The Multiverse is the shared fictional universe depicted on Magic: The Gathering cards, novels, comics, and other supplemental products. Though Magic is a strategy game, an intricate storyline underlies the cards released in each expansion. On the cards, elements of this multiverse are shown in the card art and through quotations and descriptions on the bottom of most cards (called flavor text). Novels and anthologies published by HarperPrism and Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), and the comic books published by Armada Comics expand upon the settings and characters hinted at on the cards. WOTC also publishes a weekly story (most often related to the plane explored in the current expansion set) in the Magic Fiction column, previously known as Official Magic Fiction and Uncharted Realms.
In the early days of the game, the name 'Dominia' was used to describe the story multiverse, but due to confusion with the name of the plane/planet where the central events of Magic occur (Dominaria, which means "the Song of Dominia"), it fell into disuse and was replaced.
Publication history
Creative origins The way Magic storylines are conceived and deployed has changed considerably over the years. The main premise of Magic is that countless possible worlds (planes) exist in the Multiverse, and rare beings called Planeswalkers are uniquely capable of traversing the Multiverse without external aid. This allows the game to frequently change worlds so as to renew its mechanical inspiration while maintaining Planeswalkers as recurrent, common elements across worlds. Players represent Planeswalkers able to draw on the magic and entities of these planes to do battle with others.
Richard Garfield established enough of this story for the game when it was first published. With the first sets, most of this story was told through the cards' flavor text, and because most of the creatures and the keywords were based on common fantasy tropes (flying dragons, for example), there was no significant driver for a backing narrative. In some cases, the narrative was demanded to help with new gameplay mechanics and keywords that did not fit standard fantasy tropes, but these were still limited to flavor text. The first expansion Arabian Nights (1994), designed by Garfield, was based on One Thousand and One Nights folklore and included figures from that such as Aladdin.
Pre-revision era With the demand for more expansions, several different teams within Wizards of the Coast's research and development department worked separately on these upcoming sets, with the card designers taking the lead in creating their narratives. Each of these teams had different approaches for implementing that in the cards. For example, the next expansion was Antiquities (1994), with a design led by Skaff Elias. Elias' team wanted this set to focus on the use of colorless artifacts and came up with the narrative idea of a battle between two brothers skilled in artifact use at a point in time before the other realms of magic had established themselves. This would tie into both their planned cards as well as help define the differences between the color mana schools better. Elias planned out elaborate timelines, but as the set was only 100 cards, most of this was left on paper, giving players only glimpses of the larger picture through flavor text. In the case of Homelands (1995), R&D had two writers craft a story first and then worked alongside them to implement that into the cards for that set. Still, few elements of any of these sets were shared save for the common connection to the plane of Dominaria.
Apart from Wizards' own attempts at storytelling, in 1994, Wizards gave exclusive licenses to Harper Prism to publish novels, and an imprint of Acclaim Entertainment to Armada Comics to publish comic books. Neither of these was developed in concert with the game and subsequently created divergent ideas to the game. "Much of the lore established" by Armada Comics "is the foundation from which the rest of continuity was built. In fact, the idea of 'The Revision' stemmed in part from WotC publishing novels based loosely on many of the stories told in these comics. Some of the details changed (or were 'retconned', in popular fan speak), but for the most part, the core of these stories stayed the same". The comics came to a sudden end in 1996 when Acclaim, parent company of Armada Comics, started to run into financial trouble. In 1997, "two video games connected to the comics, Shandalar and Battlemage, were also released [...]. In general, Pre-Revisionist materials are still canon unless contradicted by another source".
Pre-mending era Wizards began to take back narrative control with the Mirage (1996) storyline. "Detailed story summaries for Mirage and Visions were available on the Wizards website, covering the events of the Mirage War. But it was with Weatherlight that Magic's first epic narrative began". Wizards wanted to try to create a more cohesive universe with the next major expansion, Weatherlight (1997), comparable to other works like Star Wars. Mark Rosewater and Michael G. Ryan developed a long-term story arc that would cross through several expansions as well as into comics, magazines, and novels. With the cards, a small team of dedicated writers was used to make sure there was a consistent voice in the flavor text to help emphasize the story elements. "The next four years, from Tempest in 1997 through Apocalypse in 2001, would follow the story of the legendary Skyship Weatherlight and her crew". This saga was intended to last the next five years, but several factors came into play by the time the Urza's block was released: there was a change in leadership in oversight of Magic: The Gathering and the direction it was heading, players were not interested in the lead characters of the saga, and players had found it difficult to follow the narrative from the cards alone.
