Honor Bound

Writer - Jenna Helland

Story - Jenna Helland, Doug Beyer & Brady Dommermuth

Illustrators - Nils Hamm, Tomas Giorello & Steven Belledin

Letterer - Jino Choi

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Volkan Braga

Released October 2008

SUMMARY

It can be found here.

Part one: Elspeth and her squire Aran head out to find the truth about "frightening tales" going around Bant. She has a few flashbacks to her youth and ascension, and eventually they discover a Grixis incursion into Bant.

Part two: Elspeth and Aran fight during a siege of Grixis monster. Aran urges her to use her magic, but she doesn't want to. Aran is cut down.

Part three: Elspeth blasts all the baddies and even brings Aran back to life, despite the laws of Bant forbidding it. In the end Aran tells her to keep using her powers, but she knows she will now never be at home in Bant again.

Alara Reborn Online

ALARA REBORN MINI-SITE & FEATURE ARTICLE

Last time I said that the Alara Reborn minisite (see Alara in Chaos, The Shards at War & The Threat to New Alara) had little more to say than "there's gonna be war and chaos!". I guess that wasn't entirely true, as it also mentioned the beginnings of the shards' cultures merging, like nacatl moving to Bant and taking the old name of leonin, Vithian survivors being welcomed as refugees by the humans of other shards, and Esperites discarding the laws of the Ethersworn, but the main point is still all the chaos and how it's feeding the Maelstrom, just like Nicol Bolas planned.

Doug Beyer's feature article, A New Age for Alara, mostly just gives an overview of Alara's Sundering and the Conflux, nothing we haven't heard before except for one little thing. He pays particular attention to the Asha/Malfegor conflict, and mentions that as Jenara, Asura of War becomes the de-facto ruler of Bant during a plane wide war, people are looking to her to claim the throne of Asha. Unfortunately at that point, just as my ears perked up, he reveals that Jenara is his preview card and the article shifts to how she's good in both agro and control decks... He does end with "Whether [Malfefor]'ll be able to enact vengeance on a newly-reborn Asha, face a newly coronated Jenara, or simply run roughshod over the embattled lands of Bant remains to be seen", and then a plug for Alara Unbroken, though as I already covered that book, we know neither Asha nor Jenara appears in it. Malfegor gets to face Rafiq instead, with some help from Elspeth.

Alara Unbroken

Writer - Doug Beyer

Cover Artist - Chris Rahn

First Printing - ...is not given in the colofon? But it's May 2009 according to the wiki.

I guess this book was never printed, and just miraculously appeared in stores one day?

SUMMARY
The book is split up in three parts, corresponding to the sets of Alara block.

Part One

After an prologue on Grixis, in which we see Nicol Bolas bossing around Malfegor and planning to use the convergence of the shards to regain his vitality, we get stories set on Bant, Jund & Naya.

On Bant Gwafa Hazid destroys Giltspire Castle to uncover the obelisk it was build upon, and Rafiq and his rhox pall Mubin are sent after him. They catch him, just as the world starts to tremble in an early warning of the Conflux.

On Jund Sarkhan Vol meets Kresh and his tribe, who are being goaded into battle against a dragon by Rakka Mar. That all turns out to be a diversion so she can blow up the beast's lair, revealing another obelisk.

And on Naya we start with an expanded version of Flight of the White Cat, with a spell capsule creating monsters that attack the nacatl, Jazal being killed, Ajani ascending and ending up on Jund, and him meeting Sarkhan (after the latter's journey with Kresh and Rakka). Rather than immediately going "vengeant" like in the comic though, he planeswalks back to Naya and ends up at to the ruins of the Coil, where a strange old woman goads him into swearing to kill whoever murdered Jazal.

The Seeker's Fall

 

Writer - Jenna Helland

Story - Jenna Helland, Brady Dommermuth and Doug Beyer

Illustrators - Trevor Hairsine, Dan Scott and Aleksi Briclot

Letterer - Jino Choi

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released January/February 2009

SUMMARY

It can be found here.

Part one: Tezzeret, as a poor kid who was allowed in the academy of the Seekers of Carmot because he showed promise, looses a duel against fellow student Silas Renn on examination day. A teacher wants to kick him out of the academy, but Tezzeret kills said teacher instead.

Part two: Tezz is a Seeker now, but he's still looked down upon for coming from the Tidehollow ghetto. He fights his way into the Seeker's inner sanctum to learn the secret of creating etherium, only to discover it's all a scam. He's caught and stabbed, but his spark flares and he ends up on Grixis.

Part three: Eh... he fights through a bunch of Grixis monsters before finally running into Nicol Bolas, who tells Tezz to kneel as his servant.

Timeline Comparisons, part 1

Something happening at different times on different timelines!? Oh no!

