One of the things that's kind of fascinating about MTG lore in its early days is that, rather than starting in a contemporary "now" before delving into backstory, the game really started with its ancient history, in Antiquities and Legends. (Yes, there is plenty of pre-Urza lore, but the principle stands.)
The original Alpha/Beta/Unlimited release was pretty light on story, and the first expansion set, Arabian Nights, was drawn directly from existing real-world folklore. But it was Antiquities (which, you know, refers to a very ancient time,) Magic's second expansion set, that detailed the story of the Brothers' War, giving us a bit more background on cards that mentioned Urza and such.
The end of said war, the detonation of the Golgothian Sylex, then led to a few sets that were either around the same time as the Brothers' War (Legends) or dealing with the gradual aftermath and the sort of nuclear winter that descended upon Dominaria following the blast. The Dark was a period in which the plane literally grew dark as dust was thrown into the sky, and then Fallen Empires details how the lowering temperatures caused the various civilizations of Sarpadia to collapse (though I guess the Vodalians got their shit together).
This, then, led to the first of Magic's true blocks - sets thematically linked to one another that follow an ongoing story. This was Ice Age, which was about the frigid period caused by the Dark, itself caused by the Sylex blast.
This first block was actually kind of botched - we got two sets, Ice Age and Alliances, and the third chapter of the story didn't come until Cold Snap in 2006 (a whole decade later) following the conclusion of the first Ravnica block. Instead, in the middle of Ice Age and Alliances, we got Homelands, the first set (apart from the retconned Arabian Nights) to take place on a different plane, and one that was sort of hastily approved after being designed by fans who, while I'm sure well-meaning, didn't really put together the most successful set.
Anyway, at 8 years old, I started playing Magic in 1994, meaning Ice Age came out right as I was getting into the game. And while I think I must not have invested much in it (naturally, I was getting a pack at a time, usually bought by my mom, and usually the cheaper Fallen Empires packs, which my local store sold for less than half of what some of the other sets were going for) given that I never even got a Snow-Covered Land, but there were names and images that stuck with me from that time, like Leshrac and Lim-Dûl.
Cut to a lot later. I stopped playing the game in 7th grade after coming back from a year spent in California (where I live now) and none of my friends were still into the game (and I'd mostly moved on to video games, to be frank.) In college, I played a bit during the Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral blocks, but I once again set the game aside (actually, WoW might have been the culprit this time.)
So I missed the boat on the introduction of planeswalker cards, and only recently have I started to catch up on their lore.
Ever since I opened a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, I've had a soft spot for Black, and so naturally I'm curious about the story of Liliana Vess. And then, looking into her story, I found out about the Raven Man.
The Raven Man seems to be like the G-Man (Half-Life) of Magic: the Gathering. He's a massive enigma, never (as far as I know) represented on a card, but he's a great focus for player speculation, and plays a major role in Liliana Vess' backstory...well, and ongoing story.
Liliana was a young woman studying to be a priest in Dominaria (I think eventually revealed to be from Benalia, another old-school name that dates back to the beginning.) When her brother, Josu, was dying of some illness, she went looking for a cure, and began to dabble in necromancy in her desperation. While searching for a particular herb she needs, a mysterious figure meets her in the forest, and he encourages her to use her necromantic magic to bring the dead specimen of the root she needs back to life to use on her brother.
Doing so, she instead curses him with murderous rage, and she's forced to zombify some of her now-dead household staff to restrain Josu - the trauma of which causes her spark to ignite and take her to Innistrad - as if things weren't creepy enough for her already.
The Raven Man's identity is a mystery, and his motivations are extremely suspect. Is he a Planeswalker? Is he a figment of her imagination? Is he an illusion or a projection of some other entity? (One theory that seemed plausible except that it never came up in the War of the Spark narrative was that he was a projection of Nicol Bolas, again, another old-school character dating back to Legends, who became a lot more prominent in Magic's story in 2009's Alara block, and was the Big Bad in the War of the Spark story.)
The linked theory on MTG Salvation posits a few possible candidates, but the author's favorite is one I find goosebump-inducingly cool: which is that it's Lim-Dûl.
