Ravnica: City of Guilds Online

For Ravnican block there are once again Mini Sites, but for the first set we just don’t have much to discuss. It just has a quick description of the four Guilds featured, introducing them, their guild leaders, their guildhall, their power structure, etc. It’s cool to have such a succinct summary of all the guilds in a central place, but after many visits to Ravnica all this is all pretty much common knowledge, or covered in the novel review. The only thing that seems to have fallen by the wayside is that according to this information Vitu-Ghazi was "struck down years ago", but kept alive by dryadic magic. These summaries are also printed in the fatpack booklet.

There is also a trailer for the set which has a cool animation style, but does little beyond showing some shots of the world and hinting that there might be some kind of conflict coming.

The real meat of the online Ravnica source lies in the Feature Articles and the weekly Taste the Magic series. 

Ravnica

Writer - Cory J. Herndon

Cover Art - Donato Giancola

First Printing - September 2005

(Well, I think it’s just called Ravnica. The cover and the colofon say that, but there is another title page that uses the “City of Guilds” tagline that they brushed out from the cover, so... who knows?)

SUMMARY

The story opens with Boros officer Agrus Kos and his lieutenant Myczil Zunich investigating a group of Rakdos killers. Kos and Zunich start to chase after their priestess… and we move 57 years further in time, to that last days of the year 9999. Ravnica is gearing up for a celebration of the Decamillenial of the signing of the Guildpact, and Kos is now an old man, drinking too much, divorced several times over and still bitter over whatever happened to Zunich all those years ago. In fact, he thinks he sees the ghost of Zunich at one point. Which should be impossible: ghosts linger on Ravnica, but without something like an Orzhov contract they don't last that long.

The plot really kicks off when this supposed ghost leads Kos into an alley where a Rakdos goblin just killed a little girl that used to live at the orphanage Kos grew up in. Kos chases the goblin to a bar where it blows itself up, killing, among others, Kos's partner Bell Borca (which is odd: Kos left him with the corpse of the little girl) and a prominent Selesnyan, the loxodon Living Saint Bayul. When Kos wakes up in the hospital he learns that Bayul's bodyguard, who is now missing, was Fonn Zunich, his old partner's daughter. Kos promised to take care of the Zunich family, but could never bring himself to face them.

Ravnica & Coldsnap Announcement!

Today I'm reviewing moving house during a lockdown. 

It sucks. Don't do it.

You can't have many people over to help, so you'll end up spending an entire month on it full-time. Especially since the amount of people allowed will get altered by the government several times during that month, requiring you to alter your plans time and again. It sucks extra hard if in the last week of that month, right before everything has to be finished up, there's a code red weather warning due to a snowstorm. Oh, and hardware and furniture stores are either closed or have limited assortiment, so you'll be living in an unfinished house doing all sorts of chores for a long time after you've moved. It'll completely derail all your plans to, say, write some book reviews. Do not recommend!

Luckily, between all that nonsense, I did find time to take a look at all the Ravnica stories, and by now I've finally finished the reviews! So... announcement time!

Ravnica dials back the amount of sources a bit from Kamigawa. No maps, nothing of note in the player's guides, and far fewer online stories (initially none at all, but a few more pop up for the later sets). We do have a few more online articles to look at, thanks to the launch of the Taste the Flavor series at the tail-end of Kamigawa block, and while all three novels are written by Cory Herndon, they are much more stand alone than the previous trilogy was, so each of them warrants their own review, rather than a mere summary followed by a combined review. So starting next Saturday there'll be six weeks of Ravnica content; 3 novel reviews alternated with 3 reviews of the online articles & short stories.

And then, as a little bonus, I'll immediately go on with two more reviews. You see, Coldsnap was released while Magicthegathering.com was still doing its Dissenssion coverage, so to make sure I had everything relating to Ravnica I had to go through all Coldsnap articles as well. I figured I might as well take a look at that set as well, in the form of 1 article covering the online stuff, and 1 covering the short story and lore summary in the player's guide.

I hope you all understand I needed to get that little rant at the beginning of my chest, and you will join me next week for our first look at Magic's most popular plane!

Kamigawa/Legends II Timeline Update

This was originally part of a larger article with a few updates and callbacks to earlier reviews, but when I actually wrote it all down it got a bit more extensive the other points. So rather than dominate that article I'm splitting it off here.

So, when I did the Kamigawa Trilogy Review Ethan Fleischer (who you all should be familiar with) commented that the upcoming War of the Spark art book might be relevant for the placement of those books. Well, by now that upcoming book has come up to my house, and while there isn't the clear "Tetsuo killed Bolas in [[year]]" date I was hoping for, there is certainly a bunch of stuff relevant to Kamigawa and the Legeds II trilogy to discuss here!

