Netflix’s Magic: The Gathering show faces an impossible problem

Magic: The Gathering is hard to envision as a TV show. The TCG has thirty years of stories, settings, and characters to pull from. The problem is, though, that a lot of it isn’t cohesive, and the narrative has only been tied together by a main cast of characters in the latter part of its life. How does a showrunner pick a main character, a setting, and what enemies to use when the Magic Multiverse is full of so much variety and,  well, magic? 

That’s what showrunner Terry Matalas is going to have to figure out. Despite recent reports that the show was canceled, Netflix ran counter to that and reannounced it as part of its Geeked Week. Known for the third season of Star Trek: Picard (generally thought of as ‘the good one’), he will now need to reign in the many iconic planes and characters into something condensed and comprehensible. 

That’s going to be hard to achieve, too – history shows it. This project is not new. It was first announced in 2019, with the Russos attached. That didn’t work out, so next it went to Jeff Kline, who even got as far as casting Brandon Routh as planeswalker Gideon Jura. That, too eventually faded away. Now, we’re at the third bite of the apple. Matalas has his work cut out if he’s to overcome the project’s production hell — though it is entering production, which suggests things are at least where Kline’s attempt was.. 

Why is Magic so hard to adapt? 

The problem with adapting Magic is it’s such a broad property. Most sets in the core MTG universe move location and they are all vastly different. While there are definitely some recurring settings like Ravnica or Dominaria, Magic’s focus never really stays in one place for very long. Instead, most sets will move to a new plane, a new idea, and location for the designers to explore. 

These settings are generally analogous to a specific trope. Thunder Junction is MTG doing Westerns. Kamigawa is an exploration of Japanese iconography, both from Samurai influences to far-flung futures. Kaldheim is MTG doing Vikings. Then there are the more original planes such as Ravnica, which is a city world dominated by guilds represented by dual colors. Heck, there are even several horror-inspired planes, like Innistrad, which is all gothic horror, Phyrexia, a metallic body-horror plane or even the current set, Duskmourne, a whole plane that is one big haunted house with a twinge of the 80s. 

The point is that MTG is not one vibe; it’s tens of vibes all smashed together that can change depending on what month it is. That’s great for a card game but not the best for a TV show. So to nail down a show, choosing the planes to focus on is important, but it can’t be so limited that you never plane hop. That’s core to the brand’s identity. A Magic show wouldn’t feel like Magic without seeing locations like Dominaria, Ravnica, Zendikaar, and Mirrodin/Phyrexia. But moving a story through all of these at too fast a pace is almost definitely going to give whiplash. 

Planeswalk with me

It’s not just a question of location either – it’s one of who. We know from the image of the show, Planeswalkers are going to be the focus. That makes sense. While attempts had been made prior, Wizards of the Coast finally found a way of centralizing the story in 2007 with Lorwyn when Planeswalkers were introduced. Magic the Gathering would, for the most part, be forever focused on a group of characters who ‘ignited their spark’, allowing them to move between all of these planes at will. That way, even if you jumped from the cosmic horror of Zendikar to Bloomborrow, the plane where everyone is instantly turned into a cute woodland critter, you had a throughline with these characters to keep you grounded. 

However, thanks to the five-color nature of Planeswalkers, no one character has emerged as the sole ‘main character’ of Magic. The first five characters introduced remain the most iconic, with White’s Ajani, Blue’s Jace, Black’s Liliana, Red’s Chandra, and Green’s Garruk. We know the lion-man Ajani and pyromancer Chandra will appear, but choosing one to be the main character feels like choosing just one Avenger to focus on in an introductory Avengers movie. It’s more about the group – whatever the makeup of that might be. 

See, that’s the other issue. What started as five core Planeswalkers has only ballooned. There have now been 84 Planeswalkers (some have been de-sparked but we just don’t have time to get into what that means or how it happened – the answer is kind of dumb, anyway). Do you tell the story of the main five? What about how Garruk has been sidelined in favor of Nissa as the Green representative? Do you just focus on Chandra and Ajani to keep a tighter focus?

Once you’ve even chosen that, there’s the other side of the coin. Who do you have these characters go up against? Magic has some omega-level threats, like the Phyrexian Praetors, who want to invade the multiverse and reshape it into the horrifying version of perfect. There’s the Eldrazi, unfathomable eldritch forces of nature that wield inevitable destruction. Nicol Bolas, perhaps the most recognizable villain in Magic, who is always on the hunt for more power. An MTG show that only shows one of these bad guys, or just focuses on one plane, or selects one planeswalker to be the ‘main character’ feels like it misses what’s great about Magic’s ever-shifting and expanding focus. That said, a TV show that tried to focus on all of it as well sounds like it would spiral without a very firm hand at the wheel. 

Finding the Sol

Now, of course, there absolutely is a world where this show lands and it is amazing. There are countless worthwhile stories to tell in this universe. If the main show does well, maybe there could be spinoffs, or numerous seasons can eventually hit the most important parts of the multiverse. Arcane has shown you can condense an impossibly large gaming world into a condensed story. Game of Thrones has shown you can have a show that bounces around a few main characters too in a fantasy setting. 

However, if there was a Magic: the Gathering show that never featured The Phyrexians, for example, it’d always feel incomplete (or should I say incompleat?). If Chandra was the show’s lead and it stayed with her through the whole thing, I’d feel short-changed by all the great stories never told with Liliana, or Vraska, or all the other interesting Planeswalkers that have been. I’m not confident that Matalas can feasibly deliver all of this unless the show goes on for thirty seasons. 

The best bet is likely to pare it all down, tell a centralized story of a couple of Planeswalkers, and have them come up against Nicol Bolas and eventually tell the story of War of the Spark down the line. It’s likely the creative minds behind the show will have to take inspiration from sets, and mix and match them. This is largely what worked for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has mostly taken elements of various runs in the comics and reworked and mixed them together. It can work.

Right now, despite only featuring Chandra and Ajani, we really know next to nothing about the show. However, despite my concerns with scope, I’ll remain hopeful that the team behind the show can figure it out. Nothing would be cooler than seeing these stories, which have only been depicted in books, cards, comics, and in blogs, played out across a long-running TV show. That said, I’ll always be annoyed if I don’t see my favorite character, Elesh Nornand I expect you will be annoyed if you never see your favorite aspect of Magic translated either. Therein lies the impossible challenge for the showrunners of the animated series. Someone is going to end up disappointed. Let’s just hope that’s a minority, rather than the majority.