The best thing about collecting Magic : The Gathering cards is that every few months, they’re going to hit you with a whole new set to tear open, organize, accumulate and trade – and truly, these are some the actions that live warmly at the core of every collector. This month, they hit us with a mystical sledgehammer.

See, there’s always been an undercurrent of narrative that runs beneath all of the existing Magic cards; things that seem related, recurring names, similar creatures and abilities, and images that appear across different cards. Most times, these circumstances and coincidences aren’t really addressed, and attributed to the general goings-on around the section of the world that each subsequent Magic set takes place in. With the newest set of cards, ‘Shards of Alara’, Wizards of the Coast has published a kind of traveler’s guidebook to Alara that unifies and explains most of the 249 cards in the set. It’s not so much a Fodor’s Guide, inasmuch as it won’t really tell you where to get a good burger or how to avoid being slain by a rampaging swarm of banewasps, but it’s more of a Froud-‘Faeries’ style journey through the five ‘shards’, or mini-worlds, of Alara, each one centered around one of the five colors of magic, or ‘mana’ – a mainstay element throughout every expansion of Magic that’s now becoming a little more personified by these new narratives. The book explores fiery mountains, death-ravaged swamps, and so forth, as well as the heroes, villains and creatures that dwell within these. And I LOVE monster manuals, from Spiderwick to Dungeons and Dragons.

The Planeswalker’s Guide is an interesting read, adding more solidity to the cards that we all play with, but even more importantly than that, it’s beautiful. Magic employs the best of the best when it comes to dynamic, inventive fantasy artists, which is important in a visual genre that quickly becomes cliché and stale with each inch of needlessly-exposed cleavage. Despite being a jaded artist, I never, ever get bored of Magic’s artwork, which is always on the forefront of design and evolving illustration theory, while always remaining classic and attentive to core visual ideas. I don’t know if I can gush enough.

The book reprints much of the card art from Alara, which Wizards has also published online, though it appears in a slightly larger format in the book, which also displays the concept sketches and artwork that the artists used in forming and communicating their final ideas.

In addition to the basic set of 249 cards, there are also five different, pre-structured starter decks to play with, all of which include basic rules and explanations, so it’s an excellent place to leap in and start playing if you’ve never played before. I’m going to continue to search the shiny, foil packs for some of the super-rare, powerful ‘Planeswalker’ cards to introduce them to my game, but I haven’t been this reinvigorated about Magic in… well, about a month. Because it’s that much fun.

Go and buy a pack and get sucked in.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.