The Game is Won

And that concludes the craziest month of my Fimfiction career thus far. A Cavalcade of Cards is complete, in its glorious entirety. It's a strange sort of feeling, as though I am relieved but also thoroughly empty.

For anyone who's been holding off on reading it either because it was incomplete, or you got turned off by the crossover tag, don't worry. There's maybe five chapters that really use the crossover aspect, and most of them are barely going to confuse you at all. You really don't need to be a massive Magic: The Gathering nerd to enjoy this.

Also, all the appropriate tags can be found in the spiffy new Table of Contents.

With all that out of the way, we move on to the aftermath.

If you had told me a month ago that I would actually be able to manage this, on several occasions writing entire stories in the space of literally under one hour to make my self-imposed deadline, I would have called you a bloody liar. Which is weird, since I had this idea around the middle of August. But since then, I've made it. I've kept to a twenty-four hour deadline, more or less, for thirty-one consecutive days, and generally produced actual quality work as a result of it. It's honestly quite surprising.

But perhaps more surprising is the absolute outpouring of positive feedback. Not necessarily in quantity, but in quality. All the regular commenters were so encouraging, so inspiring, and so much fun to watch for reactions. For the first time, I've really understood what it is that can compel someone to keep updating a daily story, even if it isn't bringing in a massive amount of views. And that's the people who do come around, the regulars, whose personalities start to stick in your mind and whose reactions you begin to predict after a solid month of talking to them.

And then, we come to the outcry for more. That double-edged sword which I have taken up time and again with pretty much everything I ever write, the constant cry of 'continue this', or 'please do a sequel' or just 'HOW CAN IT END ERMAHGERD I GUNNA DIE IF NO MORE OF THIS'. I've always been aware of the constant cries for sequels to my work, whether by just one person or by many, and banging out thirty-one one-shots has been a frickin' magnet for folks demanding continuation.

Okay, not demanding. That's a rude word. But regardless, a lot of people want a lot of sequels. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't always make a point to make stuff as open-ended and interesting as possible in case I ever do write sequels, so a few of these are just the ones that I'm also interested in. A little.

So, let's run down the list, shall we? (just for Cavalcade, though. It would just be depressing to look at the sheer number of my fics that people want more of that I refuse to give them).

The first is The Planeswalker's Field Guide: The Essential Manual For Those Seeking to Explore Worlds Beyond Their Own, the most dry, clinically detached, difficult-to-continue idea in the set. Thankfully, it's also the one that literally only one person seems to want, or bothered to mention wanting. As a brief run-down, the soratami planeswalker Tamiyo has written something which she calls a field guide for planeswalkers. It's a dry thing, and most of the humor of the progenitor one-shot comes from the fact that she's describing a world you just don't want to go to, because of how absurdly fragile their reality is. It's not exactly a style of humor that can be easily replicated for most of the MtG universe, and it's even harder to do as a pony thing, because there's only two pony planes.
However, when I described the Planeswalker's Field Guide as the Encyclopedia Galactica rather than the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I will confess that I did hit upon the idea of Dack Fayden the multiversal thief writing a much more tongue-in-cheek tourism-oriented booklet as an answer to Tamiyo's dry old scrolls. Still has the problem of not being pony enough, but it might prove easier to write than a long, droning encyclopedia that amounts to a better-written wiki article.

The second, and one that has all-around more buzz around it, is Twilight Sparkle, Queen of the Slivers. Fairly self-explanatory; dimensional shenanigans drop one of the ubiquitous deceptively-intelligent unclassifiable snake-golem creatures in Equestria, and then slivers are as slivers do. Whether it becomes a happy, jaunty story about these creatures of mindless destruction existing peacefully with ponies, or the slow creepy takeover of their entire society and way of life, I don't know yet, but I can say that this is one that has very high odds of happening.

The Phenomenal Adventures of Rococo Pommel is up next, and despite not having many comments begging for more, it's definitely one that I'm considering. A guild closely associated with the enigmatic seaponies of legend shows up in Manehattan one day, and begin to push an agenda of empowerment and bio-engineering modifications. The politics, as you can imagine, are quite complex once they start to really make waves. Up in the air, but leaning towards likely.

And speaking of Ravnica-inspired AU, there's The Harmony Conclave. A world where the Tree of Harmony has all but assimilated Equestria into a single unified hive-mind with good intentions and creepy methodology, made even more interesting by them being called upon to help the Rainbooms of the EqG world after the world finds out it has superheroes, and isn't too happy. A lot of fun to be had with this one, and quite a lot of eagerness surrounding it.

The Equine-Phyrexian War, also known as What If KingMoriarty Wrote My Little Praetor?. Not much to say here, it's a fun idea that proved so fun that the person who got me into MtG had to give up writing this very concept because they just kept getting really interesting ideas for what to do, and just sort of threw them all into a massive pile. And well, call me a smug prick but I wouldn't mind seeing if I can do better.

Dear Princess Ulamog, or alternatively Rise of the Celestidrazi. This is one that most people haven't explicitly asked for, but I can't help but feel they probably wouldn't object.

Granny Smith, Planeswalker. Nothing else needs to be said. You all want it. And there may or may not already be plans for it.

Time Patroller Starlight Glimmer. Not much to this one, just a fun idea to make Starlight visit all kinds of wacky AU that would otherwise take too long to give their own story.

From the Desk of the Royal Assassinorum, or something along those lines. Octavia Melody as an assassin, with more than a few surprise cast members to go along with her. Probably the only chapter in all of Cavalcade that was deliberately written to tease and test the waters for a particular concept, or at least the only chapter to which I'll admit having planned it.

Also, some of you are hoping for some resolution of a dangling plot thread about Derpy or something. That might happen, along with a few hundred other ideas that just sort of materialize when you spend an entire month thinking about ponies and MtG together.

But with that long, tiring, perhaps even exhaustive list of all the possibilities to come out of October finally over, I have to ask:

Was it good for you? Did you enjoy reading along as much as I enjoyed desperately refreshing myself on any and all relevant lore and any memes or strategies associated with certain cards? Was it fun to see ponies and MtG brought together in so many wacky and wonderful ways?

I hope so. Because at the end of the day, all of this means nothing if none of you loved it.

Well, see you next time.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

It was tremendous fun to be on the other end of this experiment. I'd say you did a magnificent job, and I look forward to any expanded concepts you care to make from this. I'm very glad I was able to help as much as I did.

[goldfencer]

Speaking as someone who's never played MtG, and has no plan to start in the foreseeable future, I can definitely say I enjoyed this.

[Bugsydor]

I had fun with this.

And yay for my getting an indirect mention as "that one hole"! Here's hoping my comments were more pertinent than irksome.

As for which stories I most want to see continued, my top three (in no particular order) are Twilight Sparkle, Queen of the Slivers, The Equine-Phyrexian War, and Granny Smith, Planeswalker.

[Admiral Biscuit]

Congrats!

[Dimensional Librarian]

I'll be honest I just read them all and I'm sad that I didn't keep up with it while you were writing them. I would love to see all of these squeals especially Princess Ulamog and Twilight Sparkle Queen of the Slivers.

I would like to also offer my services as a co-author on some of the sequel ideas you have in mind (Namely the resolution to the dangling Derpy plot if it's the one from the "Peel from Reality" Card)