Why should it just be cards?
Near the top of a tall pile of books on my nightstand is Seanan McGuire’s Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos. The novel, which came out last month to coincide with the release of Secrets of Strixhaven, is the first printed Magic novel in six years—the last was Django Wexler’s Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths – Sundered Bond—and the return to print was greeted with great fanfare.
Even though I’m enjoying Omens of Chaos (more on that in a second), I have to admit that the novel both joys me and stimulates my mind for reasons that go beyond what’s in its pages. The novel is a joy to experience, I mean, because of the vision it announces (or re-announces) for Magic storytelling.
It asks whether Magic’s world might live not just in media but in the spaces in-between them, in the leaps and vicissitudes of the imagination. And, at the same time, it provokes questions about what Magic’s structure actually is, as a franchise. As I suggest here, it’s far weirder, and far more precious, than you might think.
Decentralized Worlds
Although we live in a cultural moment dominated by sprawling multimodal mega-franchises, Magic is part of an intriguing sub-set, in that its media is near-omni-canonical (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?).
Magic, that is, departs from the models of franchises like Marvel and DC Comics in that almost all its media “count” as part of the same world. As the former brands’ RAM-devouring Fandom wiki pages attest, their sprawling consumer output spawns worlds upon worlds upon worlds—not just the explicit alternate universes of stories like What If? or Elseworlds, but also the implicit alternate universes of different media.
In the case of Marvel, all the franchise’s different video game series, different TV series, and different movie series belong to worlds that, despite their external similarity, are different. You cannot expect that the Spider-Man of the comic book series The Amazing Spider-Man (Earth-616) will have experienced the same things as the Spider-Man of the 2001 PlayStation 1 game Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro (Earth-20824), the Spider-Man of the newspaper comic strip also titled The Amazing Spider-Man (Earth-77013), the Spider-Man of the 1980s TV series Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (Earth-8107, not to be confused with the Spider-Man of the ongoing children’s TV show Spidey and His Amazing Friends (Earth-21642)), the Spider-Man of the Universal Studios ride “The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man” (Earth-TRN160) or the Spider-Man of the children’s media crossover extravaganza Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel (Earth-TRN1805).
(Side-note: I love-hated having to write that, and when Magic’s Reality Fracture comes out in October, I’ll have more to say about it.)
Different material products in the Marvel brand implicitly belong to alternate continuities, different worlds. Outside of the occasional cheeky multiversal crossover (which itself extends new problems—the Spider-Man 2099 of Enter the Spider-Verse (Earth-928B), for example, is not the same as the original Spider-Man 2099 (from Earth-928) or from a recent reboot of the character (Earth-2099), and I have no idea whether the Spider-Man 2099 of Spider-Man 2099 or Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O’Hara are different guys from that)—
—Outside of those, I was saying these variations don’t bear on each other. This makes sense: the contemporary superhero franchise is sustained on its stability (or stagnancy). No matter what happens to the Spider-Man in your favorite game/comic strip/breakfast cereal, the Spider-Man you like will always be out there somewhere.
But Magic is not like this.
Almost every piece of Magic media, with some important exceptions, belongs to the exact same world—and they bear on each other, not always directly but nonetheless in a real way. The Ajani of Ajani, Outland Chaperone is the same big cat guy you read about in the Secrets of Strixhaven web fiction. The worlds of the Magic novels and comic books and web fiction are (again, with important exceptions) the same world conjured by the cards.
Indeed, to some extent, they depend on each other. Without the web fiction to chart his story—in Lorwyn Eclipsed, his ongoing attempts at redemption since his de-Phyrexianization—Ajani, Outland Chaperone is just a regular ol’ Ajani card. On the other hand, without the card, the Ajani of the web fiction is unmoored, deprived of concrete materialization.
And so, unlike the archipelagic islands of the Marvel franchise and its ilk, the gestalt thing that is Magic’s story-world functions like a sprawling web or a buttressed structure: not every medium is given equal weight, but each one also provides vital support for the others.
