As has been the trend for the past few Magic sets, Dominaria United is coming with a series of short fiction that tells what's going on in the expansion.
This post contains SPOILERS for those bits of web fiction.
As a return to Dominaria (most recently done five years ago, at the 25th anniversary of MTG) there have been a lot of old names popping up. The past two stories have had Karn as the viewpoint character, and the threat is the oldest big bad of Magic's lore, the Phyrexians.
What's funny is that for the past two years and change, I've been running a D&D campaign set in Ravnica, which was first introduced when I was in college, playing Magic Online using a PC emulator on my Macbook (it wasn't pretty, but I loved the set).
Given that I was going to let players be members of any guild, and the party has a Rakdos Bard and an Orzhov Cleric (who's currently a Warlock - it's complicated) and thus we were going to have a party with full-on evil characters, I wanted to bring out a villain that even a serial killer cannibal (the Bard) could find reason to fight against, and that's Phyrexia. The plot of this campaign has been all about the Phyrexians.
And I planned this in 2020, before Kaldheim had Vorinclex show up on another plane, meaning the last anyone had heard of the Phyrexians was New Phyrexia, which came out in 2011, nearly a decade before my D&D campaign started.
What's fun and a little spooky is that the Magic story has been working in parallel with a lot of the ideas I've got. Though I only just introduced it (to only one party member,) I've intended for the finale of the campaign to involve using the Golgothian Sylex on New Phyrexia to defeat them. The Sylex was used by Urza to end the Brothers' War, and was a card from Antiquities - really the first MTG set to start to flesh out Dominaria as a setting (also, it was a set hoser - removing all cards from its own set from the game, which is something that they also did in Arabian Nights but never did again). Well, it turns out that in the current story, Karn the Silver Golem intends to use the Sylex to do precisely that.
The Phyrexians were not exactly a deep cut, just an old one. But when I was playing around with Ravnica as a setting, I toyed with the idea of another deep cut. I made a Half Elf Dimir Shadow Sorcerer who got his powers when he was possessed by a fragment of an ancient necromancer. This being's soul was shattered to pieces back in the pre-Mending days before it was impossible for non-Planeswalkers to travel between worlds.
The figure in question was Lim-Dûl, one of the villains from Ice Age - the first true "Block" in Magic (though the third part wouldn't come out until over a decade later). This was a fairly deep cut - he hadn't been mentioned after Alliances, the follow-up to the Ice Age set, and the Magic story moved on with more recurring characters like the Weatherlight Crew.
Following the Invasion block, there were two blocks focusing on new characters on the continent of Otaria, but then Magic started hopping between planes, leaving Dominaria behind for the most part, and there weren't really many recurring characters until the introduction of the new Planeswalkers, which became a new card type. One of the most popular among them is Liliana Vess, the necromancer anti-hero.
Liliana's story involved a mysterious figure called the Raven Man, who haunts her across planes, driving her to greater mastery of necromancy. And for years, there has been some tin-foil-hat speculation that the Raven Man might be various known figures, such as Urza or Yawgmoth. But another contender that was suggested was Lim-Dûl. I wrote about it in this post. Well, as of the third part of the Dominaria United plot, it looks like those theories were 100% correct.
Yes, the Raven Man is, in fact, a fragment of Lim-Dûl's soul or consciousness that rested within an artifact buried on the Vess family estate. It's been Lim-Dûl all along!
When Nicol Bolas reemerged as a villain in Shards of Allara, and went on to become the big bad of Magic for several years, culminating in War of the Spark, I was kind of blown away. I've had a Chronicles version of Nicol Bolas since 1998, and built my deck around him (a deck I'm certain wouldn't be very good by today's standards).
I get frustrated with Magic as a game sometimes, feeling that it's always had a bit of a pay to have a chance to win structure, and that the lore doesn't really get reflected in gameplay most of the time. But it's also been a huge influence on my fantasy tastes since I was 8. So I'll confess, all this deep lore coming back is really hitting me in the nostalgia.
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