We’re approaching my favorite time of year: the weeks between hurricane season and Halloween. It’s a time when, while still in the eighties in South Carolina, there’s incipient change in the air—a golden tinge to the light, a tremor in the limbs that suggests the harvest is coming. In a couple of weeks, the cicadas will fall silent, the leaves will start to flare, and pumpkins will appear on porches. It’s the time of year when you open every single window, put on some Tom Waits, and indulge in pumpkin spice-flavored treats. Jane Austen called it “that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,” and it’s a time I always look forward to. This year also brings a highly-anticipated Magic set, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t most excited about that. We aren’t just getting new cards; we’re getting new Ravnica cards, and autumnal Ravnica cards, at that.
One of my milder shames is how deeply I was into Ray Bradbury as a kid—his breathless, paid-by-the-word and deep-in-the-thesaurus Americana was extremely up my alley during my embarrassingly idyllic childhood. I was a precocious millennial raised by literate Baby Boomers—the children of parents traumatized by the Great Depression and the depredations of World War II. My reading lists led me to an anti-Communist, proto-Objectivist “greatest country on Earth until the outsiders tried to drag us down” ethos that was equal parts Strangelove and Lovecraft. Not outright fascist or anything, but an unquestioned, small-c conservative mindset that catalyzes fascism. Now, a little bit smarter and a lot better read, I recognize that all art is intrinsically political, and that art based in preserving an idealized version of something most never experienced is the most political art of all. But there’s still, even now, a part of me that always wants to read Something Wicked This Way Comes or The Halloween Tree this time of year.
All of which is to say that Guilds of Ravnica feels like coming home. The gilded light, the touches of burgundy and goldenrod in the scenery, the gusts of leaves that swirl through the art of Boros soldiers and Dimir skulkers—it doesn’t just feature autumnal imagery, it evokes Autumn itself. Innistrad, released on September 30th, 2011, did something similar—there was an autumnal palette to the cards that mirrored the harvest-time feel of the plane. It’s beautiful from an objective sense, but Wizards is also using these images in order to suggest a deeper theme: the winding down of an entire society.
After Dominaria, Ravnica is Wizards’ most recognizable plane. (Jesse Mason, in his formative series of design analyses, points out that Ravnica isn’t just a good story, but a story that only Magic can tell.) If they intend to leave it in ruins, we have to start acclimating ourselves to the idea now. So a beautiful autumn is what’s in store now, but Wizards is clear that we’re heading towards some bitter winter. I don’t expect them to fully explode the world—after Amonkhet’s destruction, the transformation of Mirrodin, and the temporary-but-total Emrakulization of Innistrad, I expect a more subdued fate for Ravnica—but I do expect Ravnica to look far, far different at the close of 2019 than now. That may not come to pass; it may just be paranoia. But I can’t think of a mental state more appropriate for current Ravnican developments than paranoia, as paranoia seems to be the dominant mood there.
The closest (and certainly most recent) parallel to what Wizards is doing with Ravnica this year is Innistrad in Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon. Like Innistrad before it, Ravnica has become a paranoid society; but, where Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon were soaked in the paranoia of cosmic horror, Ravnica’s paranoia is that of the surveillance state—espionage instead of eldritch horror. Ravnica is now “don’t trust anyone,” where Innistrad was “don’t trust yourself.” It’s the hypervigilance of understanding how truly powerless you are; but that lack of power comes from something systemic and acceptable, rather than the inchoate manipulations of a cosmic force.
That is a much scarier kind of horror to me, as it’s a horror that’s closer to the way the real world works: through interlocked architectures of power and scrutiny. The Dimir aren’t far removed from {YOUR HOBBYHORSE SURVEILLANCE ORGANIZATION HERE}, and there’s an oddly cruel bent from the Boros this set (see the flavor text for Lava Coil and Citywide Bust) that highlights the power disparity between the forces of state control and the populations they tyrannize. The paranoia of the powerless runs through the entire set, and suggests a deeper narrative irony: all, save the Gatewatch, is powerless before the real coming threat of Nicol Bolas.
More to the point, I don’t think it’s unintentional that Ravnica, post-2010, operates through a series of gates and mazes. The horror of Ravnica is the horror of the outsider, the daily infusion of anxieties caused by knowing you’re outside the halls of power, and you’re freezing to death. It’s the paranoia of the underclasses, the paranoia of the subjugated and the suppressed. That’s a justified paranoia, the kind Joseph Heller understood: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Paranoia is a function of power that cuts both ways: the truly powerful know someone’s is gunning for their position, and the truly powerless know no one will stand up for them if anything goes wrong. We’ve seen paranoia mostly as a white mana thing—the kithkin in Shadowmoor, the zealotry of the Order nomads on Otaria and the salt-field hermits of Dominaria—but we now see what paranoia and persecution looks like on a societal scale.
As a global game, Magic can’t match the changing of the seasons. Wizards can’t release a snow-covered set in the dead of winter, as it wouldn’t be winter in the antipodes, for example, but it can mirror general trends. We have a schema for “autumn,” even if it’s, say, 90 degrees and swelteringly humid in late September. What it can do is use the rich creative resources available to it—ludic structures, professional art, dramatic irony arising from player awareness of character, etc.—to suggest an impressionistic feeling based in seasonal detail. There’s some creeping, almost-dormant part of all of us that perks up this time of year, starts feeling the paranoia of the winter-bound, hoards acorns and sniffs the wind and knows the end of something is coming. We’re in Ravnica’s fall, and there’s a hard stop at the bottom.
A lifelong resident of the Carolinas and a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Rob has played Magic since he picked a Darkling Stalker up off the soccer field at summer camp. He works for nonprofits as an educational strategies developer and, in his off-hours, enjoys writing fiction, playing games, and exploring new beers.