After building toward a nigh-unstoppable otherworldly threat, bringing together a remarkable team for the forces of good, time travel shenanigans to glean a solution from your storied past, and near defeat that sends our heroes to the precipice of ruin, it all comes down to the final battle. The moment when good triumphs over evil, pushing against the darkness, though not without sacrifice. Despite this pain, our heroes ultimately triumph. As the dust settles, there is a chance for peace at last, though this is only the beginning. The fallout leaves a multiverse of possibilities for those who live to fight another day. We stand at the beginning of a new chapter.
This is Magic: The Gathering at the conclusion of March of the Machine. This is the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the conclusion of the Infinity Saga.
Surely, it’s an elemental approach to story structure, the bones of these two sagas can be traced back through the epics of our times and across cultures, though the echoes and reflections in these grand narratives expose a shared ethos in grand narrative storytelling. These are some of the last remaining pillars of the great multiversal obsession of the early 2020s, and I’m concerned for how they will continue to stand in the future.
Scroll through the dozen or so essays I’ve published and it’s easy to pick up my excitement for Reality Fracture. Of the Lorwyn Five, Jace has always been my favourite and there remains enough room in the narrative expectations to deliver a stellar conclusion to the last few years of Magic storytelling. There’s no reason that Jace needs to be reduced to a mustache megalomaniac, even if his intentions so far have been foggy at best. The recent Omenpath arc has felt like a prolonged throat clearly, a reorganizing of notes and plot ideas scattered across the table rather than a satisfying chapter in an ongoing story.
A similar sentiment is frequently levelled at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has felt unfocused since the grand conclusion of its decade-long experiment with Avengers: Endgame. This isn’t the first time that Magic has found inspiration in Marvel. There was a good amount of eye rolling when the Gatewatch formed in Battle for Zendikar at the height of Marvel Mania following the first Avengers film. The Blind Eternities with their own team of heroes to combat the greatest threats to the multiverse; sure, they don’t have secret identities, but they remind me of the headier super teams across comics history like Grant Morrison’s Justice League, Warren Ellis’ Planetary and, fittingly, Jonathan Hickman’s iteration of the Avengers.
I don’t fault a more widescreen cinematic approach, comics had a similar shift at the beginning of the millennium, and utilizing a team to tell a story allows for a broader scope in perspective with the opportunity to bring everything back together in focus during pinnacle moments. Wizards experience a similar turn in their storytelling as they moved away from the block structure. Pick up a set that thematically piques your interest; maybe you might miss out on the overarching story but there should be a worthwhile self-contained narrative.
Later this year, Magic’s great multiversal swing will arrive a couple of months before Marvel; but only if you haven’t read the work inspiring Avengers: Doomsday — the canon-shifting Secret Wars.
Johnathan Hickman’s 2015 series was a miracle in itself. The conclusion of a yearslong saga that wove together his work on Fantastic Four, New Avengers, Avengers, and a co9llection of tertiary titles that supported the frankly massive weight of the story he was attempting to tell. Even today it’s well worth going back and reading through, but suffice it to say, and to avoid spoiling one of modern comic’s grandest storytelling achievements, he pulls it off.
(Somehow Hickman would capture lightning twice and embark on an exciting new direction for the X-Men as his next project.)
This has become the keystone for Marvel Studio’s current grand arc, and one can only assume an inspiring work for Wizard’s narrative team, the Omenpath arc and Reality Fracture. Doomsday will do fine business, and recent Magic sets seem to be smashing sales goals with every new release both beyond the universe and within, but their narrative weight is unsettled. Underwhelming capstones that fail to live up to what came before.
I was an avid comic reader during Hickman’s Avengers Initiative — which shared a design ethos with the concurrent films but differed dramatically in tone and sophistication. Fittingly for 2026, Hickman’s writing was often compared to the films of Christopher Nolan, intricately plotted narrative devices that some critics found distancing or cold., but remarkable in their ambition. I doubt ‘ambition’ was the general vibe to come across from the recent Doomsday trailer.
