Magic The Gathering / Planes

Main Character IndexPlaneswalkers: Planeswalkers who ignited Pre-Mending, Planeswalkers who ignited Post-Mending: A-M, N- ZPlanes and their peoples: Factions, Other Characters (Dominaria, Phyrexia, Rath and Mirrodin, Innistrad, Kamigawa, Ravnica, Theros, Tarkir, Zendikar), Planes

In fantasy stories, the world the story takes place in is often as much a character as our heroes and villains. Indeed, this is very much the case with Magic: The Gathering, as the various locales and realities that collectively form The Multiverse are integral to the flavor of the game, giving each and every world its own vibrant, unique identity.

The Magic multiverse was originally called Dominia and technically still is, but references to the name were phased out to avoid confusion with its central plane, Dominaria ("the Song of Dominia"), and it is now usually just called "the multiverse".

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The Blind Eternities

The space between spaces. The place between planes. It is everywhere and nowhere at once. Very little has been explained about the true nature of the Blind Eternities, largely because it arguably doesn't even count as a place.

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• A Form You Are Comfortable With: According to the 2021 comic, the Eternities look however a planeswalker imagines it. Ral Zarek sees an eternity of clockwork not unlike Mechanus, Kaya sees a peaceful afterlife where her victims rest in peace and Vraska sees it as the endless cycle of life and decay. This is subject to Schrödinger's Canon, however.
• Eldritch Location: If it even is a location.
• Mind Screw: The Blind Eternities are not a place. That said, the Eldrazi are from there. Yeah.
• Void Between the Worlds: It surrounds all planes, and nothing is in it as far as is known.

Major Planes

Planes that have featured in at least one premiere, core, or supplemental set. Some planes (like Dominaria or Innistrad) have been visited in multiple sets, and some sets (like Magic Origins) have taken place across multiple planes. Listed in order of appearance:

Dominaria

Where it all began...

Debut: Alpha (1993)

Setting of: Alpha/Beta/Unlimited/Revised (1993), Antiquities (1994), Legends (1994), The Dark (1994), Fallen Empires (1994), Ice Age (1995), Alliances (1996), Mirage (1996), Visions (1997), Portal (1997), Weatherlight (1997), Portal Second Age (1998), Urza's Saga (1998), Urza's Legacy (1999), Urza's Destiny (1999), Prophecy (2000), Invasion (2000), Planeshift (2001), Apocalypse (2001), Odyssey (2001), Torment (2002), Judgement (2002), Onslaught (2002), Legions (2003), Scourge (2003), Coldsnap (2006), Time Spiral (2006), Planar Chaos (2006), Future Sight (2007), Dominaria (2018), Dominaria United (2022), The Brothers' War (2022)

Planeswalkers: Bo Levar, Dyfed, Freyalise, Jaya Ballard, Jeska, Jared Carthalion, Karn, Kristina of the Woods, Liliana Vess, Lord Windgrace, Nicol Bolas, Teferi Akosa, Tevesh Szat, Ugin the Spirit Dragon, Urza, Venser

Literally "the Song of Dominia". The plane most people think of when they hear the words "Magic: The Gathering setting", Dominaria has been the focus of more sets than any other plane in the Multiverse, largely dominating the story before a massive creative overhaul shifted focus to a wider variety of planes (earlier stories tended to simply create a new part of Dominaria when a new setting was desired). As a result, Dominaria is a lot of things. Earlier sets are fairly Standard Medieval European Fantasy with a couple of Fantasy Counterpart Cultures; this becomes less prominent as the story goes on and apocalyptic events pile up, replaced with After the End landscapes dominated by barbarian warlords and Phyrexian and Thran technology. All things considered, Dominaria likely is the most diverse and complex plane in Magic, as befits a plane that is both the center of the multiverse and two and half times the size of Earth.

For the individual characters of Dominaria, go here.

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• After the End: Dominaria has gone through no less than four apocalypses— the fall of the Thran, the Sylex Blast, the Phyrexian Invasion, and the events of Time Spiral. Karn lampshades this in his narration in the Dominaria trailer:
  "How many times can you rebuild from apocalypse? On Dominaria, we've almost lost count."
• Alternate Timeline: The Planar Chaos timelines, in which several legends of Dominaria are presented in different contexts — for instance, Braids, a member of the Cabal in the main timeline, is a Conjurer in the altered timeline.
• Cool Airship: The Weatherlight, which was capable of planeswalking.
• The Exact Center of Everything: Why the breaking down of reality and the advent of alternate timelines cropping up at random throughout the plane was such a bigger disaster than on paper—if Dominaria fell apart, so too would every other plane.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Most notably various African cultures in Jamuura, Dominaria's largest continent and home to its most advanced kingdom, Zhalfir. The nearby archipelago of Madara is home to an East Asian inspired empire. And the Keldons of northern Aerona are like Norsemen if they had grey skin and nothing but homicidal rage going for them.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Dominaria has had about ten years to go through just about every trope in the book.
• Knight in Shining Armor: The nations of Zhalfir and Femeref in Jamuura, and Benalia in southern Aerona, all have a penchant for fielding these.
• Hive Mind: Sliver creatures, whose card effects each affect all other Slivers— i.e. if one Sliver has flying, then all Slivers can fly.
• Hollow World: Word of God suggests that Dominaria may be hollow, to explain why it has Earth-normal gravity despite officially being 2.5 times Earth's size.invoked
• Medieval Stasis: Profoundly Averted. The sets that take place on Dominaria showcase the world's progression over a period of millennia, with numerous civilizations rising and falling, magics and technologies discovered and lost, and even ecologies and terrains changing over time. The warring humans and nightstalkers of Caliman even have pistols.
• Merged Reality: The artificial Death World of Rath is merged permanently with Dominaria during the Phyrexian invasion. Skyshroud Forest, where Rath's elves lived, ends up in Keld and the Stronghold, home base of the Evincar of Rath, ends up in Urborg.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Became full of these when all those apocalypses began to pile up and destabilize time.
• Religion of Evil:
  • The Cabal, in previous sets, worshipped money and power. As of the Dominaria set in 2018, the elder demon Belzenlok has taken over the Cabal and turned it into a death cult.
  • In Dominaria United, it's also revealed that there are Gix Cults that worship Phyrexians. They are responsible for aiding Sheoldred in her Dominarian invasion.
• Time Skip: Between the end of the Invasion/Planeshift/Apocalypse block and the start of the Odyssey/Torment/Judgment block, about a hundred years pass. Then, between the Time Spiral/Planar Chaos/Future Sight block and 2018's Dominaria set, about sixty years have passed.

Rabiah

Let's never mention this again...

Debut: Arabian Nights (1993)

Setting of: Arabian Nights (1993)

Planeswalkers: Taysir

Also known as Rabiah the Infinite, a collection of 1,001 parallel desert planes, all of which refracted off of the original Rabiah. Based off of The Arabian Nights, to the point where characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba exist within the setting.

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• Canon Discontinuity: Wizards seems content to act as if Rabiah doesn't exist from a story perspective. Officially, this is because of the fact that The 1001 Nights isn't part of Wizards's intellectual property. It might also because some cards haven't exactly aged well. That being said, certain cards from the set (particularly City of Brass) occasionally get reprinted in supplemental sets, albeit with references to Rabiah excised. However, Rabiah's most famous son, the planeswalker Taysir, still played a role in the Invasion set storyline and the original comics, as well as the backstories for Homelands and the Battlemage video game. And a Plane card from Rabiah (Sea of Sand) appeared in Planechase.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Rabiah was the setting for the Arabian Nights expansion, the first ever Magic expansion set. As the name suggests, the setting is based off of The Arabian Nights, and features characters from various stories, such as Ali Baba and Shahrazad - though not as legendary creatures, which didn't exist until the aptly titled Legends expansion two sets later, so you can have more than one Aladdin, Sindbad or King Suleiman. In-universe this can be explained by the existence of 1,001 Rabiahs. It also has cards directly reference locations from the real world, such as the Library of Alexandria, Cairo and Baghdad, which has not happened in a primary Magic set since.
• Meaningful Name: The plane is pronounced "ray-BEE-uh", which is just a syllable off from "Arabia".

Phyrexia

Not quite Hell, but close enough.

Debut: Antiquities (1994)

An artificial plane created by an unknown planeswalker, Phyrexia was conquered by the vengeful Yawgmoth and transformed into his own hellish clockwork paradise. Read more about it here, and its individual characters here.

Ulgrotha

Homelands, sweet Homelands.

Debut: Homelands (1995)

Setting of: Homelands (1995)

The original Gothic plane. Also known as the Homelands by its inhabitants, Ulgrotha is a backwater plane with low levels of mana and a populace largely dominated by the cruel Sengir family of vampires. Salvation is only found in the form of angels donated by the planeswalker Serra due to her connection with the plane.

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• After the End: In the ancient history of the plane, it was caught in an unending war between two factions of planeswalkers. To end the war, one planeswalker named Ravi rang an Artifact of Doom called the Apocalypse Chime that cut off every flow of mana in the entire plane, with the single exception being the flow from a rift created in the war. As a result, the vast majority of Ulgrotha is uninhabitable, with only a single Last Fertile Region.
• Ambiguous Situation: At the end of the Homelands comic, we get Autumn Willow being thrust into a position where she can either restore Ulgrotha's leylines to return life to the majority of the plane but at the cost of killing everyone in the currently inhabited part or do nothing and let Ulgrotha eventually die out altogether. When we get a brief glimpse into the plane in the Time Spiral novels, Baron Sengir's forces are marching to conquer everything. Throw in the weird consequences of the Mending, and the fact that Creative has decided to never return to this plane again turns the ambiguity infuriating.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Most of it is medieval European and Überwald flavored at that, but the Anaba minotaurs are based on Aboriginal Australian cultures.
• Last Fertile Region: Only a very small portion of Ulgrotha is fertile. Due to the Apocalypse Chime, most is a dead desert waste. It's ambiguous if the small fertile area eventually succumbed to the Dead Zone or if Autumn Willow healed the plane.
• Teleport Interdiction: Feroz's Ban prevents outside planeswalkers from reaching Ulgrotha. The backlog of mana after the plane was cut off from the rest of the multiverse is also what caused Autumn Willow to develop from a simple forest spirit to a powerful Force of Nature.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Located beneath Castle Sengir was the Dwarven Gate, a planar portal of unknown origin and destination. This was a great mystery of the plane at the time, but considering that post-Mending, planar portals no longer work, and Ulgrotha itself may no longer be inhabited, a concrete answer is unlikely to ever appear. March of the Machine revealed that the plane is still around, along with the Sengir family.

Rath

What a fun place!

Debut: Tempest (1997)

Setting of: Tempest (1997), Stronghold (1998), Exodus (1998), Nemesis (2000)

A Death World artificial plane created by Yawgmoth as a staging ground for his invasion of Dominaria. Read more about it here, and its native characters here.

As of the Phyrexian invasion of Dominaria, Rath no longer exists as an independent plane, having been overlaid onto Dominaria, which transported all its creatures and its few major landmarks there.

Mercadia

Whaddya' buyin?

Debut: Mercadian Masques (1999)

Setting of: Mercadian Masques (1999)

A plane where everything is for sale, Mercadia is a plane of vast wilderness surrounding a single city on the top of an inverted mountain. Betrayal and deception are the currency of Mercadia, though ordinary coin will do. And believe me, you will want some currency, as you can find just about anything in its bustling markets.

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• Ancient Conspiracy: The entire plane is controlled by a secretive cabal of unusually intelligent goblins, of all things.
• Fantastic Caste System: Much like the upside-down mountain the titular city is seated upon, goblins, typically Cannon Fodder and Red Shirts of other worlds, are the top of the political and social food chain.
• Merchant City: Mercadia's hat is being this.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Mercadia is home to some bizarre beasts that share only a name with their relatives on other planes.
• Wretched Hive: Mercadia is full of criminals and sell-swords who are willing to do just about anything to make a coin.

Serra's Realm

Too good to last.

Debut: Urza's Saga (1998)

An idyllic plane created by the planeswalker Serra. It, unfortunately, began to fall to paranoia and corruption after its creator's demise, before finally collapsing as part of one of Urza's plans to destroy Phyrexia.

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• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: It certainly had the aesthetic, being full of angels and literal fluffy clouds.
• Knight Templar: A disproportionately large number of the inhabitants are these, due to a combination of the overabundance of white mana and restrictive religious dogma, especially after Serra leaves and the archangel Radiant takes charge.
• World in the Sky: Serra's realm consisted of an endless sky, dotted with floating plains where its human residents lived and Serra's own free-floating sanctum.

Mirrodin/New Phyrexia

The Five Suns will never shine...

... On Phyrexian soil

Debut: Mirrodin (2003)

Setting of: Mirrodin (2003), Darksteel (2004), Fifth Dawn (2004), Scars of Mirrodin (2010), Mirrodin Besieged (2011), New Phyrexia (2011), Phyrexia: All Will Be One (2023)

Planeswalkers: Koth, Slobad

A mechanical plane created by Karn after ascending to planeswalkerhood. It was originally supposed to be inhabited only by constructs, but the plane's caretaker Memnarch had other plans. Read more about it here under the "New Phyrexia" heading, and about its individual residents here.

Kamigawa

Human arrogance. Spirit grudges. What a combination.

Debut: Champions of Kamigawa (2004)

Setting of: Champions of Kamigawa (2004), Betrayers of Kamigawa (2005), Saviors of Kamigawa (2005), Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty (2022)

Planeswalkers: Kaito Shizuki, Tamiyo, The Wanderer

A plane reminiscent of Feudal Japan, Kamigawa was once locked in a titanic war between spirits and mortals thanks to the arrogance of a human daimyo. In present times it is a Cyberpunk setting based on Japanese sci-fi.

