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the show by following the links below. This is a painting by Henri Bellechose from 1416 titled “The Last Communion and Martyrdom of Saint Denis.” It is a prototypical example of the International Gothic style: from its Biblical subject matter to its dazzling use of gold pigment, the painting is synonymous with so many works hanging in the apses and ambulatories of cathedrals across the Western World. For regular churchgoers, such a painting would be discernible and legible, even to the illiterate. For those unfamiliar with the patron saint of Paris, however, the narrative is hidden in layers of anonymous figures and holy symbols. So how can we read this? The centerpiece of Christ upon the crucifix anchors the composition. To the left, we see Christ again, who is offering Saint Denis
his last communion. The steel bars of the prison cell constrict Denis as he receives the Eucharist, a foreshadowing of his eventual beheading. To the right, Denis appears again, three times, where Bellechose theatricizes his martyrdom. Notably, he is adorned with the same robe worn by Christ on the opposite side of the painting, sanctifying Denis with this visual rhyme. The first figure here is being pushed forward by a heathen crowd. He is bound by his hands, and his head is cast down in despair. The second figure is strewn across the executioner’s block. A cleaver hangs above him, aimed at the bloody wound etched into his nape. Denis has already taken a swing. Finally, in the third figure, Denis is decapitated completely. Overlapping the foot of the cross, his disembodied head glows with a golden halo, a symbol of his sainthood. Here’s another painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Denis, this time from 1880 by Léon Bonnat. Nearly 500 years separate these two paintings, but the narrative remains the same. Stylistically, Bonnat’s work is much more photorealistic; it has taken queues from the Renaissance masters and employs a depth of field absent in the Gothic and Medieval works. Unlike that of Bellechose, Bonnat’s painting captures the execution suspended in time. This work is much more “legible”
to a contemporary audience. It depicts not a vignette of Saint Denis’ tragic life, but the exact moment it came to an end. Fundamentally, Bonnat’s work is in tune with the majority of Magic’s illustrations. Instants and sorceries look like this painting; these card types often show scenes full of action and motion and violence. They are the verbs, not the nouns, of the game’s visual language. Bellechose’s painting is much less
conventional. It makes use of the axis of time, and to be understood it relies on the audience to be familiar with the events and symbols and
figures that crowd the scene. A composition like this would never have found a home in the first 25 years of Magic art direction. But with the release of Dominaria arrived new design space for visual storytelling. This is a saga. Similar to Medieval and high Gothic paintings, the illustrations on these cards lean into symbolism and iconography to memorialize the past, and as a result, their legibility presupposes an audience that is in-the-know. But like The Martyrdom of Saint Denis, they rely on common conventions and tropes to communicate their messages and in their imagery, lives outstanding storytelling potential. Let’s start with The Akroan War by Steven Belledin. This is an oil painting on gessoed hardboard. It measures eleven inches wide by eighteen inches tall Its verticality is one of its
key features: when sagas debuted in 2018, many players remarked that due to this striking layout they did not look like Magic cards. With this new frame design, however, artists like Belledin could reconceptualize their approach to illustration. New limits inspire new ideas, and even a simple change in aspect ratio or a change in canvas orientation can breathe life into an old brush. Compositionally, this saga is divided into three panels. Its subjects resemble the black figurework found on ancient Greek pottery which helps place viewers on Theros. Even without knowing the historical source material or its context in the game world, however, this saga is legible. We can lean into intuition to read its main narrative beats: Blue king loses blue queen to red warrior, blue king assembles blue army, blue army fights red army. In its clarity and in its simplicity lies its mastery, like a good folk song. But there is more to this painting
than its superficial elements. For one, the story itself is a reinterpretation of the events that initiated the Trojan War. The blue king is a stand-in for Menelaus of Sparta, who lost his wife Helen to an elopement with Paris of Troy. The abduction of Helen has been the subject of countless artistic works throughout the centuries, and this saga adds to that longstanding tradition. Secondly, the painting here is pulling double-duty as an imitation of Greek tapestry. Belledin emulated the texture of a weave by painting the beige background in parallel with the horizontal brushstrokes of the gesso underneath. He then carved away the bottom of the painting with an exacto knife to reveal the vertical warp threads, adding to the realism of the piece. The third panel was intentionally left unfinished, not only to call attention to the illusion of the tapestry, but to symbolically represent an unresolved war. In this way, the medium is integral to the narrative. It is both ornamental to
