At MagicCon Amsterdam, the next year of in-universe Magic: The Gathering sets were revealed. We spoke to Magic’s Story Lead, Roy Graham, about the year to come, and the current state of MTG storytelling.
Wargamer: I’d love to know a bit more about Nauctis. Could you tell me about the humans, because it seems like we’ve got this beautiful undersea world, and then humans in subs who seem so different. Was that a conscious decision to try and make them seem almost like outsiders to the world?
Roy Graham: Yeah, a very deliberate choice. Humans are the only faction. I think the only- no, not the only faction, but there is a conscious choice that we made to not have any green mana associated with the humans of Nauctis.
Both in their visuals and their mechanics, we really wanted to emphasize that life on a world that has no dry land to be found is very difficult. How did they get there, is a question that there is an answer to, and that will be revealed once we get a little more look at world building and story.
Wargamer: You’ve revealed that the initial vision for Reality Fracture was to have it spanning 10 different alternate-reality planes, before this idea was scaled back. Is it hard for Magic to have these epic, multiverse-scale finales at the end of story arcs, when you can only dedicate one set to each idea?
Graham: It’s not quite the situation where, at the beginning of every arc I get handed a list, like “Here are the nine worlds we’re going to go to in the next three years, and tie them together in whatever way you figure out.” That’s not quite the situation.
I’m part of the group that decides what worlds we’re going to visit for the future in Magic, and I have a say in where we go, they’re interested in my perspective from a storytelling standpoint. But you know, there are a variety of reasons why ‘because the story would be good’ is never enough of a reason to do something for Magic.
Sometimes things are easier; sometimes things aren’t. Sometimes people like writing to a prompt, you know, there’s a level to which creative constraints can lead you to interesting places that you might not have gone to on your own. But also certainly there is some contortion that you have to do, sometimes, to get somewhere that you’re happy with when you have to hit these big swings between tone, between setting, all of that.
Wargamer: I was going to ask actually how sort of involved you guys get to be in the big picture plan? It seems sometimes as if a set concept comes down from on high, like wacky racers or detectives, and you’ve got to make that fit…
Graham: You know, I can’t give you any information about what this actually is, but there is a set coming out in the future – and not that that far in the future – that I originally pitched as, it’s not an event set, it’s a set that I said: “We need to go here for years’ worth of of story value.”
“If you guys want this thing that we’re trying to set up to work, we have to go here.” And I don’t pull that card very often, because I understand what Magic is – it’s a card game – and because I keep that card close to the vest, I don’t use it very often, it meant that there was a lot of willingness from the people that do make those decisions to be like, “Well, let’s figure out how how it can work then, as a full Magic set, as a standalone thing that you don’t need to know anything about the story to enjoy.” And we got there, and it is gonna rule. It’s really cool!
Wargamer: The complexity of magic cards is increasing, as designers have to come up with new and more complicated ideas, which means rules often squeeze out flavor text. Have you had to change your approach to flavor text to still get the story out through the cards?
Graham: The short answer is yes, but I think there is a lot of excitement and willingness on the creative text team to- Again, it’s writing within constraints.
And we also have developed new tricks to address this as well, like one one thing that I think we actually got from Universes Beyond Design actually was multiple versions of characters in a set, which you can see with Edge of Eternities. We had a main crew that were characters that the story was built around, and you had multiple versions of those characters in the set.
So even though, you know, you might not get as many lines of flavor text as you used to, or sometimes you don’t get any because of the complexity of the rules. But getting to see three different snapshots of the same character doing three different things with three different epithets after their name gets you a lot. It informs a lot of a character’s personality and tells you a lot about what they are, and their moments of power, and all that.
Wargamer: The plane of Zhalfir is taking the place that Mirrodin used to occupy, and it’s got its suns, which we know are influencing the world. Are there any other Mirrodin references in the set?
Graham: So we can’t be particular. We were conscious of that. We have put in some references to Mirrodin into Zhalfir as well. But there’s so much to cover in Zhalfir that we felt like it would have been a mistake of our limited resources to lean too hard into the Mirrodin angle.
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Source: Wargamer
