War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg WeismanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Reading War of the Spark: Ravnica is like watching the latest season of a long-running TV series. There's a bunch of people with all kinds of history running around, with just enough explanation to follow the main plot but not enough to grasp all the implications of their past relationships. And on top of that, for some reason there's a big chunk of time missing from the storyline that's being doled out in weekly flashbacks.
The worlds of Magic: The Gathering have a fairly long history, and it hasn't always been very well organized. Hardly organized at all, at the very beginning in the early 1990s, and it took quite a few years for Wizards of the Coast to get their act together in terms of the game's story lore. But in the last few years, at least since Magic Origins in 2015, things have been much more coherent. (Argument can be made for some of the earlier set stories being pretty decent, too.) In general, the story behind the game has become pretty good, following a group of heroes called the Gatewatch across various planes of existence in the Magic multiverse. For the last few years they've been butting heads with a cunning Elder Dragon called Nicol Bolas.
The Magic set War of the Spark was released a few months ago, and with it the novel War of the Spark: Ravnica. I was looking forward to it, since the main storyline had largely been on hiatus for the second half of 2018. We got some background stories set on Ravnica (which weren't bad at all) but nothing to move ahead the big conflict between the Gatewatch and Nicol Bolas. The novel picks up those threads, which have been gathering for the last several years across many Magic sets on multiple planes.
Which means that I was a bit confused when I started the novel and the state of things on Ravinca was quite a bit different than what we'd been lead to expect. Dead guild leaders, plans to oppose Bolas gone awry, people mourning a character (Hekara) I'd never heard of. Turns out, there's an entire "prequel" novel that's being released one chapter at a time that took place before War of the Spark: Ravnica. I have no idea why the story folks would do this - it makes reading this book feel like I'm coming into a movie halfway through. It's a disappointing dropped ball from a story team that's been pretty good for quite a few years now.
As for characters - there's a lot of them. As a reader of Magic story articles, I have a pretty good idea of who is who in the Magic multiverse. But even so, the sheer cast of characters in War of the Spark: Ravnica is pretty daunting. Weisman makes an effort to introduce those important to the story, but that still leaves a whole lot of folks who are just kind of hanging around the background or have very limited contributions. I suspect anyone who hasn't followed the Magic story for several years will be fairly confused about who all these people are.
OK, having said all that - I still think War of the Spark: Ravnica is a pretty decent novel. Weisman is a good writer, other than the occasional tendency to toss in unnecessarily cheesy one-liners. (Haven't we heard "Can't we all just get along?" and "It's not the heat; it's the humidity" enough by now?) He does a fine job with Teyo and Rat, two new characters for this story. And once you get the gist of where things stand on Ravinca, the overall plot moves along pretty well, with very little downtime...it's action of one kind or another pretty much all the way.
If you've followed the Magic story for a while now, you'll want to check out War of the Spark: Ravnica. But if not, don't start here - you're better off reading through some of the older Magic story articles, and then if you want to know how things proceed, this book will be there.