the story and a voice in its retelling. Finally, this painting makes use of an invisible phenomenon that we often take for granted when reading illustrations. We can make sense of these three panels in sequence because of a concept that theorist Scott McCloud calls “closure.” In Chapter 3 of Understanding Comics, McCloud highlights how graphic novels completely depend on closure to function at all. The leap from one panel to the next requires readers to fill in the gaps between the drawings by pulling from lived experiences, thus committing closure. In a world full of fragmentation and incomplete information, closure is the act of “observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” McCloud’s example here of three coins that when arranged just right evoke another familiar shape underscores just how quickly our minds make sense of illusions, how we’re nearly helpless to pattern recognition and generating meaning out of inanimate images. Lately, I’ve been immersed in comic books. I’ve been obsessing over the relationship between the image and the written word. The storytelling power of this medium lies in its ability to stylistically communicate with the reader and encourage their involvement in meaning-making. These novels stimulate the imagination in a manner unavailable to traditional books or films The sagas of Magic tap into this same space and could be classified as what Marshall McLuhan called “cool media.” Cool media require closure and active participation from the audience to make sense of the artform, and sagas, more than any other type of Magic illustration, share a formal affinity with the narrative devices at play in all these books I’ve been reading. The Trickster-God’s Heist by Randy Vargas also requires closure to follow its three-panel format. In order to better understand its narrative, I invited my friend and resident lore expert Jay Annelli to walk me through the events depicted in this painting. “I am Jay Annelli, I am the loremaster for Wizards of the Coast…I always thought the loremaster title was a little silly, so I usually call myself a continuity editor when I want to be taken a little more seriously. I’m also the cohost for the Vorthos Cast…and I’ve written two books for Wizards of the Coast, two little artbooks. One is called ‘Legends: A Visual History’ and another is called ‘Planes of the Multiverse: A Visual History’ and I write articles for CoolStuffInc on lore things, and I used to write them for Magic: the Gathering Salvation way back in the day.” “So this is what looks to be a page from an illustrated manuscript in the medieval style. We can see a lot in common here with like medieval Bibles and things that were hand-copied by monks. It reads from top to bottom: what we see at the top is the dwarf Koll…so this is Koll forging the Tyrite sword…There are a lot of gold halos here: in medieval manuscripts, it’s meant to signify importance or holiness…We see that Valki, the God of Lies is there, but that behind him, our eyes are directed to this because it’s got a little gold halo, is a hidden knife behind Valki’s back. So then we move into the second panel and we see that Valki has stabbed Koll and taken the sword, but Valki’s disguise is starting to slip. So we see these red horns in the otherwise Valki body. We also see an image of a giant serpent stylistically behind Koll and a smaller tooth figure underneath, perhaps signifying the chaos that quote-unquote Valki is about to unleash with the cosmos monsters, or maybe representing another monster that was on the plane at the time, Vorinclex. The last image is of Tibalt. So we now know that Valki wasn’t Valki at all but he has slowly transformed into Tibalt throughout these three panels, making it clear he stole it to be up to no good. We also see a knotwork representation of The World Tree throughout…we know this is The World Tree because at the very top, we get the sundog effect of Starnheim atop the tree. A lot of people have been like ‘why is the Dark Ascension symbol there?' It’s not intended to be the Dark Ascension symbol, it’s intended to be a sundog like you see throughout the cards whenever you see Starnheim as sort of the sun of the plane in the background." Much like The Akroan War, this illustration, as Jay noted, imitates the conventions of its source medium. This is another key feature of Magic’s sagas: so far, many of them purposely call attention to themselves. They are metanarratives, imagined to be in-universe artworks that the peoples and cultures of the game world would conceive of their own histories. This adds another layer of fragmentation to the images. These stories are not just stories per se; their formal qualities give players insight into the values and behaviors of those who tell them. Mirari’s Conjecture by James Arnold, for example, is intended to resemble a map drawn on a chalkboard. The eraser marks are not accidental inclusions: they intentionally communicate that, through trial and error, the investigators who have drawn the map are slowly closing in on the true location of the Mirari. The First Eruption by Steven Belledin, like The Akroan War, emulates the texture of a woven rug. This is because the Shivan people who tell this saga are nomads, and so their art must be portable as they constantly pack up and move homes across the continent. Fall of the Thran by Jason Felix, too, plays into this concept of layering a story into the aesthetic features of the medium that tells it. “Fall of the Thran from the original Dominaria…gives you this very Art Deco representation of the Thran city being destroyed…and I thought that was very evocative, especially using Art Deco which is very associated with The Gilded Age…Art Deco is a great way, you know like Bioshock uses it to great effect as well, as a great way to illustrate kind of hubris in a culture in artistic mediums, and that is exactly what it’s doing here.” Kiora Bests the Sea God and Binding the Old Gods, both by Victor Adame Minguez, also flaunt their formal qualities. The former illustration was painted in the style of ancient nautical charts, and the latter was hand-carved with Swedish knives into a block of mahogany as an homage to Nordic woodworking. Both of these pieces are a testament to Victor’s range; it feels like you can send just about any art description his way and expect great results, but they also showcase how sagas allow artists to embrace