Mirrodin block online

Back when we looked at Odyssey block’s online content we had to go through quite a few sites, but over time most of those get dropped. Mirrodin didn’t have its own website like Invasion and Odyssey, and the last update on the Magic Multiverse page was just link to a description of the Mirrodin novel, nothing more. But the Magic Book Archive is still going, and Magicthegathering.com has a few feature articles and arcana posts that deal with the story or flavor.

Let’s start with the feature articles on Magicthegathering.com, as I assume those would be the most widely read source from back in the day. There is one for each of the three sets and the serve mostly as a quick introduction to the setting and to plug the books. Unfortunately for the continuity obsessives there are a few inconsistencies between these articles and the books they are trying to sell.

Mirrodin Image

The article starts with what can be seen as the mission statement for the new planeshopping era:

“The multiverse is vast, but Magic sets haven't explored a lot of different worlds. The latest expansion is the first step in changing that. Mirrodin is the start of what we hope to be a new, exciting era for creative elements in Magic, in which we get away from the traditional locations and explore the true potential the multiverse has to offer.”

The article then introduces Mirrodin and mostly just says stuff that is entirely obvious to us in 2019. Mirrodin is full of metal, it has 4 orbiting suns, you’ve got the Oxidda Chain, the Tangle, the Mephidross, Lumengrid and the Razor Fields etc. etc. etc. It then goes on to set up the mystery story about Mirrodin’s origins that the novels refused to actually give us. Author Rei Nakazawa talks about Bosh’s hidden origin, the unknown reason why the Krark Clan was ostracized, and most off all, he talks about Glissa heading out due to her curiosity about the world’s history.

“For all its savagery, the Tangle is strangely silent, which is why our heroine, whom I'll introduce later, strikes out to find a greater truth … Glissa Sunseeker is a Tangle elf with an innate curiosity and a strange discomfort with the way the world is. She will travel all across Mirrodin to satisfy her curiosity, and answer her nagging thought that this metal planet is wrong somehow.”

…and that is everything Rei has to say about her before launching into a bit about how her card functions mechanically. I always thought this Glissa sounded much more interesting that the purely vengeance driven one from the novels.

Another inconsistency happens with the description of the leonin, as Rei talks about Raksha having a plan that could stop the artifact creature attacks on the Razor Fields, “or doom his people to extinction.” In The Moons of Mirrodin the Razor Fields are under constant attack from the nim, not artifact creatures (the leveler attack was a one time deal), and Raksha does little more than send Glissa on her way to fix things.

The final inconsistency is that the Radix is said to be “a clearing where things simply vanish” while the “Edges of Forgetting” are where the elves erase their memories. In the novels that happens at the Radix, and the “Edges of Forgotting” are never even mentioned.

Oh, and here is something to note for when we do the timeline next week:

“the Vedalken, a new blue race that I first helped write up years ago for an exploratory Magic project. These beings spend their lives in the ceaseless pursuit of knowledge, towards a grand goal that has eluded the species for millennia. They are so desperate for those answers that they may have made deals with hidden powers to get what they want…"

Emphasis mine!

Shedding Light on Darksteel

Here Rei starts revealing some of the mysteries around Memnarch and the infection of the plane. He keeps it very vague though, which could be seen as a good thing, as it means there aren’t really any bits that outright contradict the books.

He talks a bit about how the infection (“from an unknown source”) created the mycosynth, which in turn is absorbing the mana from the core and turning flesh beings into metal and metal beings into flesh. This is more detail than we ever got in The Darksteel Eye, where the metal-to-flesh mutations remained a mystery. It’s good to have some explanation for it, although this doesn’t explain why the amount of metal bits in the fleshy population seems to have been stable for generations, while the metal bits only started rapidly developing on artifact creatures over the course of the one novel, or why it stopped happening in the next one. So you could call this an inconsistency between article and books, although I’m inclined to blame this one more on the latter’s refusal to resolve its own mysteries.

The article also tries to tie the cards into the story a little by saying the forging of darksteel is Memnarch’s “greatest achievement as an artificer”, though other than that there Rei doesn’t have much to say about it.

And for the timeline folder:

“Over the centuries of Mirrodin’s history, this infection has not only affected Memnarch, but the entire planet as well.”

Again, emphasis mine!

