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“Forgotten Estates” ~ Paris (2015) by Laurent Kronental ⬣ Aging brutalist monuments frame daily life in suburban housing blocks

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'Norwood Riders' by Rebecca Guay.

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Watching it burn, Konstantin Korobov

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Now I'm just curious if there are any other artworks from Magic's past that come this close to just replicating an exact scene/frame from an existing piece of work.

What people are trying to communicate to you is exactly that the way modern sets handle tropes HAS in fact gotten more heavy-handed than in the past. Twins of Maurer Estate references the same trope as Unsettling Twins — but the former does so obliquely, and in a way that's particular to the specific Magic setting; whereas the latter simply states the literal name of the trope outright. And if you look more broadly, you'll see the same trend throughout recent sets.

I'm not even making an assertion that this change is a bad thing. I'm just hoping for you to recognize that the change exists as an objective observable phenomenon.

But, it hasn't got more heavy-handed. We've done blunt naming since the game began in Alpha (Black/White Knight, Lightning Bolt, Castle, Animate Dead, etc.) For example, here are names from expansions set on Innistrad (where the Twins of Maurer Estate example comes from):

Aim for the Head, Army of the Damned, Black Cat, Blood Pact, Boarded Window, Bride’s Gown, Bump in the Night, Burn Down the House, Burning Oil, Butcher’s Cleaver, Brain in a Jar, Ceremonial Knife, Cellar Door, Convicted Killer, Creepy Doll, Evil Twin, Executioner’s Hood, Foul Play, Gone Missing, Graveyard Shovel, Identity Thief, Jack-o’-Lantern, Jar of Eyeballs, Laid to Rest, Lost in the Woods, Magnifying Glass, Night Terrors, Runaway Carriage, Sanctify, Séance, Shard of Broken Glass, Skeleton Key, Stuffed Bear, Unruly Mob, Vampire’s Kiss, Walking Corpse, Wooden Stake and Zombie Apocalypse.

I think the thing going on this year is that we are heaviest with blunt names the first time we visit a world, because we haven't mined a lot of the simple, blunt names yet. 2024 had *three* new worlds each with a new theme with lots of tropes to plumb, plus a revisited world as a backdrop with a brand new theme we hadn't done.

Should we have pulled back a bit on the volume of top-down naming? Should we have done less new worlds in a row? Should we have intertwined unique story elements more? All of that is fair to discuss. I'm not saying we did everything correctly, because obviously some players are unhappy.

My point is this isn't a case of us doing things any differently than we've done before (except maybe in volume, and set proximity) when it comes to bluntness of naming.

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Sorcery, MtG Card design by Babs Webb on Instagram

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The Queen of the Night (Simon Quaglio, 1818)

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Thundering Falls (Murders at Karlov Manor No. 269, Illus. Grady Frederick)

I already touched on this a bit in my entry on Scene of the Crime - but a very fun part of every visit to Ravnica is looking at the architecture pictured in the card art and trying to imagine how it is utilized. What is this huge chasm between the buildings for? How would it be like to spend a lazy afternoon strolling through this Selesnya garden? Where does this doorway lead to? And so on. Sometimes I wish there was a Ravnica video game where you could actually move through the city and all its interconnected streets, staircases and rooms. It would be very fun to just take the city in like that, even if there was no actual gameplay to it.

As far as guild affiliation goes, Thundering Falls is a bit ambiguous. Its colors suggest an affiliation with the Izzet, but there are no trademark Izzet influences here - no masses of bronze pipes, no lightning towers, no boilerworks. It seems like this is a more or less neutral area, connected to red and blue mana based mostly on its geography (and the underlying leylines). Some members of the Izzet could live here, but the guild doesn't have a strong enough grip on the area to completely transform it. When I look at the small tower in the foreground, I imagine a small mage's studio. The part with the window front is the main studio area, and there's probably a small bedchamber and kitchen below it or in the back. Another intriguing thing about this tower are the small spires floating aroung it. They don't seem big enough to hold a person of any kind of furniture - so what are they for? Maybe they hold magical focus items of sorts that would be too dangerous to keep in the main building or stabilize the structure somehow.