new challenges and work far outside of their usual style. Elspeth Conquers Death by Ryan Yee is another excellent example of an illustrator leaning into an ambitious assignment and emerging victorious. The Bloodsky Massacre by Livia Prima is yet another exemplary piece that marries storytelling with pastiche. This painting shows an elaborate tattoo of the titular event as memorialized by a raider of the Skelle clan. At the top of his arm, we see the face of the demon Varragoth who escaped the rivers of fire on Immersturm and spearheaded a massacre so bloody that it left the misty skies of Bretagard tinted red. Along the bicep, we see the raiders themselves, who long await the return of their Demon-God. Knotwork frames the events, and a pile of skulls toward the forearm symbolizes the death they seek to bring upon the world with their conquest. Notably, Varragoth’s head is the dominant image of the piece. It is exaggerated in size and scale, and it emphasizes just
how much the Skelle idolize their god. This painting differs greatly from The Akroan War in its legibility and in its composition. Without knowledge of the characters and events in the Kaldheim story, it is much harder to interpret the narrative embedded into the tattoo. There is also no element of closure involved in its reading: the events here exist atemporally and have no sense of progression. Because the painting relies so much on symbols, this saga is closer in spirit to a mural than something graphic novel-esque like The Akroan War or the Bellechose painting of Saint Denis’ martyrdom. But much like the Shivan rug and the Greek weave, the tattoo gives insight into how the Skelle see themselves, and how they embody their history. Their masterworks don’t hang in halls fit for kings: they are carved into the skin of the warriors who seek to fulfill the prophecy that their religion promises. Time of Ice by Franz Vohwinkel is equally muralesque and even more esoteric. This is one of the most difficult stories to parse for the unfamiliar. Like The Bloodsky Massacre, it
is absent of closure and instead summarizes an entire block of storytelling in one image. As a result, if you aren’t in the know, then these figures require interpretation and translation from those who have read the tales. “So, Time of Ice. For those of you who don’t know what the Ice Age is, basically at the end of the Brother’s War, Urza detonates this device called The Golgothian Sylex, and it basically obliterates most
of what’s left of the continent and it ushers in this ice age. So we pick up with the actual ice age a couple thousand years later, and there are these two warring kingdoms. One
of these barbarian tribes called the Balduvians, and one of these knights in castles, more high-fantasy knights called the Kjeldorans. What we see in the Time of Ice artwork here is what appears to be a tapestry, like you’d see in like a medieval
castle depicting some history here. So the piece itself – in the background
there, we see a Kjeldoran outpost. We actually see several details from the multple arts of the card Kjeldoran Outpost on this castle in the far background. While flying above it, we see two different kinds of knights from Kjeldor. The one atop a pegasus is a white shield crusader, literally from the card White Shield Crusader. And the other one is a Kjeldoran Skyknight riding what is called an Aesthir. These are kind of deep-cut references where, if you see it, and you know the card set the images are from, it’ll look really familiar to you. If you don’t, it just kinda looks like a generic tapestry. What’s important here is more in the foreground. So in the foreground, we see these two figures on either side kind of united around this field of – it’s difficult to see, you can see a dead zombie up front – but then there’s a whole field, a whole army of them behind these two figures. These two figures are Darien, who is the king of Kjeldor at the time, and Lovisa Coldeyes who is the most powerful of the Balduvian clanleaders at the time. These two – what they’re depicting them in front of is a battle in the snow with a lot of defeated zombies. So, the plot of the Ice Age is that
Lim-Dûl, this great necromancer, raises this massive zombie army while playing the Kjeldorans and Balduvians against each other, and eventually these two nations have
to unite in order to hold off this zombie invasion that Lim-Dûl is trying
to conquer the plane with. That alliance between them ends up forming the foundation of what will become a new nation. So both of their children end up getting married and they found a new nation called New Argive years later.” “Beneath those foreground figures are Jaya Ballard and Jodah in the little boxes…they’re both heavily involved because they’re the ones who negotiated the alliance between Kjeldor and Balduvia. And then,
there’s some even more deep cuts. So one of the most famous cards from the Ice Age is Marit Lage...you see her tendrils breaking out through the ice. That’s just more of a, like, stylistic thing, a nod to Marit Lage being famous, more so than any kind of story connection.” I asked Jay if it was possible to interpret this painting without having played Magic in the mid 90’s. He advised me to look at the body language of the two figures in the middleground. The key to reading this piece lies in the illuminated torches held over the slain figure between them, which represents a shared victory over a common threat. “So even if you didn’t know