This isn’t an impassioned slagging of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — I had a great time over the weekend hanging with my pal Spider-Man — between the shifting priorities of Disney execs, the reorientation of their narrative direction away from Kang and toward Doom, their hold on the story feel looser than it had been during the threat of Thanos. There’s a rushed feeling to the arrival of Dr. Doom, plenty of yada-yadaing to cement his place in the universe; bolstering his reputation in the eleventh hour before his debut. Contrasted with the gradual build for Thanos, who loomed in post-credit stingers and hints for eagle-eyed viewers, Doom has no greater weight to his arrival than Justin Hammer — save a reputation imported from the comics and the return of Robert Downey Jr. The scale feels illusionary, weight immaterial and limited by time.
The are echoes of the same issues in the current Omenpath arc. I reinvested in Magic’s story toward the end of the Phyrexian Invasion, and despite a substantial amount of reading to catch up on, I understood the significance of the multi-planar incursion. One of the storied villains in the Blind Eternities, the mecha-fascist destroyers of Mirrodin had arrived to lay siege to the multiverse. Even though the effects were temporary, the compleation of Nissa, Ajani, Vraska and Jace felt like a proper threat, dangerous. These were the heroes at the centre of novels, sets and stories stretching back to 2007, stripped of their souls, under the thrall of Elesh Norn. Surely good would triumph in the end, but there would be consequences.
Total up all of the card stock and ink for the Omenpaths arc and it’s missing the storytelling gravity. It’s hard to believe we’ll be wrapping up three years of story in the fall. Since Wilds of Eldraine, the in-universe story has been building to Jace’s imposition of a universe to control. To avoid blissful ignorance for the sake of argumentative convenience, I know that not every narrative beat has been with Reality Fracture in mind — I’d love to one day learn how the story took shape and its various iterations. Plans needing to shift and change as Magic’s popularity has grown, new properties have been invited into the fold and player have, hopefully, had some influence on the narrative course of the Omenpath arc. But it all feels like it’s wrapping up too quickly, no? There are several sets in Magic’s hat era — an experiment that hopefully Wizards has left behind — where most of my attention was on trying to figure out exactly what the hell Jace was up to.
A reliable complaint for abandoning the block structure is that stories feel poorly paced when confined to a single set, especially for culminating conflicts and conclusions. The resistance against the Phyrexians could have used another set, as much as I’m an Aftermath apologist, though the pace of Reality Fracture feels even more egregious. Thanks to the announcements in Amsterdam, we know the upcoming sets in 2027 and they, on first reveal, look to be free of any aftereffects from thew showdown with Jace. I don’t want to get too far out over my skis speculating, given that we know absolutely nothing about the narrative direction but aren’t any hints to why these sets would be out of place in the current Omenpaths arc. They look cool and exactly like the sort of world I want Wizards to explore, but not a bold new direction for the Blind Eternities.
The influx of Universes Beyond, as it’s brought up time and again, hasn’t helped the long-term pacing of Magic’s story. Allotting half of the year’s release calendar to sets that carry no narrative weight, while introducing hundreds of new cards into the ecosystem, make it hard to keep track of the plot and emotional throughline to make players feel invested in the greater narrative. This isn’t the downfall of Magic the Gathering — some of the best narrative work has come in recent sets — and for decades there have been players who could not care less about the game’s lore, but to forget it is a wasted opportunity.
Wizards has celebrated the new, and lapsed, players brought to the game thanks to Universes Beyond. I’ve played with a surprising number of people who came to Magic through Final Fantasy, the Avatar prerelease or the Fallout precons. One of my favourite nights at my old LGS in Halifax was for the launch of Dr. Who, where another member of my pod would nerd out about the deep cuts and mechanical homages built into their deck. I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, but nevertheless, I was stoked on their behalf.
Despite what lamenters might say, I doubt most fans of Universe Beyond pop in to collect their cards, stow them in a hermetically sealed display and then never think about Magic again. I’ve chatted with enough players who have stuck around for Lorwyn Eclipse and Secrets of Strixhaven to know that Universes Beyond is an invitation in, a beginning, not an endpoint. Crucially, these conversations often turn to Magic. Not only the commanders we play or our opinions on the current set, but the lore behind the game, recommendations for stories, articles and how they can venture further into the archives of the game.
Over the weekend, new cards from the convention-exclusive Mystery Booster Commander Edition were unveiled. Deep cuts from the game’s history abound and it’s not only Magic boomers who are excited to play with these new designs. Many players came to the game thanks to a strong relationship to a world, a story. Wizards has the opportunity, and I’d argue a responsibility, to give the players a rich story within they universe they have found and grown to love. This can only happen if they’re given the time.