The Gathering Dark

Writer - Jeff Grubb
Cover Artist - Gary Riddell
Released June 1999

SUMMARY
We are back in the Dark Age, between the Sylex Blast and the coming of the ice, and with that comes intolerance, plague and war. We follow the young wizard-in-training Jodah,who is not having a good time during the first half of this book. First he is captured by the inquisition, who kill his mentor Voska. He flees to the city of Alsoor just as it falls under plague quarantine. He gets a job selling folk cures, but his own magical improvements of the healing balms bring the inquisition down on him again. To flee persecution he joins the army, only to have both his fellow soldiers and the opposing army be slaughtered by attacking goblins and giants. Eventually he hooks up with Sima, a wizard of the City of Shadows, who promises to bring him to this mysterious school to study magic in peace. But then he is kidnapped by merfolk working for the Rag Man, who instead leads him to the rival school called the Conclave of Mages.

Still here!

Hi everyone! I thought I'd put up a quick notice for anyone getting impatient with the recent schedule. Don't worry, the project is still going, and I should be able to put up the review of The Gathering Dark next week!

I had wanted to put it up a good while ago, but the day I got back from holiday I was offered a bunch of new responsibilities at work, which severely cut into my free time. Then when the busiest time had passed I was all set to catch up with Multiverse in Review... and then my laptop broke.

Hopefully you can bear one more week of waiting. Once I get my computer back getting the next review up will be priority number one!

~Squirle

Phyrexian Autopsy

Writer - Will McDermott
Originally appeared in The Official Urza's Destiny Game Guide
Reposted online on Will McDermott's site

SUMMARY
Urza pops up on Tolaria and drops off a Negator corpse for dissection. Despite some grumbling about Urza's manners Rayne and Barrin get to work. What follows is a lot of descriptions and technobabble about how Phyrexians are put together, interspersed with them reminiscing about past events, specifically those from Bloodlines. In the end they find a Capashen blood sample the Negator took, cluing them in that a big attack on Benalia is imminent.

The Duelist #39-41 (Urza's Destinty)

And so we reach the final issues of The Duelist. To be honest, there is very little of interest for us here, but as you know I am a completist and I've done all the other issues of this magazine, so let's take a look anyway.

Bloodlines

Writer - Loren L. Coleman
Cover art - Kev Walker
Released August 1999

SUMMARY
Bloodlines spans the centuries between Time Streams and Rath and Storm, and takes us to various corners of Dominaria and Rath, showing what was going on there in the build up to Gerrard's adventures with the Weatherlight. It ends up being more a collection of overlapping stories than one single narrative.

First there is Tolaria, where Urza has embarked on a eugenics project to create the Heir to the Legacy, someone who can understand how to defeat the Phyrexians by having a certain affinity for them without being tempted to their side. Breeding starts in the fast-time zones, but the subjects there lose their bonds to Dominaria's mana, and with that their empathy. So Urza starts to manipulate bloodlines all over the plane in all sorts of ways, from arranged marriages to gene manipulation in fetuses. Throughout the book the Tolarian characters keep discussing the ethics of this project, but while individuals occasionally opt out, the project itself just keeps going.

Scars of the Legacy

Writer - Will McDermott
Original appeared in The Official Urza's Legacy Game Guide
Released online on Will McDermott's website

SUMMARY
Like Time for Remembrance, this story is mostly a summary, though here the framing sequence is more extended. It features Jhoira's last mission as captain of the Weatherlight, in which she goes to Zhalfir to drop off some of the refugees from Serra's Realm. She and Karn meet with Teferi and they reminisce about their adventures together. Then at the end of the evening, Teferi proposes to Jhoira! But she wants to live her own life after years of following Urza, and so decides to turn him down and return to Shiv.

The Duelist #35-38 (Urza's Legacy)

In the period we're currently discussing the novel line was really hitting its stride. After some early weirdness we now have a book for every set, the anthology line has kicked off and soon we'll look at the first trilogy covering older sets. The flipside of that though, is that The Duelist seems to no longer know what to do with the storyline. Features appear in one issue only to be gone in the next and after Born to Greatness wraps-up the level of lore is down in general. I guess that makes sense. Wizards is fully invested into the novels at this point, and if you want people to buy your books you don't go spoiling their stories elsewhere. But don't worry, it's not as bad as around the days of Odyssey and Onslaught, when we will end up in a situation where the books were essentially on their own, with very little connection to even the cards. With Urza's mug on so many cards in his titular block, Wizards is pretty much obliged to cover the storyline in some fashion in their magazine. They just weren't sure how.

LORE
I guess the main attraction here is issue 36's "Past mistakes, Future hope" article, which tells the story of Urza's Legacy. It's not that interesting to us, as it is basically just a summary of Time Streams, which I already covered. There is one illuminating thing in there though. Since it covers the set Urza's Legacy rather than the novel Time Streams, it considers the Tolarian disaster and the Phyrexians attacking Serra's Realm past events. After all, those were already shown in Urza's Saga. Thus it is able to describe the plot of Urza's Legacy as Urza having to return to the scenes of his greatest failures: Tolaria, Serra's Realm and Argoth (by proxy of Yavimaya). I had never thought of it that way, but it does make the split between Saga and Legacy less arbitrary. Saga shows Urza's string of past mistakes, while Legacy is him making amends.

Of course, there is still the odd gear change in Saga when we go from Urza hanging out with Xantcha to him and Barrin building the academy, and Shiv has little to do with this past/amends split, but hey. You can't have everything.