It’s November 2005 and a passionate wrestling fan, David Wills, is about to become the butt of jokes following a moment of emotion. He’s at a question and answer panel, in a high school gym, and gets his turn with the mic. It’s been a bit of a rough weekend for him – he’s met a bunch of southern wrestling greats like Terry Funk and observed them moving slowly and painfully, their health destroyed by years of practicing the fake-yet-still-plenty-dangerous act of professional wrestling. Much of wrestling was changing, with the larger proliferation of the internet, along with everything else in the early 2000s . It was an emotional moment for Mr. Wills.
Can you blame him?
“IT’S STILL REAL TO ME, DAMNIT!”
Of course, a middle-aged white guy crying about wrestling, a media subset held in pretty low esteem by the average person, was immediately played for laughs around the internet. Jimmy Kimmel even showed it, saying something mean-spirited I’m sure. As we all know, wrestling is fake, right?
I love wrestling & watch it semi-religiously. I call it “my soap”. By 2005, it was pretty obvious and exposed that wrestling was, despite all of its previous insistences, fake. “Fake,” meaning that it wasn’t a legitimate sports competition and instead featured pre-determined storylines and winners. The rise of internet forums, newsletters and leaks of backstage drama and the wrestlers personal lives has at long last put the last shovel of dirt on the grave of “kayfabe.”
Kayfabe (noun): “the portrayal of staged elements within professional wrestling (such as characters, rivalries, and storylines) as legitimate or real.”
Eventually, the wrestlers gave up on keeping up the act while the cameras were off. What was the point? Why not be yourself on social media if everybody already knows your name isn’t Roman Reigns, but is instead Joe Anoaʻi, a guy who’s survived leukemia twice?
Real, Fake & Not-Real
The suspension of disbelief asked by any media property is a powerful thing. Letting yourself become immersed in something not of this world, something that obviously isn’t real but wouldn’t-it-be-so-fun-if-it-was has entertained the human race for generation upon generation. However, we’re often our own worst enemy, allowing irony and pessimism, together with a healthy dose of cold logic, work together to cease the magic that can be found in the likes of a bout of storytelling… or allowing ourselves to believe that an undead wizard actually cares about beating a sumo wrestler in a fair competition to win a big golden belt.
The clashing of the fake-and-real was taking over wrestling in 2005. Is it hyperbole to say it’s taking over Magic now? Can we say this is reality when piles of cash from Universes Beyond, and its fandom-laden intellectual property, slowly smother 30-plus years of Magic legacy? It’s hard to suspend the belief anymore that any of this stuff matters.
To that end, Edge of Eternities is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is everything that Magic can be when firing on all cylinders. A new and well rendered plane, an expanded story written by sci-fi darling Seth Dickinson (who nailed it), more side stories to help flesh out unique elements of The Edge, and more. At a high level, looking at the card file presents wonderful art that combines to create what feels like a completely realized world… as opposed to another round of Legendary Creatures in a cool hat on yet another plane. I felt similarly about Tarkir: Dragonstorm, a set that for all of its little faults and foibles presented as the first meaningful return set we’ve had since… Ravnica: Allegiance? The love and care that has shown through on the last several in-universe sets – Edge, Dragonstorm, Foundations, Bloomburrow, etc. – has stuck with me as the creative teams & designers do their best to stand up to the outside competition.
That Which Pulls Us In
The flavor of Magic sets, the art, the story, the names and flavor text, all are a sort of kayfabe in my mind. Some could call it window dressing but they breathe a needed life and context into every card, every draft, every match. We’ve all heard the story of the Magic pro who insists that they would still play the game, even if it was just the rules text on the card. This gritty, raw underpinning of the game obviously has its appeal – it’s one of the greatest games ever made and cards are the pieces of that game we consistently interact with. However, despite this, many people point to specific pieces of art, specific flavors of cards, or the marriage between flavor text and mechanics that first made them fall in love with the game. For some reason, once upon a time I looked at Catacomb Slug and said “Wow, this is it. They’ve really done it now, I’m so in.”
