Picture it - it’s the early late 90s, and I’m drifting through college, more concerned about where the big party is this weekend instead of my struggling GPA, or even thinking about what I might want my major to be.
Turns out there ARE no big parties this weekend, but my best friend invites me to his dorm room to play cards. Cards? Ok, but doesn’t sound like all that much fun. High-stakes poker aside, cards seem like what you play when you don’t have anything better to do.
But when I walk in the door I find out we’re not talking regular cards. We’re talking Magic: The Gathering cards. I can’t emphasize enough, there was NOTHING like this in the world at that point. I had played computer games, I had played D&D, but I had never, ever even seen a game like Magic before. We went over the rules quickly, and jumped into a game.
By my second turn, I was hooked. And the morning after, I spent my food money for the week on a deck and a few booster packs.
Several years, settings, expansions, and hundreds of dollars later, I put all my cards in a box, put that box in a closet, and lost it somewhere over several moves. There was nothing wrong with the game, I was just moving on to other things. But I’d always look back on it with a fondness.
So, imagine my surprise, when decades later, I was asked to come on board the official Magic: The Gathering comic, by Boom! Studios. Talk about dreams come true!
Being a big fan of Jed Mackay’s writing, I had been keeping up with the series on my own, and was more than excited at the prospect of designing and writing a new arc with him, and all the talented artists working on the title. I loved what they were doing, and wanted to do everything I could to push it to the next level.
What we came up with was The War of Fate - a multiverse-spanning storyline where our team of planeswalkers races against time to foil the ambitions of Isona Maive, a young planeswalker who will stop at nothing to change the fate her home plane was doomed to.
After the explosive events of Issue #20, we questioned where to take the story - and the answer was to pull out all the stops - making it bigger, crazier, and full of more action than even we imagined at first. Part of the goal of issue #21, though, is to provide a great new jumping on point for people who might be checking the book out for the first time, and I have to say, I’m pretty proud of how this first page bridges the gap between the two storylines.
You can check out the first five pages at this link right here, and pick up tissue #21 on Wednesday (12/7)! I hope you come along for the ride, we’ve got some crazy, crazy stuff planned, with characters every Magic fan will be dying to see!
- Rich