For a long time now I've thought about making my timeline a bit more legible. Maybe something with a few different columns, to make it so the Weatherlight Saga can sit in one without being interrupted by, say, the backstory of Benalia. Or perhaps just to have one column for definite dates and one for vague "approximately several centuries before..." references. But before doing such a big overhaul I want to make sure it's as complete as I can make it. Having crossed the Mending seems like a good opportunity to finish up the pre-Future Sight part (at least until we're getting another Brothers' War style flashback story of course). So I've put my timeline next to the one on the MTG Wiki (and the Sourced version on the same wiki, which is slightly different) and gone over all the differences to see what I've missed. In the proces I'll also adres a few discrepancies between our versions. Turns out there is quite a bit too talk about, so this will be the first in a series of articles. Let's start with...

...STUFF THAT DEFINETELY NEEDS TO GO ON MY TIMELINE

I've been quite thorough in my coverage of pre-Mending stories, so this article mostly just covers flashback stories that I haven't gotten to yet. The only pre-Mending things that made me go "Oh, right, I've missed that" were "The Mirari's mutating waves spread across Otaria" and "Thousands of Dominarians immigrate to Otaria." My blog covers the Magic stories rather than the sets, but with Onslaught block we had the bizarre situation that the cards told a completely different story than the novels. This stuff, as well as the Riptide Project dooming itself by reviving the slivers should probably be represented somewhere.

While covering the Alara Savor the Flavor articles we've already run into some more stuff that wasn't in any of the stories, like Progenitus waking up, and there's only going to be more of that in the future, so maybe my overhauled timeline should also display when all sets happen in general.

Conflux Online

INTRODUCING THE CONFLUX

As is usual at this point our first introduction to the new set comes through a mini site (split up in The Shards Collide, Sowing Fear, Reaping War & Claws of an Ancient Evil) and a feature article (Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker). These tell us that the shards are converging, though that can't have come as that great a surprise after the Planeswalker's Guide hinted at it... and we already knew the name of the next set was "Conflux".

A bigger reveal is that Nicol Bolas has been fermenting war all along. Some stuff he's been doing we knew, just not that he was behind it (He's the bigger power behind Malfegor and the Seekers of Carmot that the Planeswalker's Guide hinted at, and got Marisi to break the Coil), other stuff is entirely new (as we are introduced to Rakka Mar & Gwafa Hazid). It also sets up his motivation of wanting to get his powers back after the Mending, though the various Alara-era sources are a bit ambiguous if his plan would bring him back to old school planeswalker levels, merely stop him from deteriorating further, or something in between.

Also, I've been made aware that there actually was a hint about the Skyward Eye being evil before Conflux... it was just in the flavor text! Which makes it extra strange nothing about that made it into the Planeswalker's Guide!

It feels a bit odd to just be told all this, especially compared to the last time Nicol Bolas was revealed as the big bad, which came as the stinger of the second novel in a trilogy, but I guess that if you don't build things up too much the reveal can't be a let down either. We should also remember that although I reviewed it earlier, Agents of Artifice, which showed Bolas hanging around on Grixis, was released alongside Conflux, making his reveal on the mini-site more of a "Hey, this character you never expected to see again is back!", rather than a lackluster way off paying of a long hinted at return. While people at the time were certainly complaining about only getting one book for a block rather than one per set, we shouldn't compare these articles to something like the Theros: Beyond Death story being summarized in one article.

Flight of the White Cat

Writer - Brady Dommermuth

Story - Brady Dommermuth, Doug Beyer and Jenna Helland

Illustrators - Greg Staples, Rafa Garres & Dave Kendall

Letterer - Brian Dumas

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released October 2008

SUMMARY

It can be found here.

Part one: Jazal puts his brother Ajani on patrol, though his fellows say he's jinxed because he's albino. Humans show up to hunt Ajani and his pridemates abandon him. Jazal shows up to save him, and takes a scroll from the humans with a picture of a white, one-eyed nacatl on it.

Part two: During the festival of Marisi the shaman Zaliki sneaks into Jazal's place. Ajani follows her. She goes away with an excuse and he sees drawings of himself on the walls, wondering "brother, what have you been hiding". That night someone saying "Please forgive me" drops an artifact that summons monsters in the pride's camp. The monsters kill Jazal, which triggers Ajani's spark, sending him to Jund.

Part three: After running from Karrthus, Ajani meets Sarkhan Vol, who is revealed as the "stranger" he was telling the events of the previous two parts to in the narration. Sarkhan talks a bit about magic and revenge. In the end Ajani figures out how to planeswalk and heads back to avenge his brother.

Shards of Alara Online

Right. How am I going to do this with the current state of the Magic website? 

Well, I've gone to the Wiki, checked out the articles linked on the bottom of the Alara page and everything from the Savor the Flavor page. That should give me the initial introduction to the setting, and what stories need to be put onto the timeline, plus whatever else might turn up in the main storyline column. To actually read those articles I can look them up on MaxMakesMagic's listing of articles in the Internet Archive. All of which was enough of a pain in the back that I didn't feel like trying to track down all the Arcana's and Card of the Day entries. Maybe I'll return for those some day. Maybe. For now, let's first dive into the introduction of one of my favorite planes!

