. In the long run going planeshopping was definitely a good thing, allowing Magic to expand far beyond its original form, but I must say I'm very glad we've now reached a point where we can get stuff like Neon Dynasty, which gives these first forays into the larger Multiverse their own continuity tie-ins, rather than keeping them as free floating anomalies.

There is also another through-line for the era, one we haven't talked about much on the blog: world building. In finally leaving Dominaria behind WotC really doubled down on that, producing a brand new world for us to explore each year. Here I have no ambivalence at all: this has been a resounding success right from the start! All the planes in this initial planeshopping era are very different, and all of them are great. There were a few dropped balls, ranging form the botched timeline of Mirrodin's backstory to the design of the orochi, but on the whole every plane was a home run that I definitely want to see again. Even in the case of Lorwyn, as much as I disliked its novels, I would love to see how the place has developed after the defeat of Oona. (And with the current structure of Magic sets we'd be done in one set and wont linger there for an entire year!)

Of course, as great as these new worlds are, Dominaria will always remain my favorite Magic plane. It simply has too much history for any other setting to come close. I feel Ravnica is the pinnacle of the new approach worldbuilding, because in developing the ten guilds so thoroughly they created a world that feels much deeper and more expansive than most, but even there all the historical tidbits in the novels are just flavor text, not actual references to other stories. Eventually that would grow naturally of course, with many sets in recent years calling back to the original appearances of their planes, but that would be a long way off. The first "Return" block is more notable for just how terribly it lines up with the original Mirrodin than for its callbacks.

I do think it's possible to take the essence of the older, Dominaria-only, approach to continuity and apply it to the Multiverse at large. You just need to zoom out and find ways to tie things together on a much larger scale. Is there a big event in a plane's history, like the Sundering of Alara, or the rule of the archons on Theros? Why not tie that into the Elder Dragon War or the Eldrazi? You'd have to be careful not to tie too much together to keep the Multiverse feeling nigh-infinite, but it's long been established certain planes are closer than others (in some vague metaphysical way), why not focus on the ones that were part of the Shard of the Twelve Worlds for a while? Finally tell us what the other 10 were beside Dominaria and Azoria and tell us in the Planeswalkers Guide articles what effect the Shard had upon them? We've seen a handful of these kinds of tie-ins, mostly with the Mending, but I would love to see more of it.

While I may be ambivalent about certain aspects of the planeshopping era, I must admit that in the grand scheme of things we can only call it a great succes. Which is perhaps most obvious if we look how future eras of the Magic story would build upon it. With previous eras tending to focus on a specific story, when that story was done... well, you could reference it from time to time, but that's it. The new story would be something entirely unrelated. In contrast, the planeshopping era found a mode of storytelling that is with us to this very day. "Planeswalkers as main characters" was just introduced on top of the planeshopping set up, and the "An ongoing story with the Gatewatch" was introduced on top of that. But underneath it all, we haven't stopped planeshopping since Mirrodin.

Looking Ahead

Now let's change gears and look ahead for a bit.

The period between the new crop of planeswalkers taking center stage in the storyline and the Gatewatch forming, which I've tentatively dubbed the "planeswalker era", is one of experimenting with the story format, where several set-ups were tried out and abandoned when they proved unprofitable. Because of that it can feel a bit stop-start and chaotic at times. Let's quickly go over it for clarity's sake.

The initial planeswalker era set-up did away with the "one book per set" approach that had been in place since Urza's Saga. Instead a block would be accompanied by a planeswalker's guide and a block novel, and there would be a planeswalker novel that was not specifically linked to the current block in between. Storywise it seemed we were moving back to a more continuous storyline, but very slowly. Alara, Zendikar and Scars blocks all retained the planebound stories of the planeshopping era, but now with planeswalkers as the main characters. All three ended with a new bad guy released upon the Multiverse (Bolas, the Eldrazi and the Phyrexians respectively) which suggested those story threads would be picked up upon in the future. Add to that a line of webcomics that led into the books, and Nicol Bolas hanging around mysteriously in the background of Zendikar and Scars blocks, and you can see why it seemed there was some big overarching plan.

Unfortunately it all began to fall apart almost immediately. The planeswalkers guide series never made it beyond its first installment, moving back onto the Magic website as free content. The idea of publishing the guide came from a poll on Magicthegathering.com on whether people were willing to buy an official style guide, but clearly the people voting were not a representative sample size. The planeswalker novels proved a greater challenge than expected to WotC (for reasons not yet entirely clear to me), with the second book needing extensive rewrites and the third book being scrapped altogether! Thus WotC began rethinking their approach to the storyline again. With all the attention apparently going to setting up the new way (new new way?) of doing things, the last few books of the "old" set-up suffered, with the last two block novels just being absolutely terrible, and the last planeswalker novel quickly accumulating so many continuity issues it's been all but declared as non-canonical. The whole situation reminds me a lot of how Onslaught block's novels were a terrible mess, both quality- and continuity-wise, while WotC was focusing all of their attention on the new world-building project.

It took a while to get the new new plan going, leaving Innistrad slipping between the cracks. Savor the Flavor had also stopped as a weekly feature, so Innistrad's entire story got crammed into just a handful of irregular articles. Kind of ironic for a top-down set that really hammered home the importance of the emotional resonance that was the focus of the "fifth age of design". It reminds me of Mirage's situation back in the day, or that of Theros: Beyond Death years later, if we're looking for more parallels with other eras.

The second sub-era of the planeswalker era properly began with Magic 2013 and Return to Ravnica. We now got weekly short stories for free via the Uncharted Realms column, later renamed Magic Story, which replaced Savor the Flavor. In addition to that the block novels were turned into E-books. 

Releasing free online content was a great and well received move. The bad news, at least for me, was that the ongoing storyline was seemingly entirely abandoned. When Sorin appeared on Innistrad, or Jace and Gideon on Ravnica, there was a lot of speculation that they were going to recruit Avacyn/Niv-Mizzet/the Boros Legion to fight the Eldrazi somehow, but no. The three bad guys introduced with so much fanfare in the previous blocks were effectively put in limbo, occasionally name-checked but their story never moving forward. The webcomics had also been discontinued, and while the first few Uncharted Realms stories seemed to hint at some kind of ongoing story through a few recurring characters, the series quickly settled into a pattern of vignettes related only by the plane they were set on. A handful of "go and buy the E-book!" stories were all the interwoven continuity we got.

This set-up lasted even shorter than the previous one though. After two E-books those were discontinued, leaving Uncharted Realms the only story source left. This made Magic 2015 and Tarkir block another short transitional period. Here we see the seeds being planted for the Gatewatch era that came next. Without an E-book to put the main plot in, some of the Takir stories were no longer random vignettes, but featured an ongoing story. One that even picked up on loose threads from years before, like all the mysterious dealings of Nicol Bolas. The Nissa and Ob Nixilis stories from Magic 2015 had also shown the slightest bit of forward movement in the Eldrazi plot. There were even some experiments with putting crucial storyline moments in the sets again!

All of which brings us up to Magic Origins, kicking off the Gatewatch era which took the online stories from the later planeswalker era, the plane-per-block of the planeshopping era and even the "ongoing story told through the cards" set up from all the way back in the Weatherlight Saga to elevate the storyline to new heights of popularity. But that's a story for far into the future.

The Immediate Future

The upcoming reviews will be slightly out of order from the stories' release dates. To explain why, let me show you a list of the Alara era story releases (minus a few random Savor the Flavor short stories).

• July/Agust 2008 - The Hunter and the Veil (webcomic)
• September 2008 - A Planeswalkers Guide to Alara, released during Shards previews.
• October 2008 - Shards of Alara (set) & Flight of the White Cat (webcomic)
• November 2008 - Fuel for the Fire (webcomic), released alongside the Jace vs. Chandra duel deck.
• Januari 2009 - Agents of Artifice (Planeswalker novel)
• Januari/Februari 2009 - The Seeker's Fall (webcomic)
• February 2009 - Conflux (Set)
• April 2009 - Alara Reborn (Set)
• April/May 2009 - Honor Bound (webcomic)
• May 2009 - Alara Unbroken (block novel)
• July 2009 - The Purifying Fire (planeswalker novel)
• July/August 2009 - The Veil's Curse (webcomic)
• September 2009 saw the release of Zendikar, as well as the first webcomics to directly tie-in to that set. The next novel, In The Teeth of Akoum, didn't come out until April 2010, after all the Zendikar sets had been released.

As you can see we're now in a time where the block's main story wasn't released until all three sets, and the online coverage of the first two, were already out. In addition to that we have the planswalker novel and a bunch of long running story threads in the webcomics, with The Hunter and the Veil and The Veil's Curse setting up a Garruk/Liliana story that was meant to lead into The Curse of the Chain Veil, a novel that was supposed to be published way later, in Februari 2010! The cancelling of which led to the plotline being stretched out for... oh god, years and years. 

I feel it makes most sense to cover all the stuff that ties into a specific block (block novel, online coverage, various webcomics) directly in succession, as that allows me to most easily spot cross references and continuity issues. Because of that I will first cover everything released during a block's coverage but not tied into it (planeswalker novels, the rest of the webcomics, eventually stuff like Duels of the Planeswalkers), before handeling the block specific sources.

So up next: The Hunter and the Veil!