The Breaking Fifth Dawn

Here Rei introduces the set as “The last chapter in the story of Mirrodin (at least for now)”, which does sound like they were thinking about returning as at least a theoretical possibility. Not enough to tell the book team not the blow up the entire setting obviously, but still…

Again Rei tries to tie the cards to the story, but although he gives it a good try, he has to get a bit out there to justify sunburst and the five color theme in general:

“Some of its themes appear to be more at home in the Invasion cycle than in the modern artifact cycle! But even this is part of a larger theme: the conflict between flesh and steel, artifacts and colors, the organic and the metallic. Each half-flesh, half-metal inhabitant of Mirrodin embodies these conflicts, and the sudden appearance of spells and creatures that feed off of different colors of mana just goes to show that the tensions between the living and the created will reach its breaking point.”

We also get some extra info on Raksha; He is the youngest ever kha, and some people say he is the second coming of the first Kha, Dakan (of course).

Now on the inconsistencies and general vagueness. Rei mentions that among the Viridian elves “serious casualties followed the sun's violent ascendance into the sky.” At the start of The Fifth Dawn novel it is said many elves have disappeared, though we never get an explanation why. I guess they were all near the Radix for some reason, Glissa didn’t notice them at the end of The Darksteel Eye, and they just got blown up?

Rei then gives a quick little overview which get quite a lot of thing wrong in short notice:

“Besides Memnarch's plotting, it seems that the entire planet is sliding into chaos. The Vedalken, shaken by the recent upheavals in their leadership, are determined to make up for their losses by uniting further with Memnarch. The Neurok respond by reaching out to other races, in hopes of escaping the Vedalkens' tyranny. A necromancer once enslaved by the Nim now uses his powers to create his own personal army of powerful undead. Raksha Golden Cub, leader of the Leonin, hopes to finally end the long, wearying conflict between his people and the Nim.”

The bit about the Vedalken tries to make something of their plot from The Darksteel Eye, though we’ve seen that in The Fifth Dawn novel this gets discarded almost immediately, as “uniting further with Memnarch” apparently meant “getting mutated into giant soldiers”. The Neurok, except for Bruenna, get killed off immediately, and Yert wasn’t enslaved by the nim, he was working for Geth. Minor inconsistencies perhaps, but still… At least here they get right that the leonin fight the nim, rather than “artifact creatures”.

A bigger, and weirder, inconsistency deals with disappearances that apparently are happening on Mirrodin:

“Then there are the disappearances. Creatures and citizens alike have been vanishing, seemingly at random. Where have they gone, and why? Does all this have something to do with the origins of life itself on Mirrodin? Even Memnarch's most trusted allies are not immune to these strange events, and in the end, it may be these vanishings that turn the tide one way or the other in the battle for control of the plane.”

The only mention of disappearances in the novel were those of the Viridian elves at the beginning, which Rei just explained as them just getting caught in the launch of the fifth sun. I think the idea is that this has something to do with the soul traps and people going home, but clearly there was some miscommunication between the creative team and the book team, as this plot point ended up in the novel a completely different form. There nobody disappeared until the very end.

Finally, a quote both for the timeline folder AND the list of inconsistencies:

“To Memnarch, the mad artifact creature who has schemed for millennia to stop his own impending transformation and escape the confines of Mirrodin, the appearance of the sun is a mere distraction. In fact, the ascendance opens the opportunity to enact a new plan, one that will allow him to gain the power of a planeswalker.”

Emphasis... oh, you know. So another hint that Mirrodin is millennia old. But also: the new sun is a mere distraction? In The Darksteel Eye his whole plan to become a planeswalker involved the final sun’s birth!

The only other flavor relevant feature article is one on the creation of Mirrodin, specifically the Mephidross, though the interest mostly comes from showing off some cool artwork and design sketches. There is also an interesting line that says Karn creating a metal world was already considered canon before Mirrodin was designed. This also comes up in a Magic Book Archive article, as we will see below. Oh, and the article A Sliver Story came out during this period, but we’ve covered that one already when we talked about Onslaught block’s books not matching the cards.

Now on to the Magic Book Archive, which has much more lore for us during this period than the main site. For a while it seemed that the storyline was migrating to that site, but when Mirrodin block is over we will only get two articles there for Kamigawa before it stops being updated altogether. (Don’t worry though, Magicthegathering.com will start picking up the slack, even starting a weekly flavor article near the end of the block). For now though, let’s see what it has to offer:

The Moons of Mirrodin Preview

This is more than just a sample chapter, as you might expect from the title. It is actually a pretty fun article, introducing the all-metal world by describing how various people throughout Magic’s history would react if they ever encountered it: the Soldevi artificers, the Yavimaya elves, Keldons… It doesn’t actually tell us anything specific about the plane, but it is a cool format. Oh, and it has this rather prophetic paragraph:

“And the Phyrexians would be overcome with joy at its beauty. They would dance in the fields, write music about the plains, revel in the swamps, and settle over this world as if it were of their own making. Vat priests would pinch themselves, wondering if they were dreaming of this pristine nirvana. Defilers would set to work, transforming Mirrodin's raw potential into New Phyrexia. And Yawgmoth would simply sit and smile, knowing that he had once again found a home.”

