A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Part 23: Magic Changes Forever; Nobody Notices
In the convoluted saga of the Magic storyline, planeswalkers are powerful magic users who can travel and manipulate the planes – the different universes that make up the Magic multiverse. Planeswalkers were, essentially, the gods of the setting, with their tragedies and machinations making up much of the backstory for the setting.
Planeswalkers were central to Magic's lore and plot, but they always had the problem of being all-powerful figures that didn't really work as the protagonists of a conventional fantasy story. For much of Magic's history, the narrative had been content to make them background figures in the drama of more conventional characters. For a long while, this was the 'Weatherlight Saga', a story that started in Mirage block and finally concluded many years later in Apocalypse, the last set in Invasion block.
This five-year storyline formed the backbone of early Magic mythology, the first time Magic really had coherent narrative direction. Stories from previous card sets and tie-in novels were knit together to form a heroic epic. The entire thing was set in motion by Urza – Magic’s ur-wizard figure and a powerful planeswalker – but the protagonists of the story were much more ordinary heroic figures – the crew of the titular airship Weatherlight – who were fighting against the forces of Urza’s original great enemy, the Phyrexians.
After the end of the Weatherlight saga, the Phyrexians were beaten back, the crew of the Weatherlight had concluded their arcs, and Magic found itself kind of aimless for a while again. The next two blocks, Odyssey and Onslaught form a sort of self-contained cycle, taking place a hundred years later on the remote continent of Otaria. Mirrodin is a whole self-contained story on a whole other plane, the metal world of Mirrodin; from this point on, Magic decides (finally) that it’s a world-hopping multiverse franchise, and each major block is set somewhere new. Kamigawa is Feudal Japan world. Ravnica is a city-spanning ecumenopolis.
And then, after years of meandering, Magic went back to the "main" plane of Dominaria, the site of the main storyline for all those years, for Time Spiral. Dominaria, at this point, was a ravaged wreck, destroyed by all the successive apocalypses. The set was about time travel and one of the core time travel tropes – the post-apocalyptic bad future.
Time Spiral's storyline ended with an event known as the Mending, in which several powerful planeswalkers gave up their power to repair the damaged multiverse. This was a sort of epilogue conclusion to the entire Weatherlight saga, a final point of connection between disparate strands of the story.
It was also a major depowering of Planeswalkers in the story. They still existed, they could still travel between worlds – just like how players travelled between worlds each year as Wizards launched new sets – but they were now much more like your common-or-garden-variety wizard. They were superhero powerful, not Galactus powerful. This was, of course, a very intentional move. Wizards wanted a persistent cast of characters who could hop from plane to plane and protagonize stories, but they wanted them to be functioning protagonists and not godlike plot devices.
So the final set of Time Spiral block, as I've mentioned before, is Future Sight. About a third of the cards in Future Sight are 'futureshifted', wacky cards from wacky possible futures with a wacky card frame. Among these is a wacky card called Tarmogoyf.
Tarmogoyf is itself a card with a fascinating role in the Magic metagame, but that's a story for another chapter – probably when we again catch up on the eternal formats. It did nothing of note in Standard.
But what I want to call your attention to is the reminder text. Tarmogoyf plays in somewhat novel mechanical space, but nothing that's truly weird and rule-breaking like some other futureshifted cards. What makes it from 'the future' are those two words in the reminder text, noting the existence of two new card types: Tribal and Planeswalker. Neither of those appear on cards in Future SIght. The Magic comprehensive rules are conspicuously updated to say that those card types exist – without any definition of how they work or what they do.
Tribal – recently, as I write this, renamed 'Kindred' as Wizards has opted to avoid using the word 'tribal' in this way in Magic – is not too important to our story. It'll come up later when I talk about the major decks and mechanics of Lorwyn, the only block that made extensive use of it.
Planeswalkers, however, represent the biggest change to the game of Magic itself since the sixth edition rules changes. Planeswalkers are now a card type unto themselves. They will, in time, come to be extremely important, and they will change the dynamic of how the game is played. But for a few months in 2007, they were just a suggestion, a glimmer.
There is a lot of instant hubbub around the new card types and what they could mean. Many, many players try their hand at possible designs for how planeswalkers could work. Speculation abounds. Some think that either planeswalkers or tribal or both won't be a thing at all – some of the Future Sight cards are merely "possible futures", after all, and might not come to pass.