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• All Monks Know Kung-Fu: To an extent. Most of the monks of the Jukai forest are no pushovers when it comes to martial arts.
• Ambiguous Situation: The original trilogy of sets that take place on Kamigawa were a Prequel recounting events that happened thousands of years before Magic's "present day", so the plane's current state of affairs was mostly left to speculation. Finally put to rest in Neon Dynasty, where it was revealed it has become one of the multiverse's most technologically advanced worlds yet it retains its spirituality.
• Asian Fox Spirit: Kitsune is a major tribe on Kamigawa, showing up in White.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Kamigawa has the highest percentage of Black-aligned heroes of any plane, though most are anti-heroes and Black is also the color of the setting's various yakuza organizations.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Always a facet of the plane (the original cycle was the conflict between an Anti-Hero and Anti-Villain after all), but as of Neon Dynasty all factions have varying degrees of grayness:
  • The Imperials (White) have long guided Kamigawa with a steady hand and maintained diplomacy between mortals and kami, but the nobles of the Imperial court are often too preoccupied with vying for power to consider anyone besides themselves, which has only worsened with the disappearance of the current Emperor. They are not outright opposed to new technology, but a rigid belief that such developments should be tightly controlled to prevent misuse has led to oppressive crackdowns of dissidents and those found with unsanctioned tech.
  • The Asari Uprisers (Red) seek to help those who have been harmed by Imperial corruption and authoritarianism, but run headfirst into Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters; their ultimate aim is to overthrow the government, and the climax of Neon Dynasty's story involves them collaborating with a Phyrexian Praetor and launching a violent attack on the Imperial palace.
  • The Saiba Futurists (Blue) are Kamigawa's technocratic elite and seek to foster new innovations so that all may benefit, but are prone to secrecy, espionage, and amoral experimentation.
  • The Order of Jukai (Green) strives to preserve the delicate balance between mortals and kami, and protect what remains of Kamigawa's natural environments from urban sprawl, but has taken a hardline anti-technology stance and resort to Eco-Terrorist methods to achieve their aims.
  • In lieu of a unified Black faction, the Reckoners are a collection of criminals and yakuza — the Hyozan, Okiba, and Mokutai gangs among others — that fight for dominance in the Undercity, but strive for loyalty and fellowship within their own ranks.
• Jidaigeki: Inspired by Sengoku Era Japan, complete with set pieces such as shrines, bizarre spirits, and samurai. Also part of a mechanic with "Neon Dynasty" samurai, who tend to have effects that work when either a Warrior or a Samurai attacks alone.
• Legend Fades to Myth: Neon Dynasty features multiple Saga cards that represent events that happened in the original Kamigawa block.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • The aggressor of the Kami War was Daimyo Konda, a White-aligned human daimyo who stole the immortality of the supreme kami O-Kagachi in order to rule forever.
  • Kataki is a mono-White kami that also happens to be a murderous psychopath. Kami of all colors are often depicted as luminous, ethereal beings, and the Neon Dynasty side story "Blade Reflected and Reborn" depicts another instance of a kami (the Red/Green nature spirit Kaima) driven to hatred and mass murder.
  • Also in Neon Dynasty, Risona is Red/White but the leader of the Asari Uprisers, and works with Jin-Gitaxias to bring the Imperials down.
• Magitek: By Neon Dynasty both the plane's technology and its magic have progressed a lot. This culminates in making mecha suits for kami.
• The Magic Versus Technology War: The core theme of Neon Dynasty is tradition vs modernity, represented in-game by the use of enchantments vs artifacts. Color-wise, Green (Jukai) is the most strongly aligned with tradition, followed by White (Imperials), while Blue (Futurists) is the most strongly aligned with modernity, followed by Red (Uprisers), with Black (Reckoners) in the middle, as Black's philosophy is to exploit whatever it can, be it spirits or technology, unfettered by ideology.
• Meaningful Name: "Kamigawa" is Japanese for "Spirit River" or "River of the Gods", and there are dozens of spirits on the plane.
• Medieval Stasis: Averted in Neon Dynasty; during the time skip, the plane's technology developed all the way to Cyberpunk level, making it the first known Magic plane where tablets, holograms, drones and photographs are a thing.
• Moon Rabbit: Home to the noticeably rabbit-like Moonfolk aka the Soratami.
• Ninja: Prevalent in the setting. Their Ninjutsu skill allows them to launch surprise attacks — if one of your units isn't blocked during combat, a ninja in your hand can switch places with it and attack in its stead after paying the requisite Ninjutsu cost.
• Oni: Given the Japanese-theme of the setting, it's no surprise that oni would exist here; however, they come in two flavors. The first are the ogres called bakemono, who are pretty much a Barbarian Tribe from the Sokenzan Mountains, and are normally Red-aligned. The second are the true oni, who are classified as Demon-type creatures and tend to be Black-aligned.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The dragons of Kamigawa are high-ranking spirits rather than wholly biological entities.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins exist in Kamigawa in the form of the Akki, a diminutive race with mud-brown skin and a shell on their backs, not unlike the Kappa (proper kappa would not show up until the "Neon Dynasty", and they would be labeled under Turtles). They live in the Sokenzan mountains alongside the ogres.
• Our Spirits Are Different: Kami are natural embodiments of abstract concepts that come from a realm of their own. By the time of Neon Dynasty the realms have begun to intersect and spirits have begun to manifest into the material world without warning, forcing both realms to adapt and mitigate any damage done to either side.
• Rat Men: Called "nezumi" (literally "mouse" or "rat" in Japanese), they show up in Black, and are often Ninjas, if not straight-up Rogues.
• Samurai: Like Ninjas, common in the setting. Their Bushido keyword is the counterpart of Ninjutsu, rewarding units who Hold the Line by providing extra power and toughness when blocking or being blocked during combat. As of "Neon Dynasty", they have since lost the Bushido keyword, and have since gained abilities that activate whenever a Samurai or a Warrior attacks alone, much like in a Jidaigeki.
• Solar Punk: By the time of Neon Dynasty respect for the kami and nature is still enforced, with diplomats engaging negotiations between technology and the will of the spirits.
• Useless Useful Spell: A lot of cards in the original Kamigawa block have the "Splice" mechanic, which allows you to add the rules text of a card to the spell you're splicing it on. This sounds useful... except that all splice cards specified that they be spliced onto "Arcane" spells, a card type that only showed up in the original Kamigawa block, and hasn't appeared since.
• World Tree: Kamigawa has one in the form of Boseiju, a titanic cedar tree (its name literally means "Sacred Mother Tree"). It has been around even as far back as Kamigawa's Bushido era (and indeed, it was 2,000 years old by the time of the first entry into the first Kamigawa block). It was eventually placed on top of a skyscraper in the Neon Dynasty era, and it's kept on growing since then...anytime a new, much taller skyscraper was completed in Kamigawa, it would grow even taller in response as if to remind the architects and the people who was there first. Sadly, Boseiju would be compleated by Tamiyo during the Invasion of Kamigawa.
• Yakuza: Black-aligned criminal organizations based on them exist aplenty. Most notable are the Hyozan Reckoners, which the protagonists of both visits to the plane defect from.
• Youkai: The plane has the requisite number of weird monsters to accurately represent Japanese folklore.

Ravnica

The whole plane is one big city...

Debut: Ravnica: City of Guilds (2005)

Setting of: Ravnica: City of Guilds (2005), Guildpact (2006), Dissension (2006), Return to Ravnica (2012), Gatecrash (2013), Dragon's Maze (2013), Guilds of Ravnica (2018), Ravnica: Allegiance (2019), War of the Spark (2019), Murders at Karlov Manner (2024)

Planeswalkers: Domri Rade, Ral Zarek, Vraska

The city plane of Ravnica is one of the busiest, most exciting planes in the multiverse, as ten guilds, each associated with two of Magic's five colors, continually struggle for dominance of the plane, in the courtroom and on the battlefield. Once dominated by a powerful spell that kept the guilds' ambitions in check and prevented planeswalker interference, the breaking of this ward has only made the plane more chaotic.

Read more about the individual guilds here, and the plane's individual residents here.

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• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Scattered all around Ravnica, as shown in this.
• Alien Sky: Ravnica has two natural moons, though the story never made much of it.
• The City Narrows: There are lots of such districts in Ravnica, such as Rix Maadi, the Rakdos guildhall, and Svogthos, the former Golgari guildhall. To the surprise of nobody, these areas tend to be dominated by the Gruul Clan or one of the Black-aligned guilds.
• City of Adventure: The guild politics and conflicts, along with the absolute grab bag of inhabitants ensures that there is never a dull moment on Ravnica. Unless you are attending an Azorius lecture, but then, that's your fault.
• City Planet: With the exception of some Selesnyan sanctuaries and areas the Gruul have managed to reclaim, now the entire plane is basically one big metropolis. The closest thing the majority of Ravnicans have seen to a wilderness are large parks.
• Creepy Cathedrals: Places run by the Orzhov have a tendency to be this. And they're teeming with ghosts, thrulls, and other creepy creatures, to boot.
• Den of Iniquity: Areas controlled by the Rakdos are usually this. It's heavily implied that not only are there murder and torture of all kinds, but also some sort of freakish sex going on as well.
  "You just need the right incentive to fulfill my dreams." (Flavor text of Deviant Glee)
• Fairy Trickster: Faeries are mischievous tricksters who often play pranks on other natives of the plane. Those associated with a guild are frequently in the Blue/Black House Dimir, taking advantage of their small size as spies.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: It's a bit more subtle than most planes, since the story and flavor don't really linger on it, but Ravnica's naming and architectural conventions draw heavily from Slavic languages and culture.
• The Government: The guilds are the de facto goverment of Ravnica, and none of them would be someone you want as rulers: the Rakdos are known to murder and torture people just for fun (but are tolerated by the other guilds due to their use as assassins), the hippie-seeming Selesnya treat their members as interchangeable and thus expendable, the Orzhov are known to extort money from their members under the pretense of faith, the Simic happily create monstrosities that cause civilian casualties for the sake of progress...
• The Hub: While the current center of the multiverse is unknown, Ravnica fits the role narratively. As the most urbanized plane in the multiverse, and one of very few planes where planeswalkers are common knowledge, it serves as a natural gathering point for planeswalkers of all strips and colors.
• Knight Templars: The Boros and (to a lesser extent) the Azorius.
• Land of One City: Then again, Ravnica is so large it covers the whole plane...
• Layered Metropolis: Buildings on Ravnica can reach rather ridiculous heights, about as high as our world's skyscrapers. There is also some level of segregation based on height as well: the Undercity, for instance, is known to be the place where the Golgari hanged around - bear in mind that the Golgari are mostly seen as lowlifes left to do the unpleasant job of tending to the city's waste.
• Light Is Not Good / Dark Is Evil: You'll be very wrong if you think that the White-aligned guilds are nicer or better than the Black-aligned ones.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: On the flipside, none of the guilds are fully evil either, including the black ones. The Rakdos are legitimately talented performers who can provide semi-safe entertainment for the right price. The Dimir run the city's public libraries, and are often responsible for exposing corruption in other guilds. Without the Golgari and their rot farms, the entire city would literally starve. Even the Orzhov have a few Honest Corporate Executive types who try to funnel money back into the community.
• Loads and Loads of Races: On Ravnica, you can find humans, vampires, goblins, ogres, elves, vedalken, minotaurs, trolls and many other races. As of the discovery of the undercity ocean in the second Ravnica block, now merfolk have joined the party as well.
• MacGuffin Location: The Maze, the very core of the story of Dragon's Maze, was the legacy of the ancient guildmaster Azor I. It's a maze embedded into the city of Ravnica, and it's said that those who solve the maze will have dominion over Ravnica. Needless to say, the ten guilds were fighting over it for the entirety of Dragon's Maze.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: The prize for solving the Maze: the authority of the "Living Guildpact" serving an arbiter between the guilds, whose judgement is legally and magically binding. Jace Beleren becomes the Guildpact at the end of Dragon's Maze, though the role is passed to Niv-Mizzet following the latter's death and resurrection during War of the Spark.
• Mad Science Fairs: Any gathering of the Izzet or the Simic tends to at least look like this. The only difference between the two is that the Izzet favor exploding mechanical stuffs, while the Simic favor monstrous biological stuffs.
• Mystery Tropes: The " Murders at Karlov Manor" set revolves around a murder mystery.
• Older Than They Look: Ravnica's separation from the rest of the Mutiverse has trapped its dead in the plane as ghosts, but also decelerated the aging process in its living people and improved their lifespans, to the point where the age of 120 can be considered as roughly equivalent to 70. Ral Zarek, who is implied to be over 50 years old, appears to be in his early thirties.
• The Old Gods: While divinities aren't as active on Ravnica as they are on, say, Theros, that isn't to say that Ravnica is a godless world. Many pre-Guildpact faiths persist in hidden corners of the city, while the Gruul pay homage to the Utmungr, a pantheon of cthonic divinities. And then there are the Nephilim...
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Death on Ravnica means invariably becoming a ghost, as the plane has a barrier blocking it from the afterlife. This could be good or bad, depending on how fond the Orzhov are of you.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • In the first Ravnica block, Ravnica's problem with lingering ghosts was technically this, since Dominaria's time rifts issue was the cause of it.
  • Even more so in Guilds of Ravnica, since the Big Bad of that block is a planeswalker dragon and his army of interdimensional zombies.
• Religions of Evil: Multiple guilds, namely the Cult of Rakdos, Selesnya Conclave, and Orzhov Syndicate, have strong religious components. Only the Selesnya can be considered even close to being "benevolent".
  Orzhov: Masses of coins. “We are the precious gold. With us Orzhova was gilt. With us it gleams most bright.” It never occurred to us that this was not meant to be symbolic. We are the precious gold, or at least the source of it! How brazen they are, how deceitful. Shame on us for believing in them. Shame on us for thinking that all that power, all that wealth, was used only for us, and not against us.
• Schizo Tech: Depending on which guild dominates the district you're in, you may encounter anything from Izzet super-science to rock-throwing Gruul barbarians.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Nephilim, ancient monsters venerated as old gods by the Cult of Yore. They awoke during the event of Guildpact to wreak havoc on the city. Two were killed by Niv-Mizzet, while the others were subdued.
• Trash the Set: Going through this due to the invasion of Nicol Bolas and his Eternal army. The whole plane is the setting for War of the Spark, a massive punch-up between Bolas and the Planeswalkers allied with him, and the Gatewatch and any other Planeswalkers they can persuade to ally with them.
• Undercity: An absolutely massive one possibly even larger than the aboveground city, full of old secrets that even the Golgari have yet to excavate. As of the second Ravnica block, it turned out that Ravnica has an ocean beneath all the streets and buildings. The Simic promptly began to research (and exploit) the said ocean.
• The Unmasqued World: Following Nicol Bolas's invasion with an army of extradimensional zombies in War of the Spark and the summoning of every planeswalker in the multiverse to Ravnica, it has become one of three known planes in the multiverse where the existence of other planes and planeswalkers is public knowledge, the others being Dominaria and Arcavios.
• Wretched Hive: Areas controlled by the Black-aligned guilds. Especially those controlled by the Golgari, who are often mocked for their (admittedly unpleasant) job of dealing with waste and the dead.
  "Enter those who are starving and sick. You are welcome among the Swarm when the rest of Ravnica rejects you." (Flavor text of Golgari Guildgate)

Lorwyn/Shadowmoor

A dark side to everything

Debut: Lorwyn (2007)

Setting of: Lorwyn (2007), Morningtide (2008), Shadowmoor (2008), Eventide (2008), unnamed 2025 set

Lorwyn is an idyllic, Celtic Mythology inspired plane full of friendly inhabitants (though oddly, no humans) that is sometimes mysteriously transformed into a Mind Screw-filled hellscape called Shadowmoor by a semi-centennial phenomenon called the Great Aurora.

Tropes that apply to Lorwyn:

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• Arcadia: It's warm, (visually) dominated by green, and never suffers winter. There doesn't seem to be any large city on Lorwyn, either.
• Endless Daytime: Lorwyn's sun never gets totally beyond the horizons.
• Fairy Tale: Based on a lot of similar tropes, though the lack of humans keeps it from being a perfect fit.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Gilt-Leaf elves in a nutshell.
• Sugar Bowl: As long as you keep away from the elves, Lorwyn is genuinely as nice as it seems.
• World Half Full: Lorwyn is very idyllic.

Tropes that apply to Shadowmoor

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• Crapsack World: Everything Is Trying to Kill You in Shadowmoor and everything from Lorwyn becomes a twisted reflection of itself. The elves are the only thing that becomes nicer in this version of the plane, going from genocidal tyrants in Lorwyn to beleagured preservers in Shadowmoor.
• Dark World: Everything that exists on Lorwyn gets turned into a twisted version of itself and forgets its old life, except for the faeries.
• Death World: On Shadowmoor, even a mirror can be... well, technically not lethal, but you'll wish it were.
  "A gwyllion's favorite trap is the vanity mirror. A bewitched piece of glass traps the looker's soul and does away with the body." (Flavor text of "Unmake")
• Eldritch Locations: Many of the locations on this plane are... weird. E.g., the Raven's Run, the Shadowmoor version of Lorwyn's Wren's Run, has trees that look really, really unnatural, to the point they look more like tentacled monsters than trees. Needless to say, this goes hand-in-hand with Surreal Horror.
• The Fair Folk: While not labeled as faeries, all the monsters that begin to appear upon transition to Shadowmoor are these in all but name. This is quite fitting, since Shadowmoor represents the dark sides of fairy tales.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Arguably the core idea of Shadowmoor. The whole plane is crawling with stuffs that come straight out of darker fairy tales.
• Heel–Face Turn: On the more positive side, the elves got better in Shadowmoor and became valiant warriors who fight to protect the last shreds of beauty that exist.
• Jerkass Gods: Most of the demigods are these, with the Godhead of Awe driving mortals mad and the Nobilis of War feeding on wars and the deaths that follow. Much of these seem to happen for no logical reason. At all.
• Mind Screw: Don't try too hard to figure out the logic behind many of the horrors that happen on Shadowmoor.
• Monster Mash: As of Eventide, there are gwyllion, ghosts, noggles, ouphes, hags, trows...
• The Night That Never Ends: As mentioned.
• Our Gods Are Different: They are spirit avatars that seem to appear out of absolutely nowhere.
• Stock Gods:
  • The Dreamweaver: The Ghastlord of Fugue.
    "Yet when his favored are found in their beds, their bodies are whole, their skin pure, except for the horror stamped forever on their faces." — The Seer's Parables
  • God of Evil: The Demigod of Revenge in particular stands out, though most of the demigods are pretty dickish to begin with.
    "His laugh, a bellowing, deathly din, slices through the heavens, making them bleed." — The Seer's Parables
  • God of Good: The Oversoul of Dusk seems to embody hope and actively seeks to bring light and joy back to this sunless world.
  • God of Knowledge: The Overbeing of Myth.
    "She walks among us unseen, learning from our imperfections." — The Seer's Parables
  • To a lesser extent, the Divinity of Pride also counts, since she was the one who told all the knowledge about the nature of Shadowmoor to the seer.
    "She spoke of mystery and portent, of such unfathomable things that my mind screamed for pity." — The Seer's Parables
  • Sun God: The Oversoul again.
  • Trickster God: The Dominus of Fealty.
  • War God: The Nobilis of War.
    "A great siege is a banquet to him; a long and terrible battle, the most exquisite delicacy." — The Seer's Parables
• Surreal Horror: In keeping with the strange, dark fairy-tale-ish vibe of the plane, you're less likely to be messily eaten by a horde of zombies than to be trampled on by a chair or trapped inside a mirror.
• Wicked Witch: The Black-White gwyllions and Green-Black swamp hags, who both have the Hag subtype.

