by Ryan Carroll
There is more to Magic’s worlds than will ever appear on Magic cards.
The Sun Empire of Ixalan rules a host of City-States, all reshaped by the Phyrexian Invasion. Among them is Atzocan, a coastal city that was leveled by Realmbreaker and that is now being reclaimed by privately funded expeditions. Another is Pachatupa, the highly stratified former imperial capital, where the popular resistance of the Invasion has blossomed into a populist power base. Yet a third is Otepec, which is ruled by ardent theocrats from temples on the city’s northern plateau. Each of these cities is mentioned on a handful of cards, but none refer to these post-Invasion details.
The holy text of the Edge’s Monoists is The Plummet Record, which is divided into two books. The first is The Seeker and the Well, supposedly written by Monoist prophet the Immortal Faller in the first person; the second is The Theorem Unending and Final, a presumably finite song that the Monoists are nonetheless still decoding from the “song” emitted from supermassive black holes; when Monoists refer to the Faller in the third person, they do so with the capitalized subscript words He and Him. Although the Theorem Unending and The Plummet Record are quoted on cards (Gravkill and Faller’s Faithful, respectively), there is no mention of The Seeker, its tangly finite/infinite status, its grammatical voice, or its typographic conventions.
On Muraganda, scattered and insular Ley Mages inhabit towers built upon leyline geysers, studying and harvesting raw magic. They live in small groups with family and students, only gathering once a year in knowledge-sharing symposia; between those meetings, they’re menaced by the Telu-Set, five human clans who, traumatized by Muraganda’s apocalyptic past, are strictly anti-magical and wield a powerful arcane-negating power called Null. Altogether, Ley Mages, the Telu-Set clans, and null mages have appeared on zero cards.
These details are all fascinating, engrossing, absorptive--I’m obsessed with them--and yet they are, in one sense, "unnecessary." They have not appeared on any Magic card; even fewer have appeared in recent Magic web fiction. Even if they did, I’m not sure how much they would register for most players. And yet, they burst with wonder and power; they ignite the cosmic forge of the imagination. So, why?
To get an answer, I decided to ask someone who had a hand in writing all those details.
The Builder
Miguel Lopez is a former Wizards of the Coast writer and narrative designer and now a senior narrative designer at Bungie.
He has helped develop some of Magic’s richest worlds: just in the last few years, he’s served as the Worldbuilding Lead and Vision Creative lead on Edge of Eternities, the Worldbuilding Design Lead for Aetherdrift, worked on the worldbuilding teams for Duskmourn and Phyrexia: All Will be One, and has written or co-written some gobsmackingly amazing web fiction and world guides.
In all these works, Lopez sketches out precisely the kind of excessive details I evoke above--and pushes the limits of the trading card form itself.
“Cutting word count is a given when it comes to worldbuilding and narrative design in a corporate setting,” he shared with me. But “It’s still worth writing more than will get published,” for multiple reasons: that extra content might become “material for narrative designers who will work on the sequel,” or it might also “set hooks for fans and players.”
“Players and readers will want to learn more about those things, will think about and talk about and write about those things, and in turn inspire narrative designers to engage with those things the next time they return to write in that setting.”
These sorts of details, for Lopez, aren’t window dressing. You’ll gather, if you take a cursory glimpse at his writing, that Lopez is intensely concerned with the social--with the way that societies distribute power, the way history is lived out in the present, and the way people imagine their own relationship to the world. This method produces the sorts of rich details that, Lopez says, “can grow beyond their initial writer.”
“I aim as much as possible for the worlds I write (either from scratch or when returning to them) to be internally consistent--to be products of their own logics,”
For Lopez, this means“examining and writing out the natural, material, and social histories of those worlds. The ‘social systems’ of those worlds are downstream from these histories and exist as expressions of or reactions to those histories. To paraphrase the author Annie Dillard, the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.”
On the reader’s end, this process registers in worlds that explode with lengthy history and social complexity. Take Lopez’s world guide for Lost Caverns of Ixalan, which links the present-day Legion of Dusk, a horde of vampiric conquistadores, to a millennia-old history of the faraway continent Torrezon.
In the small city of Alta Torrezon, the guide narrates, a controversy of gavelkind succession and religious upheaval birthed centuries of apocalyptic civil-religious war, rebel princes aligning themselves with religious apostates; the war only ended with the appearance of Saint Elenda, who shared the gift of vampirism with the loyalist forces and transformed Alta Torrezon into a continent-conquering behemoth. At the time of Lost Caverns of Ixalan, the Phyrexian Invasion’s widespread destruction has fomented new social strains: both vampiric aristocrats and human serfs face starvation and seethe with apocalyptic enthusiasm, and both the monarchy and the Church of Dusk are split between radical upheaval and orthodox reform. “Gold-draped priests in the capital contend with ragged, charismatic street preachers,” the guide reads, “while outside of Alta Torrezon sanctioned pastors buttress their lonely parishes and humble flocks against great penitent marches.”
