The Implicit Neighs · 12:16am Dec 14th, 2014
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their kind words and well wishes. It means a lot to me.
And now, something I've been wanting to gush about for a while. So like a lot of geeks, I like Magic: The Gathering, and - wait, no, come back! This'll be interesting, I promise! And it's relevant to ponies too!
Okay, so Magic: the Gathering (or MtG) is a card game, and it's really fun and that's all I'll say about it in terms of mechanics. This isn't about the game, really. This is about ponies, worldbuilding, and a really awesome ponyfic.
You see, MtG isn't all about the cards or the game mechanics. (It's only mostly about those). It also has flavour and story, which aren't really that important - except for that there's a peculiar intersection that FanOfMostEverything discovered between ponies and MtG.
Okay, I need to do a quick infodump but I promise this is interesting honestly. In Magic: the Gathering, there are multiple planes of reality, and one of those planes is called Ravnica. Ravnica is a city which covers an entire planet (think Coruscant from Star Wars, but medieval).
Many, many races and species live in Ravnica. Not just the usual humans, elves, and goblins, but also centaurs, minotaurs, gorgons, vampires, merfolk, faeries, and just about any fantasy creature you can think of. It's a world where magic is freely available to pretty much anyone, and anything can be had for a price. It's a world where your life can turn upside down in a second if you're unlucky (or lucky, as the case may be). It's a world where death is just another way of life, and where you can face far worse things than merely dying.
It is, in short, a magical world of near limitless potential, where many different races attempt to live together in harmony.
Sound familiar? It should. I'm not saying Ravnica is Equestria; but it does have the same kind of potential as Equestria. And this brings me to FanOfMostEverything's awesome story: The Implicit Neighs.
In The Implicit Neighs, FoME presents an utterly ingenious concept: you can put ponies in Ravnica, and nobody would even think it was weird. Why would they? Ravnica is exactly the kind of place where weirdness can abound. It's a world where some people explode for entertainment, for goodness sake. (And before you ask, yes, you probably can explode twice in Ravnica).
But he didn't just stop there. You see, there's more to Ravnica than a world-sized city. Much more.
Okay, look, I'm going to do another infodump, but if you're still reading at this point, you're interested, right? It's gonna be cool. Okay, here we go.
One of the core concepts of MtG is that there are five colours of magical mana. This never changes. MtG will always be about the five colours of mana: white, blue, black, red, and green.
Each colour is associated with different aspects. White is about order, protection, and light, among other things. Green is about life, growth, brute force. And so forth.
When you're playing the game, the colours you choose influence the kinds of spells you have available to you. And you can play in more than one colour: you could play white and green for example.
And this brings us back to Ravnica. You see, there are ten ways to combine the five colours into two-colour combinations.
Ten ways.
Ten Guilds.
See that picture up the top there? That's the Tablet of the Guilds with a bunch of pony cutie marks on it. It represents the ten Guilds of Ravnica.
A Guild is an organisation which has embraced one of the ten combinations of two mana colours, and this is the awesome thing about Ravnica. Every guild has its own philosophy, agenda, and style. For example, take white and green again. When combined, these two colours represent a desire to nurture and protect life.
Sound familiar?
Ravnica is constantly in a state of uneasy balance between these ten guilds, who all keep each other in check. And thus comes FanOfMostEverything's other masterstroke - he puts the ponies we know and love into guilds that might suit them, but while maintaining the bonds of friendship that we admire from the show. A little piece of Equestrian harmony in the chaotic ecumenopolis that is Ravnica. It's quite heartwarming.
Some ponies fall naturally into guilds - Fluttershy, for example, couldn't ever be anything but white-green - but others take more interpretation, and it's fascinating seeing the ponies we know and love in a Ravnican light.
And that's still not all. The Implicit Neighs is hilarious. I want to say that FoME has a Douglas Adams style, but it's probably more like Terry Pratchett (he implies Discworld is an influence), but I haven't read any Discworld books so I don't know exactly if that's true and yes I know, please don't hit me, I know I should read them, and if they're as good as this story I probably will. The dialogue is fantastic, and I was giggling madly all the way through. I could spend the rest of this blog post just quoting bits from it, so I'll avoid the temptation and just suggest that you read it.
But that brings us to the clincher: could a person who's not familiar with Magic: the Gathering read this and enjoy it? I'm not sure, but I'm going to say that they probably could. Even I'm not familiar with the vast majority of MtG's lore. For most players, the flavour is purely optional, because when you get down to it, it's a card game. I think FoME has written the story with that in mind, using lore for flavour but without letting it bog things down too much. It actually adds a nice air of mystery to the whole thing.
If nobody else does anything with the setting I'd be disappointed, as there's so much potential here. It's not like a certain other crossover didn't become utterly massive...
Well, I'm certainly flattered.
And yes, both Adams and Pratchett have been major influences. And you really should read the Discworld series; it's quite good.
Also, it was definitely my intention to make my crossovers accessible to people with little to no familiarity with the card game, but that one needs the most familiarity with Magic lore out of all that I've written. Those entirely unfamiliar with the game might be better served reading the ones set in Equestria first; they do a pretty good job of introducing the basic concepts and some details of Ravnica in particular.
2651710 You're going to make my want to play Magic again... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!
*clings to Shandalar*