Tropes that apply to both sides of the plane:

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• Alien Sky: Lorwyn has unending daytime, while Shadowmoor is always at night. Either way, it's alien enough.
• Fairy Trickster: Lorwyn faeries are tricksters of a cruel and mean-spirited sort and spend their lives pursuing amusement, often at the expense of others — typical fairy pranks tend to involve hiding tripwires in the path of larger beings or driving them nuts with sneezing powder.
• Fish People: Lorwny merrows are Blue-White and act as merchants and ferrymen for the other races, while the Shadowmoor version are Blue-Black and act as river looters.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: When an Aurora happens and transforms the races of Lorwyn into their Shadowmoor versions or vice versa, they forget it was ever any other way.
• Light Is Good / Dark Is Evil: Lorwyn is all bright and happy, while Shadowmoor is always dark and has eerie monsters crawling all over the place. Guess which world is the more pleasant place to live in. Also, let's not forget the fact that the one unpleasant thing about Lorwyn - the fascist elves - is Black-aligned. That said, almost everything White-aligned on Shadowmoor is also bad, from the paranoid kithkin to the warmongering Nobilis of War, and the boggarts in Lorwyn are usually harmless hedonists.
• Our Elves Are Different: The elves of Lorwyn are deer-hooved, horned fashion fascists that exist in Green and Black. They think that they are the most beautiful things in the world... and thus have the right to exterminate less beautiful living beings (read: most non-Elf creatures, the boggarts in particular). Lorwyn also marked the first time where we have Elf cards that aren't at least part-Green, in this case mono-Black. Nissa was lucky that Gilt-Leaf elves considered her beautiful enough to have the right to live despite being a different kind of elf, when she accidentally planeswalked into Lorwyn upon igniting her spark. On Shadowmoor, while every other race becomes twisted and evil, the elves become the good guys of the plane, and are Green and White.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Faeries aren't unique to Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, nor did the plane introduce faeries. But there is little doubt that this plane is by far the one most strongly associated with faeries. This is due mainly to the fact that Oona, the queen of faeries, was the one behind the whole Great Aurora fiasco, marking that one time where faeries are central to a plane's story. The design of the plane's faeries is also an interesting twist on the idea of faeries, since these faeries have insectoid features, and mix disney-esque influence (winged, small, cute, etc.) with more traditional interpretations of faeries. On the more mechanical side of things, the (in)famous faerie deck comes from Lorwyn and Morningtide.
• Small, Secluded World: Among the planes. The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block is so far the only post-Time-Spiral block to not feature any plot-relevant planeswalker.
• Treants: Lorwyn is also the first set to draw attention to treefolk. Before it, treefolk were mostly big Green creatures that showed up once in a while and soon got overshadowed by wurms and such. Lorwyn's treefolk are the most ancient and long-lived of the intelligent races, and are viewed with great respect by their younger neighbors. They differ in size, physical and magical abilities and role in their society based on what trees they resemble — for instance, oak treefolk are the largest and strongest of their kind, black poplars are healers and rowans are magicians. They're also the only species on the plane to be on generally decent terms with Lorwyn's highly xenophobic elves.
• World of Symbolism: One of the unique traits of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor is the fact that the plane's native elementals are just as likely to represent abstract concepts as they are physical elements. The Lorwyn ones seem to embody dreams, while their Shadowmoor versions naturally embody nightmares.

Alara

Everything's coming together.

Debut: Shards of Alara (2008)

Setting of: Shards of Alara (2008), Conflux (2009), Alara Reborn (2009)

Planeswalkers: Ajani Goldmane, Sifa Grent, Tezzeret

A plane that was split into five sub-planes thousands of years ago, only to be abruptly re-merged in an event called the Conflux. This was all in accordance with Nicol Bolas's plan, of course.

Read more about the individual sub-planes, known as Shards, here. Each is centered on one of the five colors of Magic, with its two allies also present and the two enemy colors absent.

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• Alien Landmass: All of the Shards bar Bant have these, one way or other.
  • Esper's terrain tends to be covered in metal, and many parts of it are floating to boot.
  • Grixis features the Dregscape, a vast wasteland whose terrains seem to be mostly made of dead bodies.
  • Jund's landscapes have extremely active volcanoes. Building civilization is practically impossible there.
  • Naya has jungles where trees could grow as tall as mountains.
• Applied Phlebotinum:
  • Esper has Etherium, a filigree metal that Esperites merge with their bodies in order to improve their own minds and magical skills. Mechanically, Esper is characterized by having large number of colored artifacts and all its creatures being artifact creatures despite being humans, vedalken, etc.
  • Grixis has Vis. Being the Blue-Black-Red Shard, Grixis is devoid of Green and White mana. As a result, life energy is very scarce, and people there live (or unlive) and rot to death, only to rise again. Vis is a strange gas-like stuff that contains the tiny bit of life energy still present on the plane. Naturally, people on Grixis often fight over it.
• Body Horror:
  • To some, the way Esperites obsess over the weakness of flesh and alter their own bodies with metal can be more than a little bit disturbing. It doesn't help that their belief is essentially a mild version of what the Phyrexians believe in. As one vedalken puts it:
    "Etherium clouded my eyes, clogged my ears, desensitized my skin. Now that I can feel, I can begin to learn." (Flavor text of Vedalken Heretic)
  • Grixis's undead are often hideous, disturbing amalgams of flesh, bone, limbs and faces with little reference to sane anatomy.
• Crapsack World: Grixis is hands-down one of the most hostile planes in the multiverse pre-Conflux. It contains so little life energy that people are constantly rotting to death only to be brought back as undead. Necromancers fight over vis and supremacy, at times using corpses as their currency. And that's not even considering the demons. By the end of Alara Reborn, much of these have spread to the rest of Alara.
• Culture Chop Suey: Alara is pretty diverse. Having five once-separate worlds probably helped. Visually, Bant seems to invoke medieval Western Europe (albeit with a notably Persian-inspired naming scheme), Naya has strong Mesoamerican influence, while Jund is hardly civilized. Grixis looks somewhat European-ish, and Esper doesn't match any of the above.
• Death World: Grixis, if the descriptions given haven't made this clear enough; Jund also counts, due to its constant volcanic activities, merciless dragons topping the food chain, and lack of any sign of civilization; Naya is crawling with gigantic beasts and could easily be this if you aren't strong enough.
• Dragons Are Divine: Zigzagged. While lacking any civilization, people on Jund, the goblins in particular, seem to have a tendency to offer themselves as food for the dragons, and that looks like some primitive form of religion. Humans of that shard more explicitly use shamanic methods to deal with the dragons. On the other hand, many Esperites have a different opinion about dragons...
  "A king in Jund, a serf in Esper." — flavor text of Spellbound Dragon
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: The Maelstrom is one of the most potent manifestations of uncontrolled magical power in the Multiverse.
• Floating Continent: Some of Esper's islands and fortresses float high above the rest of the shard's landscape.
• Hungry Jungle: Immense, trackless jungles filled with hazards, predators and giant monsters cover most of Naya and significant parts of Jund.
• Light Is Good: Bant, the primarily White Shard, is without doubt the least hostile of the shards (before the Conflux, anyway...), while Grixis, the primarily Black Shard, is... not very pleasant, not to mention being Bolas's base of operation.
• Magitek: Esper makes heavy use of complex, magically-derived machines, artifices and mechanical limbs. After the Conflux, their techs seem to have spread to the other shards.
• Mega Maelstrom: The Maelstrom, a chaotic mana storm that formed at the center of New Alara after the Conflux.
• Outside-Context Problem: Every shard found itself at a loss to deal with the foreign tactics and ideologies that began to assault them from all sides during the Conflux. For instance, to the people of Bant, the idea that someone would use a dishonorable tactic like backstabbing in combat was so foreign, they didn't even wear proper armor to defend against it, while Grixis's necromances were at a loss to combat Esperite looters after realizing that their death magic was of no use against the intruders' mostly metallic bodies.
• Passion Is Evil: Esperites definitely believe in this, and so does (to a lesser extent) Bant.
  "Only a mind unfettered with the concerns of the flesh can see the world as it truly is." (Flavor text of Master of Etherium)
• Religion of Evil: It seems demon worship has arisen all over Alara (read: Shards that aren't Grixis) after the Conflux.
• Scenery Gorn: As mentioned, Grixis has landscapes that look partially made of dead bodies. It isn't a pretty sight. Of course, there are also Jund's constantly erupting volcanoes...
• Schizo Tech: Started to emerge when Jund invaders trespassed into Esper.
• When Dimensions Collide: The Conflux saw the five Shards, each a self-contained world in its own right for millennia, fuse once more with each other. This was disastrous for many of the Shards' inhabitants, both due to the new kinds of mana and associated ideas often shaking each Shard's highly specialized society to the core. Also, there were the physical disruptions caused by large tracts of land from other shards appearing in their landscapes, often alongside natives eager to invade.

Zendikar

A world of discovery!

Debut: Zendikar (2009)

Setting of: Zendikar (2009), Worldwake (2010), Rise of the Eldrazi (2010), Battle for Zendikar (2015), Oath of the Gatewatch (2016), Zendikar Rising (2020)

Planeswalkers: Kiora, Nahiri, Nissa Revane

The adventure world. Civilization is small and fragile, but ancient ruins and natural wonders dot the landscape, filled with great treasures, ancient spells and fierce guardians. On Zendikar, even the soil itself will rise up to defend its secrets, as a phenomenon called the Roil makes the landscape behave in strange and fantastical ways. If that weren't enough, the Eldrazi, once trapped within the heart of the plane, have been released, wreaking havoc.

Read about the individual residents of Zendikar here.

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• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: The ruins on Zendikar definitely have this look and feel, with their mysterious glyphs and magical powers of the hedrons and so on.
• Adventurer's Club: Lots of these arise as adventurers gathered, trying to seek out the secrets in those ruins.
• Adventure-Friendly World: Adventurers are just about the only people who would ever voluntarily come to this deadly gauntlet of a plane.
• Alien Landmass: The lands in Zendikar are really weird — archipelagos of floating islands are particularly common, but also present are things such as kilometer-high cliffs rising from the seas and forests of trees large enough for regular-sized forests to grow on their branches. Mechanically, the Zendikar block was the first block ever to focus on lands, which have, for the most part of the game's history, been treated as little more than "things that make mana but rarely do anything interesting".
• Apocalypse How:
  • The plane suffered a planetary-level one long before the present storylines. Prior to the arrival and imprisonment of the Elzrazi, it was fairly stable with multiple civilizations. The resulting turmoil and upheaval left the plane in its current state with scattered settlements and a whole lot of ruins.
  • The Eldrazi's reawakening sees multiple regional- to continental-level ones. Before their defeat at the hands of the Gatewatch, they still managed to obliterate large portions of the world, turning large swathes of the continents into lifeless barrens and destroying most of its civilizations.
• Death World: Zendikar is home to an immense variety of predatory animals, predatory plants, toxic organisms, aggressive native cultures and natural deathtraps, all regular shaken up by immense seismic and climatic upheavals. If you're neither native nor brimming with magical powers, then your remaining lifespan is probably measured in days at best.
• Durable Deathtrap: Loads. Despite the fact that knowledge of the Eldrazi was ancient enough to remain as nothing other than dim memories of forgotten gods, the deathtraps in those ruins are still very much functional. This is slightly justified, since those traps are magical in nature.
• Eldritch Location: Many of the lands or ruins border on being non-Euclidean. Aside from the floating pieces of lands, there're also floating pieces of water-pouring rocks. Don't try too hard to think about how that works.
• Enchanted Forest: Zendikar's forests are typically immense, trackless wildernesses brimming with magical wildlife and trees large enough to build small settlements on.
• Floating Continent: Zendikar's magic causes large sections of its landscape to regularly become unmoored and float off into the sky. Even the basic lands have these. The hedrons — floating polyhedron-shaped stones that were there to seal the Eldrazi — also count, since most of them are large enough for a normal human to walk on.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The earth itself will wreak havoc on anyone foolish enough to let their guard down. Too bad it does almost nothing to stop the Eldrazi.
• Genius Loci: Zendikari lands seem to have a will/wills of their own at time. Mechanically, cards from Zendikar have an unusually high chance of being "man-lands" — lands that can somehow turn into creatures.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Long before the events of the first Zendikar block, the kor ruled the plane as the autocratic Makindi Empire. Frustrated with their subjugation, the other races instigated a civil war which wiped the Empire off the map. The only remnants of the kor's hubris are the floating skyclave ruins, which were recovered during the events of Zendikar Rising.
• Mordor: In the Chandra comic, the titular Planeswalkers walks to Zendikar during a panic attack. She arrives in an ashy wasteland.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Zendikari vampires drink blood (as usual)... but are explicitly said to feed on the energy in the blood of living beings, and that this energy is the strongest in times of terror and pain (a bit less usual). Also, born on a world like Zendikar, they tend to be more feral and less refined than, say, their Innistrad counterparts. However, they are similar to them in that they are technically not undead.
• Prison Dimension: Formerly this to the Eldrazi.
• Scenery Gorn: As of Oath of the Gatewatch, a significant portion of the lands of Zendikar has turned into large swaths of wastelands unable to produce colored mana, courtesy of the Eldrazi.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Zendikar was the can that contained the Eldrazi.
• Temple of Doom: Scattered all across the land. Emeria, the Sky Ruin is one of the more prominent ones. Naturally, they tend to be full of traps and draw in lots and lots of adventurers. Too bad what's sealed inside these temple aren't treasures, but a whole army of Eldrazi.
• Tree Top Town: Zendikar's trees often grow large enough for entire villages to nestle among their branches — most elves live in such settlements.

Innistrad

A realm of horror and madness

Debut: Innistrad (2011)

Setting of: Innistrad (2011), Dark Ascension (2012), Avacyn Restored (2012), Shadows Over Innistrad (2016), Eldritch Moon (2016), Innistrad: Midnight Hunt (2021), Innistrad: Crimson Vow (2021)

Planeswalkers: Arlinn Kord, Sorin Markov, Tibalt, Vronos

The Gothic Horror world. Isolated groups of humans cling to survival against the hordes of darkness, while larger cities are plagued with corruption from monstrous parasites. The plane once flourished under the guidance of its angelic protector, Avacyn, but her disappearance heralded dire times, as her church fell into corruption and impotence.

Read more about the doomed individuals that call this accursed plane home here.

