Over the last three years, we’ve been asked to travel Magic: The Gathering’s worlds via way of Omenpaths as we’re taken through the Metronome story arc. We’ve been introduced both to worlds new and old, with the familiar being both marred and evolved by their brush with Phyrexian invasions. A major feature has also, of course, been seeing planar denizens getting to clash and interact with one another without needing to planeswalk, given that Omenpaths are interplanar super-highways. As the end of this story arc approaches with the release of Reality Fracture later this year, a set we’ll learn more about at Magiccon Amsterdam, it feels like a good time to take a look back on each of the sets and worlds we visited along the way.
A Mixed Beginning
We really got off to a mixed start of touring the different planes of the Multiverse. I’m not talking about the actual narrative itself, as overall the Metronome saga has been rough to get me back reading it every time a new bit of lore drops.
When the concept of the Omenpaths staying around post-invasion was revealed, people seemed hopeful of unique travels and interactions. Instead, what the average player got was a weird mashup of various characters they remembered from yesteryear.
Wilds of Eldraine and Lost Caverns of Ixalan were return sets showing planes working to recover from the Phyrexian invasions; having evolved beyond their past form we had last seen them in. These relatively medium sets were able to succeed on the back of beautiful worlds full of already-established flavor. “What’s happening now?” can often present a more interesting question to answer than “what’s all this new stuff over here?” especially when we’re tracking all of the new words present on the cards as well.
Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction were so… non-resonant that they brought back the “hat set” moniker. Understandably so—rather than getting to explore new concepts and ideas from the Omenpaths we were immediately instead shown strange genre sets chock full of places and people we knew but, for reasons ill-defined, wearing fedoras or Stetsons. Disappointing.
Karlov Manor and Thunder Junction were both early experiments in what Wizards could do with more… advanced (?) genre concepts in a Magic: The Gathering set. Genre has often been the driver behind many of the most beloved planes, so much so that the concepts of “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” design has entered the vernacular of the invested audience. For the unfamiliar, a top-down design is one that starts from the name of the card and is built from that point, with art, mechanics, and flavor text all being drawn from that north star. The perfect and classic example is also the given example for genre at play in Magic: Innistrad. By setting out to design the set with a whiteboard full of horror tropes, they created a block which has resonated with fans old and new alike for over a decade. The alternative option, bottom up, fills in the rules text and lets the more creative side of the building figure out the rest later.
However, this top-down approach often was still, in a way, design-driven as opposed to creative-driven, creating relatively shallow worlds that communicated something at a base level. They were enough for you to grab onto, but they never really tried something too ambitious. Horror movies, adventuring parties… whole external IPs and even steampunk are recognizeable, easily accessible playgrounds that have tropes strong enough to carry every common in a set. But what about murder mysteries? What about… westerns? Okay, westerns definitely do, but there’s so many layers of problems to unpack that Wizards chose the easy route, sidestepping them, creating even more of a shallow pool to be played within. These two sets, while flop-ish in execution, were important learning experiences for more sets coming down the pipeline.
A Scattered Interlude
Bloomburrow, Duskmourn: House of Horror and Aetherdrift are perhaps the three most aesthetically disconnected Magic sets to ever follow each other in Magic history. A Redwall-inspired world full of sentient forest creatures into a mix of all horror tropes, including the modern television, and a cross-planar race set pushed the boundaries on what has been seen before on magical cardboard.
Bloomburrow was easily the most traditional of the bunch. Tiny beings are easily loveable. The idea of mice with swords has been hoped for by players for years. It helps that the main “risk” here was the entire lack of humanoids, otherwise playing close to the chest with very traditional high fantasy aesthetics of warriors, knights, wizards and rogues. However, a human-free plane was still a decent risk. The only time it had happened before was Lorwyn, a decision that tested so poorly in the moment that Wizards abandoned the concept for nearly a decade.