I get buzzy just typing this history out. In these superabundant details there emerges a living world, pulsing with meaning in excess of the basic vampires-as-conquistadores archetype. Alta Torrezon is driven by internal patterns, historical forces that try to resolve themselves in the small scale of individual lives and the huge scale of social change. This is a world one might actually spend time with.
Such, Lopez told me, is the heart of his method. His worldbuilding process emerges from “a historical materialist understanding of how our world works”--referencing the Marxian approach to history, which suggests that societies are best understood through the way that social relations concretely organize labor, goods, and people. This method shines luminously in Lopez’s writing on Torrezon, whose history, you notice, sees social contradictions burbling up in extreme crises and instigating large-scale transformations. As Lopez himself writes, reminiscent of the final lines of a certain political manifesto, “A change is necessary, and the moment is ripe: a new world is about to be born.”
This open-endedness, in turn, recruits the player into this transformation. In the dynamis of social change, of internal tensions exploding into open conflict, there’s an invitation to imagine how this world might develop, at the highest and smallest levels.
And yet--can we? Is it still possible to engage with these exuberant possibilities when they remain elusive, beyond the bounds of Magic cards themselves?
The Time is Now
In my very first work of Magic writing, I turned over the strange, evasive complexity that is Magic story. The game’s story doesn’t live in one enshrined form, like the story of a novel lives in book pages or the story of a video game lives in book pages; instead, Magic’s worlds are diffuse, emerging from the combinatory gestalt of all that we see and encounter, from web fiction to card images to tabletopic ludic narratives to world guides. These are worlds who come together in the space between media.
This puts hyper-detailed worldbuilding in a funny spot, however. It’s true that an Ixalan emerges through gameplay, but to what extent does that Ixalan include, for example, the ecumenical politics of Torrezon? Those details register only dimly in flavor text, and are nigh-on invisible in, say, a game of EDH.
Indeed, as Lopez pointed out to me, Magic’s structure shapes the way a player encounters a world--even the kinds of worlds they’re capable of encountering to begin with.
“When the role of the player is strictly competitive [as it is in Magic: The Gathering],” Lopez said to me, “the player prioritizes mechanics over flavor. That makes sense, as the game tells them it’s more important to know how to kill their opponent; the story that they’re telling is how they win. The world they expect is one that supports this fiction and that’s the world that needs to be built.”
The logic of Magic’s gameplay, in other words, is inevitably adversarial: one player wins and one doesn’t. And this informs world design: “It’s been my experience that competitive, player v. player games like Magic are difficult to situate in anything other than a high-conflict settings; likewise, the narrative dressing of the mechanics are almost always high-action, adversarial, or otherwise ‘loud.’ The worlds the mechanics of these games demand are violent; the aim of the game is zero-sum, and its art is found primarily in the mechanical sandbox rather than its text, its characters, and so on.”
Lopez here quipped that he was “not the perfect narrative designer for MTG, to say the least.”
This last line was startling to hear, not least of all because Lopez has played a major role in creating some of the most energizing, Vorthos-sustaining stuff in Magic. I, of course, am inclined to disagree with his self-assessment--but I also saw his point. He’s gesturing to a tension between the very spirit of worldbuilding that he practices--invested in social organization and dialectical history and transformative change--and Magic’s basic modalities.
What do we do, then, with the possibility that Magic's very foundation--the experience of the card game--seems to not need its vivacious worlds? Indeed, what do we do when Magic’s living worlds are swept beneath the ever-faster locomotive of corporate profit? What do we do with a world that seems less and less inclined to care about the font in which the Faller’s name is written?
Shrugging and moving on is an option, I suppose. But not the only one.
By some miracle, the god of wonder and surprise has distracted or otherwise bartered with the god of cold efficiency and profit, and--for a little while longer, anyway--this card game opens onto worlds that are more alive than they need to be. Magic’s worldbuilding is, in other words, deeply gratuitous--not in the sense of too much, but in its etymological root: gratis, freely given.
If we want to keep savoring this free gift, then we have to make use of it for ourselves--not depend entirely on what Wizards of the Coast does with its worlds. As Lopez remarked to me, the goal of worldbuilding is always “to build something that becomes the property of players,” to “Build a world whose parts that are seen are parts that thrill, that hook, that pull and invite players to wonder what else exists beyond.”
This means making use of gratuitous worlds in our own way--in art and storytelling, role-playing and reflection, forms of engagement that let us participate in these worlds rather than merely observe them.
Let this be a humble invitation: do something with your favorite Magic world. Live in it, for a little while. Consider where you might take its story, its characters, the structure of its existence. Accept the gift--and make it your own.
Ryan Carroll writes about the art, story, and experience of Magic: The Gathering on substack as Dominarian Plowshare and on Hipsters of the Coast as himself. When he’s not thinking and writing about Magic, he’s thinking and writing about nineteenth-century novels, spiritual poetry, and why it is that sitcoms don’t have annoying neighbors anymore. He is allergic to dairy.