At one point during my recent viewing of Magic: Legends, the new action RPG based on Magic: The Gathering, my character stopped, raised his hands above his head and disappeared in a wave of magical energy. It was the first time I saw someone fly in a plane before and, according to executive producer Stephen Ricossa, it’s just one of the little details that his team had the opportunity to bring to life for the first time.
At the Magic: Legends, players will take on the role of planeswalker – a powerful magical being with the ability to move between dimensions. It is a trope that is at the heart of the seminal collectible card game. Each new set of cards that is released occurs in a different part of the Magic multiverse known as the plane. But traditionally, the art of static cards has not focused so much on the act of planeswalking itself. It is usually something that happens outside the framework.
But in recent years, Hasbro – the company that owns Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast – made a concerted effort to transform the original collectible card game into a modern transmedia property. Magic: The Gathering comics have been around for years, of course, and there’s a new contract with BOOM! Studios by writer Jed MacKay (Black Cat) and artist Ig Guara (Ghost-Spider). There were also novels, including 2019 Ravnica: War of the Spark, who killed a beloved character. This book, written by Greg Weisman (Gargoyles, Star Wars Rebels), quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
There is also a Netflix animated series in preparation, with brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo in charge. The planeswalking animations you will find while playing Magic: Legends? Well, they were not just conjured out of nowhere.
“It’s actually really cool,” Ricossa told me during my demonstration. “[Wizards] provided us with the conceptual art that they were using to animate planeswalking. “
That means that what you’re seeing in Magic: Legends, which goes into open beta on Windows PC on March 23, is a small preview of what’s to come in the Magic animation series. It’s all the result of the work that Wizards of the Coast team members have been doing for the past few years. We interviewed one of them, the creative director of the franchise Jeremy Jarvis, in 2019.
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Image: Cryptic Studios / Perfect World
“This is not just for Netflix,” Jarvis said at the time. “My franchise IP development team and I are doing explorations on the move, to bring things to life in ways that [trading card game] does not have access to viewing powers for, What does it really look like when the character does the thing? How is planeswalking? Right? We are doing this exploration on a franchise level. “
According to his LinkedIn profile, Jarvis recently received an update. He is now the creative director of the Wizards franchise development on a large scale, trying to apply some of the magic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to franchises like Magic, but also to other Wizards properties. He is now in charge of “ensuring the transmedia and entertainment readiness of all Wizards IP”.
This bodes well for the film Dungeons & Dragons, which is already in development.
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