This afternoon on Weekly MTG, Wizards of the Coast revealed The Wildered Quest by Kate Elliott, which will tell the story of Magic: the Gathering’s upcoming set Throne of Eldraine. It will be available as an ebook for $3.99 on September 4, 2019 with preorders starting on Monday, July 29 (or earlier) on all ebook platforms.
September 4 is exactly one month before Throne of Eldraine is released, meaning that The Wildered Quest will be available before Throne of Eldraine’s preview season starts. Elliott, who joined the Weekly MTG stream, said that her book will set up the story that takes place in Throne of Eldraine. “A lot of things that happen with [Rowan] later will be based on this introduction,” she said.
The Wildered Quest will follow Rowan Kenrith, who is featured on the cover of the book. Rowan was introduced in Magic’s Battlebond set in 2018 along with her twin brother Will, and Wizards revealed at San Diego Comic-Con last weekend that the Kenrith twins were originally from the plane of Eldraine.
The story is “about going on a quest and getting lost—maybe not physically lost so much as in other ways,” Elliott said on stream. It’s “the start of a larger story arc, so I knew that I would be grounding the future” of Magic’s story with The Wildered Quest.
The Wildered Quest by Kate Elliott will release on September 4, 2019 for $3.99 with preorders starting on Monday, July 29 (or earlier) on all ebook platforms. It will only be available as an ebook and is being published by Wizards of the Coast itself, rather than with a partner like Del Rey, which published War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greig Weisman. The ebook will only be available in English to start, but Wizards is looking into translating it into other languages after it is published.
Elliot’s Return to Magic Fiction
Kate Elliott makes her return to writing Magic’s story just a year after she made her Magic story debut writing the story of Core Set 2019. That story was told in weekly episodes on Magic’s website and follows twin sisters on Tarkir as they discover the story of another set of twins from Tarkir: the Elder Dragon twins Ugin and Nicol Bolas.
“It was very intimidating” to come into Magic’s story, Elliot said. But she Core Set 2019 story ended up being a very positive experience for her. “The Vorthos players really analyzed the [Core Set 2019] story in a way that I don’t often get in my own field. I like to layer in a lot of little details that mean something later and [the community] picked up on [those details]…and they were excited by that.”
“For me, as a writer, that’s really gratifying,” she continued, “Because I feel like people were really paying attention to what I was doing.”
The Magic Story is Moving to Ebooks
Wizards also announced that the Magic story will now be told through ebooks rather than weekly episodic stories and that The Wildered Quest was the first example of this change in how Magic’s story will be told.
Since June 2012, Wizards has told Magic’s story through weekly episodic web fiction posted on their website under the name Uncharted Realms and then Magic Story. Mark Rosewater, Magic’s Head Designer, said in 2016 that, “[b]y every metric we have…more people are enjoying the current [weekly episodic] story versus stories of days gone by.”
Before the web fiction, Magic’s story was told in the form of physical novels and novellas from 1994, beginning with Arena by William R. Forstchen all the way to the 2014 novellas Theros: Godsend Part I and Journey Into Nyx: Godsend Part II by Jenna Helland.
Then, earlier this year, Wizards revealed that it would be publishing a new Magic story novel, hiring Greg Weisman to write War of the Spark: Ravnica, a novel telling the story of Magic’s War of the Spark set. He was also tasked with writing the weekly web fiction, which recounted the events in the book from another point of view. Weisman then wrote the forthcoming War of the Spark: Forsaken, which tells the aftermath of War of the Spark’s events, and releases on November 12, 2019.
After a five year absence of Magic novels, the announcement of The Wildered Quest by Kate Elliott appears to cement Wizards of the Coast’s decision to return to long-form written story telling as the main vehicle for Magic’s story. There won’t be any web fiction for Throne of Eldraine and Wizards said that there aren’t any immediate plans for episodic stories to return to the Magic Story website.
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