The last few years of Magic: The Gathering have seen a lot of crossovers, like Fallout and Middle-earth, as well as sets with unusual themes like the cute animals of Bloomburrow and the grand prix race of Aetherdrift. Given how well most of these sets have sold, obviously this has been a popular move with the players actually buying cards—not that you'd know it based on Reddit threads and YouTube comments, which are full of players demanding a return to Magic's trad lore.
The complainers get their wish in Tarkir: Dragonstorm, a set that puts the most straight-up fantasy creature you can imagine front and centre, and returns to a setting that debuted in 2014's Khans of Tarkir. It's a plane where five khanates, each based on a different east or central Asian culture, are in conflict with impossibly powerful Dragon Lords, and where a magic storm keeps giving birth to more dragons. It's generic fantasy enough that Brandon Sanderson could get a trilogy out of it by lunch.
Recent sets have foreshadowed this return to Tarkir, with a strange dragonhawk appearing in the otherwise fuzzy Bloomburrow, and dragons appearing out of mysterious storms to disrupt the Ghirapur Grand Prix in Aetherdrift. While I'm not always hot on Magic's storytelling it is fun how a card in one set can, if you look at it closely, contain a hint about what's to come months down the line.
What happened is that the five khanates worked together long enough to perform a magical ritual to overthrow the Dragon Lords, which they did by tapping into the dragonstorm to summon spirit dragons. They say when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail; on Tarkir all they have is dragons and I guess every problem looks like a thatched-roof cottage.
While the ritual worked and the Dragon Lords have been ousted, it worked a little too well and now the storm is spitting out wyrms all over the planes. Some of Magic's well-loved heroes, like the archangel Elspeth, are traveling to Tarkir to see what's going on and that's where the set will kick off. (Incidentally, I love that Elspeth, who comes from the 1920s-themed Capenna, still wears pinstripe pants beneath her angelic plate armor.)
It'll be interesting to see how well this return to Magic's deep lore does compared to, say, the Final Fantasy set due in June. Given that Wizards of the Coast claim more than 50 million people play Magic, you gotta assume there's room for crossover sets and gimmicky theme sets and plain vanilla fantasy sets.
We'll find out in April, with Tarkir: Dragonstorm launching digitally in Arena on April 8 and then physically in stores on April 11. Pre-release events will run from April 4–10.
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