New Phyrexia you say?

Author Profile: Will McDermott

McDermott outright states what we already gleaned from earlier articles: “the authors don’t interact with the card designers all that much”, but there are summits where authors, the creative team, the Magic book editor and often members of card R&D get together to hammer out the story. More shocking is that after the summit the authors “crawl back into their holes” to write, and from that point on have very little interaction with the creative team. That sounds like fairly ludicrous way to tie your card sets and your books together, but remember that this is the era when story and cards were deliberately kept separate!

Picking up from that mention from earlier, Will McDermott says that J. Robert King brought Karn back in Scourge on his own, and that Will then hit on the idea of tying that into the metal world he knew would be the next setting the story would visit. How serendipitous that there was a metal plane being introduced right around the time a metal plane was needed for the next set. I am always in favor of tying things together to create a tighter continuity, though in this case I can see that turning the pristine Argentum in the populated Mirrodin led to them implementing a centuries/millennia long gap in the timeline after Scourge which would cause issues when Mirrodin proved popular enough for a return. But more on that next week.

Mirrodin Overview & The Wonders of a New World

These are just overviews of the locations and characters in Moons of Mirrodin. They don’t tell us anything that’s not in the book. The second one goes a bit deeper, but has no real shockers either.

The Challenges of Writing in an All-Metal World

This article however, opens with a jaw dropper: when Jess Lebow was first presented with the idea of an all-metal world, he was in the middle of editing Planeshift! Apparently there was a list a possible new settings being shopped around that early! Lebow then heard nothing about it for two more years, until he went from editor to writer, at which point he was presented with concept sketches and design documents for Mirrodin. Kinda surprising that as the editor he wasn’t involved with world building that had apparently gone on for that long... Also, I hadn't realized that Jess Lebow has only just moved from editor to writer and that The Darksteel Eye was his first book. This eh... might explain a few things about that book's quality. First efforts rarely turn out golden...

Hilariously, Lebow was initially down on the idea of a metal world because it would be too much like Phyrexia, and only got enthusiastic after Will McDermott told him about Mirror World, the first draft of what would become Argentum in Scourge, and how different it was from Phyrexia!

Character Profile: Ramses Overdark

Here is one I really should’ve covered during the Legends II period, but I missed it entirely. Better late than never!

As you'd expect, this article gives us the backstory on Ramses and his family. We learn that his great-grandfather established a spying network, and that Ramses himself got his position by uncovering a plot against the emperor his father missed, leading directly to his father’s exile and eventual murder.

It’s a cool little extra that shows how much backstory Scott McGough had developed for his Legends II characters. I would’ve loved to see more of these backstories come to light. Still would, though I doubt it will ever happen now.

The Evolution of Magic the Gathering, part 1 and part 2

These two articles talk about the development of Magic’s story over time. It’s not quite a historic account though. It says Magic started having a story with Legends, followed by Antiquities. (This is not quite as mad as it sounds, as Legends, Ice Age and Mirage were in development for a long time, so may well have predated Antiquities). This not only skips poor Worzil and Thomil, but also glosses over the fact that Legends didn’t really have an original story. During design it was initially populated with creatures of real life myth and history (Hercules, Lancelot, Hiawatha), just like Arabian Nights, only for those to be replaced with the D&D Characters of the creators during development. Stories for characters like Sol’kanar and Hazezon Tamar were only thought up after the fact, mainly by the Armada Comics crew.

Later the article states that by Ice Age “even the game designers got into the story”, which is a bit misleading. The game designers of Ice Age were the East Coast Playtesters, who had been making both the story and the cards since Antiquities. In fact, in an interview Skaff Ellias has said that by Ice Age they were actually paying less attention to the story!

But now I’m just nitpicking. It’s a cool way to open the articles, showing some behind the scenes context, and clearly this was an article written from memory, not deeply researched. We’ll come back to this in future articles covering online material, especially after the weekly Savor the Flavor series launches. As annoying as it is for us hardcore fans who obsess about canon, weekly deadlines mean you can’t research every little detail, and mistakes will thus creep in to the articles from time to time. Luckily I don’t have such deadlines (I would’ve been fired from this blog ages ago…), and can thus take my time to point out a few of the mistakes.