In 1998, a new four-issue limited comic series was published by Dark Horse. Around the same time, Wizards had regained control on the license to publish novels and comics and they decided to make the novels the primary route for the story of Magic: The Gathering which would tie in closely with the cards designed for the expansion. This approach was used through the Onslaught block in 2003, after which Wizards found that novels were not a sufficient means to build out the details for cards; novels would be focused on how characters change over events, while the game presented a character at a single moment, and a novel could not flesh out all the other supporting elements that the card designers needed to build their sets without weighing down the readers.
Following Onslaught, the narrative of Magic: The Gathering took a more distanced approach. Once an idea for an expansion was presented, preliminary work was done simultaneously by the research and development team and by the creative staff to build out the basic gameplay concepts and the setting of that expansion, respectively. Once both sides agreed to that, the two teams then proceeded primarily on individual routes towards their end production. Brady Dommermuth, the Creative Director in 2006, said that "generally the cards provide the world in which the novels are set, and the novels sometimes provide characters represented on cards. But cards also introduce their own characters that might not appear in the novels. In short, the Magic creative team and the novelists work largely in parallel and inform each other as much as possible."
Post-mending era The pre-mending and post-mending monikers come "from the event known as the Mending, which fundamentally changed the nature of Planeswalkers from near-divine beings to mortals with a bit more oomph". During this time, Wizards further transitioned to ebooks as well as having their creative staff write more in "Uncharted Realms", a weekly column on the company's website. In September 2011, Hasbro and IDW Publishing accorded to make a four-issue mini-series about Magic: The Gathering with a new story but heavily based on MTG elements and with a new Planeswalker called Dack Fayden, the story of which mainly developed in the planes of Ravnica and Innistrad. In total, between 2011 and 2014, four four-issue mini-series were published by IDW. In 2013, Wizards saw that even with continued growth in player numbers, printed novel sales had fallen greatly and ebook sales remained flat, and made the decision to discontinue the larger narrative works in favor of having the creative team provide story coverage and shipments as of the "Uncharted Realms" column.
In 2014, Mark Rosewater wrote: "Unfortunately, the public has made it very clear that novels are not how they want the story told". Clayton Emery, on why he no longer writes Magic: The Gathering novels, wrote that after being invited to Gen Con he "arrived to find waiting for me — nothing. [...] No reading, no panels, no chance to meet fans, and not a single copy of any of my books anywhere in sight. Why did you invite me? [...] While there, I did get to ask, [...] Will you guys promote my work? 'No. If you catch fire with the fans, then we'll promote you.' How do I catch fire with the fans if you don't promote my work? 'Who knows? We don't promote Magic books as a rule anyway, because they don't sell well.' Then why produce them? And hey, you promoted Jeff Grubb's latest Magic book, advertising it on the inside front cover of every DC comic for three months during one summer. 'Oh, sure. His books sell.'" Sam Keeper, for CoolStuffInc, wrote "I can't attest to the accuracy of Emery's recollections, but it certainly feels familiar. [...] None of the ebook releases, to my knowledge, have ever been acknowledged by official accounts, aside from that single link to an incomplete list on mtgstory.com. [...] Nonetheless, it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy to not promote a product, and then conclude that there simply isn't an audience for it".
This approach continued through 2017. Then, Wizards of the Coast hired novelist and scriptwriter Nic Kelman as their Head of Story and Entertainment. Kelman's task was to assemble all of the lore established from previous card sets and the published novels, comics, and other materials to create the game's "cosmology" or the story bible that established all the known planes and elements of those planes, the individual Planeswalkers and their connections to others, and other details that they could be passed not only to the teams developing new cards but also to those expanding the franchise with new novels and other content. This allows for highly connected events between the external media and the game; one example established the death of a major Planeswalker in the novel War of the Spark: Ravnica that was published just prior to the release of the new set War of the Spark, the first novel published by Wizards in several years, with the set containing cards referencing that death.