Pattern Recognition #79 - Ravnica's End

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

16 August 2018

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Hello everybody! My name is berryjon, TappedOut.Net's resident Old Fogey and full-time purveyor of all things historical, entertaining, educational and informative. If you're new to the site, this series is pretty much about whatever I want to talk about. My own personal soapbox if you will. But even I sometimes need the help of a Crystal Ball to know what comes next.

After that brief divergence over the past couple weeks to address the Villains of Magic, I now return to the history of Ravnica, giving everyone out there a quick crash course in the nature and backstory of the next plane we will be returning to in couple few months.

So, after the novels were completed, Wizards eventually moved to short story anthologies, and stand alone-tales not tied to any of the blocks in order to maintain some .... you know, I'm still not fully sure why they did this, but it happened. I know that it had something to do with the profit margins of books - which were never high to begin with.

Regardless, because of this, our next look at Ravnica comes from the book Agents of Artifice.

Now, this book wasn't a Ravnica focused novel, rather it was a character focused story, with focus on Liliana Vess, Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas and ... sigh ... Jace Beleren. In this novel, we are introduced to the Infinite Consortium, a sadly-dropped idea about a group of inter-planar thieves and "Acquisitions" experts who could get whatever you wanted. For a price.

One of the more important branches of the group, the one that Jace and Liliana were involved with, was the one on Ravnica, and through these occasional points, we get a sense of what is going on there.

What we do see paints an unkind picture. Teysa's attempts to create a new Guildpact have fallen short, and there is chaos in the streets. And in a world covered in city, that means a lot of streets. The established paradigm is being assailed from all sides as the Guilds and the Guildless attack each other openly.

Now, I may not have covered this last time, but the Guildless is the collective term applied to everyone on Ravnica who is not a part of the ten Guilds. And they outnumber the Guilds in terms of raw numbers - just not in ability to coordinate or in actual power.

What really annoys me is that we are told that of all the Guilds, the Selesnya were being attacked by the Guildless for the crime of being the most evil and putting down of the Guildless. Which is total baloney. If you read the original novels, the Selesnya actually come off as the least offensive guild, and were side victims in the first and third novels. That they were actually EVUHL! and the most 'put the common man down' just stinks of someone's decision to make sure that all the Guilds had something bad that they have done because of ~reasons~.

Urzadammit.

However, this was not a sustainable state of affairs for the plane. It was this sort of internal warfare that required the Guildpact to stop in the first place. So, while the ten Guilds were working to maintain their grips on their responsibilities (or in the case of the Gruul, business as usual as they tear down buildings), Niv-Mizzet, one of the remaining original Paruns (the other being Rakdos, who wasn't in a position to do anything about it), set about to make sure that everything didn't fall to ruin.

He started by going back over the original Guildpact. When Azor wrote it, he made sure that the law was comprehensive as possible, with as many contingencies as could be accounted for.

As he investigated, others became aware of what he was doing. Including Ral Zarek, and, naturally, Jace Beleren. Because of course. And the other guilds started to become aware of Niv-Mizzit's research. And when the head of a Guild takes a personal interest in something called "The Implicit Maze", everyone started to look for it as well.

Now we enter into the plot, such as it was, for Return to Ravnica, three short stories that share the title of "The Secretist".

The best part of this story, given my own personal biases, is that Jace is investigating as well, an independent agent, and while he's doing so, Niv-Mizzit spills the beans and tells everyone everything, rendering all of his work useless.

I'm sure there's a German word for my feelings on that subject, but that is not here or now.

Niv-Mizzit revealed the existence of the Implicit Maze openly and publicly. He stated that it was part of a contingency plan for the Guildpact, should the Guild no longer support it properly. Every Guild and anyone else could attempt the Maze, a winding path that would take all those who participated through the heart of each Guild's power before ending where it all began - the place where the original Guildpact was signed.

The first person to complete the maze would become The Living Guildpact, the physical manifestation of the Guildpact, and in whom would be entrusted the power of the Guildpact reborn.

And so the race was on. For the most part, those without the support of a Guild were quickly taken out of the race, leaving Jace as the only effective Guildless participant. The rest of the Guilds each supported their participant, making their passage through their Guildgate as easy as possible, while hindering everyone else.

