What we talk about when we talk about "Magic story"

On worlds, play, and experience

The first Magic card I can remember really looking at—really stopping and staring at and contemplating—was Danitha Capashen, Paragon.

She was tucked into a mid-tier Syr Gwyn, Hero of Ashvale EDH deck I grabbed off Moxfield and proxied to play with friends. I didn’t know anything about Dominaria or Ravnica or Eldraine or anywhere else, but the sight of her arrested me. Look at that sword! Look at her armor! Look at her quote I’ve never seen anything like that! Danitha produced in me the kind of hazy half-clear vision of a story that comes from rich worldbuilding; there were no other Dominaria cards in the deck, so she floated there, in a void, promising endless possibilities. I was entranced not because of the personality printed on the card, but because of the open potential.

And yet there was something disappointing in that, too. I felt the same way when I got really into playing Magic and reading the story: there was such life to the worlds, such fascinating aesthetics and promise seeded into so many named and unnammed characters across a thousand thousand worlds (so it seemed), but those possibilities didn’t come into view. They held the same kind of power that action figures held for me when I was eight years old: the descriptions on backs of chunky cardboard boxes and the crystalline images printed in my mind could never live up to the banality of play itself.

The ache worsened as I tried to trace Danitha in the web fiction and across other cards. She’s fared better than many legends—she’s appeared more than once, after all—but each of her appearances was a mere vaporous hint at an amazing character and an interesting story. As the web fiction and worldbuilding guides illuminate, Danitha is the heir to House Capashen, the most powerful house in the Dominarian nation of Benalia; during the events of Dominaria, she declines to join Jhoira’s reformed Weatherlight crew, and in Dominaria United, she takes the stage for two scenes—fighting and being forced to kill her father, Aron, who had been Phyrexianized during the new invasion. These appearances were profound and evocative, but still left me feeling unfulfilled; I loved the pathos and mythic power of the plot and the mixture of melancholy and resolutness in cards like Danitha, Benalia’s Hope and Danitha, New Benalia’s Light, but something was—missing.

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Those who ask anything of Magic’s story ask a lot of it. Visit Reddit’s r/mtgvorthos subreddit for living proof: within a few clicks, you’ll be up to your knees in critiques of the web fiction, critiques of Wizards’ (often-mentioned) oversaturated business model, critiques of the shift away from the expansive Magic novels (notwithstanding their dubious quality and poor sales), critiques that what shows up in the story doesn’t show up on the cards and that what shows up on the cards doesn’t show up in the story. To be fair, there’s plenty of positivity as well—new episodes of the web fiction tend to be met with praise in the comments (even if the general sentiment flips after everything is said and done). Nonetheless, I’ve noticed that amidst all this commentary and complaint, there’s an essential question that goes unmentioned.

When we claim to be talking about story in Magic, what are we actually talking about?

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Magic story isn’t like other TCG storytelling.

Magic isn’t like Pokémon, in which video games inspired a card game and an anime that have since recursively pollinated each other; in Magic, the game is the source material for the story, not the other way around. Nor is Magic like other fantasy storytelling, where the main action happens in books or movies; although the narrative web fiction is meaningful to some parts of the community (I love it, personally), these stories are auxiliary to Magic’s central thrust. Many more players know Ajani or Jace or Elspeth than have ever read the web fiction.

But what is story, after all? How does it happen?

This might seem like an odd question. Story is story, of course, with characters and plot, and a story happens when characters take actions or things occur to propel a plot.

But I mean this literally: how does a story actually happen?

The answer is different for every single medium, of course. When you read a story, a story happens as you read each new word; when you watch a story, each new frame your eye perceives moves the story along; when you play a video game, it happens as you take every action to interact in the confines of the bounded world the game has created. Usually, games are attributed a special kind of storytelling capacity called emergent narrative, which are the kinds of narratives created as a player interacts with a world in ways big and small, outside of the explicit script of the game; the narrative in Mass Effect includes not just the cutscenes, but the act of running to a location or fighting off enemies (emergent narrative is part of the reason a boss battle has to feel at least a little difficult to feel narratively satisfying—you can’t just be told that you’ve beaten the odds to defeat the biggest bad guy in the universe, you have to feel how hard it was to do).