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• Apocalypse How: A world-level one occurred in Eldritch Moon. Basically, Emrakul invaded (thanks to Nahiri), bringing with her an army of Eldrazi, twisting much of the population into something even more monstrous. Things got so bad it even led to a temporary sort-of alliance between humans and vampires.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Innistrad is subject to a perverse version of this. While the plane was already a terrible place to live before Edgar Markov made a Deal with the Devil, the creation of vampirism nearly brought the plane to collapse. The creation of the angel Avacyn by Sorin Markov ensures that humanity can survive, but not thrive, thus making sure that werewolves, demons and vampires will always have a source of food that's not a threat to them.
• Big Fancy House: Vampires of Innistrad tend to live in these.
• Big Red Devil: The looks of Innistrad devils definitely invoke this.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Unlike on other worlds, the Phyrexian Invasion is barely a footnote in Innistrad's history, getting lost amongst all the other things actively destroying the plane.
• Corpse Land: Many. Most of the bodies would probably end up becoming zombies.
• Corrupt Church: The Church of Avacyn gradually degraded into this in her absence. They got better when Avacyn was finally freed from the Helvault. A shame it didn't last.
• Crapsack World: If you are a human.
• Creepy Cathedral: Benevolent as it is, the church architecture of Innistradi humans still has a rather Gothic look to it, and thus can look quite creepy at night.
• Creepy Cemetery: Spread all across the land, naturally. Many impromptu cemetaries, known as "Grafs", dot the landscape.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Church of Avacyn has a very Christian look and feel. It seems to lean the most towards a mix of Anglican and Protestant influences, but goes full Spanish Inquisition once Avacyn loses it.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: Numerous demons, such as Griselbrand, Withengar, and Ormendahl, are powerful and influential even among their kind, often commanding legions of lesser demons and being worshipped by widespread cults.
• Derelict Graveyard: The Drownyard of Nephalia is full of lost ships.
• Enchanted Forest: The forests of Kessig are dense, trackless and extensive, and haunted by werewolves — and if you go deep enough, the house-sized boars, immense wurms and territorial spirits and elementals soon eclipse the werewolves in terms of danger posed.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Fitting a horror setting several cards are grim allusions to fairy tale, like an entire cycle of werewolves referencing Red Riding Hood.
• Fur Against Fang:
  • While initially not a particular focus of the plane, vampires and werewolves do come into conflict as a result of having the same prey. Midnight Hunt brings it more into focus, as The Night That Never Ends means werewolves are getting bolder, and vampires are not excempt from being prey.
  • Word of God claims that werewolves and vampires are symbolic opposites: the former represent repressed anger, the latter repressed desire.invoked
• Fusion Dance: The more grotesque version of this happened to lots of people when Emrakul arrived. It was reflected on cards as the meld mechanic.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The much-loved transform mechanic, using double-sided cards to represent the story of a single entity as it's changed into something horrific by nature of being on Innistrad.
• Ghost Town: Given how dangerous the plane is, many abandoned villages can be found that contain myriad ghosts.
• Gothic Horror: The main source of the plane's aesthetics. The design of Innistrad has made use of pretty much every Gothic horror cliche out there, though the plane does have a few quirks of its own.
• Haunted House: The plane is basically saturated with ghosts, so really this could describe any Innistradi house, but special mention goes to the beings known as the Hladvora, a Living Structure Monster whose interior is an Eldritch Location in and of itself.
• Hope Spot: Avacyn's and the other angels' return gave the inhabitants of Innistrad hope that the dark days were over at last. Too bad that events on other planes led to things getting worse in Shadows over Innistrad, as Avacyn got driven homicidally insane, her church got radicalized and initiated an inquisition. Then the plane was ultimately invaded by an Eldrazi Titan.
• Humans Are Insects: Well, the vampires definitely felt this way. They treated Innistrad humans at best like cattle which supply blood. If the humans were lucky, they could be turned and become the vampires' servants.
• Hunter of Monsters: Naturally, this is a common profession among humans on Innistrad.
• Idiot Ball: In-Universe Played for Laughs. Ajani ponders if Innistrad swallows the self-preservation instincts of its denizens, since it's the only way he can explain how they keep falling for such obvious horror tropes.
• Light Is Good: Nearly everything white-aligned is on the humans' side. Nearly everything black-aligned is trying to harm the humans.
• Light Is Not Good: That said, there are exceptions. White aligned geists are mostly benevolent, but they are stated to be also capable of being vindictive. The angels went mad in Shadows over Innistrad. Finally, Crimson Vow introduces mono-white or white/red vampires.
• Lunacy: Both sides, no less. Avacyn and her fellow angels (and presumably the church clerics as well) were explicitly said to draw power from the plane's mysterious moon. At the same time, the various monsters also hunted mainly at night.
• Mad Scientist: Creators of the various stitched zombies on the plane and inventors of some pretty crazy Schizo Tech, including teleportation and cyborg werewolves.
• Monster Mash: Innistrad may be a terrible place to be a normal human being, but those that embrace the darkness on the plane seem to be in a lot better shape. That is, until Emrakul arrived.
• The Night That Never Ends: Thanks to Emrakul being imprisoned in the moon, the day-night cycle on Innistrad is royally screwed up, and the nights get longer and longer. Great for the plane's werewolves and vampires, but terrible for the humans. The Dawnheart witch coven aim to fix this in Midnight Hunt, using an arcane aparatus of unknown origin known as the Celestus to kickstart the sun and prevent an endless night.
• Orphanage of Fear: The Heron's Grace orphanage featured in the Midnight Hunt trailer forces the children to pick apples for the owner, being disabled or hurt is treated as an excuse to not work and "lazy" children are thrown to the werewolves. The children get back for their abuse when a woman infects them with Lycanthropy.
• Our Angels Are Different: They eventually got driven insane and went on a mass killing spree. Gisela and Bruna even merged (under the power of Emrakul) to become an Eldrazi Angel.
• Our Demons Are Different: Kind of. The black-aligned demons are your traditional horned beings of pure malice, but Innistrad also has red-aligned devils who behave more like trouble makers than evil incarnate.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Not that different, really. The White ones are your typical radiant benevolent spirits, while the Blue ones and the Black ones are more malevolent.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Innistrad vampires are classy (but less than benevolent) beings of the night, much like classical vampires, except they, being Red-aligned as well as Black, have some issues with impulse control...
  "Many peasants secretly admire vampires' glamour and elegance — until they witness a moment of pure bloodlust." (Flavor text of Vampiric Fury)
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Here, whether they transform seems to be dependent on how frequently spells are being cast.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Here on Innistrad, they are aligned with Blue and Black, with the Black ones being the traditional "magically raised corpses", while the Blue ones are Frankenstein's monsters made from dead bodies.
• Outside-Context Problem: From the point of view of an average Innistrad resident (be he/she a human, vampire, etc.), an Eldrazi army appeared out of absolutely nowhere.
• Religion of Evil: The cult of Skirsdag worshiped demons.
• Saintly Church: The Church of Avacyn used to be this, until its patron went crazy.
• Sealed Good in a Can: The Helvault became a prison for Avacyn, who was trapped there alongside Griselbrand.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • Griselbrand was trapped in the Helvault alongside Avacyn,
  • By the end of Eldritch Moon, Emrakul gets sealed in the plane's moon.
• Shout-Out: There are dozens of references to gothic and modern horror in the mechanics and lore of the plane— everything from each of the four vampire families each possessing one of Dracula's signature abilities (turning into animals for the Voldarens, turning into mist for the Stromkirks, flight for the Falkenraths, and mind control for the Markovs) to the Delver of Secrets being inspired by The Fly (1986), and Cloistered Youth being a reference to The Exorcist.
• Troperiffic: Innistrad has loads of tropes compared to other planes, likely due to the fact that the plane was designed to invoke as many Gothic Horror cliches as possible.
• Überwald: The naming conventions and aesthetics of Innistrad are decidedly Prussian.
• Weird Moon: The moon of Innistrad drives everything, including seasons and the hunting patterns of monsters. As of the end of Eldritch Moon, it also houses the Eldrazi Titan Emrakul.
• Wicked Witch: The witches of Innistrad primarily revolve around putting curses on people. There also seemed to be some Witch Hunt going on, especially when the Church began to radicalize in Shadows over Innistrad.

Theros

Where the gods are like children

Debut: Theros (2013)

Setting of: Theros (2013), Born of the Gods (2014), Journey into Nyx (2014), Theros: Beyond Death (2020)

Planeswalkers: Calix, Gideon Jura, Niko Aris, Xenagos

The Classical Mythology world. Theros is home to all manner of heroes and monsters, all watched over by a pantheon of incredibly powerful gods, who range in temperament from wise and patient to mercurial and cruel (but mostly the latter).

Read more about the individual inhabitants of Theros here.

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• Achilles' Heel: The gods are very powerful, but as God Needs Prayer Badly below mentioned, they will cease to even exist if no mortal believes in them. Mechanically, this is reflected in that while the gods are very powerful indestructible creatures, they can't manifest as creatures if your devotion isn't high enough.
• Alien Sky: Nyx, the plane's magical, moonless night sky, also doubles as a demi-plane of dreams. Its power is the reason why the gods could manifest from the ideas of mortals.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: On Theros, the collective unconscious beliefs of mortals eventually become real. Most famously, it affects the gods, who are powerful and immortal because humans believe that they are. It also has the side effect of history re-writing itself so that legends told of previous time periods actually happened.
• Control Freak: Quite a few of the gods were these.
  Karametra: "I refuse to let the folly of mortals endanger the home I made for them." (Flavor text of Dictate of Karametra)
• Crapsack World: With most of the Therosian pantheon being at best spoiled children with superpowers, it's natural that life as a Therosian isn't exactly easy.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The Black-aligned gods tend to be (relatively) benevolent, such as Erebos being merciful towards the dead, Pharika being a god of both poison and medicine, and Athreos being a grim reaper who's just doing his job. In contrast, Heliod, the mono-white sun god, is petty, egoistic, and extremely spiteful.
• Deity of Mortal Creation: The gods of the world of Theros are embodiments of mortal ideas and belief. Furthermore, they change based on how mortals perceive them - the nurturing agriculture goddess Karametra once demanded blood sacrifice in exchange for her gifts, until mortals stopped believing the sacrifices were necessary.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Phyrexian invasion during March of the Machine absolutely ravages Theros, even relative to the other worlds that were invaded. After all, Theros runs on the power of belief, and belief is one thing Phyrexians have in inexhaustible amounts, resulting in gods becoming Phyrexianized when their followers were.
• Expy: Theros is essentially Mythic Greece, and all its gods take pretty clear inspiration from the Hellenistic pantheon, right down to being best known for being petty assholes. More specifically:
  • Athreos is Charon, as the ferryman of the underworld.
  • Ephara is Athena, as the patron of civilization, law, and science.
  • Erebos is Hades, as the underworld god.
  • Heliod is a Composite Character of Helios (sun god) and Zeus (leader of the gods, supposedly good but does a lot of downright cruel things).
  • Iroas is another Composite Character, taking on aspects of Ares (the honorable bits of his character) and Nike (goddess of victory).
  • Karametra is Demeter, as the generally nice but somewhat controlling goddess of nature and farming.
  • Keranos is Zeus in his role as a sky god rather than the head of the pantheon.
  • Klothys is a composite of the Moirai/Fates, as the oldest god and the ruler of destiny.
  • Mogis is Ares in his most common portrayal as a brutish god of violence.
  • Nylea is a combination of Artemis (goddess of hunting) and Pan (god of the wild).
  • Pharika is a composite of Apollo in his role as a healer and a god of plagues, and Apollo's son Asclepius, who specifically watched over medicine.
  • Phenax is another one with no direct counterpart, but who takes inspiration from Hermes (trickster god) and Orpheus (escaping the Underworld alive).
  • Purphoros is Hephaestus, as god of craftsmanship and forging.
  • Xenagos is mostly original, but he also takes inspiration from Dionysus (god of madness and revelry) and Pan (more specifically, panic).
• Evil Counterpart: To Amonkheti gods, who genuinely cared for the mortals of their plane.
• God Needs Prayer Badly: In a rather Plato-esque twist, the gods of Theros are actually manifestations of the thoughts and ideals of sentient races, manifested through the magic of Nyx. Thus, if a god isn't acknowledged, he/she will fade from existence.
• Humans Are Insects: From the gods' point of view.
• Jerkass Gods: Most of the gods were at the very least petty and arrogant, if not outright evil. The pinnacle was Heliod, who murdered his champion Elspeth for... helping him get rid of the mass-murderer Xenagos, God of Revels. His reason? He felt threatened by the power of planeswalkers after watching Elspeth (a planeswalker) kill Xenagos (a god). That, and Elspeth kind of stole his spotlight by saving the day. There's some mythological basis in this too, since the Greek Gods are very well known to be flat out Jerkasses.
• Land of One City: Theros is full of city states, much like Ancient Greece. Meletis, for instance, is an obvious Expy to Athens.
• Meaningful Name: "Theros" is the Greek word for "summer".
• Our Angels Are Different: One of the few planes in the multiverse to have no native angel. Theros instead has archons, who are Always Lawful Evil tyrants who used to rule over humans with an iron fist.
• Our Gods Are Different: Here, they are enchantment creatures manifested from the power of a magical night sky.
• Our Titans Are Different: Theros Beyond Death reveals that the plane holds several Titans, typed as Elder Giants in the game. They are beings of godlike power who are nearly impossible to kill and were instead imprisoned in the Underworld until the events of the aforementioned set. They are also, notably, not enchantment creatures like the Gods, implying that they have no connection to Nyx.
• The Philosopher: True to its Ancient Greece inspiration, Theros seems to be abundant with philosophers, though unlike their Greek counterparts, Therosian philosophers are hardened badasses who can wrestle with bears.
• Rage Against the Heavens: The story of Theros block revolves around this trope.
  • Xenagos's ascension to godhood and attempt to replace the Therosian pantheon definitely counts.
  • At the end of the Theros block, Ajani, disillusioned with the gods after Elspeth's death at Heliod's hand, is trying to get Therosians to stop believing in the gods. This, as mentioned, could result in the end of the gods.
• Snake People: Theros has gorgons, though unlike more conventional gorgons, Therosian gorgons have a snake-like lower body.
• The Spartan Way: Akros, the city that is basically an Expy to the Spartans, naturally invoked this trope. Akroan people were known to be the most feared warriors across Theros, and had a culture that sought to harden their armies' bodies and minds over generations. Gideon was from Akros.
• Stock Gods:
  • God of Death: Erebos, God of the Dead.
  • God of Evil: Well, Mogis, God of Slaughter, definitely has the look and is said to embody malevolence as a concept. But really, most of the Therosian pantheon are divine assholes.
  • God of Good: Karametra, God of Harvests, who runs orphanages and stuffs, and Ephara, goddess of wisdom and social progress. Kind of (doubly so for the latter).
  • God of Knowledge: Kruphix, God of Horizons, who was the first god to come into existence. He's also the one who revealed the true nature of Therosian gods, himself being born the first time mortals began to wonder. To a lesser extent, Pharika, the goddess of natural knowledge, and Phenax, the god of secrets and deceit, also count.
  Kruphix: "Knowledge is cruel. It will break your heart and test your allegiances. Are you certain you want this curse?" (Flavor text of Dictate of Kruphix)
  • Lord of the Ocean: Thassa, God of the Sea.
  • Love God: There was once one, now long gone.
  • Sun God: Heliod, though he wasn't the first one.
  • Top God: Heliod tries to be this, at least, but he only attempts to claim the position due to his massive ego, and his authority is frequently disputed by the other gods.
  • Ultimate Blacksmith: Purphoros, God of the Forge.
  • War Gods: The twin gods - the aforementioned Mogis and Iroas, God of Victory - are this. The former focuses on the destructive aspects of wars, while the latter focuses more on the glory of fighting.
• World of Ham: A little. Therosians don't run around shouting their every word, but they do have a love for epic stories and poems about heroes and gods and monsters. Therosian heroes tend to happily go along with it.
  "You. Poet. Be sure to write this down." (Flavor text of Fabled Hero)

Tarkir

The dragons are dead...

long live the dragons!

Debut: Khans of Tarkir (2014)

Setting of: Khans of Tarkir (2014), Fate Reforged (2015), Dragons of Tarkir (2015), unnamed 2025 set

Planeswalkers: Narset, Sarkhan Vol

A world of warlords and strange beasts, Tarkir takes inspiration from cultures all over central Asia, but especially the sphere of influence of the Mongol Empire. Perpetually wracked by war between the Khans of the clans, Sarkhan Vol once called this plane home, before engaging in time travel shenanigans that resulted in him being deleted from Tarkir's history, as well as the restoration of the oppressive dragon-ruled empires that subjugated the plane's humanoid races. Whoops.

Read more about the individual clans and broods here, and the individuals that comprise them here.

Tropes that apply to both timelines:

• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Yetis are present on Tarkir in both timelines. They are mostly red-aligned.
• Body Motifs: Each of the five clans worshiped a specific aspect of the dragon. Each clan (and also each brood) used a certain body part of the dragon as their symbol.
• Cool vs. Awesome: Shaolin-Tibetan monks versus Orcish Mongol hordes!
• Culture Chop Suey: Tarkir may well be the most culturally diverse plane so far, pulling iconography from anywhere from China to Ancient Mesopotamia. Tropes Are Not Bad, however. This makes Tarkir, according to popular opinion, one of the richest and most dynamic planes out there.
• Dragons Are Divine: In both timelines, though in different ways. In the Khan Timeline, dragons were seen as long-gone but god-like creatures deserving of worship, e.g., each clan worshiped a specific aspect of the dragon, for starter. In the Dragons Timeline, they were practically the rulers of the plane.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Each of the five clans (and their respective broods) has a rather clear real-world counterpart:
  • The Abzan Houses seem to be based heavily on Persia.
  • The Jeskai Way takes after Tibetan and Shaolin monks.
  • The Sultai Brood has the aesthetics of Indonesia and the Thai Empire. Their architecture heavily resembles that of the Khmer Empire's Angkor Wat.
  • The Mardu Horde is very stereotypically Mongolian.
  • The Temur Frontier has a rather Siberian look to it.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Here they're a mainly black-aligned race. There're also some bonuses for fantasy geeks here, as the original Tolkien orcs were said to be inspired by a distorted vision of mongoloid peoples.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Kind of. Sarkhan going back in time did save Ugin, but it also prevented dragons from going extinct on Tarkir, which... screwed up the fate of lots of humans and humanoids.
• Single-Biome Planet: Deliberately averted. From what we've seen, Tarkir's landscapes consist of deserts, tundras, to rather subtropical-looking jungles.
• Snake People: The Tarkir block introduced the naga race.

Tropes that apply to the Khans Timeline:

• Crapsack World: Well, Sarkhan definitely viewed Khans Timeline Tarkir as this. His reason? There're no living dragons in this world.
  • In Sarkhan's defense, Narset did explain that Ugin the Spirit Dragon was connected to the plane itself; going so far as to call him the "Soul of Tarkir." And with the plane's constant state of war after the extinction of dragons and the fact that the world seemed to be harmed by Ugin's fall, it wouldn't be too far off to say she was right in some form or another.
• Forever War: The war for control of the plane doesn't seem to have any particular end in sight, since no side seemed to be willing to give up and a decisive victory was nowhere near being close.
• Humanity Is Superior: With dragons gone for good, humans and humanoids became the undisputed rulers of Tarkir.

Tropes that apply to the Dragons Timeline:

• Bad Future: As dangerous and unforgiving as the Khans timeline was, the Dragons timeline was even worse, with the dragon broods treating humans as ignorant peasants at best and vermin at worst. Not that Sarkhan cares...
• Breath Weapon: Each brood had a distinct weapon:
  • Dromoka's Brood breathe rays of searing light.
  • Ojutai's Brood breathe icy wind.
  • Silumgar's Brood breathe clouds of poisonous gas.
  • Kolaghan's Brood breathe lightning.
  • Atarka's Brood breathe fire.
• Humans Are Insects: This is definitely the case... in the dragons' opinions.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Quite different, in fact. They're explicitly supernatural in nature and bear little resemblance to one another, depending on where they were spawned, and as mentioned, each of the broods had a different Breath Weapon.
• To Serve Man: Humans (and humanoids) are frequently used as food for the dragons in this timeline.

Kaladesh

A plane filled with wonders

Debut: Magic Origins (2015)

Setting of: Kaladesh (2016), Aether Revolt (2017)

Planeswalkers: Chandra Nalaar, Dovin Baan, Saheeli Rai

The Steampunk plane. Kaladesh takes inspiration from India for its architecture and naming conventions. The inhabitants of the plane recently discovered a way to refine the omnipresent aether in the plane's atmosphere into a clean, efficient fuel source. As a result, the plane has been experiencing a sweeping technological renaissance ever since. Unfortunately, aether supplies are under the strict control of an increasingly corrupt Consulate.

