Intro to Magic Part 3: Reading Magic Story

All this talk about game mechanics is all well and good, and it's important to know if you want to play Magic, but none of it is really why I got into the game in the first place. What drew me in was hearing longtime players talk about the stories that went with the sets, and the settings those stories happen in. In this post, I'm going to talk about what the stories are like, and suggest some places to start reading.

At a very high level, here's what's going on: Magic story happens on a multiverse of parallel worlds called planes. Most people, including some very powerful wizards, spend their entire lives living on one plane, but planeswalkers can travel between them using an innate ability known as the Spark. Most Magic stories are about planeswalkers either stirring up trouble on a specific plane, or trying to solve an ongoing problem on a plane. Or both, since the biggest social and environmental issues on any given plane are usually caused by planeswalkers.

Early Magic story was published as a series of novels, mostly set on the plane of Dominaria. I recommend starting with The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb, and its sequels The Eternal Ice and The Shattered Alliance. These books tell the story of a wizard named Jodah as he grows up from "awkward apprentice" to "someone who's wise and powerful enough to boss planeswalkers around." It's a fairly typical coming-of-age story for the most part, but it's solidly written, it has a number of fun characters, including the pyromancer Jaya Ballard, and it's the best introduction to the actual magic system of Magic that I've ever read.

There's a full list of Magic novels here. I can't vouch for the quality of all of them, and the books published before 1998 are no longer canon, but here are some more that may be worth reading for more context, both for Jodah's story and the current Magic story.

• The Artifacts cycle tells the story of the war between the wizards Urza and Mishra, which caused the nuclear winter on Dominaria that's the setting for The Gathering Dark and The Eternal Ice.
• Rath and Storm and the Masquerade Cycle follow the adventures of Gerrard Capashen, a distant descendant of Urza's, and the crew of the interplanar airship Weatherlight. This was the first time Magic had an ensemble cast.
• The Ravnica Cycle and the Return to Ravnica Cycle are set on the plane of Ravnica, which is ruled by ten competing guilds. I recommend these because Wizards of the Coast has announced three consecutive sets set on Ravnica beginning in fall 2018.
• Agents of Artifice and The Purifying Fire tell the stories of important moments in the lives of four of Magic Story's current main characters.

Wizards of the Coast switched to publishing official story on its website between 2012 and 2014. If you're more interested in getting a quick background in the story and catching up in time for the next set, everything you need is in their archive. The best place to begin is with the stories from Origins, the summer 2015 set, which tell the origin stories of the five planeswalkers that make up the core of Magic's current ensemble cast:

• Gideon, an indestructible order mage who's determined never to let his friends down again
• Jace, a mind mage with amnesia (he recently got better)
• Liliana, a necromancer who traded her soul for eternal youth and has been trying to get the rights to her soul back ever since
• Chandra, a teenage pyromancer who believes the government of her home plane killed her parents
• Nissa, an elvish nature mage whose home plane has been invaded by eldritch monsters

These characters all already existed in the lore, and in some cases their stories have been altered slightly in recent retellings, but the five stories I've linked to above are a helpful prologue to the characters' adventures together, which happen in the following order.

• Battle for Zendikar/Oath of the Gatewatch
• Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon
• Kaladesh/Aether Revolt
• Amonkhet/Hour of Devastation
• Ixalan/Rivals of Ixalan
• Dominaria

Stories I've listed together are set in the same place and listed together in the archive. The continuity between bullet points isn't always as strong as I would like, but it's all worth reading.

The story of the latest set, Core Set 2019, is a series of flashbacks to the history of two more recurring characters, the Elder Dragon planeswalkers Ugin and Nicol Bolas. The flashbacks themselves stand alone, but the framing device that connects them is going to need some more context if you're new to the lore. I'll lay that out in another post.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading these stories, especially when switching between old and new stories, is an event about sixty years ago in canon (or 2006 in real time) called the Mending that totally changed how planeswalkers work. Urza did some experiments with time travel that caused the spacetime around Dominaria to break. Other planeswalkers repaired the breaks, and the repair changed the nature of the Spark. Before the Mending (as in Jodah's story), planeswalkers were effectively gods; afterward, they became mortal, their powers were limited, and it became a little easier for them to have empathy for planebound people. This made it possible to represent planeswalkers as a card type (before the Mending, they were just too powerful), and to keep the story moving from plane to plane after the destruction of the Weatherlight. It also drives the plot: some of Magic's antagonists, including Nicol Bolas, became planeswalkers before the Mending and are trying to regain their old powers.

So that's my guide to Magic story, both old and recent. I wish you all happy reading.