But really, emergent narrative falls under a general pattern that the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser identified in literature: every text sets in motion an experience in which the reader imaginatively constructs the text’s virtual world in their imagination, using the materials a text has provided and filling in the blanks that a text’s ambiguities can’t cover. When a novel narrates what a character is doing, it can never capture every single detail—you can tell me a character is running, for example, but you couldn’t possibly tell me everything, how many beads of sweat were on him or the exact temperature of the air or the heat of the sun on his brow (and even if you did, you’d need to keep writing forever to describe all the other details). Instead, a writer supplies the reader with a starting point, and then we fill in the details by using our own meaning-making capacities. This is the same reason we don’t short-circuit when a text confuses or surprises us (which it should always be doing, otherwise it wouldn’t really be a story); we fill in the rupture with our own imagination. The point is, for Iser, that literature is less like a 3D model and more like an “event,” something that’s “experienced as something which is happening” because new possibilities are constantly arising, resolving, and unfolding more possibilities (The Act of Reading). The point where story happens is the moment when we meet a text and need to fill in the spaces.

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Where does this leave Magic?

Magic’s story is eclectic. Its ingredients are sprinkled across cards, narrative web fiction, cinematic trailers, worldbuilding videos, and supplemental materials like Planeswalker’s Guides, art books, and “Legends of” articles. But where does it happen? Do I experience the story when I read Miguel Lopez’s holy-shit-this-is-incredible all-encompassing guide to the Lost Caverns of Ixalan or the haunting Building Worlds video for Phyrexia or James Wyatt’s lovingly crafted guide to Mending-era Dominaria? Is it when I’m inspired by the interplay between Mirko’s obsession and Lazav’s mysterious disappearance in the “Legends of” article for Murders at Karlov Manor? Is it when I watch Compleated Ajani scrap with Teferi, or when I read K. Arsenault Rivera’s astounding March of the Machine web fiction? Is it when I merely look at Mirrodin Avenged, or do I need to play it, too?

These are the tricky quandaries of Magic, because, of course, the answer might be all of the above, none of the above, or a few of the above, depending on the person. It’s hard to imagine that any one of them can be the answer: the guides are more description than narrative, the videos are more snippets than stories, and the web fiction doesn’t depict nearly everything from the cards and the cards don’t depict nearly everything from the web fiction.

I think this multiplicity reflects that, in a game like Magic, there’s a gentle and beautiful ecosystem of experience in which story happens. It can’t live in the web fiction alone; it also has to live in the experience of play, and the experience of looking, and the experience of watching, and the experience of reading description, and so much more; it happens in the interplay of text and reader, in the imaginative formation of a world that fills lived-in.

But still more is required, I think. As those who have ever created or run a world for a tabletop RPG know all too well, a world isn’t alive when it’s printed on the page. It requires the springing-forth of narration and play, imaginative possibilities that feel like they’re genuinely happening. Like the Danitha card that first got me hooked, it’s about the adventures I imagine for her—but staying inside the head can be sterilizing. Magic story can feel like a flash of light on the horizon, a vaporous impression that you can get just-this-close to before it retreats. I remember the emptiness and melancholy that came from Danitha’s story being so fragmentary. It was so purely charged with possibility that my mere imaginings will never be the same as the articulated story. Something else is needed, some additional part of the ecosystem that will help unfurl the boundless pulsing life contained in these small little places. Perhaps it’s fan stories (in an effort to exorcise my demons, I went on a word bender and wrote a non-official 30,000-word-long short story series about Danitha, and it was quite satisfying).

This isn’t a dismissal of Magic’s story. It’s an expression of its richness—and a hope for more. What else can we do, I wonder, to be both consumer and creator alike, both analytical critic and imaginative maker? The answer, of course, is bound up with the affordances of content creation in the Magic world, the way that there are very few spaces to write and publish anything at all and little coherent niche for fan-created art and content, considering the glut of official content. But I hope, for the sake of making these dreams real, we can find more.