https://www.ign.com/articles/magic-the-gathering-comic-boom-studios-ravnica-zendikar

It's hard to get excited for this after how the IDW comics went but maybe I'll be surprised.

That description basically includes everything that's wrong with Magic's "story" these days...

Also, is Kaya still the Orzhov guildmaster? I thought she handed the reins to Teysa or something?

Kaya is still guild master, she's just found a loop hole so that someone else can literally suffer in her place while she shirks her duty.

As much as that synopsis is exactly what I've been complaining over recently, I trust boom and their talent pool substantially more than idw at least.

Ok, but isn't Kaya's motivation that she needs money to help her family or something? That's why she is hunting down Vorinclex on Kaldheim, right? But how is that an issue when she's the leader of the richest guild in all of Ravnica? (Not to mention the fact that she could just replace Dack as the greatest thief in the multiverse, considering she can 1. planeswalk and 2. go through walls.)

I find that these synopses are usually market-tested into a state of utter blandness. Just looking at the show blurbs on Netflix I'd probably never decide to watch anything. For that reason I can overlook a bland sales pitch.

It's hard for me to ignore that it's Kaya on a trip to Zendikar from Ravnica where she's doing her best Jace ignoring his responsibilities impression.

Random idea: What if there was a comic line of Tamiyo telling bedtime stories to her kids? Then, each arc could be set as a story from a different plane without the need of recurring characters. However her kids want her to interject their favorite characters (planeswalkers), so she has to find ways to fit them in. A motif could be characters in panel looking confused as one of their actions gets attributed to an inserted planeswalker instead.

Honestly we need a comic where it's just Teysa and Lavinia getting drunk and complaining to each other about how much they hate trying to get their planeswalker bosses to do their jobs. I think that's honestly what makes their spotlight-stealing feel the most egregious: not only do they become the most important people on the plane for a completely contrived reason, but then 5 minutes later it's completely forgotten about.


Wait, what happened with IDW comics?

It took over a year to release a four-issue limited series and then the follow up line "Trials of Alara" got canned.

Also add in they where trying to tell a story about Chandra having post- War of the Spark trauma before War of the Spark so they where semi dancing around spoilers.

Which is a shame I do think more side stories like this would be great and when it was allowed to be spoilerly the Chandra comic was solid. A lot of magic story telling is directly tied to the cards and set so the idea of seeing planes or doing stories that couldn't fit into a magic set is nifty.

I haven't read the recent stuff but iirc her family was rich/royal? so she doesn't really need the money. She does things for money but it is more like an excuse, her real motivations are more about seeing cool things and keeping her skills sharp.

She was also motivated by trying to fix some magic sky problem on her home plane but that might have fixed itself when Bolas "died"

To clear up sum: they have not outright said why Kaya want to be paid (other than maybe her just wanting money for the work she does) and what position her family is in.

When we first meet her on Fiora it showed she a ghost hunter, has a moral code (as she gave the guy who killed his mother to the ghost as justice since she doesn't like kin-slayers) and thinks on how her family is royal/nobel as the mother-killer iirc said something about her being common.

During in the art book they said Kaya took the job for Bolas to help her family, but in the story it was expanded out to Bolas agreeing to help her plane with a "broken sky" which is causing madness and later guesses Bolas might have a claw in since he had been pulling the strings behind a lot of planeswalkers.

My guess is money is just to help her family/the people her family rule over with the basics (food, water, clothing, shelters ect) and the rest of the time she had been looking out for people who might be able to help with the sky. And all this is why I also don't care for Kaya as guild master, made sense for the story but once she got those contracts moved to someone else I would except her and Orzhov to never interact again.

Could be indeed specifically to help her people, but if that's the case she wouldn't be aligned. She's not a bad person, but definitely on the self-interested end besides having basic moral standards like hating the slavery the Orzhov put the spirits through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeSUIqjNDF0
So the comic is apparently diverging from the mainline continuity. Some images from the ashcan version of the comic have also been released.

Honestly, the art is better than past endeavors.
I am... Perhaps a little irked at some of the obvious differences, but only because I don't like the discontinuity having basically no chance to see any card representation.

So, this came out today.
I'd be willing to do a review of anyone had any interest.

Please do. Reacomiconline might not have it for months.

Yes plz

Sorry for the delay, hadn't had time sit down and really bang out a long form post.

So, long story short first: it's better than either of the previous comics. Admittedly, it's by a slimmer margin vs the Chandra comic, but still.

Where the strength of it lies definitely comes in both the art and conceptual space. The art is graphically better than the previous endeavors, especially the Dack line, which was technically proficient but had hideous color techniques and clearly was done by an artist unfamiliar with inking. The colors on this are really vivid and distinct, and the composition is very clear.

The conceptual space they're working in is also more ambitious. A lot of the shots they do are cool, and there's this brilliant splash page showing how each of the stars interrupts the blind eternity as a different abstraction, which I've always been a huge fan of.

Additionally, this is it's own continuity, which is a books choice, but seeing artifacts from the planning stages is also fascinating. Niv Mizzet is not an avatar in this, for example, but a Dracoid. (Robot dragon)

But, it's not all sunshine and sparkles. By far, by FAR, the weakest part of this is the characters and dialogue. Real comes across as annoyingly arrogant in his intelligence and Kaya is just annoyingly annoying, way too confident and snarky... And kinda off-puttingly callous (even if I don't like her normally, I never thought of her as just as mean as she is here). Vraska, meanwhile, is a bit over theatrical but otherwise alright. She also has this adorable at of excursions when Jace turns up.

Now, for the plot.


And that was the first issue.

Just checked it. Yes, the exposition and dialogue nearly kill the story, but Ral looks sexah and the villain might be Marit Lage which I hope (if it's Emrakul I'm going to scream).