I imagine the bottom of this spire/cliff structure to be a huge reservoir type of area, similar to the one shown on this island from Guilds of Ravnica. Waterfalls are a very common feature shown on blue-aligned lands from Ravnica sets, with the main reason probably being that they look cool. It still makes me wonder just how much height difference there is between the highest and lowest parts of the city, and where all the water originates.

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Sol Ring (Secret Lair Drop No. 1696, Illus. Lindsey Look)

This illustration is from the recent "Sheldon's Spellbook" Secret Lair Drop dedicated to the late Sheldon Menery (RIP). I like the relative subtlety of this piece. In most Sol Ring illustrations, the ring is front and center, with its power emphasized in an obvious manner. Here, it is still quite noticeable, but has more of a supporting role, guiding the writer to pen some (both literally and figuratively) powerful words. Is it a spell he's writing out? Or a magical letter?

The style of the illustration reminds me of one of my favourite settings shown on the "futureshifted" cards from back in 2007 - let's call it the "magical Victorian not!London" plane. Arcanum Wings, Patrician's Scorn, Street Wraith and maybe also Imperial Mask and Grave Scrabbler show this setting. There are also some other cards like Locket of Yesterdays or the Iconic Masters printing of Manakin that, while not being "futureshifted," fit this aesthetic very well.

I've been thinking about how this Victorian plane would look like if it was fully fleshed out. Gothic and Cosmic Horror are Innistrad's thing, and the next close match - Steampunk - has been done on Ravnica (with the Izzet) and Kaladesh. I suppose Magic still lacks a proper "gritty" steampunk plane, since Kaladesh is very neat- and clean-looking overall and the Izzet have a strong comedic element to them. However, looking at how there seems to be an enchantment theme to this plane (Arcanum Wings, Patrician's Scorn, Imperial Mask), I would probably steer closer to Gaslamp Fantasy, or maybe a mix of that and Steampunk.

Magical Victorian not!London could only be one part of the setting, with the rest of the plane drawing inspiration from other European countries. If not!London is centered in Blue, White, and Black, there could be a magical Celtic France region focused in White, Green and Red and a region of fragmented kingdoms based on various Germanic and Slavic people centered in Red, Green, and Black. I might do some more posts on this fan plane idea if I end up fleshing it out in the future.

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Dimir Strandcatcher (Ravnica: Clue Edition No. 30, Illus. Iris Compiet)

A lot of cards in Murders at Karlov Manor reference classic detective and crime fiction, but of course there are also many references to things we have seen during previous visits to Ravnica. In the art for Dimir Strandcatcher, we can see the memory strands that were introduced as a trademark Dimir "magic effect" in Guilds of Ravnica (Never Happened, Mission Briefing, Thoughtbound Phantasm).

The strands represent memories and thoughts, but since this creature is called a Strandcatcher, it seems like they don't always have to be forcefully "pulled out" of people's heads. Apparently thoughts sometimes extend from the head like tentacles, and all that Dimir agents have to do is to catch, process, and bundle them. I also assume that they must not be visible to everyone all the time, or else this faerie wouldn't be able to just sit on a lamp post and extract everyone's thoughts in plain sight.

Aside from the memory strands, there is another visual callback in this illustration, which also hints at a mechanical connection. The insects buzzing around the faerie shown here are clearly Dimir Spybugs. These bugs ostensibly feed on discarded memories, and the Strandcatcher is able to provide those repeatedly and en masse (both in lore and mechanical terms). No wonder the spybugs are gathered around them like a swarm of flies who just found a fresh piece of carrion.

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Scene of the Crime (Murders at Karlov Manor No. 267, Illus. Jokubas Uogintas)

While I'm pretty so-so on all the trenchcoats and fedoras/detective hats heavily featured in MKM, I really like these "barrier wards" (as they're called in the Planeswalker's Guide). Just like the Cryptoliths in Shadow over Innistrad or the blue-colored "time boundaries" in Time Spiral, they create a neat visual through-line connecting illustrations from the same set while fitting into the existing setting pretty seamlessly (unlike all the hats and other fashion ... grumble, grumble).

In addition to being a set signifier/identifier ("this card is from MKM!"), they also are really good at creating a sense of depth and immersion. On many of the illustrations featuring them, they create a line going from the foreground into the background, pulling the viewer into the picture. This makes the illustrations feel more grounded - it's like you're standing right there. Other than scene of the crime, Tenth District Hero, Crowd-Control Warden, Perimeter Enforcer and all the full-art surveil lands also use this "trick."

There seem to be different models of barrier wards. In most illustration featuring them, the "markers" are finely crafted metal pieces resembling the R.A.M.I symbol. The markers in Scene of the Crime, however, look somewhat crude - as if they were hastily (and sloppily) sculpted. Whereas the ward in Tenth District Hero feels like it makes a crisp, crackling sound, this ward would probably sound softer, sputtering and rustling like a candle that's about to burn out. Maybe they belong to some no-name private investigator somewhere far from the Tenth District, not even officially affiliated with the R.A.M.I, trying to get by on their own.

Out of all of them, the illustration for Scene of the Crime is the one with the strongest feel of immersion for me. Do you know that feeling when you stumble upon an unremarkable, but kind of hidden area in a video game? A spot on the map that the developers probably didn't put much thought into, but makes you able to view the world from a different angle/perspective? Scene of the Crime triggers that sense of discovery. I want to go through the door in the background, explore the rest of the house, the street below it ... with its heavy focus on architecture, Ravnica is a very good setting for these kinds of unremarkable, but subtly captivating places.

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Veiled Ascension (Murders at Karlov Manor Commander No. 18, Illus. Domenico Cava)

The afterlife is an area of Ravnican afterlife is an area that's surprisingly unexplored. Sure, we all know that the souls of many people get bound to the Orzhov and continue to hang around as indebted ghosts. And in the past, there used to be the pocket plane of Agyrem (also known as the Ghost Quarter), which led to even more ghosts being around (since the Mending, this has since been resolved).

However, beyond all the ghost-related stuff, the lore is pretty vague. Is there an underworld or heavenly realm that people go to after they die? There are angels on Ravnica - but then again, in Magic, angels are first and foremost constructs of pure white mana and not necessarily messengers of some kind of god.

So what is happening in the art in Veiled Ascension? The people depicted here don't seem to be ghosts - they're very much made of flesh and blood, not wispy smoke or bright glowing spirit energy. Considering this, the illustration seems to show some kind of rapture event, where people are literally (and also metaphorically?) lifted into heaven. However, since it is shown on only one card and happenings like this don't get mentioned in the story or anywhere else, it can't be that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

The card doesn't have any flavor text, but maybe we can extrapolate from the rules text a bit. The mechanics care about disguised and cloaked creatures. Aside from disguised criminals, face-down creatures in MKM are also flavored as regular people/nobodies. So the people depicted here are probably guildless commoners.

Another point worth noting is that the rules text doesn't mention the graveyard. The name and the imagery make it feel very afterlife-y. But there's also the possibility that this ascension isn't related to death. Based on these observations, I think there are two possibilities:

The card depicts living commoners that are being given wings as some sort of magical favor.

The card depicts the dead bodies of commoners being exalted and lifted into some sort of heavenly afterlife.

Either way, it seems like this event is not connected to any kind of guild activity. It's too benevolent / non-profit oriented for the Orzhov, and too peaceful for the Boros. Given the absence of "celestial gods" on Ravnica (opposed to the Old Gods of the earth associated with the Gruul), my conclusion for now is that Veiled Ascension represents the white mana of Ravnica acting on its own, as an ambient natural force, to reward the good deeds of commoners who have gone unrecognized. If they are dead, maybe they are lifted towards the sun and merged with the white mana of the plane. If they are living, maybe a flight on magical wings represents the turning point in their life, when they are freed from their hardships.

White mana "erratically" acting on its own, without any focus or agent, would also explain why the cloaks-turned-wings are so unsymmetrical and messy. White mana is manifesting, just like it does when angels are created - but in an uncontrolled, imperfect way. Going by this interpretation, it couls also mean that the artificialness of the plane has warped and transformed its mana flow, which has limited its abilities to affect the world "naturally."