Duskmourn and Aetherdrift are such weird sets I don’t even know how to explain or interact with them. However, they both represent even more divergent experiments in playing with genre. Duskmourn feels like the first “risky” choice of the Omenpaths era, introducing a plane that is itself some strange pocket dimension contained entirely within a massive, evil house. It also massively expanded the scope of technology we had seen inside of a traditional Magic set, including a television. A haunted one, at that!
Speaking of technology advancements, Aetherdrift presented an event, that being a multi-plane race with an intriguing prize on the line. The isolated Spark of a Planeswalker, enabling any one person with the ability to walk freely between planes… an ability which has been greatly reduced in utility by the very introduction of the paths the contestants are racing through. A set full of vehicles, drivers and assorted other items that have to fill out a Magic set made for a jumbled mess of a concept while also “wasting” short returns to several planes.
The Incredible Finale
Much ink has been spilled on the run of Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Edge of Eternities, Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven. I’ll condense it down: it was incredible. The fact that it was three returns to asked-for and beloved worlds is an automatic strong start. But these sets represented, at least to me, what felt like the real possibility of Omenpaths and the effect they can have on the worlds around them. Lorwyn with Strixhaven students studying it. Cross-planar characters preventing chaos on Tarkir. A Strixhaven that is scarred from Phyrexia’s invasion picking up the pieces while welcoming students from other planes, centered around a unique-to-the-world problem. Granted, my view of Strixhaven was also augmented by Seanan McGuire’s Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos and they’re all mixed together there at this point, but it counts. Strong worlds. Strong concepts executed well. And yet, the strongest parts were those that looked inward, ignoring the idea of Omenpaths entirely and showing us the intrigue of the plane we’re on at the time.
The Omenpaths arc has ended up with a bit of a weird reputation, representing many possibilities of planar exploration that instead resulted in a mix of return sets with twists and continual experiments with how genre can be used in design of sets. What could have been a wild romp instead showed us little, shallow vignettes of places we had seen before or may never see again. Really, what it did was expose the weaknesses of Magic cards, independent of the intriguing story told alongside them via web fiction, of communicating anything more than glimpses of something larger.
A Sudden Detour
Tokyo. Barcelona. Sydney. Honolulu. Venice. Kuala Lumpur. Rome. San Juan. All of these cities and plenty more besides (especially Las Vegas!) are cities that have hosted the Pro Tour, Magic’s premier competitive event, at least once. At one point, the travel was the major point of the appeal of competing to first time competitors. Part of qualification prizing included airfare, making it relatively trivial to fly to places you may not have otherwise ever seen. Go to Europe, play some Magic, maybe spike a great result, go home and go back to grinding.
“Play the game, see the world,” the old adage went and for plenty of people, especially the not-super-grinders, this is how it worked. Listen to the old pros though and the adage is flipped a bit more onto its realistic head – “play the game, see the convention center.” Yet another flight to yet another city where, perhaps after a day of touristy stuff, you buckle in and compete under the same tone of fluorescent lights as you might in the Valley Forge Casino in beautiful King of Prussia, PA. Burnout comes.
Magic has long promised its players experiences and intrigues that it can’t quite actually execute on. The Omenpaths maybe aren’t that different. MagicCons are perhaps the latest and greatest innovation on this concept, bringing together all forms of love for the game together in a tourist-ish destination that promises fun both inside and outside of the convention.
If you’re reading this on its original publication date, I’m most likely somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean at this very moment, making the thankfully short hop from Detroit Metro to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. As a 6’4 guy, I don’t know if my body could take more than 8 hours on a plane at once. It’s my first time leaving the country, something that I don’t think my little midwest boy brain would have believed when I first picked up a Magic card in 2013 in the back room of a Subway. It’s taken me all across the United States, from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City to Minneapolis to Austin to upstate New York to, somehow, the middle of nowhere PA for a good friend’s wedding. Now, we’re off to MagicCon Amsterdam and, after that, France. I, for one, am playing the game and seeing the world, a very tiny bit at a time.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, Dandân fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack.