Not that I'd want anything to do with those comics either way, but I see that as a big problem. Creating a separate continuity that's very similar but deliberately different is 1.) just another admission of creative bancruptcy and lack of care, and 2.) going to confuse a lot of people (including the WotC folks on the story team). I guess this is what Nic Kelman meant when he was talking about "different versions" of characters or however he phrased it.

#FireNicKelman

I think that's a bit of an uncharitable read on the creative decision to separate the continuities. Allowing BOOM! Studios the freedom to move the story they want to tell at their pace without worrying about keeping continuity with the mainline story should lead to a better story overall. At the very least, they don't have to worry about things like dancing around major plot beats to avoid spoilers (such as Chandra's comic run dancing around the fact that Gideon was dead to avoid spoiling WotS) or the sketchy character continuity between individual stories (Kaya raring to go save her home plane at the end of Forsaken only to detour to Kaldheim for poorly realized reasons).

That said, I do find myself caring about this comic less after learning that it's "non-canon" or "canon-adjacent", since like you said, it can become confusing (especially considering if we ever get that Netflix show, that will probably be in it's own continuity too). And ultimately, whatever story they want to tell "doesn't matter" outside the comic continuity (although elements from the comic may make their way to mainline continuity).


You might be a bit late on that one.

Issue 2 is out.
Vraska continues to balance being a softy with being a drama queen and Kaya continues to prove she's just the worst irresponsible hypocrite in the franchise. And that includes Jace being the Guildpact.
Ral's a'ight.
And chances are the person behind the scheme is not at all surprising.

...Cramming a Zendikar cameo in was horribly horribly dumb though.

In War of the Spark and The Gathering Storm: "uwu Ral you're my bestie"

Here: "YoU aRe HaRdLy My FiRsT cHoIcE"

Another issue out and the plot is actually getting kind of interesting.
Kaya is still fairly annoying, but we got a few nuggets of information about her home. Most of which isn't new, but I think there's a tiny shred of novel information there.

Vraska and Ral are decent characters here and the art does a pretty nice job of being expressive and recreating classic pieces like Rix Madi and Svogthos.

Caught up with the comics and the villain is in fact MARIT LAGE!

New issue deals a lot with old Dominaria flavor. Anyone care to point out inaccuracies?

But Helio, those aren't "inaccuracies"! It's a separate continuity and they wanted to give the writers the chance to tell their version of the story. Isn't that beautiful? /s

...Actually I was only being half-sarcastic, at least as far as the separate continuity is concerned. Then again, that makes it even worse by establishing a weird shadow continuity that a lot of confused people are going to take at face value and that may or may not be true in the main continuity. Honestly, part of me thinks this whole comic line was done out of a malicious intent to further muddle the waters and de-emphasise the importance of continuity. If everyone is confused and a new audience has been cultivated through a whole separate continuity, Creative might stop worrying about what's "canon" altogether. (See also: futuristic Kamigawa).

I'm not following the comics, but I might have a thing or two to say about possible inaccuracies if you are interested in telling me more.

Basically, Marit Lage is out and about being a cult. Jaya tells Ral Zarek, Vraska and Kaya that, way back in the ice age, Marit's brine shamans and other cultists were killing people in her name, and she became a sworn enemy of the cult. Then some time later a bunch of Marit worshipping Balduvians attacked Kjeldor by drinking salt water and becoming mutants, forcing Jaya to retreat.

After the Thawing Jaya, now a planeswalker, attacks Marit Lage, but her Cthulhuness is so powerful that she can only drive her glaciar into the Blind Eternities before her mind gets broken.

Now Marit Lage returns and wants Ravnicans to drink salt water.

Don't really think its anymore confusing than Time Spiral block having all the "what if" timelines/futures (which this basically is).




Oh thats totally true, also Maro is personally putting microchips in each foil (thats why they bend) best put your cards in tinfoil sleeves! /s

I was talking about new info concerning old lore specifically, though, or existing lore gaps being filled by those comics in general. It's actually fitting that it's Marit Lage we are talking about, because we know precious little about her, and the new info Helio mentioned is now essentially some kind of Schrödinger's canon because it was established in a comic that's separate from the main continuity. This is quite different from the Planar Chaos and Future Sight stuff. The latter had special frames and was restricted to the cards anyway, and the alternate versions of familiar legends in Planar Chaos created zero ambiguity concerning their canon in the main timeline. Cards like Mirri the Cursed and Crovax, Ascendant Hero only worked precisely because we knew the characters and stories from the main timeline that they were based on.