Lim-Dûl was a necromancer and major player in the Ice Age story. A major villain who struggled under the domination of the powerful planeswalkers Tevesh Szat and Leshrac, Lim-Dûl managed to travel to a different plane, Shandalar, despite not being a planeswalker himself, and in fact manipulated events to nearly conquer the entire plane after turning the two god-like planeswalkers against one another.
Shandalar is sort of interesting in how generic it is - basically, Dominaria has such a dense history and so much lore had built up on it that its whole post-apocalyptic and artifice-centric history had made Dominaria too distinct compared to the old-school fantasy tropes that they wanted a setting to embody. Taking it from some obscure Microprose games in the late 90s, Shandalar was fleshed out a bit more to be the sort of standard fantasy setting.
But in building Liliana's backstory, Shandalar played a key role, which is that her most powerful weapon, the Chain Veil, has its origins among the enlightened ogres of the Onakke civilization there. Basically, the civilization was wiped out and all of their souls became trapped in this spooky veil.
Given that Lim-Dûl's story has his spirit bound to an unnamed artifact on Shandalar, it seems possible that Lim-Dûl might have somehow cursed the Onakke to take his place within the Veil. The Raven Man seems to have witnessed the deadly magical meteor swarm that wiped out the Onakke. So it doesn't seem that hard to imagine that this Raven Man is actually Lim-Dûl himself (the article I linked also shows some rather persuasive arguments about artistic motifs that hint at this connection.)
While I was never deeply into the lore as a kid, the imagery and names from Magic have had a really big influence on me, and sort of formed the foundation of my taste for fantasy (hell, there are characters in my Otherworld setting who are more or less planeswalkers.)
But it does sometimes feel like the Magic stories of my youth were sort of dropped in favor of the new figures introduced as planeswalkers following the Mending. I'm happy to see Karn and Teferi show up again, but there's a ton of stuff that connects with me on a really deep, primal level.
I was absolutely tickled to discover that the Elder Dragon Legend (this was before Legendary was a supertype) I'd bought off a friend of a friend in 6th grade (the Chronicles version, though, which is worth like 2 bucks) happened to turn out to be the biggest big bad of the game since Yawgmoth. (Actually, the return of all the Elder Dragon Legends in new cards in Core Set 19 was a total nostalgia-blast. I remember looking with wide eyes at the original cards in my local store's display case, knowing that these were "the best creatures in the game.")
I know that we're extremely unlikely to see Urza represented with a new card, and while the Phyrexians are definitely back, I'm almost hesitant to approve of another grand epic showdown against them, after their defeat in Invasion Block was sort of the antecedent to last year's War of the Spark. There's certainly something to be said for letting characters whose stories are done lie - it would be really underwhelming for Nicol Bolas to emerge a couple years from now, as much a threat as he ever was.
But a figure like Lim-Dûl is, I think, the perfect sort of character to bring out that tons of players wouldn't even have been alive yet to see his original influence (oddly, he didn't actually get a card until Time Spiral - but while I'm an increasingly feeling like an old man and consider 2006 not that long ago, even that's pretty ancient history for many MTG fans.)
Like, I don't think that this is a guy anyone's had a chance to get sick of yet.
I also think there's a lot of story potential in having non-planeswalkers seeking ways to get around the strictness of the post-Mending multiverse. Nicol Bolas was pissed off that he wasn't a god anymore, but he could still travel the planes. Having powerful but plane-bound figures like Heliod, Niv-Mizzet, Elesh Norn, or Lim-Dûl trying to find some exemption that would allow them to journey to other planes could be the cause of massive conflict (especially given that the only other canonical interplanar travelers are either lazotep-covered zombies or the freaking Eldrazi, which these folks might be willing to try to court to get around their travel limitations) as well as allowing non-planeswalking cards and characters to be part of Magic's ongoing, plane-hopping story.
Anyway, one of the great pleasures of long-lasting properties like MTG is that the lore is profoundly deep, and you can give your audience a real rush by making some distant callbacks. I wonder if the Raven Man might, eventually, be revealed as such.
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