Magic: The Gathering Multiverse

Reality is not one world but numberless ones, each a plane sealed off from the rest by the Blind Eternities, and across that dark drift the planeswalkers — mages who draw the mana of white plains and blue islands, of black swamps, red mountains and green forests to bend worlds to their will. This is the Multiverse of Magic, glimpsed first on ten thousand painted cards and then written outward into a shelf of novels, where the spells carry consequence and the archmages have names and graves. Its spine is the Weatherlight Saga, the long war of the plane Dominaria against Phyrexia, the machine-hell ruled by the deathless Yawgmoth. The story opens in deep antiquity with the Artifacts Cycle — Jeff Grubb's The Brothers' War, the fratricide of the artificers Urza and Mishra — and closes amid ruin in J. Robert King's Invasion Cycle. Around that trunk the branches multiply: the Ice Age and Legends cycles reaching further into Dominaria's past, the Masquerade and Onslaught cycles, and later books that leave the home plane entirely for the living metal of Mirrodin or the spirit-haunted forests of Kamigawa. It is a shared world of many hands — King, Scott McGough, Cory Herndon and others — pinned set by set to the game it grew from. Open one and you are reading epic fantasy stripped to its engine: conjurers and dragons, artifice and apocalypse, each volume tinted by the color of mana that fuels it. The publication run is a tangle, so a newcomer does best to begin at the beginning of the world — The Brothers' War, a self-contained tragedy of two brothers and the weapon that unmakes a continent, and the cleanest door into everything the Weatherlight crew inherits after.