Please, everybody knows that. That's why their products have become so expensive. /s

That said, I'll give you that one. That new Innistrad story about Arlinn proves that the comic line wasn't even necessary, we've already arrived at a point where each new set or block essentially is its own separate continuity and freely ignores previously established information. I guess my trademark pessimism has been overtaken by reality much sooner than I thought.


Hm... Perhaps Jaya's involvement wouldn't sit quite right with me if we were talking about the main continuity, but the general info about Marit Lage sounds like a reasonable addition to the established lore. There is a card called Brine Shaman (salt water!) that has a dude with a mutated-looking face in it who's established as a Marit Lage cultist in the flavour text. The mutated Balduvians sound like a nod to Balduvian Conjurer. In fact, I had a bunch of similar ideas that I shared in the Northland thread a while ago:



I'm kind of on the fence about the Jaya stuff. Sure, it's not really a problem in the comics where we know certain events happened differently anyway. In the main continuity, however, we could argue about how big of a stretch it would or wouldn't be. I suppose she could have had a run-in with those cultists before the events of The Eternal Ice and it simply never came up again? Mutated Balduvians attacking Kjeldor are never mentioned anywhere, though. And it'd be a bit weird for Jaya to come back soon after the Thaw, but maybe if some time has passed? Does it say when she battled Marit Lage in the comic? I'm wondering whether there would be a clever way to use this as an explanation for why Jodah thought Jaya was dead in the Time Spiral books, but I can't tell you from the top of my head whether any timeframe for her supposed death was given. I think not, but then again, Jodah may or may not imply it's been more recent... On the other hand, why would they want to establish a big confrontation between Marit and Jaya that we never got to see (in the main continuity)?

So the bottom line is, solely based on what you told me, that this doesn't sound so bad. Most of it is actually pretty exciting to me, and I have a nagging suspicion that we might learn more about this in Dominaria United. All that stuff just sounds too weirdly specific and has too much attention to detail when it comes to integrating old cards for it to be a comics-only idea. My guess is that they took some of the lore produced for Dominaria United and shared it with the writers to give the audience a little teaser of things to come. I'm pretty sure producing a comic can be done much more quickly than putting out a Magic set, so the timing would line up. Plus, the teaser for the set had an image of what was pretty clearly New Argive, so Jaya being in the set is already pretty likely.

"For me, it started over 1,600 years ago" is how Jaya opens her flashback to the ice age.

The jump to the Balduvia on Kjeldor attack is 8 years.

After that the specific ages are unclear. There is clearly a fairly large gap between that incident and Jaya's encounter with Marit Lage, but how long it's been is unclear.

Well, "over 1,600 years ago" is exactly right in this context, because that's the time around the end of the Ice Age when Jaya was young. I'd say if her first encounter(s) with the Cult of Marit Lage happened a few years before The Eternal Ice and we flash forward eight years from there, that would put the attack of the mutant Balduvians somewhere in that 20-year-gap between the end of The Eternal Ice and the start of The Shattered Alliance*, and Kjeldor and Balduvia don't formally merge into New Argive until the end of that book, so that would fit. Granted, I'd have to look up whether any Balduvian attacks on Kjeldor are mentioned during that time period, or at least whether the political situation would make them seem plausible (or what other weirdly specific references might contradict any of this), but judging purely from the top of my head, I think this could work. And a large gap between the end of the Ice Age and Jaya's fight with Marit might actually fit the "Jaya is dead" part I mentioned above.


*Alternatively, Jaya's run-in with the cult could have happened in that gap after The Eternal Ice as well if we are okay with her referring to it as "the Ice Age" even though it had technically ended a few years before that. Note that Jaya was already possessed by Mairsil/Lim-Dûl during that time, but the takeover happened gradually and we have a lot of elbow room on the timeline here, so that's not an issue. In fact, Jaya did go around helping people during that time, so I guess she was still mostly herself for a while.

Damn, the more I think about it, the more I want to know whether any of this is actually going to be acknowledged in the main continuity. It sounds like it has a lot of potential. I really hope Dominaria United is going to clear things up...

See? That's what frustrates me about this being Schrödinger's continuity! Add that to the fact that we could be following Jaya and Jodah taking on Marit Lage or something right now instead of... *gestures helplessly at Cyberpunk Kamigawa and the D&D set*

Yeah, from what I can see the author did do the research after all, and since you describe this as extremely plausible I hope to all gods above and below me that it becomes actual canon.

Marit Lage's absence from the modern storyline is a sin as it is, but with this amazing set up it would be a crime to not use it.

Latest issue just dropped. If the body horror was canon it'd still be pretty distinct from Emrakul's and Phyrexia's touch, which is very nice.