Random side note at the end: While a lot less scary, the figures in this art strongly remind me of the Pilgrim Butterflies in the Dark Souls games. Not only are there some visual similarities - similar to the butterflies, they're also not explained and left open to interpretation. I think Fromsoft-style indirect worldbuilding works really well in Magic.

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Beholders  - Mia Bergeron , 2024.

American, b. 1979   - 

Oil on canvas , 24 x 24 cm.

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Griffnaut Tracker (Murders at Karlov Manor No. 17, Illus. Svetlin Velinov)

One area of Ravnica worldbuilding that I often find myself wondering about are the city's "outskirts." As far as we know, the plane of Ravnica is entirely covered by city. But even in modernmetropolises, the city limits usually include some parts that are not as built up as the center, or borderline countryside (like the mountainous western part of Tokyo prefecture). So could it be similar on Ravnica?

Most Ravnica sets are set within the tenth district, which is essentially the heart of the city - so the backgrounds are usually filled with buildings. However, there have been some instances where the environment seem less urban. Take this forest from Return to Ravnica, for example. It looks like the central districts are off in the distance, and the part that is shown here is slightly tending towards the "rural" side. This mountain from the same set also seems to show the city center giving way to a low-rise surburbia kind of region.

In MKM, there are another few examples: This forest, this Island, this Plains. Going by how Ravnica is usually portrayed, you'd expect to see a mass of huge spires on the horizon, but the sky is mostly empty here, and the buildings that are there are around four stories tall at their highest point. The art for Tolsimir, Midnight's Light also shows him standing in what seems to be an empty field (although since Vitu-Ghazi is visible in the distance, I suppose this is a smaller area that was leveled during the Phyrexian invasion).

The background on Griffnaut Tracker seems to give us another glimpse at "rural Ravnica." There's a huge spire and some city blocks on the right, but in the left, beyond the Selesnya Guildgate, you can see meadows and natural hills, with a river slowly winding through them. Clouds are obscuring the horizon, so I guess one could argue that this is supposed to show a big park, not the countryside. But it doesn't really look like a Selesnyan park, does it? If that was the case, I'd expect to see a lot more landscaping, trees and groves interwoven with architecture, etc. The background right here just looks like a stretch of not-built-over land that's maybe maintained by a few rangers.

Of course, I don't think Griffnaut Tracker (or any of the basic lands I mentioned) confirm the existence of a "rural Ravnica." It's still fully speculative at this point. However, I do like the idea that there are far-off parts of the city where the plane almost retains some of its original, natural surface. Having fringes like that makes the setting a bit more realistic/diverse. It's something that would be nice to see explored a bit in future visits to the plane - even if it's just in the background like here.

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Experiment Twelve (Murders at Karlov Manor Commander No. 37, Illus. Michele Grigori)

I'm a big fan of the Simic guild - always have been. However, like most of the Ravnica guilds, they have gone through some slight flanderization, so their "silly" side (crazy animal mashups! weird self-modification!) gets emphasized a lot in the card game.

For example, take Experiment Twelve. She has lizard arms. OK. That may be really good for tearing apart your enemies, or punching through walls. But imagine having to each dinner with these hands! How does she eat? Can she use cutlery? Does she do animal-style eating, just going in face first? Or does she get her food astronaut-style, fed straight through the gas mask-like thing she's wearing? We'll never know!

Also, there's an implied continuity here between this illustration and Experiment One. Experiment One was just a slimy blob with some bones in it, so I guess this implies they got better (or more conservative?) about preserving the original humanoid form of the test subject.

Anyway, it's always this outrageous side of the Simic that gets displayed on cards, but in-universe, the "boring" applications of their Magic seem like the real bangers. If they can make people half ooze, then they can probably lab-grow every kind of organ there is. Spare hearts, livers, lungs and kidneys for everyone! Maybe even extra brains? Apparently the Golgari are responsible for most of the food production on Ravnica, but it for sure seems like given a few years at most, the Simic could come up with some sort of plant-based superfood that grows super easily, doesn't need much space and fulfills all your dietary needs. Some sort of super biomass reactor could be a really interesting collaboration project for the Golgari, Simic and Izzet to undertake together!