I can picture that moment again and again in new fans approaching a bold, yet somehow still familiar, set such as Edge. We’re obviously in a whole new place, treading new ground as we enter the tropes of sci-fi to go along with the ancient and well-tread tropes of high fantasy that Magic is more than used to. The mechanic and flavor of [mtgcard]Virulent Silencer[/mtgcard] will create a new fan of poison counters. The eye-grabbing borderless art for the shockland reprints will start a fresh generation of people wondering what’s so great about non-basic, expensive lands anyways. Hopefully people will be talking about what is a truly excellent story and world that has been built up for years. Unfortunately, there isn’t much space for that discussion to occur.
That Fakening of Magic
MagicCon: Las Vegas 2024 felt, in many ways, like a major turning point for Magic’s existence. In the span of the same panel, Wizards of the Coast informed fans that Universes Beyond would take over Standard, with three sets coming in 2025, and also did their best to impress the importance of “Quintessential Magic IP” while discussing the upcoming Foundations. The new art for Solemn Simulacrum, featuring a rejected-by-Wizards-attempt by the artist to bring back its original likeness, on the damn slide was a nice touch.
Now, barely nine months later, it’s already become a weird time to be a long-time Magic fan. Edge of Eternities prerelease coinciding with continued Final Fantasy speculation and hype coinciding with a deluge of previews coming out of San Diego Comic Con and also a one-off Avatar: The Last Airbender promo? Tarkir: Dragonstorm feels so far in the rear view mirror that multiple people I’ve spoken to can’t even remember it was released a little over three months ago.
MagicCon: Las Vegas 2025 was more defined by a consumer rush to buy Final Fantasy at MSRP and flip it to vendors for a profit, than by any other happening of the weekend. The desperate desire of everyone in the room to make money off the set was palpable. You could feel it in the air. It was different. It wasn’t good.
Universes Beyond has taken over the game in a pernicious way, one that slowly is destroying the kayfabe that was carefully (or in some cases, recklessly) built up by creative teams over time. It turns one shared reality into multitudes as more and more gamers lose the original plot and fracture off into their preferred IPs rather than internalizing and celebrating Magic’s own.
Increasingly, it’s seeming as if Wizards of the Coast is making the choice to forgo the hard work of creating the emotional connection, lore building and other important fan-base-building elements. Instead, bringing in the pieces of media that already have those and putting them on Magic cards instead. Has it still made good Magic sets? …Sure! Final Fantasy in particular was a great Magic set as far as designs go (and matching designs to pre-existing flavor) but it still isn’t a Magic set. Edge of Eternities feels like the farthest we should be getting to escaping the multiverse, not exiting it entirely to replace it with other things.
I got the chance to do two prereleases this last weekend. I had a great time cracking Edge of Eternities packs, getting a closer look at the nuts and bolts I missed while also getting to introduce a friend, Gabe, to his first prerelease. It was a blast. Shout out to [mtgcard]Starbreach Whale[/mtgcard].
Did I see any others online celebrating with me? Barely. It was SDCC weekend and so, of course, we’re showing off Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a property that everybody you know is a superfan of, by the way. Just like Final Fantasy AND Avatar: The Last Airbender AND Fallout AND Elder Scrolls which we really hope they make a set for. Being a fan has for many been reduced to consumption and reading Twitter headlines of industry news.
I don’t need others to be celebrating with me though. I can reject the pessimism – the spoilers come but Edge of Eternities is still here for me to celebrate with friends, the people at this prerelease who lose to my five-color Landers pile, and quite frankly, with myself. If anything, the lack of traditional Magic sets this year has only highlighted how great we’ve had it, how good of a job the creative teams have done up until now, despite the obvious shortcomings and missteps.
It feels a bit empty to compare this to an emotional moment surrounding the health and well-being of those dealing in dangerous deeds for a cheering crowd’s enjoyment. It’s not a one-to-one by any means. But still, the phrase repeats in my head, time and again, as the magic of Magic reasserts itself on me. Despite everything else going on, the kayfabe slowly falls apart around the idealistic version of the game I wish existed. A version of the game that still exists in some of these sets like Edge of Eternities.
It’s still real to me, damnit.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, DanDan fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack.