Welcome back, lore fans! As some of you may be aware, I have a book coming out next week! Magic: the Gathering: Legends: A Visual History (gosh that's a long name, with three whole colons) is the product of months worth of work in early 2019. If you look at my article history on this very site, you'll notice that my writing output dropped to about one article a month. That's because I was busy starting a new job at the time, but also writing a 20,000 word manuscript in my spare time!

What is Magic: the Gathering - Legends: A Visual History?

Cover Art by Tyler Jacobson

Well, that's a long title for one thing, so let's just call it Legends. Legends is a 256-page Hardcover book in the same format as Rise of the Gatewatch. The text is approximately 20,000 words, I say approximately because with the amount of editing that goes into developing an art book like this, whole sections get cut, rewritten, or added after I've turned in the final draft of my manuscript. Almost every page of this book is covered with Magic artwork, including some never-before-seen concept pieces. It covers over 110 Legendary Creatures from throughout Magic history (although it focuses on modern artwork), many of which were picked because they're popular in Commander.

Please note that this isn't a direct companion to Commander Legends, but instead another product in the 'Year of Commander'. The book is written for more casual lore fans, but if you enjoy my "Legends of..." articles, this will feel like a huge version of one of those, albeit one with less links to other materials (what with it being a physical book and all - although the ebook is also nice). The goal was to keep it high level and avoid referencing characters not included in the book, to keep the text somewhere at the "back of the action figure box" level. Given the number of bios and the word count I mentioned earlier, it's also around 150-200 words per legend, so it was important to pack each bio with characterization over personal history.

Content Warning

As this book was finalized in the fall of 2019, Wizards of the Coast had not yet terminated their relationships with Terese Nielsen or Noah Bradley. As such, pieces from both artists remain in this book, one image from Terese Nielsen, and two from Noah Bradley.

Creating a Book

Photo of Legends: A Visual History Spine

To give you a sense of the time scale of these books, I was brought on in roughly February or March of 2019 (depending on when you're counting from), had a first draft manuscript by May, and by October the book had a near-final layout and art placement. It was originally slated to be published in July 2020, but was pushed back due to COVID-19 concerns until October. That's a full 18 months between conception (or at least, my part of it, anyway) and publication.

Let's look at each step here to give you a sense of what went into the book. Please keep in mind this is all from my perspective and my best recollection of work I did over a year ago.

Concept

The original concept focusing on Legends was there from the beginning. This book had been planned since Rise of the Gatewatch, and they wanted to shift focus from Planeswalkers in that book to Legendary Creatures in the new book. Outside of that concept, however, I had a lot of freedom. I was given a list of Legendary Creatures that Wizards of the Coast wanted to include in the book, but that list was only a fraction of the final total.

Outline

After some initial calls with the Abrams ComicArts and Wizards of the Coasts teams, I got to work on an outline. That outline included characters who were majorly important to each plane or otherwise popular, as well as commonly used Commanders. After some back and forth, we settled on around 120 Legendary Creatures to be organized based on plane and timeframe.

Drafts

Over the next two months, I spent a fair amount of my evenings and weekends working on the first draft of the manuscript. 20,000 words was the longest single publication I'd ever written (although early versions of my Archive Trap articles came close, I typically split those up for publication). For comparison, my average article hovers somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words, so this was like writing ten articles in a timeframe where I'd usually only write half of that.

The first draft looked a lot more like my "Legends of..." articles, which are written with a slightly more enfranchised crowd in mind. Future drafts would pull back a bit on specifics, like proper nouns that a new reader would have no context for, and ensuring anything in the Magic lexicon was explained properly.

Cover Art

Getting to help concept original Magic artwork was probably the most exciting thing I got to do for Legends. My original idea was to pit Niv-Mizzet against the Weatherlight, but other suggestions from the team included a version with dozens of Legendary Creatures. The final art split the difference, in a way, featuring Krenko, Mob Boss, Captain Sisay, Gerrard Capashen, Brago, King Eternal, Atraxa, Praetor's Voice, Avacyn, Angel of Hope, and Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind aboard the Weatherlight.

That mix of fan favorite characters and historically important ones should give you an idea of the content of the book itself. The core team also made sure to get their favorite Legendary Creature, and for my part that's what Krenko is up there. Tyler Jacobson really knocked it out of the park with this piece, and it has become one of my favorite pieces of Magic art ever.

Proofs

After my manuscript was turned in and finalized, the Abrams team set about turning it into the final layout that would be printed inside. We worked hard (although mostly graphic designer Liam Flanagan) to upgrade this book from the layouts in Rise of the Gatewatch. A few iterations later, the book turned out to be something I'm really proud of, with cool art and graphic design giving an epic sense of scale to these characters.

Acknowledgements

While I acknowledge them in the book itself (and others!), I want to take a moment to call out some of the people I worked with on this book. At Abrams, editor Eric Klopfer and graphic designer Liam Flanagan were excellent partners who helped bring the vision of this book to life.

At Wizards of the Coast, art director Daniel Ketchum brought me on board for this project and I can't thank him enough for that (as well as Jeremy Jarvis and the rest of the team). Also James Wyatt and Doug Beyer of the Worldbuilding team got to critique my work for once, which I'm sure was something they enjoyed. Copy editor Nathaniel Moes made my work actually readable, as I enjoy making the English language weep.

Publication

Legends: A Visual History finally comes out October 27, 2020. You can pick it up in a hardcover at most major booksellers (in the art book section) for $20, or you can pick up the ebook version on sites like Amazon or Barnes and Noble for around $10-12. As a work-for-hire contract, I don't get paid more if it sells well, but it sure helps get me hired back for future books. So, if you want to see more from me, make sure to let Abrams ComicArts and Wizards of the Coast know!