anything about this, you’d say ‘oh okay, so there’s an ice age, there’s some kind of zombie attack, and it unified these people’. And you can infer that from those kinds of details.” Jay also told me that not even he could decipher all the silhouettes hiding in the outer frame, proof that sometimes even the most enfranchised can be left uncertain when viewing these cards. Admittedly, not all of the sagas printed thus far require such heavy extrapolation. Cards like The Modern Age and Forging the Tyrite Sword stay lower to the ground, and can be interpreted without much knowledge of Magic story. Context clues provide useful insight as well. Often, plots are succinctly summarized in the card titles, and the mechanics of the chapters elegantly align with the main events of the narrative arc. The Fall of Lord Konda is self-explanatory, and the flavor text on the flip side fills in the gaps that the front side leaves opaque. But I’ve noticed that the sagas, maybe more than any other design in the game’s history, invite players to engage, at least in passing, with the game’s lore. They encourage players to interact with the illustration, to extract hints from the artwork and pair them with the effects that hit the stack at the beginning of each turn. Even finding a saga in a booster pack will often merit a longer pause than normal to admire the beauty of the card in its entirety. Casting a saga initiates a dialogue between image and word, like reading through the panels of a comic book. Furthermore, their art direction is a departure from the typical commission, allowing painters more freedom to communicate with the audience through symbols. The emulation of other materials in three-dimensional space, what the French would call “deceiving the eye,” gives these paintings even more standalone character than what is usually found in the card frame. Toward the end of our talk, I asked Jay
Annelli to share his own thoughts on Sagas and how they affect on the game as a whole. “So there are really two kinds
of sagas. There are the nostalgic sagas, which are reminding players of past events. Those are primarily in Dominaria, but we saw a bunch in Kamigawa with things like Fall of Lord Konda. And then there are also worldbuilding sagas, which exist to flesh out the worldbuilding in ways traditional Magic cards can’t, and often find clever ways to do so. So, in both cases, they’re very lore-driven art pieces, but they’re also abstract interpretations. They are in-universe art of an event, so it’s always challenging to interpret the art within art of it. But when you start to think of it that way, a lot of them start to make more sense, when you start to realize ‘oh, well the medium here isn’t just Wizards doing some sort of stylized interpretation of this thing. It’s telling you something about an in-universe culture, or who in-universe is making it, which I think is very clever when done very well.” Recently, I took a trip down to San Antonio to tour the remnants of The Alamo. In the main plaza, I was greeted with a giant sculpture that commemorated the men who fought there, their larger-than-life figures stood emerging in high relief from marble and granite. I thought about how we frame our histories, how we memorialize the past, how cultures communicate their values through art. I thought about who was excluded from the cenotaph, too, and how that omission continues
to shape who we see as our heroes. As we walked away from the monument, I thought about the headless sculptures of Saint Denis I saw all over Paris as a teenager. I remember how eerie the statues looked to me, a kid who knew nothing about his story. This episode was sponsored by Card
Kingdom and Coalesce Apparel and Design. Follow the links below to purchase cards and merchandise, or support the show directly on Patreon. All new patrons receive a code to redeem a free Rhystic Studies sticker from Coalesce, as well as access to my behind-the-scenes podcast, and highest-tier supporters will receive a signed copy of Baleful Strix from me. Thanks for watching, as always. I’ll leave you with a clip of Jay Annelli walking me through The Antiquities War from our talk together, which you can hear in full by
supporting at the one dollar level. “So the history here is that there are
these noble brothers who are orphaned, and their new stepmother wanted her child to inherit, so she sends them both out to the desert to study with an artificer where everyone from their nation sends their troublesome children to study with an archaeologist. Out there,
they actually find their passion. They start uncovering these devices from an ancient civilization called the Thran, and they are the ones who are able to crack how to build this Thran flying device called the Ornithopter. “They use it to find more and more
Thran sites hidden out in this desert and eventually stumble on essentially the motherload when they find this massive–what’s called a Powerstone–which is this crystal that holds a lot of magical energy that was used
to power all of the Thran’s technology. They both to grab it and it splits in half into what’s called the Mightstone and the Weakstone.” “Eventually, they end up killing—one
of them ends up killing their mentor by mistake—because they both covet each other’s stone. A series of events happens that places them at the helm of two different nations. So what is this sibling rivalry turns into this war between nations that completely devastates a continent on Dominaria." “This particular piece, as I mentioned before the name is based on The Antiquities War, a book by Urza’s wife. Her name was Kayla bin-Kroog, where she kind of told this unvarnished history of the brothers both of what she had known from Urza and what she experienced herself. The art here is almost like a blueprint style illustration. You’ll see in there both brothers reaching for this massive powerstone and shattering apart in their hands. You’ll see little illustrations for what were called Urza’s Avengers and his thopters and a dragon engine, which was one of Mishra’s iconic weapons. And it’s likely representative of an illustrated edition of the book by Kayla bin-Kroog. It was noted that there were illustrations of the people in there and all sorts of stuff through various editions of this book. So it’s really a great reference to this in-universe text which also gives us an idea of the history there, if that makes sense.”
