Dear Azami is going to be changing for a while.
During the summer I got the idea for what sounded like an overly ambitious project. For those who don’t know, my background is in creative writing. I’ve applied that experience to my numerous analyses of Magic’s story in the past, but my passion has always been for the actual process of writing rather than taking apart someone else’s work.
So I decided to do just that. I’m writing a Magic story. And it’s going to be published here. My normal Commander and story analysis will be going on hiatus in the mean time, so the next time you’ll hear from me will be when the first story goes live two weeks from today.
My goal for this project is to tell a full-length story in the same serialized style as the online articles published by Wizards themselves. The story will be set during a return to Theros block after the upcoming Ravnica saga and is going to be eleven stories long.
In order to start I had to make several assumptions about how Ravnica and the invasion of Bolas storyline will play out. They are as follows:
- Bolas was killed.
- Jaya was killed.
- Ral died trying to assassinate Niv-Mizzet.
- Tezzeret disappeared along with the planar bridge.
- Liliana turned the eternal army on Bolas in the final battle and was killed as a result.
- Niv-Mizzet ascended after sucking Azor’s spark out of the immortal sun, and has not returned to Ravnica.
- Nissa is still missing.
- The blackblade was destroyed by Bolas.
- Most of the Gatewatch is committed to following Karn to attack New Phyrexia.
- Jace and Vraska decide to stay on Ravnica to help their home rebuild after the devastation.
It’s worth noting that I don’t think any of these events are terribly likely. I don’t intend them as predictions, merely as a starting point for my story. It’s also worth noting that I started writing during the summer, so I didn’t have all the information we know now about Ravnica, which Guilds aligned with Bolas, and so on.
I have a lot of goals for this project, but mostly I want to challenge myself to be a better author. As a baseline that means I want my work to be of a high enough quality that a casual reader could mistake it for an official publications from WotC, which is why I’ll be linking back here every week.
If any of you have questions about the story, either now or once episodes start to go live, I’m happy to take questions on twitter.
And most of all, I hope you all enjoy what I’ve made.
Levi Byrne has been with the game since Worldwake and has a rabid love for fantasy writing that goes back decades. Despite some forays into Legacy he plays Commander almost exclusively, and has a love for the crazy plays and huge games that make Magic what it is. He was the go-to advisor of his playgroup on deck construction for more than five years before joining Dear Azami.