So, there's a supposed leak going around on the interwebs (hey, does that date me, calling the internet the interwebs ironically? Is that peak elder millennial?)
We know that the next two major MTG sets are going to be a duology of Innistrad sets. Having missed both Innistrad blocks during my years not playing the game, I've been super excited to play in those sets, as the setting seems insanely cool and I'm also a big fan of top-down design in Magic. Innistrad will be coming in Midnight Hunt - a set themed around werewolves, and Crimson Vow, which will focus on vampires, giving us the two top-tier gothic horror monsters that aren't specific individuals.
But, the leaks suggest that we'll be getting first a set called Dominaria United. Dominaria was, of course, the original setting for Magic: the Gathering, and is by far the most fleshed-out world. While the makers of Magic stopped revisiting it following the transition to more of an annual planes-hopping tradition starting with Mirrodin (other than a return a couple years later in the Time Spiral block,) we went nearly a decade without seeing it again until the Dominaria set came out in 2018, which was a big hit.
So it both makes sense and is exciting to hear that we might be getting another return to the plane that started it all. As someone who now plays D&D as well, I'm hoping that the next crossover book we get after Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos will be a Dominaria campaign setting book. While I'm certainly more invested in settings that go beyond the prime material plane (hoping for a 5th Edition Planescape book, and loved Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft,) I think that if there's any MTG setting that deserves to transition into D&D, it's Dominaria.
But the next title is even more intriguing. While the era of the "Weatherlight Saga" did see a couple other planes like Rath and Mercadia, once the game transitioned to a "new plane every year" style, Kamigawa was the second one we visited, coming after Mirrodin. It was also the first that really didn't tie at all into Urza and his activities, given that the Kamigawa block was set thousands of years in the past - its protagonist (a rare black-mana hero, based and named after legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune,) Toshiro Umezawa, was actually the ancestor of a legendary character from... Legends, an ancient foe of Nicol Bolas (who of course was a deep cut old school card until his reappearance in the Alara block a couple years later.)
Kamigawa was designed as the "Legend Block," and I think was the first to have common legends. It also introduced the Legendary supertype, or rather expanded it. Previously, "Legend" was a creature type, though the same rules applied to Legendary lands (which also appeared in the block that premiered the concept of legends, namely "Legends.") The rules also underwent a change, though we'd see further changes later on. Previously, if a legend was in play on either side of the battlefield (though it wasn't called that yet,) you simply couldn't cast the same card. Kamigawa changed it so that playing one would cause both to be destroyed. Obviously we've seen this change in a few ways since then, but this rule actually allowed for some nasty combos, like casting two copies of a legendary Spirit Dragon that, when it died, stole 5 life from your opponent and gave it to you. So you could have a 20-point life swing if you got two of these out.
The metagame had been coming off of a difficult time with Mirrodin block, where a small number of deck archetypes ruled, and Kamigawa didn't really do a ton to fix that (I still have nightmares about Umezawa's Jitte) but the follow-up, this newfangled urban setting called Ravnica blew people away with its many viable strategies around its different guilds.
Anyway, while Mirrodin and Ravnica have seen revisits in the years that followed, we've never gone back to Kamigawa. We do have a moonfolk planeswalker who has appeared since then, but no word on what Kamigawa has been like since then.
Which brings us to the second leak:
Kamigawa Neon Dynasty.
Now, technically speaking, Neon is just one of the elements, a noble gas that doesn't react chemically with others in normal circumstances. But Neon has a particular association with electric neon lights, which are a hallmark of the cyberpunk genre.
The folks at MTG have talked a little about getting out of the comfort zone of medieval fantasy. Innistrad, true to the gothic horror genre, has a bit more of an 18th century vibe, and Zendikar has a kind of unplaceable time period to it, existing as something not really based on earth cultures. I know there are purists out there who never want to see anything remotely modern in their fantasy works (and who will insist that Star Wars is science fiction, when I'd argue it's about 75% fantasy.)
Perhaps because of its rise to prominence in the 1980s, at a time when Japan was undergoing its post-War economic miracle and Japanese culture was becoming far more influential in the west, Cyberpunk as a genre tends to incorporate a lot of Japanese elements (it's also a genre that is very popular in Japanese media like anime, with examples like Ghost in the Shell or Akira as staples of the genre.)
Given that the Kamigawa we had seen was known to have taken place thousands of years before what was then the current story of Magic, it makes sense that we'd find a very different Kamigawa in the future. And perhaps it's not unthinkable that we'd seen technological and cultural developments that would make it closer to 1980s Cyperpunk than the mythical Japanese-inspired landscape it was.
Let's talk about what the original block was about, in the loosest terms:
The core of the story was a conflict between the Kami and others. Kami roughly translates to "spirit" in Japanese, and in Kamigawa, the spirit creature type was extremely common. A lot of inherently magical creatures like Demons and Dragons were Demon Spirits and Dragon Spirits in the block. (Actually, given that Japanese Oni are also kind of their version of ogres, Oni were Demon Ogre Spirits, though there were also normal ogres who tended to have synergy with demons.)
The conflict started when a powerful lord, Konda, stole a child/portion of the supreme spirit, O-Kagachi. The spirits, once existing in harmony with the people, go to war against the world of mortals.
The conflict ended in part due to the efforts of the ronin Toshiro Umezawa, who was later transported to Dominaria (this was pre-Mending, so non-planeswalkers had an easier time traveling across the planes. Still waiting to find out how Vorinclex made it to Kaldheim.)
Given how far in the future this would be taking place if it's contemporary with the current MTG story, we could see a vastly transformed Kamigawa. I actually love the prospect of a gritty urban environment in which gangs might be run by strange kami spirits.
All we have is a name, of course, and we don't know if it's confirmed. But as someone who loves genre-bending, I'm really hoping we get a futuristic science fantasy Kamigawa set.
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