Eventually, after many trials and tribulations, alliances forged and broken, Jace arrives at the finish line - dead last. There, he was that everyone was arguing, trying to claim the prize for their own, and to the victor would go the power of the Supreme Verdict - the ability to wipe a whole Guild off the map. In pseudo-desperation to not be at ground zero for a localized apocalypse, Jace mentally dominated everyone's minds, and completely by accident, fulfilled the purpose of the Implicit Maze.

You see, the Maze was never intended to put one guild over everyone else. Rather, the purpose of the 'Maze' was to get the victorious participant to 'walk a mile in the other man's shoes', so to speak. The Guildgates were not meant to be checkpoints, but rather the means by which each participant could see and come to understand each of the other Guilds. The position of Living Guildpact was meant to be given to the person who understood all the Guilds, rather than dominating all the others in service to their own.

And Jace did that without actually doing it. Looking for a way out that didn't involve blowing everything up, the arbiter of the Guildpact pronounced Jace the winner for lack of better options, creating Jace, the Living Guildpact.

Yeugh.

And there we have it. Jace, the new Living incarnation of the Guildpact, out to bring something remotely resembling peace to Ravnica.... And he goes and runs off to deal with other problems in the meanwhile.

And if you feel like this ending was anti-climactic? Well, yes. It's just as anti-climactic as the story itself.

To make you feel better, when I was selling packs of this at my [s]F[/s]LGS, I described the plot of the story as "The Amazing Race Ravnica Edition, just without the nice announcer.

After that, we've had a couple of small shorts set on Ravnica. Ral Zarek starts to collaborate with Jace to hide the existence of Planeswalkers from Niv-Mizzit - especially as both of them are 'Walkers. Teysa Orzhov works with Tajic of the Boros Legion - both Maze Runners themselves - in investigating the secrets of her Guild, and are captured for it. Gideon Jura joins the Boros Legion because he's an overachiever.

So that's it. Seriously. We go through multiple novels where I have to explain things in detail over a couple of weeks, then I can summarize everything else in half an article.

There's a lot of issues involved on Wizard's end as to why this is, and for the most part, I may not like them, I do agree with them. The story for Ravnica has become quite threadbare over the past few years, despite Wizard's attempts to turn it into the new 'central' plane of the story given that Dominaria was off the table.

Not well, mind you, but still there.

But back to the story.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the first Ravnica trilogy was that the ten guild mechanics were incorporated into the story. We are shown from the 'ground floor' how a mechanic like Radiance works, when we see Agrus or the Boros as a whole lay into their foes. We see the Dimir constantly shift around like the Transmute mechanic, and one Izzet utilizing the Replicate mechanic on the work of another is a major plot point. Everyone in their own way gets to be part of the story, and while it is told from the point of view of Agrus Kos, Noir Protagonist, it is clearly shown that there are other heroes and villains out there. Which is a degree of integration that is missing from a lot of flavour in the game.

And you know what? Wizards likes to draw inspiration for their sets from real world cultures and civilizations. From Arabian Nights to Ixaland, you can find correlations between places on Earth and Planes in Magic with ease. Some more easy than others.

Ravnica is Slav in nature. This is especially apparent in the names utilized, but when you dig down, you can see a lot of parallels involved. And it's not a culture that really sticks out for the default audience for Magic. Pirates are an easy sell (they were for me!), High Middle Ages is practically a given. But a Slavic World-City? That's different. That's new.

And that's what sets Ravnica apart from everything else, before and since. It's the flavour of the set that makes it stand out from most of the rest. Ravnica tells a story, and that is something that has been lacking for a long time. Yes, the card design was brilliant, and the mechanics ranged from amazing (like Hybrid Mana) to the banal (Cipher) to the broken (Dredge) - but the real standout came from the effort to make the world living and breathing.

I love Ravnica, an I will defend it to the end. I'm just worried that Wizards is going to make a rather large mess of things with the next chapter of the Nicol Bolas saga. That the story of Ravnica will get trampled over by whatever Bolas has planned.

My hat in the ring? Bolas, with the Immortal Sun as the physical manifestation of Azor's Spark, will attempt to merge it with the power of the Guildpact (created by Azor and supported for 10,000+ years) and use that energy to push his Spark back into Old'Walker status. The Eternal Army is there to make sure he isn't disturbed.

Join me next time when I take a look at Commander as a format, and point out some pros and cons to the whole thing.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!