INTRODUCING FIVE NEW WORLDS

As always, we start with a handful of feature articles (Alara, a World Broken, Ripping a World Apart & A Shards Day's Night), and a Mini Site (split in various parts: Five Worlds, Life Imitates Mana, Fiends and Behemoths & Planeswalkers of Alara). I also found this reference to something called "Alara Explorer" on the Mini Site, which sounds cool, but unfortunately I can't find it anywhere.

Finally there is Planes of Existence: Alara, which is dated July 25, 2008, which is before all the other stuff. I think that's just because it got pre-dated to the launch of the (then) new version of the website though.

Also, I thought the Shard-murals were from the mini-site, but if they were I can't find those either. Maybe they were in the explore section? Thanks to this Magic art Tumblr for compiling them.

A Planeswalker's Guide to Alara

A Planeswalker's Guide to Alara

Authors - Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland

Cover Art - Raymond Swanland

First Printing - September 2008

...and a whole bunch of other people.

Review

For the past few years Wotc had been putting up bits and pieces of their style guides, which storyline fans obviously loved, leading to them asking to see the whole thing. Eventually WotC put up a poll asking if people would buy one if they could, and since everybody said they would, here we have the Planeswalker's Guide to Alara. It's not really a style guide though, as it has loads of card art rather than just design sketches, and I assume all the text is at least updated from the original style guide to fit changes made through the development proces. So it's really more of a precursor to the later artbooks rather than a true style guide.

The guide gives you a quick introduction to the setting: how Alara used to be one plane before it broke into five shards, what life is like in those shards, which people live there, occasionally some history facts, and finally an overview of the four planeswalkers from Shards of Alara. All of which should be very interesting to hardcore storyline fans, and is accompanied with illustrations from both the cards and the style guide, which always look amazing.

...maybe a bit less so due to my scanner.

Yet while the artbooks were enough of a succes to last four years and eight entries, the Planeswalker's Guide series was cancelled after just this book, with the overviews of new worlds moving back to free online content. So what happened? Well, I can think of three reasons why this series was less successful.

Agents of Artifice

Writer - Ari Marmell
Cover Artist - Aleksi Briclot
First Printing - February 2009

SUMMARY

We open with Kallist Rhoka & Liliana Vess living together (she's just turned down his offer of marriage) when a bunch of thugs attack them looking for a mister Jace Beleren. Kallist and Liliana used to be Jace's friends but are on the outs with him at the moment. Still they (well, mostly Liliana) feel they have to go warn him. They're too late though, and Jace is killed.

...and there was much rejoicing, because remember: a large chunk of the storyline community hated the new planeswalkers at this point. We're only now covering the book that made everybody like Jace!

Except of course Jace isn't dead. Killing who we think was Jace undid a memory swap spell, and we discover that the Kallist we've been following is actually Jace, and it's the real Kallist has just been killed. Shaken by the return of his memories Jace runs out into the street. Meanwhile Liliana kills the thugs... but then we learn she was in on the plot!

Yeah, kinda like that.

Before we hear what that plot is though... flashback time!

Fuel for the Fire

Writer - Doug Beyer

Story - Doug Beyer and Jeremy Jarvis

Illustrators - Christopher Mueller, Andrew Robinson & Lucio Parrillo

Letterers - Brian Dumas

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released November 2008

SUMMARY

You can find it here 

Part one is a retelling of Chandra's Ultimate, the first webcomic released during Lorwyn block, but with a new page at the start and at the end. It still just covers Chandra running away from the cops after having stolen a scroll, but now ends with police finding a planeswalker symbol made of ash that tells them she is still alive.

Part two has them hiring Jace via the Consortium (more on them in a future review) to chase Chandra down. He does. They fight. Part three: They fight some more. In the end Jace takes the scroll and Chandra's memories of it. But we see she's made copies.

REVIEW

Not much to this one, just a chase scene we've seen already and a big fight. There's some neat turns in there, Jace makes good use of his illusions, but as a story it doesn't have much substance. It's just here as a tie-in to the Jace vs. Chandra duel deck, and to introduce the scroll that will become important later on. At this point all we hear about it is Chandra saying "this is not just any fire spell ... it's quite the trick, let me tell you" though, so this comic could've just been left as a one-off story with no greater importance than giving Chandra a new spell. It'll be become much more than that though.

The Hunter and the Veil

 

Writers - Doug Beyer & Jenna Helland

Story - Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland & Brady Dommermuth

Illustrators - Jason Shawn Alexander, Paul Lee & Alex Horley-Orlandelli

Letterers - Jen Page & Kevin Smith

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released between July 30 and August 13 2008

SUMMARY

The comic can be found here.

If you do want a summary though: Kotophed has sent Liliana to go get the Chain Veil. On her way there she is attacked by beasts, which she kills. Garruk finds the corpses and goes after her. They fight, but Liliana grabs the Veil, puts a curse on Garruk and leaves.

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.

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!