Kamigawa: Titanbreach Would Be Lazy If It Wasn’t So Sick
On Friday, at MagiCon: Amsterdam, Wizards of the Coast announced the three upcoming in-universe Magic: The Gathering sets for 2027–and one of them is a combination of two planes we’ve seen before. Kamigawa, the plane heavily inspired by Japanese folklore and culture, and Ikoria, a plane largely dominated by powerful monsters of, well, titanic proportions. One might even say they are “Kaiju-like.”
And some might say that that is, well… a rather obvious idea. I mean, have we had enough time yet that I can say that? Like, come on, they took The Sci-Fi Japan Plane and they took Creatures Inspired By Godzilla Plane and they said “what if the former got attacked by the latter?” That media property exists already–it’s called Pacific Rim. This is an idea that we’ve already seen play out before. Giant monsters attack the shoreline, and humanity (in Magic’s case, humanity and also fox-manity and rat-manity and all the other fursonas running around Kamigawa) has to build giant mechs to fight back.
It’s not new, it’s not innovative. It’s been done before.
AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!
Like okay yes it is a little trite that they took these two very specifically Japanese ideas and just made them kiss. But come on. We’re gonna get to play a set with cool-ass vehicles, giant mechs a la Thundersteel Colossus fighting against Godzilla-sized monsters! Plus there’s the fact that not just Ikoria’s behemoths, but Ikoria itself is coming to Kamigawa. The very land itself from this low-tech heavily un-colonized plane of existence is just gonna start fucking falling into a hyperadvanced cyberpunk dystopia? That’s so fucking sick! I wanna see dudes with katanas fighting against bone-plated monstrosities beyond my comprehension. I wanna see a hotshot human pilot and her venerated foxgirl copilot (with whom she has a toxic situationship) suit up in a giant mech to go fight a monster the size of a skyscraper!
I might be a boring, no-fun giga-woke lefty loser who always has to look for the themes and the symbolism and talk about how a lot of the game’s origins are ~problematic~ and condemn not only the evils of capitalism as a whole, but the company that makes this game I love for all the evil that they do. And some small part of me did wonder how much of this set might again fall into the trappings of orientalism in fantasy, how much it might reuse problematic tropes–especially those found in cyberpunk media. Even Cyberpunk: 2077, a game I adore, is not immune to completely embracing the most racist Japanese stereotypes found in its origins. And I question our right as Americans to even indirectly adapt something like the original Godzilla, a film made about the very real and very prevalent fears of a country devastated by not one, but two nuclear bombs dropped on innocent civilians by the American military. We are the villains of that story, and here we are adapting it in our trading card game with all the elegance of a white guy who watches so much anime that he dreams of going to Japan and bothering the people who live there with his weird and probably perverted love of the fictionalized versions of their culture that he has seen over and over again.
But hey, forget all that shit for a second. It’s a set with giant mechs fighting giant monsters. They’re probably gonna have a bunch of sickass Pacific Rim nods, implicitly or explicitly. And hey, they might even reprint the Triomes from original Ikoria! Which you and I have of course just been proxying, but still!
Sometimes, Magic is a game about far more than just wizards throwing bullshit magic at each other. It can be about us, about our culture, about other cultures that we want to appreciate and respect. It can be about life, liberty, tyranny, about death and joy and hatred and rebirth and love and healing. It can be beautiful, it can be terrible, and it can be mediocre.
It can also just be about giant robots fighting giant monsters and how fucking sick that’s gonna look. And I, for one, cannot wait to turn my brain off and swing for 30.
