If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I have no patience whatsoever for people who insist on genre purity. Star Wars, Final Fantasy, and Stephen King's Dark Tower series are all huge influences on my tastes in fantasy, and each of those remixes and shades their worlds with elements of other genres. Star Wars is a fantasy epic that also happens to be filled with robots and spaceships. Final Fantasy games vary, of course, but a game like Final Fantasy VII takes place in a pseudo-modern world with evil megacorporations and motorcycles along with magic and swordplay. And The Dark Tower is a mix of post-apocalyptic wasteland, western, and Arthurian quest mixed into one.
Magic has certainly made use of a wide range of the fantasy sandbox, and it has incorporated elements of other genres before - we have things like the Gothic Horror of Innistrad, Steampunk/Gaslamp Fantasy in Kaladesh, and a plenty of "lost, advanced civilization" stuff in Dominaria.
But from the looks of it, and from what I've read of its first web fiction story, Neon Dynasty is going to be Magic's first foray into true futuristic sci-fi - in a world that was already established as a place of magic.
1,200 years after the Great Kami War, as depicted in the original Kamigawa block, we find a Kamigawa where the kami spirits have long been at peace with the mortal races, and now electronic technology like computers and cybernetics seems to have been developed on the plane amidst all the magic.
There are a couple things that make me really excited about this: the first is simply that this feels so different from any other Magic plane we've gotten before. The other is that it breaks one of the hoariest fantasy tropes - the idea of medieval stasis. While I consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy some of my favorite films, and I loved reading the books (I read them in high school, in the paperback editions that had concept art from the movies with a banner that said "soon to be a motion picture trilogy from Newline Cinema!") I do remember thinking it odd that in the time between the Last Alliance at the end of the Second Age and the War of the Ring at the end of the Third, with over a thousand years of development, things seemed to be locked at the same technological level (indeed, I think canonically things actually regressed, in keeping with lots of myths about how ages past were better than what we have now).
But with Kamigawa, there has been serious technological development.
In a world of magic, sure, you could imagine that magical phenomena might take the place of technologies we've developed in our world. But I do think that humanity has shown a penchant for iteration and development - always seeking to improve on what came before. If physics as they work in our universe works in the planes of Magic, there's no reason why people wouldn't strive to improve technology in tandem with developing a better mastery of magic.
There are, also, already some interesting hints toward greater lore. For one thing, Kaito, the new ninja planeswalker introduced from the setting, has some past with a man with a metal arm - my guess being Tezzeret, whose loyalties seem to have jumped around from Nicol Bolas to, possibly, the Phyrexians (I don't know if we yet have an explanation for how Vorinclex got to Kaldheim - ever since the end of Time Spiral block, only Planeswalkers have been able to actually travel between planes, until the Planar Bridge opened the way between Amonkhet and Ravnica. Now, I believe Tezzeret was the one who secured the Planar Bridge, so could he have found a way to replicate that technology?
The MTG team has talked about what they want to do with this set - Kamigawa had some problematic mechanics, and so they're being careful on what comes back and what doesn't. I'm actually expecting the set to be fairly mechanically independent from the original block, though I could see some fun niche things like Ninjutsu make a return. Just, for the love of God, don't reprint Sensei's Divining Top. No card I can ever remember slowed down the game as much as that one did. I do wonder, though, if Umezawa's Jitte would be as painful as it was back in the day, given the greater availability of removal these days.
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