But alas, all those things don't tie into magical combat ... so they'll probably never be properly acknowledged.

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Foreboding Steamboat (Murders at Karlov Manor Commander No. 28, Illus. Josu Solano)

Murders at Karlov Manor is fully spoiled, and the big-format JPGs and PNGs are rolling in! I think I'm going to make a Top 10 post and a post on my general feelings about the set, but for now let's look at some individual pieces.

Is full of references to classic murder mysteries, and Foreboding Steamboat is obviously representing Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Mississippi." I'm feeling very ambivalent on the high number of references in this set, but this is one that I like. Not because of the reference, but because of the artwork and how it fits in the setting. By which I mean - it doesn't. A steamboat doesn't really fit on Ravnica. But in this case, the illustration exudes the kind of enjoyable weirdness that was also present in some older Magic sets.

From a marketing standpoint, the Dimir are a bit of a pain in the neck. For a brief period after the original Ravnica block, they got a bit less secretive, becoming librarians, information industry workers, etc. But in MKM, after the Phyrexian invasion, they're back to being "the guild that doesn't exist." The problem is, in visual terms, WotC wants strong "branding" so that the players can identify more easily with their guilds. That usually means guild symbols and motifs being plastered everywhere. But that's not exactly what a secretive guild like the Dimir would do...

There are no obvious Dimir guild logos to be found on Foreboding Steamboat, but small hints like the flecks of blue light over the water or blue streaks in the smoke hint at it being at least affiliated with the guild. I imagine that in-universe, no one really knows why such a boat exists and who runs it. There are no registration papers, no official owners. It just appears every now and then, and suddenly, certain people feel strangely compelled to go on a boat cruise on Ravnica's canals. Before the Azorius or the Boros can do anything, the boat disappears again, just like the people that went aboard. For me, it almost feels more like a supernatural horror thing than a murder mystery thing.

Because MKM is a backdrop set (and is more about the "murder mystery" gimmick than the guilds), it remains to be seen where WotC will go with the Dimir. I hope they don't go back to "actually they have an overt arm that's managing libraries," because that would basically invalidate what they did with them in this set. But until then, we can only wait.

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Vesperlark (Modern Horizons No. Raoul Vitale)

If Dead of Winter represents the end of all things, then Vesperlark is a symbol for hope and light in the darkness. Magic classifies this being as an "elemental", but between the wings and the weird, otherworldly appearance, you might as well interpret it as an angel of sorts (after all, white elementals and angels in MtG are similar in the sense that they are made out of pure white mana).

However, as a winter-themed card, Vesperlark still focuses on the fading of light. "Vesper" refers to evening prayers, and in archaic language even means "evening" in itself. Unlike Reveillark (which it obviously is a hommage to), the ball of light between the twisted branches at its center is not that of a fresh new morning or dawn, but the dim, warm light of a winter sunset.

In terms of visual worldbuilding and storytelling, I like that Vesperlark shows an aspect of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor that has never been shown before. Shadowmoor was always hovering in an endless state of late autumn, but the cards from the set never showed winter.

In the story for the original block, Lorwyn and Shadowmoor merged at the end. The specifics of that event (or in what state it left the plane exactly) have never been explained. The upcoming "Return to Lorwyn" block might bring answers, but my gut feeling is that Wizards is going to retcon at least some parts of the original block's ending. After all, "a world split between light and dark" is Lorwyn/Shadowmoor's main thing, and from a marketing perspective it makes little sense to get rid of it.

However, regardless of how the next official set looks - to me, Vesperlark represents a timeline in which Lorwyn and Shadowmoor did merge, and stayed that way. There is a relatively normal day and night cycle, and the fours seasons come and go. In autumn and winter, the darker denizens of the plane grow stronger, and in spring and summer, light reigns. In such a world, Vesperlark would be a messenger that makes appears to defenders of the light in the hours before darkness, to remind them that they can't give up, because a new dawn will come.