Magic the Gathering returns to Dominaria

So the big caveat to this whole post is that I haven't played Magic for probably over ten years. Still, the game is a huge part of my background in both nerdy games and fantasy fiction. Indeed, looking back on my childhood, I didn't really read a whole lot of fantasy until I got to Lord of the Rings as a Freshman in High School. But Magic was a giant thing for me in the background.

I started playing when I was eight (maybe seven?) in either second or third grade (I'm a June baby, so each school year I spent was almost entirely during one numerical age.) Anyway, my first cards were a booster pack of Fallen Empires cards and then a big box (60 cards) from the Revised Edition, in which I got a Royal Assassin, which kind of steered me toward Black decks moving forward.

I played up though about sixth grade, and then picked it up again in Magic Online in college, using an emulator to play the PC program on my Mac.

Anyway:

For the last decade+, Magic has generally had each major block of card sets take place in a new plane - the core concept of the game is that players are Planeswalkers - former mortals who have ascended to become essentially gods, and travel between various planes. Thus, we've gotten places like Ravnica - a plane that is just one enormous city - and Mirrodin - an artificial plane in which even the biological life incorporates mechanical and metallic elements.

But the world that the game was initially set in was a place called Dominaria, and while there was a brief return to this plane in the Time Spiral block, that was over ten years ago.

So it's pretty exciting to see a return to this original plane.

While Dominaria doesn't have quite the high-concept pitch of some of the more recent creations (Innistrad, the gothic horror plane, or Zendikar, the dungeon-punk plane,) Dominaria also has ages worth of history, with the ancient Thran, the Brothers' War, Urza's thousands of years fighting the Phyrexians, the crisis of the Mirari. Personally, I have a soft spot for the Sarpadian era - probably a footnote in the lore as it was about the fall of empires on one continent following the Brothers' War, but it's the story from the first booster pack I bought!

Anyway, I don't know if I'm likely to get into Magic again any time soon - I think my CCG play is mostly casual Hearthstone - but I do get a pang of nostalgia hearing about Dominaria again (which, to be fair, is probably by design.)