The story of the Kaladesh block mostly takes place in Ghirapur, the City of Wonder and largest city on Kaladesh.

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• Alien Sky: Has a sky filled with aether and flying whales.
• Applied Phlebotinum: To a degree, the logic of how aether works on this plane can be summed up as "whatever ways the plot requires".
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: Given that Kaladesh is full of inventors, it's no surprise that its bazaars tend to be this. Huatli will likely agree, considering her reaction to her first visit to Ghirapur.
• City of Adventure: Ghirapur.
• Control Freak: The Consulate seems to be made primarily of these.
• Cool Airship: Loads. The sky of Kaladesh is also filled with inventors and pilots flying around in various Steampunk-esque vehicles. The Heart of Kiran is a particularly notable example.
• Gadgeteer's House: The homes of Kaladesh locals tend to be this.
• The Government: The Consulate. They were at best a group of Control Freaks, going on a Witch Hunt against users of fire magic possibly out of fear that the ability to generate power independently may threaten their dominance. And when someone (i.e., the Gatewatch) had the guts to rebel against that, they flipped out at once and issued an order to confiscate all artifacts, resulting in a major rebellion during the story of Aether Revolt.
• In Harmony with Nature: The Green-aligned artificers or "lifecrafters", who create automaton animals that blend in with nature.
• Lighter and Softer: Than Esper, in which technology has replaced emotions and created a cold and apathetic world. On Kaladesh, technology and emotions are combined into living works of art, and its people are brilliant and passionate inventors. Rather fittingly, Kaladesh was associated with Blue and Red in Magic Origin.
  • More generally, Kaladesh seems to be one of the, if not the, least hostile planes in Magic: the Gathering.
• Magic Versus Science: Most people of Kaladesh regard natural mages with at best distrust, and will probably support science in the magic vs science struggle.
• Magitek: Kaladesh is basically Magitek: the plane.
• Meaningful Name: Depending on how you write the name, "Kaladesh" has several different meanings in Hindi.
  • If you read it as "Kala desh", it can mean "Art Country", reflecting the beautiful and intricate nature of the technology there.
  • If read as "Kal desh", it can mean "Country of Tomorrow" or "Country of Yesterday", reflecting the technologically advanced state of the plane compared to others seen in the multiverse.
  • If read as "Kala adesh", it means "Order of Tomorrow", referencing the way the Consuls control the plane. Similarly, "Kala Adesh" means "Art order", which reflects the firm controls around invention on the plane.
  • In addition to the above, it also contains the word for "mandate" (Ladesh), and a portion of it could be read as "Black" (Kaalee), possibly a reference to the Aetherborn.
• Science Hero: The plane is full idealistic gadgeteers looking for a new way to improve the world with technology and look good doing it.
• Solar Punk: Kaladesh is a prime example of this genre. A place where technology is directly influenced by the wildlife. It helps that the technology is based on aether (think diesel fuel, if you replaced the carbon with Mana, had it seep into the plane from the Blind Eternities, and had it give off zero emissions), meaning no pollution and no major exploitation of nature.
• Space Whale: Well, sky whales, but close enough. Kaladesh's skies are home to skyborne whales and leviathans.
• Steampunk: Kaladesh is a more optimistic version of this.
• Sugar Bowl: Downplayed. Kaladesh has its troubles, but its one of the best planes to live in in the Multiverse of Magic: the Gathering.
• Technophobia: Somewhat surprisingly, averted for the plane's Green-aligned characters. In most of Magic's history, any artifact-themed plane tends to have Green-aligned characters act as Luddites. Here in Kaladesh, they spend their time making technology work In Harmony with Nature, instead of opposing technology altogether.
• Tomorrowland: Kaladesh is one of the most technologically advanced planes shown so far. Heck, its name even can be translated into English as "World of Tomorrow".
• Witch Hunt: Natural mages are viewed with at best suspicion here, and fire magic is strictly forbidden. That was why Chandra's spark ignited in the first place (igniting a spark requires a traumatic event).
• World Half Full: Kaladesh's other hat, besides its advanced technology, is its unflinching idealism. It is a plane full of Science Heroes where the biggest antagonists, the Consulate, consisted almost entirely of Well Intentioned Extremists at worst (and Tezzeret).

Regatha

Feel the burn.

Debut: Planechase (2012, first appearance), Magic Origins (2015)

A volcanic plane that is home to both Keral Keep, the monastery of pyromancers that trained Chandra, and the Order of Heliud, the knightly order of Lawful Stupid heiromancers that enforce tyrannical order throughout the multiverse.

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• The Magocracy: The city of Zinara was ruled by the Order of Heliud, who specialize in hieromancy, a branch of magic that focuses on justice and laws.
• Playing with Fire: Fire motifs are strong on Regatha, with the plane itself being volcanic and its main feature being the Purifying Fire and so on.
• Scenery Gorn: Nearly all of the Regathan landscapes seen so far are arid badlands.

Vryn

Not pictured: peace.

Debut: Planechase (2012, first appearance), Magic Origins (2015)

Planeswalkers: Jace Beleren

A plane dominated by a network of Magitek structures called Mage Rings, which can be used to control and direct mind-boggling amounts of mana. The plane has been torn since time immemorial by war for control over the mage rings, overseen by the enigmatic Arbiters. Given the number of conspirators and profiteers that see value in the war, it is unlikely to be stopping anytime soon.

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• Crapsack World: We haven't seen too much of Vryn. However, considering the facts that (1) it was stuck in a state of perpetual war, and that (2) the plane's upper class seized most of the plane's energy for their own consumption, Vryn certainly doesn't sound like a nice place to live in. Not to mention the fact that the Vryn landscapes seen so far mostly consist of barren-looking lands.
• Early-Bird Cameo: It actually first appeared on the Trail of the Mage-Rings card in Planechase before being fleshed out somewhat in Magic Origins.
• Forever War: As mentioned.
• The Government: The Core States, set at the middle of the ring network, are said to gather all the energy of an entire continent... so that the energy can be used by the mage elites who lived at the top of the society.
• Magitek: The Mage Rings are the most notable ones. They are said to be conduits of Mana and move energy around the plane.
• The Magocracy: Apparently, the mage elites can dominate the use of energy channeled by the mage rings because they are mages.

Amonkhet

A paradise for the devoted

Debut: Amonkhet (2017)

Setting of: Amonkhet (2017), Hour of Devastation (2017)

Planeswalkers: Basri Ket, Samut

A dying plane inspired by Ancient Egypt. Once home to a thriving civilization, the plane's gradual decay left only a single bastion of society left in the harsh, monster-infested deserts: the city of Naktamun. Nicol Bolas subjugated the plane just before the Mending and brainwashed the gods of the plane, along with its humanoid population, declaring himself the God-Pharaoh and turning Naktamun into a factory that does almost nothing but pumps out dead bodies of great warriors and mages.

Also notable about the plane is the Curse of Wandering, a phenomenon that permeates the plane and causes all deceased creatures to rise as flesh-eating zombies. On the plus side, these zombies can be controlled and put to constructive use with the help of magic channeled through the mystical material known as Lazotep.

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• Alien Landmass: Downplayed. The terrain of Amonkhet does not look that different from that found in most other planes or on Earth, but Nissa has something to say about it...
  Nissa: "Death has seeped into every part of this plane. I can feel it on my skin and taste it like sand in my mouth." (Flavor text of Shadow of the Grave)
• Ancient Egypt: The plane's aesthetics, complete with pyramids, sphinxes, cat worship, mummies, and animal-headed gods.
• Apocalypse How: The Hour of Devastation was a city-level one, though an at least regional-level one seemed to have occurred before the story of the Amonkhet block.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Lazotep. It was used by Bolas to create the Eternals, undead warriors who were champions in life and strengthened even further with the power of lazotep.
• Binary Suns: Amonkhet has two suns, one of which was created by Nicol Bolas before he was Brought Down to Badass.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Most inhabitants pre-Hour were more concerned with dying nobly and leaving behind a good corpse than, y'know, not dying.
• Brainwashed: The whole Naktamun was subject to this, courtesy of Bolas.
• Cats Are Superior: Like Ancient Egyptians, Amonkhetu people worship cats, and one of their gods has the head of a cat.
• Crapsaccharine World: Thanks to Bolas, this bright, sunny plane has a nasty undercurrent to it. The events of Hour of Devastation destroyed his façade, and now it's just a straight-up Crapsack World.
• Crossing the Desert: What Hazoret, the god of zeal, and the survivors of Naktamun did after the Hour of Devastation.
• Cosmic Horror Story: If you were an Amonkhetu, the story of Amonkhet would be one: Your civilization has spent some time falling apart until the people retreated to the world's last known city. Then a dragon literally from another world showed up, wiping the floor with your gods, subduing the entire plane and turning it into a factory that produces undead warriors. Oh, when the dragon was done, he killed your gods, and then tore down the last thing that protected your city from the invading desert. Even your gods were totally helpless in the whole thing. Hour of Devastation was basically a disaster movie.
• Death World: Oh Gods yes. Just one city that's protected from the encroaching desert (that in itself is filled with hordes of undead and other monstrosities among the ruins of older cities), and the city is a cult-like meat grinder where people train to undertake trials that have the potential to result in their brutal deaths. It actually wasn't like this before, as before Bolas showed up there was a whole civilization (a fading one, but still) out in the rest of the desert.
• Deflector Shields: The Hekma in a nutshell. The city of Naktamun was surrounded by the Hekma, which kept horrors from the desert away from the city. It was destroyed by the Locust God in the Hour of Promise.
• Egopolis: Naktamun was this to Bolas. Half of the decorations took after his horns, and the city worshiped him as the God-Pharoah. This wasn't the case before he invaded and subdued the plane.
• Endless Daytime: Amonkhet has two suns, one of which seems to take decades to even change position significantly. It's thus no surprise that most Amonkhetu don't even know what 'nighttime' is.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Downplayed, since this is a game technically aimed at kids, but the denizens of Naktamun don't have any culture of monogamy or marriage; they have sex when they please, with who they please, with the children being reared by the Anointed in communal creches to ultimately sacrifice their lives in turn.
• Expy: Lots of characters are directly based on those from ancient Egyptian history or myths, such as Hapatra being based on Cleopatra and Hazoret being based on Anubis.
• False Utopia: Naktamun might seem like an oasis amongst a rather unforgiving plane infested by undead and horrors, but turns out everyone was indoctrinated to fight in deadly gladiator games and the Gods were all brainwashed to serve Nicol Bolas without knowing that they're all used to manufacture his undead army.
• Family of Choice: Enforced culturally; children are reared by mummy servitors called the Anointed in communal creches, with nobody having any idea who their parents are (not that it matters, as their parents are killed off during the Trial of Zeal anyway). As such, an Amonkhetian's crop is their family in every detail that matters.
• Forbidden Zone: Basically anywhere other than Naktamun.
• From Bad to Worse: When we first see Amonkhet, it is a cult-like city-state where only a selected few spend their lives doing anything other than training for grueling, bloodsport-like competitions, believing that this would win them a place in the afterlife. Then Hour of Devastation happened.
• Good Counterpart: On the plus side, the gods of Amonkhet are actively benevolent underneath Bolas's brainwashing, unlike their capricious Theros counterparts. Except Bontu the Glorified, who betrayed her people and helped Bolas maintain his spells on her fellow gods.
• Land of One City: Naktamun was the only known city on the plane by the time of Amonkhet block.
• Language Equals Thought: The Naktamun's inhabitants refer to their social units as "crops". Which provides a very clear indication of how their Martyrdom Culture has shaped them.
• Last Fertile Region: Naktamun and the surrounding areas were at least viewed as this.
• Martyrdom Culture: All of Amonkhet glorified dying honorably in the gods' trials, to the point that the final trial for each generation consisted of a grand melee that left no survivors. Before Bolas invaded, the trials were significantly rarer, and only a few individuals would go through them.
• Meaningful Name:
  • While not Egyptian in origin, the Hebrew word "Amon" means "secret" and the Thai word "Khet" stands for "district", so the word "Amonkhet" (which certainly sounds Egyptian) can be interpreted as "secret district". How fitting for a plane that is secretly Bolas's undead warrior factory...
  • Amon is also a way of spelling one of many solar deities of the Egyptian Pantheon, Amun. "Khet" was a form of Measurement in Ancient Egypt, equaling 100 cubits (about 150 feet/46 meters), so it can be interpreted as "Measurement of the Sun God".
• Mummies: There are two different kinds. Inside of Naktamun, there are the Anointed, the formally mummified remains of those who perish during any trial other than the Trial of Zeal; these form the labor caste of Naktamun, performing all tasks from farming to making food to child rearing, freeing up the mortals to dedicate themselves to preparing for the trials, and marked the first time we have mono-white zombies. But outside, there are black-mana mummies in the form of sun-dried, desiccated zombies; these mummies are crawling all over the plane, and exist only to try and kill any living thing they can get. A third type, the lazotep-encased Eternals, appear after Bolas returns to gather his army.
• Pyramid Power: Somewhat surprisingly, these didn't really play much of a role either in-story or on the cards. But all over the landscape, there're loads of pyramid whose top sections are physically detached from and just floating above the bottom ones.
• The Sacred Darkness: Amonkhet is based around necromancy and the practicing of Human Sacrifice... but all of these have a strong, positive connotation in Amonkhet's culture. Dying in the name of the gods is a holy act, and the zombies they animate are revered as honored ancestors who take up the trials of day-to-day labor so that the living may dedicate themselves to preparing to die for the gods.
• Scarab Power: True to its basis on ancient Egyptian myths, Amonkhet loves scarabs.
  Bontu: "They (scarabs) are small, but they always want more. Learn from them." (Flavor text of Nest of Scarabs)
  • Played very straight with the Scarab God, who raised an army of Eternals during the Hour of Eternity. The army then proceeded to slaughter every Naktamun citizen in their ways.
• Scary Scorpions: There are lots of giant ones out in the desert.
  • Also played horrifyingly straight with the Scorpion God, who awoke at the Hour of Glory and proceeded to murder Rhonas, Kefnet, and Oketra in quick succession.
• Scenery Gorn: The ruins of all the bygone cities outside Naktamun.
• Stock Gods:
  • God of Death: Hazoret the Fervent, in a way. She's responsible for using her spear to give the worthy an honorable death, so for Amonkhetu people, she's basically the symbol of the glorious death they craved. Fittingly, her design was based on Anubis.
  • God of Good: Oketra the True, god of solidarity and altruism.
    To the end, all Oketra did was for others. (Flavor text of Oketra's Last Mercy)
  • Hazoret used to embody compassion as part of her domain before Bolas invaded and corrupted the Amonkhetu gods.
  • God of Knowledge: Kefnet the Mindful.
  • Sun Gods: Oketra and Hazoret are both connected to the Second Sun. Bolas tried to pass himself as a sun god.
  • Top God: Nicol Bolas, the God-Pharaoh, was supposedly this. Too bad Amonkhetu people were wrong.
• Thirsty Desert: What we have so far seen of the world outside Naktamun is this.
• Town with a Dark Secret: It's a seemingly utopian city in the middle of a hostile desert, but people are fed into the meat grinder of competition and trials, dying by the hundreds for some unknown purpose. Then Bolas shows up and reveals that's actually his military factory where everyone, Gods included, were brainwashed and/or conditioned into doing his dirty work.
• Uncanny Atmosphere: The Gatewatch definitely felt so especially when they knew Bolas was behind this plane. Turns out they're horribly right when he shows up in-person and gleefully attempts to annihilate everyone who worshiped him.

Ixalan

Swashbucklers, dinosaurs and vampires, oh my

Debut: Ixalan (2017)

Setting of: Ixalan (2017), Rivals of Ixalan (2018), The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (2023)

Planeswalkers: Huatli

The plane of Swashbuckling Adventure. A plane that is home to at least two major continents, Ixalan houses vast swaths of unexplored wilderness, lost ruins and, unlike Zendikar, very much alive empires eager to reclaim them. Complicating matters somewhat, events on the continent of Torrezon have driven pirates and raiders to Ixalan's shores, with vampiric zealots in hot pursuit. All eyes are on a single prize: Orazca, the city of gold, which's said to house an artifact of unimaginable power.

Ixalan is actually both the name of the plane and a continent on the said plane. Read more about the individual factions here.

