Champions of Kamigawa Vignettes

Let’s take our first steps into this new plane with some short stories! You can find a portal containing links to all of them here, but I’ll also include individual links below. I’ll give quick summaries for all of them, but I’d urge you to just go read them yourselves. They aren’t long, they’re free, and most of them are worth a look. Also, Magic’s short stories have a tendency towards twist endings, so those will all be spoiled if you read the reviews first.

Kamigawa Announcement

Did I really end that last review promising the next one would be up after a week or two, and then posted nothing for multiple months? How embarrassing. I don’t really have an excuse either. The world just has an annoying habit of having stuff happen (as I’m sure you’ve noticed these past few months), and between friends, family, work and other stuff the blog just always seems to be the last thing that gets incorporated into my new routine. So after the so manieth misfired attempt at a regular schedule I think I’ll just have to accept that this blog isn’t going to have one, and I’ll just put up an announcement whenever I’ve got a chunk of reviews ready.

Speaking of which… Announcement! Kamigawa reviews start this Saturday! Here’s what you can expect the coming weeks!

• September 5th - Champions of Kamigawa vignettes
• September 12th - Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa
• September 16th - Champions online
• September 19th - Champions fatpack booklet
• September 26th - Betrayers of Kamigawa vignettes
• October 3rd - Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa
• October 7th - Betrayers online
• October 10th - Betrayers fatpack booklet
• October 17th - Saviors of Kamigawa vignettes
• October 21st - Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa
• October 24th - Kamigawa trilogy review
• October 28th - Saviors online
• October 31st - Saviors fatpack booklet
• November 7th - Kamigawa block overview

You see, the first Kamigawa review was almost done when I put up the last Mirrodin one, and when I decided on this new way of doing things I first finished up all the others before doing the announcement. Couldn’t show up empty handed after all that time, could I?

As you’ve probably spotted already… this is quite a bit more stuff than a block usually gets! This is because Kamigawa is a top-down block, meaning it was made flavor-first, rather than mechanics-first, and to promote this WotC put out a lot more lore than usual, including a whole bunch of online stories. Which means more reviews, but also that I’m not going to do the usual order of looking at the books and then at the online stuff. The first of the short stories were released during spoiler season, making them the very first look at Kamigawa we ever got. So to keep things roughly chronological I’m going to cover them first for each set, then the novel second. Which does leave the articles on the rest of the online stuff fairly short, but that’s why you’ll be getting articles on the fatpack booklets (which normally don’t have anything worth talking about in them, but hey, top-down block!) in the same week.

Oh, and one more point of housekeeping: from this point on it seems Wizard’s has finally learned from Odyssey and Mirrodin block that having three different authors on your trilogy is courting trouble. So starting with Kamigawa each cycle has at least one writer working on all three books. This is great for the consistency of tone, quality and continuity, but a bit strange when it comes to writing reviews about them. When I’ve covered one book there isn’t much more to say about, for example, the writing style of the other two. So to keep me from repeating myself I’m going to cover the Kamigawa novels the same way I did Invasion novels way back when: the three reviews will just have the summary, trivia and continuity sections of the review, then in the same week as the third article I’ll also put up a review of the entire trilogy as a whole, where I will also cover the timeline stuff.

And with all that out of the way… see you Saturday for our first look at Kamigawa!

Ur-Golem's Eye (and a whole bunch of other stuff)

Once upon a time on MTGSalvation, someone brought up the fact that Mirrodin took place millennia after all other stories. In response the then head of the Creative Team Brady Dommermuth pointed out that the flavor text of Ur-Golem's Eye was an error, and that only a few centuries were supposed to have passed.

This is emblematic of what happened to the debate about the Mirrodin timeline. While there were loads of temporal references in the books and in online articles (as we've seen in the last four reviews), as time passed those became harder and harder to find, and thus the debate became focused on the most visible pieces of evidence: flavor text. Which is kinda convenient, as a single piece of those is much easier to declare an error than a whole pile of different sources.

This wouldn't be Multiverse in Review though if I just left it at that. I've dug up all those other references, so now it is time to put it all together, showcase the inconsistencies and trace the development of the Mirrodin timeline over the years. But we're also going to do something else. While trawling through forum threads for my research I kept finding interactions between Brady Dommermuth and... eh... myself. Which got me thinking about the relationship between the Creative Team and the storyline fans, and how it often wasn't great at the time. So for those interested in that sort of thing, stick around after all the timeline talk for some introspection on, well... myself around age 18.

Yeah, this was a weird one to write.

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.

The Fifth Dawn

Writer - Cory J. Herndon
Cover art - Jim Murray
First release - May 2004

SUMMARY
We start in an unexpected place: with Yert, the controller of a Reaper (=Harvester) that Glissa met in The Moons of Mirrodin and who was said to have been killed in The Darksteel Eye. He’s having visions of worlds without metal and a Mirrodin without life, while someone is telling him to wake up.

We then cut to Glissa and Slobad, who are still on the edge of the new lacuna created by the birth of the green sun. They discover the magic has caused loads of mutations to the wildlife. There is some random fighting with giant wasps and rats, and then the two are captured by the Viridian elves. Turns out that since Glissa left a whole bunch of elves disappeared, most of them vanishing around the creation of the new sun. Also, Glissa’s sister Lyese is still alive, but thinks Glissa is responsible for their parents deaths. So Glissa is put on trial. She tells the assembled people about her adventures and most seem to believe her. Lyese doesn’t though and attacks her. In the scuffle the two of them and Slobad are separated from the assembly. Then aerophins attack.

The Darksteel Eye

Writer - Jess Lebow
Cover artist - Carl Critchlow
First printing - December 2003

SUMMARY
We again start with Memnarch, who has clearly gone insane since the last timewe met him. He thinks Karn is speaking to him, is completely addicted to serum, and for some reason he is turning into flesh. He sends his metal minion Malil after Glissa. Throughout the book we get chapters from Memnarch’s point of view in which he is ranting against an imaginary Karn. Through these rants we learn about the history of Mirrodin and most importantly about Memnarch’s plan: since Karn ascended when he and Urza were destroyed in the Legacy blast (back in Apocalypse), Memnarch reckons that if he and Glissa (who has an unflared spark) are destroyed by the creation of Mirrodin’s 5^th sun he will turn into a planeswalker as well… sounds like a foolproof plan to me! Anyway, he has built his fortress Panopticon in the path the final sun will take when it is born, so now all he needs is to make sure Glissa is with him at the right time.

The Moons of Mirrodin

Writer - Will McDermott
Cover artist - Brom
First printing - September 2003

SUMMARY

In the prologue Memnarch wanders around Argentum after Karn left him there as the new warden of the plane. He decides the whole thing is too mathematically perfect. Fascinated by the blinkmoths, which are the one thing Karn didn't create but imported from another plane, he decides to bring more lifeforms over. Before he can get to that he notices a weird black smudge which he wipes away, unknowingly infecting himself with a mysterious oil. He immediately decides to rename the world Mirrodin, after himself.

Chapter one starts an unknown amount of time later. We meet Glissa, an elf warrior who doesn't trust the rebuking ceremony in which the trolls of the Tangle let the elves forget painful memories. Elves get "flares" of these suppressed memories, but Glissa's are special: she gets flares in which she remembers a different world, one where all life isn't infused with metal.