Granted, the flavor text had help. The name fits well with the strange, craggy, mummified thing in the artwork, for one thing. Then there was the ability. I didn't know what it meant for a thing to "become colorless", but it sounded about right for this strange stone and bone creature. Whatever this thing was, it was more than just ancient, it was also deeply magical and alien. I loved it immediately.

Ancient Kavu wasn't alone in my affections, of course. Its flavor was helped along by numerous other cards in Planeshift's preconstructed "Scout" deck. Horned Kavu was gorgeous and instantly compelling. "The Aether"? "Rath's overlay"? I had no idea what any of that stuff meant but it sure sounded cool! Radiant Kavu was similarly visually striking, Ron Spencer's psychedelic colors and textures not quite like anything else I had seen before. Once past the art, though, its flavor text's matter-of-fact pronouncement fascinated me: this strange creature could send out blasts of light as a self defense mechanism! As a longtime fan of weird biology, the mysterious glimpses of adaptation and mutation these cards offered all captivated me.

And then of course there was the wider story, hinted at everywhere. Take Nomadic Elf's flavor text. I knew there was some sort of invasion going on in the backstory to Planeshift — I had read the scant blurb in the deck's guide even if I didn't completely understand it. Nomadic Elf, however, explained the stakes in a more concrete way. Oh, sure, you can say that there's these things called Phyrexians, and they're invading, and they're The Bad Guys, but that information can't come close to the weighty quote on that card:

Wow.

And underpinning it all was one other special card . . .  but let's return for a moment to Ancient Kavu.

A sense of ecology, setting, and story was present in all these cards. Whatever the heck Dominaria was, it clearly had a history and its own fantastic, alien ecosystem, and all of this was in peril from whatever a "Phyrexian" and a "Rath" were. Ancient Kavu brings these aesthetics together in a way that still stands out to me years later. Ancient Kavu, as an organism, had its own particular biology, an ability to adapt to its environment, and this existing biological nature became important in the context of larger world events. That is what the flavor text tells us: "Those with the ability to change their nature survived Phyrexia’s biological attacks. Everything else died."

For all that fantasy has trended away from "Inaccessible" Proper Names over the last decade, the information here is pretty straightforward. I didn't know what Phyrexia was. I didn't know what "colorless" was. But from the moment I first read the card, I knew what an Ancient Kavu was. An Ancient Kavu was a creature with the ability to adapt. So, the Ancient Kavu survived.

Everything else died.

I gleaned a lot more than that from Ancient Kavu, mind. Let's look at that noun clause: "Phyrexia's biological attacks." Interesting! Whatever Phyrexia is, it's not attacking with any simple sorcery, or spears or swords or anything as rudimentary and low tech as a simple gun . . .  no, Phyrexia uses bioweapons. And they're everywhere. And their plagues are everywhere.

What I learned from Ancient Kavu was that this setting was unlike practically anything I had seen before. This was a setting where the evil enemy's technology clearly put anything Saruman ever dreamed up to shame. But, perhaps more interestingly, it was also a setting where there wasn't a divide between the relatively familiar natural world and the monsters of The Enemy. It wasn't just orcs, trolls, and the stranger monsters of Morgoth on one side, with humans, pointy eared humans, short humans with hairy faces, and short humans with hairy feet on the other. The stranger monsters were on every side!

Everything was strange, in fact.

Yet, Dominaria didn't feel like a strange dream, something prerational. This wasn't the dream logic of Alice in Wonderland, The Labyrinth, or The Phantom Tollbooth. It felt like it was merely so alien that I couldn't yet understand the rules, the ecosystems, the logic behind its creatures' existence. Ancient Kavu didn't turn to stone (or whatever it's doing there) because of sunlight hitting its evil hide, its rocky skin was a biological adaptation, an adaptation that allowed it to survive an extinction event. There had to be some sort of consistency to this strange world, even if it wasn't obvious to me, because it was obvious to that dude Multani when something like the Horned Kavu was not natural, while Ancient Kavu and Radiant Kavu were.

Of course, this kind of storytelling method for SFF wasn't new to Magic or to me, not entirely. I grew up with my father reading Lord of the Rings to me, so I had already encountered the idea that a fantasy world might have an ecology and a history as deep and meaningful as our own world. Lord of the Rings, in its unfairly dismissed opening chapters, introduces horribly intelligent wolves, malevolent trees, otherworldly ring-wraiths, the unexplained nightmare of the Barrow Wights, and the delightful yet somehow deeply inhuman Tom Bombadil. These are all fantastical elements. But the Old Forest was also a place, shaped by layers and layers of history and geography, even if all that history was just alluded to. (None of our hobbits are, after all, ecologists.)

