by Brandon Amico

Italian writer Italo Calvino’s mid-20th century magical realist work Invisible Cities is a novel in the loosest sense. The story of a young Marco Polo who has traveled from Venice all the way through to the easternmost reaches of Kublai Khan’s 13th century empire is primarily made up of depictions of the cities Polo has encountered along his travels. They are fantastical, otherworldly, and evocative. They are imaginative, and their reality is occasionally plausible though often less so. There is connective tissue between the short depictions of each city—a page here of Polo and Khan’s conversation, another half page of narrative padding there—but the novel is better thought of as a constellation of stars. Bright depictions of fantastical places lined up side by side, related but independent, all hinting at a whole world and untold stories within.

One of the greatest moments in Magic: the Gathering is when you can look down at your lands and see them the same way. A row of worlds both impossible and yet at hand, each with so much more to reveal to a thoughtful visitor.

Lands serve as windows to planes of the Magic multiverse the same way chapters in Calvino’s Invisible Cities provide a snapshot of these impossible places. Compare Calvino’s cities:

  • Octavia, a city suspended by ropes and chains between two mountains, and not built upon those ropes but hung down from them
  • Sophronia, which is divided into two half-cities, one an enormous carnival and the other a grey, functional place with factories and schools and banks. Unlike you’d expect, it’s the more practical half-city that is packed up into a caravan and driven off to another vacant lot annually
  • Tamara, which is so densely covered in signage and esoteric symbols that there is little else to see and “you leave Tamara without having discovered it”
  • Eutropia, which is a plateau of identical cities, only one of which is inhabited at a time, and every so often the entire populated city puts down what they’re doing, moves over to one of the empty cities, then starts again; everyone begins with a new job, spouse, and home

to some of Magic’s planes:

  • Ravnica, a plane is comprised entirely of one massive city with ideologically divided “guilds” controlling different parts
  • Zendikar, a constantly shifting world, brimming with a chaotic energy that seeps from three massive eldritch horrors that were trapped within it
  • Bloomburrow, where the denizens are all sentient animals (and if you find yourself there, you too are turned into one)
  • Zhalfir, a technologically advanced kingdom on the plane of Dominaria that was phased out of time and space until it was recently transplanted onto another previously occupied plane
  • Duskmourn, a haunted house that has grown to envelop an entire plane