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• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: The human civilization in Ixalan's hollow core, the Oltec, have an aesthetic reminiscent of this, with elaborate devices and automata powered by Cosmium, and have some visual designs that evoke the ancient real world Olmec civilization. Notably though, while the inheritors of an ancient legacy, the modern-day Oltec are a civilization very much still in its prime.
• Ancient Artifact: The Immortal Sun, a fabled artifact said to be more valuable and powerful than any other artifact that exists. Anyone who gets hold of it was promised unlimited wealth, the strength of empires, command over nature, and eternal life. To nobody's surprise, the four factions spent much of the story of Ixalan block fighting over it.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: Though the dinosaurs aren't the same as Earth dinosaurs, there are still many discrepancies with current science:
  • For mechanical purposes, all pterosaur creatures, and a single mosasaur-like creature are listed as "dinosaurs", when they weren't.
  • Several pterosaurs, such as Sky Terror, are depicted as having feathers.
  • The card Nest Robber depicts an Oviraptor, and its name implies it's stealing the egg; in reality, Oviraptor is a misnomer, as the eggs the holotype was discovered with were later found to be Oviraptor eggs, though some scientists do think it actually did eat eggs.
  • The card Bonded Horncrest appears to depict a ceratopsian dinosaur with not two or three, but six horns, including two tusk-like protrusions under its head, something that has never been found in the fossil record.
  • This is averted with the card Snapping Sailback depicts a water-dwelling Spinosaurus, which is accurate to modern paleontological knowledge, but generally not accepted by popular culture.
• City of Gold: Orazca, the... well, City of Gold.
• Cool Ship: Naturally, the Brazen Coalition and the Dusk Legion use lots of these. Mechanically, the Ixalan block also marked the return of vehicles, mostly in the form of cool ships.
• Cool vs. Awesome: The main theme of Ixalan. Dinosaurs and dinosaur riders versus pirates^note which feature orc pirates, siren pirates and goblin pirates alongside the human pirates versus vampire conquistadors versus merfolk elementalists, oh my!
• Culture Chop Suey: Ixalan is, alongside Tarkir, one of the more culturally diverse planes so far. What makes this even better is that the designers of Ixalan actually made the distinctions between different Native American cultures, instead of just mixing them together. See Fantasy Counterpart Cultures below for more details.
• Daywalking Vampires: The Dusk Legion ("vampire conquistadors", in a nutshell) have no problem walking around and fighting under daylight.
• Deserted Islands: Scattered all around Ixalan. Jace got stuck on one when he first arrived on the plane.
• During the War: The main story of Ixalan was more or less an all-out war between the four factions. It only got worse when they finally discovered Orazca. Much of the Rivals of Ixalan stories consists of the four factions trying to kill each other and gain total control of the golden city.
  "Drench these golden streets (streets of Orazca) in the blood of our enemies." (Flavor text of Champion of Dusk)
• The Empires: The Dusk Legion and the Sun Empire. The former was trying to take over the whole continent, and one of the purposes of this was to ensure a steady supply of blood, while the latter was explicitly expansionist and sought to enhance its power, mostly at the expense of the River Heralds.
• Fantasy Counterpart Cultures:
  • The Sun Empire has strongly Aztec aesthetics, although the name of their capital city Pachatupa sounds a little bit Quechua (a language more associated with the Inca Empire).
  • The River Heralds seem to be based on the Maya.
  • The Dusk Legion is an obvious Expy to Spanish conquistadors, outfitted with appropriate clothing and fighting style, a church that looks suspiciously Catholic, and an iron-fisted queen.
  • The Oltec are a mix of the ancient Olmec, Teotihuacan, various Andean civilization, and Hollow Earth pulp fiction, with a generous helping of Magitek on top.
  • The Malamet are a civilization of jaguar folk who inhabit grand cities in the caves between the surface and the core, and keep constant vigil against the mycoid scourge. They're pretty clearly based on the image of the Aztec jaguar knights.
• Feathered Fiend: As according to modern scientific theories, most carnivorous dinosaurs have feathers, but are still very dangerous.
• Festering Fungus: Among the plane's most feared beings is the Mycotyrant, an infectious fungal Hive Mind sealed in the seemingly endless tunnels beneath Ixalan's surface.
• Fish People: The River Heralds marked Green finally getting merfolk, though the design team was trying to push it as far back as Shadowmoor.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: All of the main factions have not-unreasonable causes to want to seize the power of Orazca for themselves. The Sun Empire want to regain their former glory and be left alone, the Dusk Legion want immortality for everyone, the Brazen Coalition want to take back their stolen homes, while the River Heralds want to prevent everyone else from abusing the power.
• Hollow World: The plane of Ixalan is actually hollow, with its interior hosting gods, angels, and a magical sun made of an Applied Phlebotinum known as cosmium.
• Hungry Jungle: Much of the continent of Ixalan is covered in this, and it has dinosaurs, to boot.
• Light Is Not Good: Both White aligned factions (the sun-worshipping Sun Empire and the Church of Dusk) are composed of fanatical lunatics who want to take over the world.
• Lost World: There are dinosaurs everywhere on Ixalan.
• MacGuffin Location: Orazca.
• Magical Native American: The River Heralds definitely give off this vibe, with their mystical connections to the rivers and affinity with magic and all.
• Mayincatec: The Sun Empire is based primarily on the Aztec, while the River Heralds are based mainly on the Mayans. Naturally, there is the Dusk Legion to serve as Expy to Spanish conquistadors.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: It's practically Ixalan's hat! The main conflict is between dinosaur-riding Aztecs, element-wielding Maya merfolk, an army of vampire conquistadors and a pirate horde whose ranks include orcs and goblins, all fighting over control of the local equivalent of El Dorado.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Ixalan vampires have no problem with daylight and are even religious.
• Pirate: The Brazen Coalition are very deliberately a massive collection of Pirate Tropes.
• The Power of the Sun: Sun motifs are strong in Ixalan, with the Sun Empire (unsurprisingly) worshiping the Threefold Sun (their concept of a sun deity who's a trinity) and the Immortal Sun and so on.
• Prison Dimension: Essentially one for planeswalkers, thanks to Azor's creation of the Immortal Sun, that prevents any attempt to planeswalk away from Ixalan. This was done for the purpose of capturing Nicol Bolas and imprisoning him there.
• Raptor Attack: There are many raptor cards, but most are actually aversions; all have feathers and few are unrealistically large.
• Temple of Doom: Orazca fits this to a T, being a massive abandoned magical complex full of traps and treasure abandoned by its original creators.
• Terror-dactyl: Ixalan's pterosaurs are the typical bird-legged, snaggle-toothed, highly aggressive snatchers of land-bound humans of Hollywood fame.
• Trapped in Another World: Happened to multiple planeswalkers thanks to the binding power of the Immortal Sun.

Shandalar

The Rogue Plane

The setting for multiple Core Sets, Shandalar is perhaps the closest thing to a Standard Fantasy Setting in the multiverse. A plane that holds a titanic abundance of mana, Shandalar has long been a favored destination for greedy planeswalkers. It is also the home of the Onakke, the ancient ogre sorcerers that created the Chain Veil. Shandalar is also notable for having no "fixed place" in the multiverse, making it a wild card when planeswalking.

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• Ascended Extra: Originally created for the MicroProse Magic: The Gathering computer game, Shandalar made it to physical cards decades later and even had some lore articles specifically written for it.
• Hive Drone: Slivers are present on Shandalar, though they behave differently from the ones previously seen on Rath and Dominaria (Shandalar Slivers only affect Slivers their controller controls, as opposed to the Rathi slivers that affected all Slivers), and their appearance can also be markedly different (here they're divided into higher-caste Slivers who look far more humanoid, being bipedal and having four limbs, while lower-caste Slivers are almost snakelike and have a single limb, like the Rathi Slivers). Notably, because the Slivers seen on Rath would have been taken from another plane, and because they were genetically modified by Volrath, this may mean that Shandalar is where they originate, and that the Slivers seen here are their original form.
• Standard Fantasy Setting: So much so that, when Wizards realized that Magic needed a lore-neutral setting for their core sets (for the purpose of reprinting cards), they settled on Shandalar, since Dominaria had become too distinctive and focused on being the fantasy post-apocalyptic plane. That said, the setting does have a few minor quirks of its own.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Shandalar has the Onakke, a race of ogres that were, contrary to the trope, actually quite intelligent, and used their magic to create many artifacts, including the Chain Veil. They were wiped out long ago in the past by an unknown cause, though some of their spirits still haunt their catacombs, including Kurkesh.

Fiora

The King is dead. Long live the King!

Debut: Conspiracy (2014)

Setting of: Conspiracy (2014), Conspiracy: Take the Crown (2016)

Planeswalkers: Dack Fayden, Daretti

A plane based on Renaissance Italy, Fiora is a world of intrigue and treachery, where everyone has an angle and there is no one not plotting to steal the crown at all times.

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• Clockpunk: Clockwork constructs are provided courtesy of the plane's artificers, though one should be wary about what you say around them...
• Decadent Court: Murder was never outlawed on Fiora, as it is too useful and widely practiced a political tool to do away with.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Of Italy in the time of the Medici and Pazzi families, complete with all the intrigue, assassinations, and backstabbing that implies.

Kylem

Let the games begin!

Debut: Battlebond (2018)

Setting of: Battlebond (2018)

A plane that's focused on competitive sports of all kinds, where the greatest warriors battle in two-on-two matches in the Valor's Reach arena.

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• Ancient Rome: The design of Kylem seems to be quite heavily inspired by Ancient Roman culture. Valor's Reach, for instance, looks suspiciously like the Roman Colosseum. Such aesthetics are quite fitting, since Kylem is themed around sports and competition.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Common in the set's fluff. Since the duels of Valor's Reach are sporting events and generally not fought to the death, it's often better to lose in a spectacular manner than to win in a boring one.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The Battlebond focuses on the Two-Headed Giant format, which is a two vs two variant of Magic. Similarly, battles at Valor's Reach are focused on two-on-two combat.
• Lighter and Softer: The fact that most of the action on this world is nonlethal gives it a brighter, more cheerful atmosphere than most planes so far.
• World of Ham: For the fighters at Valor's Reach, victory is less important than being spectacular and flashy. It naturally causes Kylem to look like this trope.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: All of the partner duos in Battlebond are between enemy-color cards. Including an angel named Regna the Redeemer and a demon named Krav the Unredeemed who are a couple.

Eldraine

Once upon a time...

Debut: Throne of Eldraine (2019)

Setting of: Throne of Eldraine (2019), Wilds of Eldraine (2023)

Planeswalkers: Rowan Kenrith, Will Kenrith

A world based on a combination of Fairy Tales and Arthurian Legend, divided between the knightly courts of the Realm and the ever-shifting Wilds where The Fair Folk dwell.

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• Dark Is Not Evil: Black-aligned things are surprisingly pleasant for a fairy tale setting. The knightly court of Locthwain is composed of literal and figurative Black Knights, yet they are just as vital as the others in protecting the realm, while the analogue for the Holy Grail is the Black-aligned Cauldron of Eternity, which even removes Garruk's curse.
• Enchanted Forest: The mysterious and uncharted wilderness between and outside of the five courts of the Realm is known as the Wilds. It's home to homicidal redcaps, Wicked Witches, dragons, turtle hydras, malicious fae, and all manner of other nasties.
• Fairy Trickster: Two of the main three types of Eldraine fae are the tiny thieving fae, the most common type, who delight in stealing objects, and the child-sized prankster fae, who enjoy playing malicious pranks on others.
• Food Eats You: Deep in the wilds, there lies the abandoned village of Sweet Tooth, which has been completely overrun by monsters made of animate candy and baked goods.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: The primary inspiration for the world.
• The Good Kingdom: The five courts of the Realm (White-aligned Ardenvale, Blue-aligned Vantress, Black-aligned Lochthwain, Red-aligned Embereth and Green-aligned Garenbrig) are all part of a monarchy under the High King or Queen, with their own rulers under him or her, and are shown to be, for the most part, perfectly lovely places to live.
• High Fantasy: Explicitly described as such by Wizards of the Coast.invoked
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Lochmere Serpent is pretty clearly supposed to be a Stock Ness Monster.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dwarves are the primary Red-aligned humanoids on Eldraine. They mostly reside in the Wilds, though some align themselves with the court of Embereth, and are pretty bog standard: largely good-natured bearded miners.
• Playing with Fire: Besides the typical Red mages, white mana users are strongly associated with pyromancy as well, wielding holy fire that purges the impure.
• Witch Classic: Positively crawling with them. Powerful and strange warlocks who follow the classic witch mold can be found practicing their foul arts all over the Wilds.
• World in the Sky: The massive magical Castle Stormkeld can be found in the clouds above Eldraine, inhabited by ostentatious treasure-collecting Storm Giants.

Ikoria

The Lair of Behemoths

Debut: Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths (2020)

Setting of: Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths (2020)

Planeswalkers: Lukka

The Kaiju plane. Brutal, wild, and home to an insane variety of wildlife, Ikoria is a plane with tiny pockets of heavily guarded civilization surrounded by unimaginable environments of alien majesty. The cycle of evolution is supercharged on Ikoria, possibly due to the mysterious, abundant magical crystals. The result is an ecology built around bizarre creatures that can adapt to each other at a moment's notice.

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• Absent Aliens: Humans are the only sapient race on Ikoria. Unlike Innistrad, there is no indication that this was ever not the case.
• Adaptive Ability: The whole plane effectively has this due to the crystals littering it. Something capable of harming a monster one day may be a No-Sell by the next, due to their constant evolution and mutation. To the extent that, when Phyrexia tries to invade, the plane quickly adapts by making the monsters immune to Phyrexian oil.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Bugs? Bats? Squirrels? They're all at least as large as a grown man, capable of spitting acid, and actively trying to eat you.
• Bond Creature: Those few humans who survive in the wild long enough may develop a powerful telepathic bond with a monster, called an eludha. This is represented in-game through the new Companion-mechanic, creatures you can bring into the game if your deck fulfills certain prerequisites.
• Death World: Like many planes in the multiverse, Ikoria more than qualifies, between its ravenous predators, incarnate nightmares, unkillable Kaiju and the mutagenic energies that randomly make its denizens ever stronger and more dangerous than they were already. Ikoria's humans survive largely through bunkering down in unimpregnable fortress-cities and letting the beasts have the rest of the world.
• Elemental Embodiment: Elementals in the shape of animals are very common in Ikoria, and are the dominant form of life in Ketria.
• Glowing Gem: Exploited, in fact — Ikoria is filled with crystals, some the size of small mountains, which glow when monsters come near them. Humanity has learned to use them as early warning systems. As long as the gems are inert, things are... mostly safe. When the gems start shining, it's time to grab your weapons.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Ikoria's mutagenic energies routinely cause its denizens to sport the traits of one or multiple other clades, making the plane home to dinosaur-cats, goat-hydras, demonic krakens, bird-winged goats and foxes, bat-winged lions, wolves with cetacean tails and dorsal fins, hippos with the tails and back plates of stegosaurs, and oh-so many more.
• Mobile City: The makeshift dirigible city of Skysail, made up of hundreds of balloons and dirigibles which can break apart into individual fleets and scatter in the event of an aerial monster attack. Its main survival strategy is mobility — besides staying far above most of the world's monsters, Skysail is constantly moving around and never stays in one spot for long, in order to stay out of the flying monsters' migration routes and to avoid making itself a target for aerial predators.
• Nuclear Mutant: Or at least the fantasy equivalent. Multicolored crystals evocative of radiation cause all the mutations in the wildlife.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Ozolith was placed on Ikoria by an unnamed planeswalker for inscrutable reasons, and it's the cause of the increased mutations and aggressive behavior among Ikoria's monsters recently.

Kaldheim

Cold Realm

Debut: Planechase (2009, first appearance), Kaldheim (2021)

Setting of: Kaldheim (2021)

Planeswalkers: Tyvar Kell

The Norse Mythology plane. Kaldheim consists of a number of distinct demi-planes — ten are known and named, although more exist — arranged around a central cosmic structure known as the World Tree. Each realm is home to a single sapient race, which is mostly limited to its home realm outside of rare pathways called omenpaths and occasional intersections between realms called Doomskars, although legendary creatures known as Cosmos monsters can move freely through the Cosmos, the strange void that surrounds and separates the realms.