Oh, and just to be clear, I'm not going to go through the entire book, I've got Ravnica reviews to work on instead. For those interested in a review: just like all the other art books it is full of gorgeous art, and while it doesn't do the deep-dive into a specific world like the previous ones it does give an overview of just about every plane Bolas has even peripherally been involved in, all planeswalkers featured in War of the Spark, and even gives us some new facts, like finally explaining why Bolas wanted the Eldrazi freed (basically, he hoped their threat to the Multiverse would lure enough planeswalkers to Zendikar to use the Elder Spell there). All in all, another great book, heartily recommended!

Now, on to the timeline discussion!

Another Look at The Duelist #1-3

As a little breather between Kamigawa and Ravnica… something completely different!

Four years ago, when the world was still young, I reviewed the first few issues of The Duelist. (Here and here) I didn’t, and still don’t, actually own the first three though. The first issues goes for upwards of 100 euros on Magiccardmarket, if there are even listings for it, and that’s just more money than I’m willing to spend on these curiosa. So I had to rely on scans from other people. And while I’m still very glad those were provided to me, eh… turns out they weren’t complete!

In the decades that have passed since 2016 the amazing Cary of mtglore.com has uploaded complete scans of these early issues, allowing us to actually go through them in their entirety, which has revealed a number of interesting little tidbits! So, check out the full issues here, or follow me to below the jump break for the highlights!

Kamigawa Overview

So, after looking at 3 novels, 3 fatbook booklets, 20 vignettes and loads of articles and arcana’s, what can we say about Kamigawa as a whole?

Well for one, it’s really good.

The worldbuilding and designs are, in my opinion at least, fantastic. Even the bizarre kami designs look great to me, even though some people seem to dislike them. Only the ororchi looking a bit goofy. But that's not a big surprise, flavorwise the set was always going to do fine. WotC had already shown of their worldbuilding chops with the popular setting of Mirrodin. Storywise though? Now there the quality is a very nice surprise!

WotC doing an entire block where the story was one of the main draws was rather a wild idea considering they had squandered so much of the story’s quality since the end of the Weatherlight Saga. Of the 12 books that had been published after Apocalypse, I actively dislike 9! The other 4 were written by Scott McGough though, so perhaps someone at WotC was paying attention to the reaction to these novels. Giving him this trilogy was certainly a good move. I've already covered why I like them so much, but let me reiterate it here: they tell a pretty splendid action story with loads of fun and engaging characters. Probably in my top 10 Magic stories, and that "probably" comes from the difficulty of deciding what counts as a "story" (for example, do you count "The Truth of Names" and "Release", or do you need to take the entirety of Tarkir and Kaladesh as entries?) Kamigawa is definitely in my top if we're counting trilogies as single entries.

Saviors of Kamigawa Player's Guide

 

Another short review, as this booklet contains just another summary, this time of Heretic, another glossary and another batch of character blurbs. The one extra bit is an article on the “Shinen”, manifestations of the spirit world beyond the veil. As always, you can find the relevant scans here.

The summary links the rising of the ghost samurai around Konda at the end of Heretic to the “shinen” reaching its breaking point (as in, the veil between worlds blurring beyond definition) the moment Toshi stole TWWT. Cool to have an explanation for this somewhat random development in the novels. On the less cool side, the text doubles down on Michiko’s mother dying in childbirth, which we saw in the Betrayers booklet as well, but which was already contradicted in the Outlaw novel.

The Shinen articles tells us that-

“In the many millennia before the Kami War, the denizens of Kamigawa gave no thought to a place called the spirit world. They believed that the kami lived in the material world – the only world that mortals knew.”

The Champions booklet said that people have been worshiping the kami for “centuries”, significantly shorter than millennia. Those two facts taken together seem to suggest that there was something that changed a few centuries before the Kami War. Could this be proof that the Apocalypse Chime disrupting veil between worlds actually happened centuries before Konda started mucking about with stealing a kami? (If you've got no idea what I'm talking about here, check the timeline portion of my review of the Kamigawa trilogy) Eh, probably not. I think the intention was to say that people didn't know about the spirit world until the Kami War, but it’s fun to speculate! Perhaps the weakening barrier allowed Kamigawans to first perceive the spirit world, or merely made them interested into researching it. Stories like the Eight-and-a-Half-Tails vignette do suggest at least some people already knew of the spirit world. More knowledge about the role of kami in the world could lead to them being seen as gods, or perhaps the weakened barrier led to them taking a more active role in mortal life, which in turn led to them being revered? And this newfound worship of the kami could explain why it took a few centuries until someone like Konda came along who was willing to do the blasphemous act of imprisoning a god.

Again, pure speculation, hence I didn't include it in my actual timeline discussion. In the comments of that review Ethan Fleischer said the War of the Spark artbook might actually have some hints towards the placement of Kamigawa, so we'll see soon if this theorizing will get thrown out. Glad that I've gotten it out my system while it was still possible though!