Returning to Dominaria

 Right before the big Ravnican year with Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, and War of the Spark, MTG traveled back to the beginning - the original setting for the game, Dominaria.

This was a bit of a nostalgic move, motivated in part by the fact that the game was then a quarter of a century old (making me feel ancient!) This was the first time they'd set things there since the Time Spiral block, which came out my junior year of college (and was the last block I played much of in my MTGO days.) But despite the 11 year absence from the game, Dominaria still leads any other plane for number of sets taking place there, with over twenty, compared to Ravnica, which I believe is in second place at only 9 (and this is before we count core sets like Alpha.)

The challenge that WotC faced when making the Dominaria set in 2018 was that the plane's very ubiquitousness meant that it basically didn't have an identity.

While early sets sometimes had some sort of light themes - like Fallen Empires' intra-color conflicts (Icatia vs. the Farrelites, Merfolk vs. Homarids, The Ebon Hand vs. their Thrulls, Dwarves vs. Orcs, and Elves vs. Thallids) and arguably a light tribal theme, most of the game's early design was just about interesting mechanics, sometimes bringing in new keywords, but rarely having a super strong set identity.

I believe that according to lead designer Mark Rosewater, the first set to truly have a theme was Invasion, and the Invasion block had a major theme of playing multicolor decks. From that set onward, every block came with a strong mechanical identity - Onslaught was the graveyard block, Onslaught was the tribal creature block, Mirrodin was the artifact block, Kamigawa was the legends block, and Ravnica was the first where they took a different tack with an existing theme (what if it was a multicolor block, but they encouraged to play with smallest possible multicolor combination, i.e. 2?)

Not every block was built with a mechanical focus in mind. Innistrad was a famously successful experiment in top-down design - building cards as well as mechanics around existing tropes in a genre (in this case Gothic Horror.) Throne of Eldraine, which I think has also been quite popular (I like it) is built in a similar manner.

The thing is, when making Dominaria, they had two problems:

One: Dominaria has had so many different sets and blocks that there's no real single mechanical identity to the plane. Hell, even the continent of Otaria, which hadn't really been a focus until after the apocalypse, had two blocks with totally different mechanical themes.

Two: but also, given how long they'd spent there, and how many different regions and time periods they'd visited, it wasn't as if there were a uniting story theme to it either. Dominaria was, essentially, the "fantasy" plane, which... is also true of every other Magic plane.

So what they decided to focus on was the very historic nature of the setting.

I've written about how I really enjoy running a D&D campaign set in Ravnica. But as a friend of mine and I have been going through Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, I've been able to put into words an issue that I have with most Magic settings.

Magic worlds are high concept. They're filled with really big, flashy, concepts. But whether the two are mutually exclusive or not, they don't really feel lived in. Wildemount - a continent in Matt Mercer's Exandria setting, which is where the Critical Role games he DMs are set, is bursting with details about individual characters, with towns and factions and history. There's amazing detail to be found there, and a wealth of fodder for DMs to use.

Ravnica, while I adore it, doesn't really have that. Indeed, the color-pie-induced stasis of the ten guilds makes it hard to even think about shaking up the balance of power there. I think Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica does a really good job of getting the ball rolling on making the world feel a little more real, but it's still a bit tough. Like, it's all well and good to depict all the crazy psychos of the Rakdos doing their thing on cards, but how does a world in which about 5% of the entire population is dedicated to this cult (assuming roughly equal distribution between the guilds and that half the world's population belongs to a guild, which I think the book says is the ratio) even work?

In Dominaria, they decided that the mechanical theme of the set was going to be a focus on its history. We got Sagas and a focus on legendary spells. And I suspect that, moving forward, any return to Dominaria will probably have a similar focus.

Bridging things with D&D, though, I really do feel that Dominaria would make a lot of sense as a crossover like Ravnica and Theros. With a history dating back to 1993, Dominaria has been around longer than Eberron (or Exandria, of course,) and there's lore a-plenty to work with.

In some ways, I feel like a D&D sourcebook could be great for the setting too, giving us a chance to really explore the world in a way that Magic sets can only really just hint at.

While Magic settings thrive on a certain degree of mechanical and thematic focus, D&D worlds all need to have a fairly broad variety of locations, themes, and creatures to fill out a whole campaign.

Dominaria has that in spades.

Ok, I honestly didn't know if this was going to be more of an MTG post or a D&D one. It's super late and in L.A. it's finally cool now it's 3 in the morning.