And then six months later in October of 2007, Lorwyn block comes out, and with it, the first five Planeswalkers ever added to the game.
They look like no other Magic cards. Planeswalkers have a unique frame, a unique illustration aspect ratio. Their illustrations even break out of the frame, as if they're more real than a normal Magic character. The game's graphic design is very clearly modernizing and ever more taking cues from other, more recent trading card games.
Unlike other new mechanics introduced to the game, planeswalkers are not self-explanatory. They come with new, additional rules baggage – a first – that players will have to learn and understand, just like how they understand creatures and spells.
A brief primer of how these work, if you're unfamiliar: Planeswalkers enter with a certain amount of 'loyalty', their key resource. Once per turn you activate one of their abilities, which either costs or increments their loyalty. When you attack with creatures, you can now choose to attack your opponent's planeswalkers; damage dealt to planeswalkers reduces their loyalty. If their loyalty drops to zero, they die.
Planeswalkers show a critical shift in the evolution of the game's design. Early Magic was, with the exception of a few one-off cards that used tokens, a game meant to be compact and to require little of the player's memory. The entire game state was represented using only the cards themselves – what's in play, what's in hand, what's in the graveyard, what's in the deck. Turning cards sideways to 'tap' them and indicate they had been used, for example, removed the need for external tokens. Damage on creatures was wiped at the end of every turn. The only extra piece of state you had to track was your own life total.
This meant that all you really needed was a deck and maybe pen and paper, and you had what you needed to play Magic. This suited the game's original intent as a game played in little bits of stolen time – your lunch hour, recess, in between sessions at a convention.
Planeswalkers were not like this. Loyalty was persistent and tracked across turns. If your deck had a planeswalker in it, you kind of had to carry dice or counters or some kind. This is part of a broader trend – Magic around the same time starts using ever more counters and tokens.
Not coincidentally, 2006 marks the beginning of Wizards' ongoing 'strategic partnership' with Ultra•PRO, a manufacturer of card game accessories like sleeves, binders, and deckboxes. The game is expanding outside the cards themselves and outside the deckbox. What began with throwing a stack of cards held together with rubber bands into a backpack is beginning to turn into an all-consuming lifestyle.
Planeswalkers also tie into another long-term trend in the game's design, the greater and greater emphasis on creatures. Creatures were always central to Magic, but more and more the design philosophy tried to disallow creatureless decks or ensure that creature combat happened in constructed play.
Planeswalkers, especially in the earlier years of their existence, turned the normal patterns of interaction in the game on their head. A planeswalker sits in play, generating value for one player, and is extremely difficult to remove with a normal removal spell – cards that destroy planeswalkers were simply not really printed early on. Instead, you're meant to attack planeswalkers with creatures. A reactive deck without creatures would, in theory, struggle against planeswalkers.
In time, planeswalkers really are going to change Magic forever. Some of them will be broken cards that dominate formats. But even 'normal' planeswalkers will eventually become format pillars. We will see Standard environments where planeswalkers are just a fact of life; every deck plays theirs, and they are all important.
But these planeswalkers aren't that. These planeswalkers are such a timid stab at the concept that they will do very little in Standard. All of these characters – also newly introduced with the cards – will go on to be hugely important in the storyline, will get multiple good cards printed, will matter a lot.
Garruk Wildspeaker will be relevant in Standard, although it'll be a role player and not the card really driving people to play an archetype. The other four? In the fullness of hindsight, they are flops. They are such flops that they disguised and obscured the potency of planeswalkers entirely, and probably contributed to just how hard and how fast planeswalkers would break the game just two years later.
To illustrate how little these cards did, the first Standard pro tour after Lorwyn was Pro Tour Hollywood, held in 2008. In the top 8, most players did not have a planeswalker in their deck. Of the three who did, all three had copies of Garruk; of those three, only one was sporting the full four copies. One only had him in the sideboard. The eventual winner of that Pro Tour, Charles Gindy, had two.
Next time: I'll talk about the actual Lorwyn-era Standard metagame, including that green deck that actually used Garruk. Lorwyn is fascinating – and though planeswalkers are a huge part of Magic's history going forward, they are kind of a footnote in Lorwyn itself.