Between Avengers: Endgame (seeing it Thursday, please don't spoil it!) the final season of Game of Thrones, and much later in the year, Star Wars Episode Nine, we're getting a lot of long-running series coming - if not to and end, then to some major climactic moment. Obviousy, the MCU will go on from here, and I imagine they'll make Star Wars movies as long as they still make money.
But Magic is also going through a huge culmination with the War of the Spark set.
Now, I haven't been a regular Magic player since college, and there was a big gap through much of middle school and high school where I wasn't playing. The last time Magic had such a major event was the Invasion block, in which the plot of the Phyrexians invading Dominaria came to a head, and we saw a massive culling of important characters including Urza himself, who had more or less been Magic's main character up until that point.
While Invasion was followed up by the related Odyssey and Onslaught blocks, which told stories of a sort of post-apocalyptic Dominaria - one that had survived the Phyrexians but was deeply scarred by the conflict - Magic started doing far more new settings after that, starting with Mirrodin. Since then, there's been a tendency to do a new plane each year, sometimes returning to popular locations like Ravnica or Innistrad. Indeed, Mirrodin itself has become New Phyrexia, allowing these one-time big bads of Magic to potentially rise again.
But in more recent years, it's all been about Nicol Bolas, the Elder Dragon, an evil planeswalker who's also one of Magic's oldest characters, having been introduced as one of the Elder Dragon Legends in the Legends blocks (which first introduced things like multicolor cards and the mechanic that would eventually become the Legendary supertype.)
But Bolas was more or less just one of five names back then, and it was only in more recent years that they've really driven home how important a character he is. (Kind of sucks of Palladia-Mors, Chromium, Arcades Sabboth, and Vaevictus Asmadi, who never became as prominent as Nicol Bolas, though they at least got new cards in a recent set.)
After several sets in which we've seen Nicol Bolas acquire his massive undead army in Amonkhet, secure loyal minions in positions of power within the guilds of Ravnica, acquire the Planar Bridge in Kaladesh, get the Immortal Sun from Ixalan, and ensure that Lilianna's contract defaults to him on their home plane of Dominaria, the War of the Spark sees Bolas enact his grand plan to become something like the pre-Mending planeswalker he once was, and maybe even more powerful than that.
It's funny, given that I haven't actually played Magic since Planeswalkers as a mechanic were introduced, but this set really emphasizes an Avengers-like confluence of storylines as I believe every planeswalker we've seen before (and isn't dead) shows up on a new card. They've had to make simpler planeswalkers to allow them at lower rarities.
In a way, I think this is closest to Endgame (which again, I haven't seen yet) in that the series is obviously continuing - Magic is still going strong - but this is the end of a many-year arc and has seen some long-established characters (including, I believe, one of the original post-mending Planeswalkers they introduced when the mechanic was first put in the game) lost.
I don't know if it's quite the cast-obliteration that Apocalypse was (while I think that set came out in 2000 or 2001, it was still close enough to the 90s that bleak and edgy was very much in vogue,) but it definitely seems like it's the biggest moment in the Magic story in nearly twenty years.
Which seems to be what 2019 is all about.
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