A Planeswalker's Guide to Alara

A Planeswalker's Guide to Alara

Authors - Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland

Cover Art - Raymond Swanland

First Printing - September 2008

...and a whole bunch of other people.

Review

For the past few years Wotc had been putting up bits and pieces of their style guides, which storyline fans obviously loved, leading to them asking to see the whole thing. Eventually WotC put up a poll asking if people would buy one if they could, and since everybody said they would, here we have the Planeswalker's Guide to Alara. It's not really a style guide though, as it has loads of card art rather than just design sketches, and I assume all the text is at least updated from the original style guide to fit changes made through the development proces. So it's really more of a precursor to the later artbooks rather than a true style guide.

The guide gives you a quick introduction to the setting: how Alara used to be one plane before it broke into five shards, what life is like in those shards, which people live there, occasionally some history facts, and finally an overview of the four planeswalkers from Shards of Alara. All of which should be very interesting to hardcore storyline fans, and is accompanied with illustrations from both the cards and the style guide, which always look amazing.

...maybe a bit less so due to my scanner.

Yet while the artbooks were enough of a succes to last four years and eight entries, the Planeswalker's Guide series was cancelled after just this book, with the overviews of new worlds moving back to free online content. So what happened? Well, I can think of three reasons why this series was less successful.

Agents of Artifice

Writer - Ari Marmell
Cover Artist - Aleksi Briclot
First Printing - February 2009

SUMMARY

We open with Kallist Rhoka & Liliana Vess living together (she's just turned down his offer of marriage) when a bunch of thugs attack them looking for a mister Jace Beleren. Kallist and Liliana used to be Jace's friends but are on the outs with him at the moment. Still they (well, mostly Liliana) feel they have to go warn him. They're too late though, and Jace is killed.

...and there was much rejoicing, because remember: a large chunk of the storyline community hated the new planeswalkers at this point. We're only now covering the book that made everybody like Jace!

Except of course Jace isn't dead. Killing who we think was Jace undid a memory swap spell, and we discover that the Kallist we've been following is actually Jace, and it's the real Kallist has just been killed. Shaken by the return of his memories Jace runs out into the street. Meanwhile Liliana kills the thugs... but then we learn she was in on the plot!

Yeah, kinda like that.

Before we hear what that plot is though... flashback time!

Fuel for the Fire

Writer - Doug Beyer

Story - Doug Beyer and Jeremy Jarvis

Illustrators - Christopher Mueller, Andrew Robinson & Lucio Parrillo

Letterers - Brian Dumas

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released November 2008

SUMMARY

You can find it here 

Part one is a retelling of Chandra's Ultimate, the first webcomic released during Lorwyn block, but with a new page at the start and at the end. It still just covers Chandra running away from the cops after having stolen a scroll, but now ends with police finding a planeswalker symbol made of ash that tells them she is still alive.

Part two has them hiring Jace via the Consortium (more on them in a future review) to chase Chandra down. He does. They fight. Part three: They fight some more. In the end Jace takes the scroll and Chandra's memories of it. But we see she's made copies.

REVIEW

Not much to this one, just a chase scene we've seen already and a big fight. There's some neat turns in there, Jace makes good use of his illusions, but as a story it doesn't have much substance. It's just here as a tie-in to the Jace vs. Chandra duel deck, and to introduce the scroll that will become important later on. At this point all we hear about it is Chandra saying "this is not just any fire spell ... it's quite the trick, let me tell you" though, so this comic could've just been left as a one-off story with no greater importance than giving Chandra a new spell. It'll be become much more than that though.

The Hunter and the Veil

 

Writers - Doug Beyer & Jenna Helland

Story - Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland & Brady Dommermuth

Illustrators - Jason Shawn Alexander, Paul Lee & Alex Horley-Orlandelli

Letterers - Jen Page & Kevin Smith

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released between July 30 and August 13 2008

SUMMARY

The comic can be found here.

If you do want a summary though: Kotophed has sent Liliana to go get the Chain Veil. On her way there she is attacked by beasts, which she kills. Garruk finds the corpses and goes after her. They fight, but Liliana grabs the Veil, puts a curse on Garruk and leaves.

Planeshopping era retrospective, Planeswalker era preview

Back in the Dissension Online review I said I was saving the planeshopping era overview until after Eventide. Well, now we're finally there, let's see what typifies this era, and how well it preformed. And let's also look ahead a little to see what's coming up.

Looking Back

The first thing to notice is the differences from previous periods we've covered.

The Armada comics, the Weatherlight Saga and the Otaria Saga were of course all story arcs first and foremost, which gave them a certain momentum that kept them on a single course until that story was done. We've seen that near the end of the Weatherlight Saga there were some red flags in regards to quality and continuity, but on the whole it barreled along nicely, not making any drastic changes. Only when the saga ended did quality and continuity take a sudden plunge. As a result we can tell a pretty coherent story about each saga's story, quality and continuity.

With the planeshopping era though, things are all over the place. You've got Mirodin continuing a lot of issues of the Otaria period, Kamigawa suddenly doubling down on story and flavor, Ravnica dialing that back to tell the trilogy most isolated from larger continuity of all (at the time at least), only for Coldsnap and Time Spiral to go deeper into continuity than ever before, with Lorwyn then doing a complete U-turn and aping Ravnica in its self contained-ness. Quality also varies wildly, with the Mirrodin cycle being pretty universally panned, but Kamigawa and Ravnica often being highly praised. And reviewing the era as a story... well, good luck. Technically Time Spiral block ties it all together, but only does so through a few stray hints in Doug Beyer articles on Dissension and a list in the Future Sight Players' Guide. If you read the novels the only connection is the reappearance of Night's Reach, as the Time Spiral trilogy is much more a sequel to the Weatherlight Saga, and the Ice Age & Legends II cycles.

This is of course a result of the "hopping" nature of the planeshopping era. Every trilogy covers a different world, thus making it possible to do stories very different from one another. Heck, if it all tied together too tightly it might result in making the multiverse feel unrealistically small.

With all that said though, there are certain common threads in this era, though we need to look beyond the content of the stories to see them.

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.