For example, it says Ice Age happened “nearly eight hundred years” after The Dark, and I have no idea where they got that 800 bit from. The Ice Age started only 20 years after the story of The Gathering Dark, and the story from the Ice Age comics and novels takes place over 2500 years later. It is also stated that after the Worldspell “The ice melted away in only a few short months”. That is also not correct, as the sea level was still rising in The Shattered Alliance, 20 years after the Worldspell.

Perhaps most bizarre is this statement:

“In Alliances, though, there were cards that sported opposing-color activation costs. Some blue enchantments and creatures had abilities that could only be activated with red mana. White cards sported the black mana symbol. It was mayhem. And it was fun as heck. The game environment again mirrored the story world. Opposing colors had to work together to form a winning strategy. The cultures on Dominaria had to put away their long-term hatreds of each other. The colors had to do the same. ”

…eh… no? There are no enemy-color activation costs in Alliances? There are allied colored ones, but those were already present in Ice Age…

Probably the most interesting historical tidbit in these articles is the claim that WotC publishing their own Magic novels was made possible by them buying TSR and thus acquiring employees who were involved in publishing D&D novels. I would love to hear more about the specifics there.

The article ends with another confirmation of the cards/novel split from this time:

“For the next few years, the card development and the story development took place at the same time. Authors would sit down at the beginning of the year, and the senior game designers would tell them about the latest mechanics, the cool new concepts, and the things they would like to see in the coming card cycle. As the cards became more locked down during development, a team in continuity would pair story events, characters, artifacts, and locations with the game pieces that best represented what was happening in the world. It was a swell time, but that school of thought, much like the one the game originally started under, has passed on. Progress and the passage of time have changed things once again, and today things are a little different. Don't get me wrong: The author summits still take place. The novels still give you all the story, and the cards still display all the flavor of the Magic world. But now the process has been streamlined. All the elements -- from the characters to the artifacts to the landscape itself -- are portrayed in the art of the cards, but the events of the story itself are left to the authors. There has been a separation of church and state, so to speak. The cards are the game side, and the novels are the story side. The flavor of the world remains the same, but where you get your information differs a little.”

I think I've made my opinion on this way of doing things pretty clear in the past, so I won't repeat myself here. Let's do some damning with faint praise instead and say that at least Mirrodin block held to the promise of showing the world in the cards and telling the story through the books, unlike Onslaught block, where the cards told a completely different story than the books...

Character Profile: Raksha Golden Cub, Kha of Taj Nar

This one expands upon the little tidbit about Raksha from the Fifth Dawn article above. Turns out the king of the cats is the only cub of the longest-lived Kha on record, Beylyss Snarling Tooth, and his Khanha Rhipuur. The statement that “Raksha treated Slobad quite well by leonin standards -- that is, the future Kha didn't eat the talkative creature after playing with him for a few hours.” fits with what we learned in The Moons of Mirrodin, though the implication that leonin eat goblins is quite something… We also learn that Raksha blamed Ushanti for Rishan’s death. That would explain why Ushanti is suddenly “out of favor” (and out of the story) in The Fifth Dawn.

When the article talks about the upcoming novel, things get a bit weird though.

“As Glissa and her companions race against time to stop Memnarch, the Kha leaves Taj Nar in the hands of his trusted cousin and joins Glissa's desperate quest.”

If by that you mean, the Kha is framed for attempted terrorism by a mind-controlling monster, after which he is exiled and his cousin, who now hates him, takes over rule, yeah, sure… The inconsistency with the novel is quite bizarre, considering the author of this article is… Cory J. Herndon, the writer of Fifth Dawn! I guess he didn’t want to give away too much of the actual plot?

Author Profile: Cory Herndon

Finally there is the author profile of Cory himself. Mostly it deals with personal stuff, but there is one answer in the interview that I had to highlight after the Fifth Dawn review:

Wizards: While writing The Fifth Dawn, how much did you work with the Magic: The Gathering creative team?Cory: Most of the face-to-face interaction with the creative team was up front when we plotted out the story that would cover the trilogy. But I got great input and information throughout the process thanks to this new-fangled "electronical postage" the kids are all talking about. My main concern was telling a good story and making sure the novel fit into the trilogy and followed logically from the events of The Moons of Mirrodin and The Darksteel Eye. 

Three things bubble up in my mind when I read this:

1. Why do these interviewers keep asking about the writer/creative team interactions if the answers is always “there’s not much of it”?
2. While that “electronic postage” bit is obviously a gag, the fact that he even mentioned it is sooooooo 2004!
3. …sorry Cory, but The Fifth Dawn does not follow the previous books very well at all…

That covers all the major articles from the Mirrodin block era, but there are a bunch of arcana posts that might interest you. Most of them I'll just post a quick link to below, but a few warrant further discussion.