Omens of Chaos models these possibilities well, picking up minor hints and major narrative threads from the game’s cards and web fiction and giving them a place to be alive.
Perhaps most obvious is the work that Omens does with the Phyrexian Invasion. Since 2023’s tentpole set March of the Machine, which culminated in the calamitous Phyrexian Invasion of the entire Multiverse, hints of the Invasion’s effects have flitted in and out of view—often exerting tremendous influence over post-MOM stories, but sometimes seeming frustratingly aloof. This is especially true for players who don’t engage with the game’s web fiction because, outside of a select few cards in a given set, the invasion’s material ramifications—the death of the Eldraine Royal family and the accession of Will Kenrith to the Throne, the annihilation of the Golgari and Dimir guilds of Ravnica, the political turmoil of the Sun Empire and Torrezon on Ixalan, and so on—these details register only on world-guides and stories. These short bites are productive themselves, of course, but it’s difficult to escape the whispering sense that they are wispy and incomplete compared to the plenitude of sets themselves.
Omens, afforded the breathing room of prose, allows us to feel through the aftermath of the Phyrexian Invasion. We enter into the story through Eula Blue, a teenage Capennan shield mage whose Park Heights family narrowly escaped death when, in a last-ditch effort, the plane’s defenders collapsed Park Heights on top of the Phyrexians. For Eula, this means material turmoil: with her home and school destroyed, she loses her chance to join one of New Capenna’s Five Families. As McGuire’s rich details bear out, it also means psychological scarring:
“[Funerals] went on for so long that it felt like the funerals were never going to end, like the people of Capenna were going to run out of the living before they finished burying the dead. First they’d buried the people who died fighting Phyrexia, and then they’d buried the people who died when Phyrexia lost, and finally they’d buried the people who died almost incidentally, the ones crushed when the city fell, the ones who never had a chance.”
It’s understandable that the sets following March of the Machine couldn’t devote this sort of attention to the aftermath of the invasion—after all, every set could be somebody’s first, and it’s risky to get mired in details from a previous set while you’re also trying to introduce a new world. (Of course, there’s also something to be said about product oversaturation and the need to speed past each set in pursuit of the next). Omens, then, provides a necessary curative: while it depends on cards from Strixhaven and Secrets of Strixhaven to concretize its imagery, to make it feel anchored in something real. In exchange it offers the kind of dense continuity you couldn’t otherwise manage in a regular set.
This is to say nothing of the work that Omens does with character. Engaging in the most vitalizing kind of fan service, three of the five co-protagonists are actually existing figures—planeswalker Teferi’s granddaughter Kequia (who appeared briefly in an excellent Dominaria United side story), chronically-mad-minotaur Angrath’s daughter Jamira (who previously appeared in one single line of text), and Alandra (the only character who had already appeared on a card, but who, up until now, was graced with no other information apart from her similarity with EDH-staple legendary creature Talrand).
And wait, there’s more—the book works even more minutely than that! As I’ve suggested elsewhere, Magic is exceptionally special because of the exceptional gratuity in its worlds—the sense that there is more in the evanescent, purely ideal versions of Ixalan and Dominaria and Muraganda than could ever fit on one set’s cards. Omens of Chaos embraces this superfluity. McGuire asks us to think about the pedestrian particularity of living in a magical world: how do planes ensure that the harmless germs of one plane don’t wreak havoc on another? What does gender-affirming healthcare look like in a world full of potions and quasi-medieval technology? Can you ensure that a water-dwelling merfolk can live in the same room as an air-breathing human?
These kinds of details rarely make it onto Magic cards, but they’re the kind of details that infuse a magical world with vitality and force—with granite as well as rainbow, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase.
And yet, something strange lingers in my mind. For all that I’ve just described, we return to cards.
