At one point during my recent preview of Magic: legends, the new action role-playing game based on Magic: The Gathering, stops my character, raises her hands above her head and disappears into a surge of magical energy. It was the first time I’ve ever seen anyone on the boards, and according to executive producer Stephen Ricossa, it’s just one of the small details that could give his team life for the first time.
In Magic: legends, players will take on the role of an airplane walker – a powerful magical creature with the ability to move between dimensions. It is a tropic that lies at the heart of the seminal card game. Each new set of maps that are released takes place in a different part of the map Magic multiverse known as an airplane. But traditionally the static map art does not focus so much on the deed of plane walk itself. This usually happens outside the frame.
But over the past few years, Hasbro – the company that owns Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast – made real efforts to turn the original collectible card game into a modern transmedia property. Magic: The Gathering of course, comics have been around for years now, and there’s a new deal with BOOM! Studios by author Jed MacKay (Black Cat) and artist Ig Guara (Ghost-Spider). There were also novels, including 2019s Ravnica: War of the Spark, who killed a beloved character. That book, written by Greg Weisman (Gargoyles, Star Wars Rebel), quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
There’s also an animated series from Netflix in the pipeline, with brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo at the helm. The plan walk animations you will find while playing Magic: legends? Well, they did not simply conjure up from the sky.
“It’s actually very cool,” Ricossa told me during my demo. ‘[Wizards] gave us the concept art they used for the animation of the plane walk. ”
This means that what you see in Magic: legends, which enters open beta on Windows PC on March 23, is a small preview of what’s going to come in the Magic animation series. It’s all the result of the work that members of the Wizards of the Coast team have done over the past few years. We interviewed in 2019 with one of them, franchise creative director Jeremy Jarvis.
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Image: Cryptic Studios / Perfect World
“It’s not just for Netflix,” Jarvis said at the time. “I and my franchise IP development team, we are in the process of launching explorations, to bring things to life in the way that the [trading card game] does not have access to, the visualizing powers of, What does it actually look like when the character does the thing? What does airplane walking look like? Right? We do the exploration on a franchise level. ‘
According to his LinkedIn profile, Jarvis recently received an upgrade. He is now the creative director for Wizards franchise development, trying to apply the Marvel Cinematic Universe magic to franchises like Magic, but also to Wizards’ other properties. He is now charged with “ensuring media and readiness for entertainment of all Wizards IPs”.
It offers good interests for the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which is already in development.
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