There are some looks at the environments of Mirrodin in the style guides, one for each color. (White, Blue, Black, Red & Green). Mostly they just how us some cool pictures, but there are two things that stick out to me. 

First, in the section on blue environments says the magical liquid taken from blinkmoths is called... lymph! This was also seen on the flavor text of Thirst for Knowledge. Yet somehow Serum Tank has influenced the parlance more, as the novels and all subsequent sets call the stuff "serum" instead.

Second, the green article says Tel-Jilad has been carved into for “hundreds of years”. Good to know...

The other interesting Arcana article is Lacunae and the Beacons. It says the Beacon cycle shows moments when mana flares up from the core, except the green one, which instead shows the destruction of the Radix and the formation of the green lacuna. What interests me though is that it delves into the history of the plane. Here are some quotes:

• “Centuries before the events of Fifth Dawn raging streams of mana punched holes through Mirrodin's surface and arced out from the core, creating Mirrodin's four suns."
• “When civilizations began to form on the surface of Mirrodin, they gravitated to the power of the lacunae. Great buildings were constructed over and around them, and over time, and with the aid of Memnarch's machinations, their original nature as deep tunnels to the inside of the planet was forgotten, lost to history, or known only by an elite group.”
• “In the era of the Fifth Dawn set, elf hero Glissa uses her mana-arcing power to obliterate Kaldra, blasting a fifth lacuna in Mirrodin's surface. The mana core of the plane throws off the surplus of mana it had been accumulating for centuries (namely, green mana), channeling it through her. This event destroys the Tangle's Radix and brings the green sun to Mirrodin's sky.”

You're probably getting bored of me pointing this out, but this is yet another case of the "Mirrodin Long Count": we hear that centuries and centuries have passed between the prologue of The Moons of Mirrodin and the main story. This is the last time I'll note this though. Next week we'll put all the evidence we've gathered of the past few reviews together and try to figure out how on earth it can fit with the current timeline, which reserves only a single century for the entire plane's backstory.

We'll wrap up with a quick summation of the rest of the Arcana articles that caught my eye...

• Sketches: Bottle Gnomes, Old and New makes a few more lymph references.
• Flavorful Reprints of Mirrodin explains how stuff like Yotian Soldiers ended up on a new world. (Though not in much more detail than the flavor text already does)
• The flavor of Modular and The flavor of Equipment sound like they might be interesting, but they also don't add much what wasn't obvious from looking at the cards.
• The Thran symbol and The symbol of Yawgmoth give us a nice blast from the past by pointing out some symbols in Weatherlight era artwork.
• A different blast from the past comes in the form of Odyssey Style Guide: Nantuko. If you ever wanted to be able to tell the difference between the sexes of the nantuko, this is the article for you!
• Slobad’s Tinkering Project points out Slobad is sitting on Bosh's shoulder in his artwork. It also gives us this fun picture:

• Style Guide - Leonin, The Hungry Hill, Style Guide: Mirrodin’s Red Aligned Artifacts and Vulshok Concept Art have some more style guide art.
• Style Guide: Mirrodin’s Core has another sketch but also the description of the Core from the guide.
• Sketches: Memnarch, Sketches: Panoptic Mirror and Sketches: Silent Arbiter do just what it says on the tin.
• Art lovers may want to check out Tall Angels, Artifact Dragons, Big Iconic Art and Black’s Tall Angels.
• Wizards.com Through the Years doesn't have anything to do with lore or flavor, but I always get a laugh out of seeing how gloriously crap early websites were.
• Graverobber Flavor Text showcases some micro-fiction from Odyssey block flavor text you may have missed. 
• The Burden of a Talisman points out that the guy on Burden of Greed is losing life form controlling an Amulet of Unity. That does imply he is only losing a single life, which makes him a bit of a drama queen in my opinion.
• Mask of Suns shows us a close up of Raksha's art, drawing attention to the Mask of Suns he is wearing. This mask was mentioned in The Moons of Mirrodin. It was made by the Great Dakan. (Of course.)

• Pincer Token shows you some token art you may never have seen before.
• Shattered Dreams points out that on the card Shattered Dreams Glissa is shown dropping the Sword of Kaldra after being hit by a mental attack. This doesn't happen in the novels.
• All About Aerophins talks about the vedalkens' attack thopters which show up often in the novels, especially in The Moons of Mirrodin, but which never got a card of their own. 
• The Elves of Argoth shows us a peek of the Urza's Saga style guide.
• Finally, The Kaldra Equipment shows the art of the MTGO Kaldra token, and reveals that the avatar was originally called Jayd during design.