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• Alien Sky: The realms' skies have no sun or moon — they're lit by the light of Starnheim, which is visible as a sundog-like effect — and the twisting branches of the World Tree are always visible beyond the clouds, rising from the horizon and out of sight. Only Istfell, the land of the dead, is too far down to receive the light of Starnheim, and its skies are instead a dark expanse lit by colorful auroras and threaded with the World Tree's hanging roots.
• Ascended Extra: After debuting in Planechase, Kaldheim appeared semi-occasionally in the story and supplemental material before getting its own set over a decade later.
• Bilingual Bonus: One that's easy to figure out for English speakers. Kald(r) means "Cold" in old Norse and most modern Scandinavian languages. Heim(r) means a variety of things in old Norse, including "World," "Realm" and "Home." Both words are the etymological origin of "cold" and "home" respectively, making it easy to figure out even if you're unfamiliar with Nordic languages.
• Composite Character: The elves of Kaldheim combine traits of the Norse alfar (besides both being elves, the Kaldheimers' split between wood and shadow elves mirrors the division between the light and dark elves) and the Vanir (an older pantheon of wilderness deities ousted and replaced by the Aesir/Skoti).
• Cool Ship: Pimped-out seafaring vessels are the norm for the exploration-focused Omenspeaker clan, but special mention goes to Omenkeel, the ship of the explorer-god Cosima herself. It can sail through the Cosmos itself.
• Fantastic Racism: Most of the races of Kaldheim are divided into two factions along color lines, and many of these — most notably the Hagi and Torga trolls, the wood and shadow elves, and the fire and frost giants — deeply detest their counterparts and often battle with one another.
• Hailfire Peaks: Surtland, the realm of the giants, is a land of freezing temperatures and volcanic activity, where geysers and volcanoes burst through glaciers and snowbanks before freezing midair and high, icy peaks rise above gorges filled with rivers of lava.
• Mordor: Immersturm is a realm of harsh crags, seas of fire, eternal lightning storms and unceasing warfare between the demons imprisoned there.
• The Necrocracy: The realm of Karfell is a series of frozen-over ruins of a mighty civilization, now ruled by the undead wizard king Narfi and his legions of draugr servitors, all at varying levels of intelligence and independence.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: High King Harald, who united the wood and shadow elves, is named after the real-life first king of Norway Harald Fairhair. His hair is not nearly as fabulous as the real thing.
• Our Demons Are Different: The demons are vicious raiders and barbarians — essentially hellish Vikings — trapped by the gods in the hellish realm of Immersturm, where their violent natures drive them to war ceaselessly with one another. They reproduce by killing people — every time a demon kills someone, its victim's blood goes to a volcano in Immersturm containing a lake of gore; once the lake fills enough, a new demon crawls out. They're divided between the Black demons, tyrants and conquerors who want to spread a realm of fear and terror over Kaldheim, and the Red demons, who just really like killing, maiming and burning things.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The dwarves of Axgard live in a beautiful city carved beneath their realm's mountains, and enjoy very long lives — they only become adult at a hundred years of age. They're a passionate and driven people whole live for only two things: crafting beautiful things (all dwarves spend their youth creating a weapon they'll carry their whole lives, and which they become named after) and legends of epic deeds (dwarves rely on skalds for lore-keeping, as they don't use written language, and most dwarves dream of passing into myth themselves). Unlike most other groups in Kaldheim, their color split (into Red and White) merely reflects what a dwarf's attitude is to crafting rather a cultural or physical division.
• Our Elves Are Different: The elves of Kaldheim are the descendants of the Einir, the gods who ruled Kaldheim before the current Skoti, who were stripped of their ancient power after being dethroned; consequently, they detest the gods and dream of reclaiming their ancient power. They live in Skemfar, a realm of dark primordial forests, and are divided into two distinct groups — the wood elves, aligned with green mana, who live in the treetops of their forests, and the shadow elves, aligned with black mana, who live underground among the roots. The two groups don't get along, and the current high king who managed to unite them under a single crown is only just able to rein their animosity short of open conflict. Unlike the game's usual portrayal of elves, Kaldheim elves are depicted as muscular, Viking-like and often bearded.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: People who don't die glorious deaths in battle, including every animal and monster, become a spirit in the foggy underworld of Istfell. These ghosts lack the passion and drive they had in life, and spend their afterlives drifting aimlessly like fog, repeating without purpose the motions of the things they did in life.
• Our Giants Are Different: The giants inhabit Surtland, a realm of climatic extremes where everything is bigger than you'd expect it to be, and are sharply divided into two elemental kindreds. Frost giants are solitary, contemplative beings who live in fortresses on the realm's high peaks, studying magic and hoarding secrets. Fire giants are a more barbaric folk who live in larger groups in the volcanic lowlands, eagerly raid other realms when the chance presents itself and lack the scholarship of the frost giant mages, although they can control fire and lava to a degree. The two groups detest one another, and fire giant tribes often attack frost giant holdfasts. Another kind of giants once inhabited Gnottvold, the realm now claimed by the trolls, but they vanished long ago, leaving only overgrown ruins scattered in the wilderness.
• Our Trolls Are Different: Trolls are hunched, green-skinned and barbaric humanoids with large, hooked noses and upward-curving tusks. They live in Gnottvold, a realm of rugged mountains and thick forests, and are divided into two groups. Red-aligned Hagi trolls are shorter (relatively speaking; even hunched over they're taller than a human), have thick manes of shaggy hair, live a primitive tribal existence, and fight constantly with each other and anyone else they meet. Green-aligned Torga trolls are much larger, with craggy features and grey skin, and when sleeping almost perfectly resemble ruins and giant boulders. Torgas can sleep for decades at a time, but if woken up suddenly (say, by adventurers poking around their territory or Hagi making trouble) they fly into murderous rages and rampage across Gnottvold, mauling anything they can catch, until they exhaust themselves and go back to sleep.
• Swamps Are Evil: The Skelle Mire in Bretagard is a dark, barren swampland home to vicious raiders who use their home's treacherous terrain to prey on travelers.
• Valkyries: The Valkyries of Starnheim are the plane's native angels. They escort the worthy dead to their feasting hall at the top of the World Tree, and travel in pairs of one White-aligned Shepherd, to raise up the souls of heroes, and one Black-aligned Reaper, to deliver lethal judgement to cowards and send them to Istfell ahead of time. They stand aloof from the rise and fall of pantheons of squabbling gods, whom they long pre-date, and rarely involve themselves in divine or mortal conflicts unless they threaten the whole plane; they hate demons, however, and always hunt them down when they escape Immersturm.
• When Dimensions Collide: The realms of Kaldheim are constantly orbiting around the World Tree, and sometimes overlap. These events, known as Doomskars, bring devastating earthquakes and other tectonic disasters, alongside war as the two realms' native races encounter one another.
• The World Tree: The World Tree is a vast cosmic structure that formed in Kaldheim's earliest past, and which grew the Cosmos monsters and the realms from its branches like fruit. In the realms, parts of the World Tree are always visible as vast, twisted branches rising from the horizon and reaching across the sky.
  • Kaldheim's World Tree unfortunately forms a key part of New Phyrexia's invasion plan, as they use a sample to grow a new, compleated one called Realmbreaker which breaches all the planes of the multiverse to deliver Phyrexian legions upon a thousand unsuspecting worlds. After the defeat of the invasion, scars left by Realmbreaker's branches remain in the fabric of reality, creating new omenpaths that non-planeswalkers can use to travel the planes.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: The dwarves only value gold for aesthetic purposes; they have a giant chasm in their city constantly bubbling with liquid gold, so it's too common to have any real value for them.

Arcavios

Pay attention. There will be a test

Debut: Strixhaven: School of Mages (2021)

Setting of: Strixhaven: School of Mages (2021), unnamed 2026 set

Planeswalkers: Quintorius Kand

A plane notable for being home to Strixhaven University.

Read more about Strixhaven's colleges here.

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• Binary Suns: Karu and Ezza, though it doesn't really come up.
• Dark Is Evil: The Oriq, a conspiracy of mage-assassins who practice forbidden spells and dress in dark colors and threatening masks.
• Great Offscreen War: The Blood Age, a period of war so devastating that most modern scholars are uncomfortable studying it. The war was ended when the founder dragons founded Strixhaven.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Archaics, multi-armed, colorless, ageless wanderers of unfathomable arcane skill. Even on such a learned plane, no one knows where they came from or what they want.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: The faculty of Strixhaven have some of the most advanced and esoteric theories about the inner workings of magic shown in the story so far.
• The Unmasqued World: Arcavios, or at the very least Strixhaven, appears to be aware of the multiverse as a whole, or at least parts of it. In "Homecoming", Liliana does research in a section of the biblioplex dedicated entirely to Dominarian history.
• Wizarding School: Strixhaven is the largest and most revered mage school in the Multiverse. What's more, it's not just a school that teaches magic but also a magical version of the tropes of actual school, with five colleges that each correspond to broad real-world subjects: Lorehold (history and archeology, Red and White), Prismari (various kinds of art, Blue and Red), Quandrix (mathematics and physics, Green and Blue), Witherbloom (biology and chemistry, Green and Black) and Silverquill (writing and persuasive rhetoric, Black and White).
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Due to a quirk of the plane's leylines, enemy-colored magic is much more common here than elsewhere in the Multiverse. Each of Strixhaven's five colleges is associated with an enemy-color pair, though with more emphasis on the contrasting individual approaches of the two colors to the college's subject, rather than on what the colors have in common like Ravnica's guilds.

Capenna

These streets have seen things...

Debut: Streets of New Capenna (2022)

Setting of: Streets of New Capenna (2022)

Planeswalkers: Elspeth Tirel

A film-noire-esque plane better known as New Capenna, focused on the eponymous city of New Capenna. Five gangster clans, each aligned with three ally colors, rule the streets with impunity, backed by demonic patrons.

Read more about New Capenna's crime families here.

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• After the End: The city New Capenna is functionally all that's left of the plane of Capenna; everywhere else is a barren wasteland as a result of the past Phyrexian incursion.
• Art Deco: In keeping with an early 20th century look, the buildings look like they were stolen from New York. And unusually for a Magic plane, automobiles exist.
• Crapsack World: A city ruled by demon-worshipping mafia. On a plane which is mostly decayed aside from that single city.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The original Capenna was the victim of a Phyrexian incursion. The angels of the plane struck a deal with the archdemons to repel them. The archdemons betrayed the angels, locking them away and extracting their magic into Halo. Using Halo, the Archdemons kicked the Phyrexians off the plane before disappearing.
• Demon of Human Origin: The heads of the five families weren't originally demons; they became demonic after making deals with the archdemons. Although they weren't human, but a vampire, a leonin, an aven, a dragon and a sphinx, respectively.
• Fantastic Drug: Halo, a luminous oil made from angels, dead or alive. While Word of God insists that it isn't meant to be a straight-up drug since it also functions as a power source, Halo is a consumable substance, it is known to reduce inhibitions, and is fought over by the city's crime families.invoked
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Of America in the 20s through 40s.
• Fantastic Firearms: Each family has their own preferences regarding ranged weaponry:
  • The Brokers seem to favor the most conventionally gun-like weapons, with an arsenal of Halo-powered Lighting Guns.
  • The Riveteers aren't above using these as well (given they probably built them in the first place), but are more often seen with plasma torches or rivet guns.
  • The Maestros eschew anything so gauche as a visible weapon, opting instead to use spellcraft channeled through a Finger Gun.
  • The Cabaretti are quite famous for the enchanted weaponized magical instruments they weave seamlessly into their on-site entertainment (so these gangsters actually do have violins in their violin cases.)
  • The Obscura seem to have a preference for just avoiding ranged combat entirely whenever possible, opting instead to use something quieter like a knife or gatotte
• Film Noir: Based on these aesthetics and tropes primarily.
• Land of One City: New Capenna is just the city by the time we visit it. There are scattered encampments in the wasteland outside the city where people are enslaved and imprisoned by Phyrexians (Elspeth grew up in one of these), but the city is the only place where non-Phyrexians are thriving.
• Last Fertile Region: All of the plane aside from the titular city is now dead.
• Light Is Not Good: The Brokers are the clan that is centered in White (with Green and Blue as secondary colors), yet they're a crime syndicate who specialize in demonic contracts and are arguably even more morally bankrupt than the pre-War-of-the-Spark Orzhov Syndicate.
• The Mafia: Five mafia gangster clans rule the city, and they're diabolists to boot!
• Our Elves Are Different: As on Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, the elves of New Capenna have horns, though smaller, and without hooves.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Halo everyone is fighting over comes from the angels who were betrayed by the Archdemons in ancient history, who are basically casked up and have the substance extruded from their bodies until they are drained dry.
• Standard Fantasy Setting: What the plane was before the Phyrexians showed up. Each of the five crime families are descended from the clans of this period, all of whom played into the trope and whose traits echo into the present day in corrupted forms:
  • The Brokers were paladins.
  • The Obscura were wizards and mystics, and advisors to the plane's angels.
  • The Maestros were the nobility as well as art aficionados, with the latter trait still present in their group.
  • The Riveteers were the builders, smiths and artisans of the old society.
  • The Cabaretti were a druidic fellowship.
• World in the Sky: New Capenna is actually a floating city, tethered to the barren plane below.

Zhalfir

Once lost, now returned

Debut: Mirage (1996)^note as part of Dominaria, March of the Machine (2023) ^note as its own plane

Planeswalkers: Koth of the Hammer (adopted), Teferi Akosa

Once among the most advanced and prosperous nations on Dominaria, Zhalfir was removed from the timestream by its self-proclaimed protector, the planeswalking time mage Teferi, in an attempt to spare it the ravages of the Phyrexian Invasion of Dominaria, only to find that he had no way to get it back once the invasion was over.

This made Teferi a pariah to the Zhalfirin descendants living in other parts of the Dominarian continent of Jamuraa for centuries, and even he eventually began to suspect that his home was truly gone forever. However, centuries later, a time travel accident would land Teferi outside the timestream, once again in his homeland. From there, with the help of his ally the dryad planeswalker Wrenn and a generous helping of Timey-Wimey Ball, Zhalfir was brought back into the timestream; not as a part of Dominaria, but as its own world, taking the place of the now-banished New Phyrexia in the Blind Eternities and becoming a home for what remains of Mirrodin, whose five suns now orbit Zhalfir.

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• Afrofuturism: Their five mage guilds create advanced automata and myriad other marvels.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: Several centuries late, as it happens. The armies of Zhalfir were actually right on time to stop a Phyrexian invasion, just not the one they were expecting.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: For many cultures across North and East Africa, particularly Ethiopia and the Maghreb.
• Horse of a Different Color: Many Zhalfirin knights ride griffins or rhinos.
• Knight in Shining Armor: The brave and steadfast knights of Zhalfir were key to the defeat of Elesh Norn.
• Sealed Good in a Can: What Zhalfir had been after Teferi phased it out until it was brought back from the void outside the Blind Eternities.
• Weird Moon: Now that Zhalfir is its own world, it is lit by the five colored suns/moons of lost Mirrodin, one for each type of mana.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: From the Zhalfirins' perspective, only a decade has passed between the Phasing and the present day — when Teferi returns, the locals are still acutely aware of what was taken from them, and who was responsible for it. Their armies spent the entire time preparing for war against Phyrexia, which helped turn the tide when said armies were unleashed against New Phyrexia.

Thunder Junction

Debut: Outlaws of Thunder Junction (2024)

The Weird West plane. After the omenpaths became more studied and used, it became one of the prime frontiers for factions from other planes to settle.

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• Cactus Person: Cactusfolk are the only known native intelligent species of this plane (all others are immigrants through the omenpaths left by Realmbreaker).
• Fantastic Firearms: Fitting for a Weird West, lightning guns are one of the primary weapons used on the plane.
• Scary Scorpions: Scorpion dragons have begun pouring into the plane through the Omenpath to Gastal, and have proven perfectly adapted to life in Thunder Junction's wastes.
• Wretched Hive: The plane has attracted a lot of outlaws looking for a new start, including several villains of Magic's past.

Bloomburrow

Debut: Bloomburrow (2024)

The Civilized Animal plane. Planeswalker visitors become talking animals as well.

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• Beast Fable: The general theme of the plane, resembling something like Redwall or The Secret of NIMH.
• Mouse World: The plane is noted to be inhabited by intelligent animals who are the same size as ordinary ones, as opposed to the animal-like humanoids found on several other planes (orochi, leonin, nezumi, aven, loxodons, viashino, etc.).

Duskmourn

Debut: Duskmourn: House of Horror (2024)

The Haunted House plane, meant to represent modern horror tropes as opposed to Innistrad's Gothic Horror tropes.

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• Big Fancy House: As far as anyone can tell, there is no "outside", the mansion is the entire plane. Whether that's actually the case is the subject of Shrug of God for now.invoked
• Big Labyrinthine Building: Big enough to be a plane in and of itself.
• Haunted House: The main theme of the plane; Word of God says it was inspired by The Amityville Horror (1979) and Slasher Movies.invoked

Other Planes

Planes that have only been briefly visited or mentioned in a story, or have only been featured on Plane cards in a Planechase set. Listed alphabetically:

The Abyss

The oft-referenced home of all (or at least most) demons. It may be a separate plane, a number of different planebound locations, or a metaphysical state of being.

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• Fire and Brimstone Hell: A literal case as opposed to Phyrexia, which merely looks the part.
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons across the Multiverse can take on many shapes and sizes, but they all converge here.
• Riddle for the Ages: Post-Mending, interplanar travel should be impossible for non-planeswalker or -Eldrazi creatures, yet demons still proliferate from the Abyss and no one's figured out how.
• Schrödinger's Canon: Hell has been alluded to within Magic lore for years, including as recently as 2018 in Children of the Nameless by the succubus Miss Highwater, but its status within canon (and whether or not Hell and the Abyss are the same place) has been tenuous for much of that time. March of the Machine's Planechase brought the Abyss back into canon proper with the card The Pit.

Antausia

A mana-rich plane broken into pieces by a centuries-long magic war.

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• Mythology Gag: The plane originated in an issue of an old Wizards of the Coast-published magazine, laying out a Magic format that later inspired Planechase, with an elaborate backstory involving a 600-year war and a World Sundering to explain having different realms with different rules that players could move between. When Planechase returned in March of the Machine, one of these realms (The Fertile Lands of Saulvinia) made the jump to the newer format largely unaltered.
• World Sundering: In the wake of the Great Magus War, the plane has been shattered into eight realms (the Caverns of Martuk, the Fertile Lands of Saulvinia, Mandrake's Mountain, the Fortified Open Lands, the Great City of Bosconius, the Wastes of Farreach, the Power Pools of Beldingard, and Icedale), with the Antausian Vortex in the center of it all similar to Alara and its Maelstrom.

