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!

The Brothers' War Annotations

The story of accompanying the new Brothers' War set had some surprisingly deep continuity references, so I thought it would be fun to do another round of annotations. Hopefully you'll also find it interesting. And hopefully I can get through the article without too many confusing sentences despite the set The Brothers' War having a story called The Brothers' War which frequently references the novel called The Brothers' War, all of them covering the in-universe event called the Brothers' War...

Before I get into the annotations, a quick review: I thought this story was amazing. Recent Magic stories have often been way too rushed, especially the ones covering planewide wars (Kaldheim, Dominaria United), and the Brothers' War is a complex multi-decade conflict, so I was wondering how it was going to go. Add to that the possible continuity snafu's that are always lurking with a time travel plot, and things could've gone pretty bad. Especially for me, as The Brothers' War is still my favorite Magic story of all time.

Luckily, and I think bravely, WotC decided not to retell the Brothers' War story at all, instead giving us a collection of much more personal stories that build on the established continuity! They cover all the characterization and character interaction I thought was sorely missing from Dominaria United, and go for a level of continuity references that's genuinely impressive. I also love how the ghost of Urza hangs over all the stories, even the ones where you wouldn't expect it (like with Tezzeret wondering about Karn's creator), which subtly but powerfully builds up to him finally appearing in person in the finale.

I do wonder if more casual fans feel cheated by not getting the whole story of the war though. If I were WotC I'd have plastered links to a discounted version of the e-book of The Brothers' War all over my sites and social media. (Or released it for free, but you know, that's not the world we're living in.)

Okay. Now let's dive into the specific references!

Shadowmoor

 

Shadowmoor
Editor - Philips Athans & Susan J. Morris

Cover Art - Adam Rex

First Printing - April 2008

The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor story didn't have enough plot to fill its three novels, so we're lucky they didn't try to stretch it to four. Instead the remaining set in the double-block gets an anthology, with one 88 page novella by Scott McGough and Cory Herndon which tangentially features some of the characters from the main story, and 8 short stories like the ones we've been getting in previous anthologies.

In theory I think giving us a bunch of short stories for each plane is a good idea. It allows you to showcase more of the setting without having to force it into the main story. In practice though I find that I usually prefer the main, more "important" stories. If a story has no connection to larger continuity, and doesn't feature any characters from the game or the main story, it has to really damn good for me to care about it. But if previous anthologies are anything to go by many writers seem to go "let's just bang out an extended fight scene or a Twilight Zone-style twist story and be done with it" when asked to contribute to one of these, rather than crafting a short masterpiece. Will that pattern hold? Well, let's dive in and see!

Lorwyn, Morningtide & Eventide

 

Writers - Cory J. Herndon & Scott McGough
Cover Artists - Mark Zug, Steve Prescott & Christopher Moeller
First Printing - August 2007, January 2008 & June 2008

SUMMARY

Lorwyn: There are a bunch of mysterious occurrences happening on Lorwyn. Magical creeping vines are killing elves, boggarts are being extra bloodthirsty, someone has razed the Murmuring Bosk, and a routine spell from elvish hunter Rhys blows up his whole hunting squadron (and his own horns).

Treefolk sage Colfenor has some idea what's going on. He's not telling anyone though, but he does have a plan, which involves getting Rhys, his former apprentice, to plant one of his seedcones in the remains of the Bosk, manipulating kithkin hero Bridgid into kidnapping flamekin pilgrim Ashling, and then using Ashling to lure a great elemental to set himself on fire. All of which is part of a ritual to be reborn in a "new world".

There's a bunch of other character tagging along, including the giant Brion, his brother Kiel, and the merfolk captain Sygg, but they add very little to the overarching story, so I'll give more detail on them below. The one important character is Maralen. In the prologue we see her mysteriously get killed by those vines, she then mysteriously shows up alive but amnesiac after Rhys's explosion. She eventually mysteriously gets control of the Vendilion Clique, after they discover she is unique in some mysterious but unexplained way and kidnap her for a mysterious meeting with Oona, the Queen of the Fae. Mysterious!

Between all that the crew is also followed by Rhys's former superior Nath and his former friend Gryffid, who want him dead for what he did to his fellow elves. Rhys ends up killing Nath.

Book one ends with the crew back in the Bosk, where Colfenor's sapling has miraculously grown into a full treefolk already.