Cardboard Gravity
As I said above, Magic’s narrative method is not like that of many other contemporary action-sci-fi-fantasy-genre franchises, in which every text is rhizomatically separated. But it’s also distinct in that it has a single and inescapable center of gravity: the medium of the cards. The card game, even with all its eclectic variations, is the heliotropic sun around which the narrative evolves.
Indulge me in a few more contrastive examples, if only to highlight how bizarre Magic actually is.
Magic is from franchises like Star Trek, in which there are a plethora of materials, many of which take place in the same universe, but no singular one of which is absolutely dominant. The Original Series or The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager, all the miniseries and novels and comic books and audiobooks and MMOs and mobile games—some of those might obviously have more prestige than the others, but they all take place in the same world (for the most part), and none of them is definitely “more” Star Trek than the others.
Magic is closer, though still very different, from Star Wars given that the original trilogy of films is the ur-text of the franchise, but there are clear (and lucrative) efforts to make Star Wars more like the Marvel Multiverse. Different media might be the center of gravity for certain fans and consumers (you might ultimately put more time and passion into The Old Republic video games or The Mandalorian series than Empire Strikes Back). Magic’s narrative ecosystem is more centralized, a heliotrope in which the sun is the card game itself.
Magic seems close to, but is very different from, multi-media video game franchises. Some non-game spinoffs are essentially epiphenomenal advertisements for the basic game (Warcraft and Uncharted are, ultimately, quite secondary to the games on which they’re based). Other non-game spinoffs attempt to unmoor the franchise from any specific medium (as in the case of Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, and (if Nintendo gets its wish) Super Mario Brothers, which grew beyond the medium of video games even if they retain some link to them). Magic is neither.
Magic is in a stranger place. It’s more centralized than Marvel and lesser game franchises, in all its mediums are equally “real” parts of its world. Magic is different from Star Trek, Star Wars, and more successful video games, in that there is still a gravitational pull back to the card game itself.
I raise this elaborate comparison because it illuminates non-card media like Omens of Chaos in a funny spot. They attempt to build out a world hinted at by the card game, but they also only exist in reference to the card game. It’s certainly not a coincidence that first edition copies of Omens come with a promotional foil copy of Command Tower, the current going price of which is higher than what I paid for the novel. Although other media might jockey for place in the Magic ecosystem, the cards themselves, for reasons both understandable and frustrating, remain central.
This is a little funny, because as I suggest above, Magic suffers without these accompaniments and additions. March of the Machine would be poorer without its web fiction, Fallen Empires would be poorer without its bizarre comic books, and Secrets of Strixhaven—the whole of modern Magic story, really—would be poorer without Omens of Chaos. This is the gravitational entropy of utilitarian IP ownership: insistent emphasis on a product that will suffice on its own but will thrive only when orbited by other celestial bodies.
Do such things exist? Let’s hope, for the sake of this metaphor. But, just in case, let’s put it this way: you certainly could eat a baguette without any toppings, vegetables, or meats, indeed it feels all too tempting to do so (if you’re me)—but you lose out on something substantive, something good, something real.
And so I count it as both an entropy-defying miracle and delicious meal that Omens of Chaos is in my hands, exists when it does not need to, makes the gestalt of Magic better and richer instead of cheaper but simpler. It emblemizes, in this sense, the extraordinarily fragile balance of Magic’s story ecosystem—one that seems direr by the day.
Staring down the release slate for 2026, lopsided as it is against Magic’s own worlds, is a grim sight. But Omens shows off how gratuitously great it is to have a game based in the cards that isn’t exclusively on the cards. It probably would’ve cost less money not to make it, and indeed I have no idea how many players will engage with it—but for all that, the novel still does the work of making the ephemeral world beyond the cardboard feel alive.
Ryan Carroll (he/him) is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature. On Substack as Dominarian Plowshare, he writes about Magic’s art, story, and experience. Outside of Magic, he writes on topics including 19th-century literature, information theory, television politics, and cliche.