I'm not necessarily taking a stance here in the old debate between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, friends with markedly different approaches to worldbuilding. I'm just trying to express what about the Tolkien approach, later expressed through that first Planeshift deck I picked up, captured my attention. I grew up constantly surrounded by nature documentaries, nature magazines, and trips to nature preserves. From a young age I was aware of global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, invasive species . . .  and also the unrolling of glaciers, carving out the shapes of my native Pennsylvania — Penn's Woods — and the way a pond or a Pine Barren each have their own peculiarities.

If a few years of hunting could erase the Passenger Pigeon from existence . . .  if a change in carbon dioxide could radically reshape the evolution of life on this world . . .  if a new species might radically alter the balance of a whole ecosystem . . .  surely magic would have some effect. Grima might kill Saruman, but Grima can't with a single blow un-transform the Shire, roll back Saruman's industrialization, regrow all the trees. Freyalise might cast a worldspell to end Dominaria's ice age but all that melting ice doesn't just disappear, and entire farming communities don't alter their entire engagement with the environment overnight.

Which takes me to the other card that sits alongside Ancient Kavu as telling me what Magic was really about.

Man this card had it all. It normally created Sun but it could also be "sacrificed" to create Tree and Water energy! I mean, I had no idea what that meant but it was tantalizing as hell, particularly since Scout was a deck. Irrigation Ditch was my first hint as to what Blue might be about. But more than that, it was just so obvious, such a totally intuitive translation of flavor into mechanics! It was normally a sunny field, but then you could do something to it that would make it produce water, and crops! Green, and Blue!

And more than that, it was doing something more akin to, say, Age of Empires II (a game I fell permanently and madly in love with around the same time) than to Tolkien. For all the complaining about Tolkien's lengthy tree descriptions, we don't get much of a chance to see how, say, Rohan keeps its people fed. But the nature of Magic as a card game where lands played a key part, resource management was built into the mechanics, and the sheer number of cards and the distribution of power across those cards meant that not EVERYTHING could be the Epic Wizard of Blue Eyes Dark Dragon, opened up the possibility of cards like humble, immediately flavorful Irrigation Ditch.

Here's what I learned about Magic from Irrigation Ditch and Ancient Kavu.

Magic had a setting that was unlike anything else I had seen before outside of brief brushes with a few Forgotten Realms novels. It was distinct, deeply alien, and had no pretense of being a simple analog to Earth. But Magic also offered a world that tried to be real, a world where magic naturally, inevitably, shaped ecosystems and lifestyles. Magic (or Dominaria, as I came to understand) was a place where animals actually evolved, and where farming wasn't just the thing the hero does before becoming King of Prydain but a more fundamental part of the world. You need these farmlands, after all, if you're going to summon your big weird monsters!

I mean, listen, I don't have a thesis here, this isn't a piece that's going to end with some grand conclusion and call to action, I just want to take a moment to really marvel at how special Magic is and was. I was a kid who always felt frustrated that Lewis spent all his time on this allegorical stuff when he could've been describing, in detail, the unique ecosystem of the Wood Between Worlds.

Opening my first deck of Magic the Gathering cards was a freaking revelation.

Practically nowhere else have I found Magic's balance between the unabashed weirdness of Ancient Kavu (I mean just look at it!), and the sense of place you get with Irrigation Ditch. Part of the secret, I think, is that they're ultimately part of the same unified system: mana flows through all things, weird or mundane, as fundamental a force as a glacier. It was that unity, I think, more than anything else, that sense that magic mattered here, that I didn't have to choose between the gloriously bizarre, and the grounded and naturalistic.

I didn't know the rules of this strange, new world. But for perhaps the first time, faced with a fantasy world radically different from my own, I sensed that I could really learn.

This is me standing back for a moment and kind of boggling in awe of just how special Magic the Gathering is, not just in its worldbuilding but in its whole creation: the intertwining of the fantastic and the mechanical, the weird and the familiar. While I'll always love that Magic has a written storyline, the cards themselves might be uniquely suited to telling this story of a place. Is any other medium capable of so blithely ignoring the pesky plot to focus on the evolutionary adaptation of a crusty lizard and how it responds to, of all things, biological warfare carried out by a bunch of evil robot zombies from another dimension?

That first bunch of cards opened a door that I, dazzled, stumbled through, and I don't think I've ever quite come back to my own homeworld.

And all it took was a crusty lizard, and a ditch full of dirty water.