Last month, I looked at a Magic art book centered on the Ixalan expansion. Today we have another such art book, about Dominaria.
Dominaria was Magic's original 'plane'- the world on which all expansions were initially based. From Mark Rosewater, Magic Design Architect:
It "was a frequent setting for the first fourteen years- around forty expansions take place on Dominaria or places that would eventually be identified as part of Dominaria."
Eventually be identified- that's a key phrase. A bunch of later expansions would be identified as taking place on Dominaria, after the fact.
Originally, Magic wasn't nearly as well organized or planned as it is today. Ixalan, for example, was a world created from nothing with a very specific and intentional theme. So too were Innistrad, Mirrodin, Ravnica, and Zendikar. But in the beginning, the designers hadn't yet fleshed out this idea, so Dominaria was a de facto location for many sets- a 'hodgepodge', per Rosewater. This specific book covers the art and backstory of the Dominaria expansion, which came out this year and commemorates Magic's 25th anniversary with a return to the world that started it all.
The designers looked into Dominaria's varied past and pulled key elements from it to create this expansion. And "in this book, you'll get a chance to see what Dominaria once was and what it's become. You'll see a world that's been through wars, invasions, temporal disasters, magical climate change, planar overlay, and more worldwide threats than any other plane in the multiverse, and come out the other side a happy, thriving world." Accordingly, the Dominaria book is wide in scope. The writing is on par with the Ixalan book (informative, repetitive, vanilla). The art is great. I liked this, but its lack of cohesive theme (compared to Ixalan) knock it down a notch.
These Magic books are fun, but what I'd really like is a definitive/official history of the game in this format, complete with art from every expansion. That would be amazing.
Rating: A-
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