Azgol

Welcome to Hell.

A desolate volcanic plane whose only known inhabitants are magma-based elemental undead and a godlike being named the Ashen Idol, who dwells in a Volcano Lair and can only be approached with an offering.

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• Death World: It appears to essentially just be Mordor.
• Evil vs. Evil: The Ashen Idol and its Azgolian subjects(?) are seen defending their plane from Phyrexia during March of the Machine.
• Volcano Lair: The Lair of the Ashen Idol.

Belenon

A chivalric world known for its magical wind, inhabited by "animal people" like loxodons, rhoxes and aven as well as humans.

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• Blow You Away: Wind seems to be very important to the culture of Belenon. Even their buildings seem to be designed to channel wind currents rather than obstruct them.
• Honorable Elephant: Loxodon knights are among the plane's known inhabitants.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The Edge of Malacol is home to some strange, almost mechanical-looking flora and fauna.

Bolas's Meditation Realm

A place of peace and introspection.

Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A comparatively tiny plane that Bolas uses to meditate and scheme. Pre-Mending, it could be accessed by non-planeswalkers with sufficient focus and force of will.

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• Prison Dimension: Bolas is imprisoned here without hope of escape after the events of War of the Spark.

Cridhe

An isolated, tiny plane dominated by green mana and a giant life-giving tree named Inys-Haen.

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• World Tree: Inys-Haen basically fills this role, albeit not to the same extent as the World Tree on Kaldheim.

Echoir

A strange world of mirrored landscapes and powerful mages.

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• Collector of the Strange: The plane's single known inhabitant is a giant mage known as The Collector who fought the planeswalker Dack Fayden.

Equilor

As old as time, and twice as mysterious.

An impossibly ancient plane visited by Urza in his search for insight into the Phyrexian threat whose inhabitants have long since Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. Later appeared in the game proper in Planechase. Equilor is so distant from the centre of the multiverse, it can take a hundred years to journey between it and Dominaria.

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• Time Abyss: All life on this plane ended long before Urza ever found it, leaving behind only eroded stones and grey fog — not frozen or dead, simply done.
• Womb Level: The location of Bloodhill Bastion, which may have existed at a previous point in Equilor's history, looks quite visceral.

Ergamon

A wild world, perfect for a showdown.

One of the first worlds ever mentioned in Magic lore^note in the Alpha rulebook, in fact, Ergamon is a primeval world that once hosted the epic battle between the planeswalkers Worzel and Thomil.

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• Hungry Jungle: The Truga Jungle of Ergamon is home to a viciously competitive food chain and wildly overabundant mana.
• Rock Beats Laser: The combined might of Ergamon's entire biosphere made short work of its Phyrexian invaders during March of the Machine.

Fabacin

Eat your vegetables before they eat you.

An ominous forested world populated by human druids and saprolings that gestate in what appear to be giant bean pods.

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• Meaningful Name: Fabacae is the taxonomic family that encompasses beans and peas.

Gargantikar

A verdant world where everything is massive.

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• Ascended Extra: Prior to its appearance in March of the Machine's Planechase, Gargantikar was first mentioned in Modern Horizons in a flavor text joke identifying it as the Brobdingnag to Segovia's Lilliput:
  "When Worzel summoned Segovian angels to fight Thomil's Gargantikari gnats, the ensuing battle numbered among the Multiverse's least destructive." (flavor text of Segovian Angel)
• Space Is an Ocean: Unfinity's Bioluminary is depicted performing alongside a "Gargantikari astroserpent".

Gastal

A blighted wasteland of a world, first mentioned as having been used as a meeting space by Urza during his war against the Phyrexians.

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• Our Dragons Are Different: They are sapient, extremely cruel, and look like giant winged scorpions.
• The Bus Came Back: After decades of real-world time without even an offhand mention, Gastal is namedropped as the homeworld of Thunder Junction Arc Villain Akul.

Gobakhan

A world where the sand is rough, course, and gets everywhere.

Planeswalkers: Teyo Verada

An inhospitable desert world, with perpetual storms of diamond dust. The Order of the Shieldmage exists to protect people from these storms.

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• Barrier Warrior: All characters shown from Gobakhan have been Shieldmages.
• Desert Punk: Appears to have this aesthetic. The way it's described doesn't make it sound too dissimilar to Tatooine.

Ir

Storms and Horns

A storm-wracked plane shown in Future Sight, Planechase and Commander 2011 that appears to have some basis in Celtic Mythology.

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• Our Giants Are Different: Ir is home to the horned and incredibly violent Fomori.

Iquatana

An alien and ephemeral world.

A strange plane shown in Planechase that exists partially in the Blind Eternities.

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• Starfish Aliens: Its inhabitants seem to be almost entirely these.

Karsus

Where only the sharp survive.

A plane populated by humans and viashino. We've never seen the surface of Karsus, only its vast crystaline depths.

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• Crystalline Creature: Massive crystaline elementals rise to the plane's defense when it is breached by the Phyrexians.
• Crystal Landscape: Almost none of the landscapes shown on Karsus are made of anything but pure, jagged crystal.

Kinshala

An urbanized, mercantile desert world that appears to have some basis in North African culture.

Luvion

A world that appears to be mostly, if not entirely, ocean.

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• Awesome Underwater World: We've only seen a protruding coral structure breaking the surface, but it hints at a vibrant marine ecosystem.

Moag

Summer won't end without a fight.

An idyllic plane of eternal summer visited by Urza and Xantcha during their flight from Phyrexia. The Phyrexians pursued them and ransacked the plane.

Millenia later, New Phyrexia returned to finish what its predecessor started, but the inhabitants of Moag weren't so unprepared this time.

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• Arcadia: Moag appears to be a world of mostly rolling fields and verdant forests.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Moag seems strongly aligned with green mana. When Realmbreaker brings Phyrexians back to the plane, dryads and treefolk rise to its defense.

Muraganda

Keep it simple, stupid!

A prehistoric plane seen in Future Sight and Planechase, full of cavemen, druids and dinosaurs.

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• Blob Monster: Oozes are among the plane's most iconic inhabitants.
• Boring, but Practical: The theme behind the cards seen from this plane so far— most of them deal with creatures that don't have abilities, including basic things like flying or deathtouch.
• Hollywood Prehistory: It's an undeveloped jungle world inhabited by dinosaurs, cavemen and Lizard Folk.

Pyrulea

An unseen paradise

A lush, foliage-filled plane that appears to exist as some kind of naturally occurring Dyson Sphere. The planeswalker Dyfed brought Yawgmoth here to demonstrate her abilities in the novel The Thran, and it resurfaced in the game proper in Future Sight and Planechase.

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• Dyson Sphere: It's a hollow sphere around a star, with its inner surface covered by towering rainforests.
• Treetop World: Its inner surface is entirely covered by trees so huge that their individual leaves are large enough to build a small house on.

Segovia

Where a little goes a long way.

A plane that houses a vaguely Roman-like culture. Unfortunately for its inhabitants, it exists at a ridiculously small scale compared to most other planes.

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• Early-Installment Weirdness: The plane was introduced as an in-joke based on one such instance: the Segovian Leviathan was introduced in Legends as a massive sea creature dwarfing even whales... with a mere 3/3 stat line. In Planechase, this was explained away as the Leviathan being the only creature on Segovia with any notable size (roughly comparable to other planes' elephants), and the rest of the plane being miniature.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: Planeswalking to Segovia scales visitors down to match. Other means of reaching the plane (like an interplanar portal) seem to bypass this restriction, resulting in the scene depicted on Invasion of Segovia — the foot of a normal-sized Phyrexian stepping into a Segovian sea, only to be swarmed by tiny leviathans.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Much of Segovia is underwater, and its marine ecosystems are dominated by (proportionally) massive sea beasties.
• Lilliputians: Anything summoned from this world stays at its miniature size. Vraska once took a Segovian chariot as a souvenir — getting it off-plane was an ordeal, but once she was back on Ravnica, it was small enough that she could keep it under a bell jar.

Shenmeng

Why yes, this is Magic's first setting based on Chinese history. Why do you ask?

Planeswalkers: Jiang Yanggu, Mu Yanling

The Plane of Mountains and Seas, based around Chinese folklore.

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• Dragons Are Divine: In contrast to other worlds, where dragons are either barely sentient predators or brilliant but selfish tricksters, dragons on Shenmeng are revered as godlike ancestors of all living things. This is reflected in the fact that they are aligned with white mana instead of red.
• Time Master: Ten Wizards Mountain is home to an order of chronomancers.
• Wutai: Based heavily around the culture and iconography of Chinese folklore, in particular the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

Skalla

Planeswalkers: Vivien Reid.

A world reportedly destroyed by Nicol Bolas, little to nothing is known about it beyond its Sole Survivor, planeswalker Vivien Reid.

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• Magic Versus Science: Kind of. From what we know of the plane, the greatest conflict was between the druidic Smagardi culture and the technologically advanced Nura culture. That said, both appear to have used some form of magic or another.
• Posthumous Character: First mentioned in Core Set 2019, it had already been destroyed, leaving Vivien and the animal spirits in her Arkbow the only signs that the plane ever existed.

Tolvada

Planeswalkers: Kaya Cassir

A dying world where the sky was "broken" and its denizens were slowly driven insane by the horrors that spilled out from above.

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• Alien Sky: We catch a glimpse of it in the 2021 comic. It's red, covered in something that resembles (more) colorful aurora, crossing the sky in a crack-like pattern. According to Kaya, it got worse over time.
• Ambiguous Situation: Kaya claims that, by the time she realized that she could bring people with her through the Blind Eternities, there was nothing left of Tolvada to save. It's unclear if this means that the plane is destroyed, or if everyone has gone irrevocably mad. This is also from a non-canon comic, so it's subject to Schrödinger's Canon as well.
  • Tolvada would later appear as an Invasion card in March of the Machine, showing that there does seem to be a few people left, but most of the plane's population are now mad specters.
• Brown Note: The plane's broken sky drives those who look upon it mad, albeit slowly.
• Canon Immigrant: Initially only shown in the non-canon BOOM comics, most of the aspects alluded to in said comics would eventually be shown when the plane received a Siege Battle card in March of the Machine, fully bringing the comics' description into canon.
• Cosmic Horror Story: A plane where the sky broke one day, and the cracks are slowly expanding. Looking at the light from the cracks drives people mad.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Kaya didn't get her ghost hunting skills from nowhere. Her homeworld is positively saturated with them, leaking in through the broken sky.
• Schrödinger's Canon: The only (brief) depiction we have of Tolvada is from a non-canon comic, but nothing about the depiction contradicts canon, so it remains to be seen if it's true. Later, March of the Machine would reveal the details about the broken sky remain, though there also seem to be a few survivors left.

Wildfire

Plane of Djinni and Efreeti

The home plane of many, if not all of the pre-Mending djinn and efreet that appeared throughout the storyline. It had several portals to Rabiah and Dominaria, through which trade and warfare occurred.

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• Death World: To humans and humanoids, given that it's basically a giant storm of fire and fire-adjacent elements.
• Elemental Plane: It appears to be made entirely of fire, lava and plasma.
• Our Genies Are Different: The homeworld of most, if not all, Dominarian and Rabiahn djinn and efreet.

Xerex

What goes up might come down.

A plane reminiscent of the works of M.C. Escher. Despite the Alien Geometry, some amount of civilization still thrives here.

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• Alien Geometry: Things just seem to jut off at weird angles.
• Bizarrchitecture: Commonplace, with notable landmarks like the Stairs to Infinity.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Physical laws like gravity are unreliable. During the Phyrexian invasion, this became a tactical advantage:
  "Phyrexia broke the laws of reality to invade the planes. On Xerex, reality merely bent around the invaders." (Flavor text of Xerex Strobe-Knight)
  "The literal-minded Phyrexians made the greatest mistake possible on Xerex: they tried to understand what they were seeing." (Flavor text of Vertex Paladin)

Non-Canon Planes

Toril

Adventures to be had everywhere

The plane of the Forgotten Realms. Toril is the setting of the Crossover set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.^note "Toril" is technically only the planet, while the plane is the Prime Material and the solar system containing Toril is "Realmspace". The majority of the cards take place on the continent of Faerûn, where empires have risen and fallen countless times throughout history, leaving behind a wealth of ruins and mysteries for brave souls to pick through. Magic is abundant in this realm, and scholars who practice the Art, as it's called, are found in nearly every town and city, sometimes as staunch protectors or wise mentors, and sometimes as terrible villains and monstrous tyrants.

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• Adventure-Friendly World: It is considered the basic setting for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, so of course it embodies this.
• Artifact of Doom: The Eye and Hand of Vecna, vile artifacts that once belonged to an evil god. Using them requires removing the coresponding bodypart, and, if combined with the Book of Vile Darkness, they can be used to summon the lich-god himself.
• Canon Immigrant: Varis from Nentir Vale is given a card depicting him in the Forgotten Realms. Acererak, his mentor Vecna, and the wizard Mordenkainen are also not native to Toril, but had already appeared in Forgotten Realms lore prior to this set.
• Chest Monster: Toril is home to the Trope Codifier, the infamous Mimics. They're actually oozes that can shapeshift into any object.
• Crossover: Its presence in Magic makes it this. It's currently unclear whether it is part of the Magic multiverse proper.
• Cthulhumanoid: Mind Flayers, aka. Illithids, are the trope codifier. Mechanically, they are blue (blue/white/black in one case) Horrors with abilities themed around mind manipulation.
• Dark Is Not Evil: D & D is famous for Dark Is Evil so most black cards are indeed evil, but there are a few exceptions. Both Brass Dragons and Krydle are canonically Chaotic Good and they're represented by black cards in Magic.invoked
• Dracolich: Ebondeath, a dragon that embraced undeath.
• Draconic Humanoid: Dragonborn are humanoids with draconic traits. They appear in a wide array of professions, from paladins to bards. Mechanically, their creature type is just Dragon [Profession].
• Dragons Are Divine: Tiamat, the Dragon Goddess, of course.
• Kaiju: It really wouldn't be D&D-verse if the Tarrasque didn't exist in this plane to ruin one's day. Fittingly enough, it is also a 9-mana, 10/10 Green Dinosaur-type Creature with Ward 10 and Haste (if summoned normally), and the ability to automatically attack another creature whenever it attacks.
• Light Is Not Good: White dragons are represented by white cards, as are followers of Lawful Evil god Bane.
• Lunacy: The Moon-Blessed Cleric is an adherent of Selûne, the moon goddess, and is depicted casting miracles in the light of the full moon.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Unlike the dragons of MTG proper, Toril's dragons are divided into colors that also corespond to elements; White dragons breathe ice, black dragons breathe acid, green dragons breathe poison, blue dragons breathe lightning and red dragons breathe fire. There are also golden dragons who are more magically inclined, and dragon turtles who live in the ocean. Finally, there's Tiamat, the dragon goddess and her brother Bahamut.
• Our Gods Are Different: There are only two cards with the God-type in the set; Tiamat, the five-headed goddess of dragons, and Asmodeus, the scheming lord of the Nine Hells. They resemble the gods of Amonkhet more than those of Theros or Kaldheim, being mostly physical creatures of immense power that gain more through worship. The Grand Master of Flowers is also a god, but wanders around in human guise most of the time (mechanically, he must reach seven loyalty to unlock his Dragon God form).
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Two, in fact, one good and one evil; The Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Vile Darkness.
• Weird Moon: The moon shares its name with the moon goddess Selûne, and is followed by a swarm of asteroids named the Tears of Selûne. It's visible in one of the Mountain cards.

Un-iverse

A parallel multiverse where the parodic Un-sets take place. Listed in order of appearance:

Bablovia

The setting of Unstable. A magic-less Steampunk plane whose precursors once declared that the world should be governed by the different fields of science — biology, chemistry, physics, and so on — in order to foster knowledge and understanding. Fast-forward to the present day, however, and Bablovia is run by five different Mad Scientist factions, none of whom can agree with each other (nor with themselves, on any given day) but share a common goal of pushing their respective disciplines to new, absurd heights.

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• Animal Testing: Lab rats were driven extinct years ago by over-experimentation. The factions switched to lab squirrels as a substitute, which may have had some unintended consequences...
• Milkman Conspiracy: Behind the five factions, the plane may be secretly controlled by super-intelligent squirrels.
• Planet of Hats: Most of the plane's inhabitants are mad scientists and inventors of some type or another: Crossbreed Labs specializes in biology, the Order of the Widget are clockwork cyborgs, the Agents of S.N.E.A.K. are conspicuous spies with cool gadgets, the Goblin Explosioneers are engineers and tinkerers whose inventions tend to explode, and the League of Dastardly Doom are supervillains who'll take any and all developments in technology as long as they're sufficiently flashy and can help them Take Over the World.
• World Gone Mad: Bablovia is ruled by five groups of mad scientists. Nothing makes much sense, and the general populace largely takes it in stride.

The Astrotorium

The setting of Unfinity. Myra the Magnificent's Intergalactic Astrotorium of Fun is not a plane in itself, but a fleet of spaceships carrying a Raygun Gothic travelling carnival across the galaxy.

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• Amusement Park: With a variety of rides (roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, a Tunnel of Love, and many others), carnival games, circus performances, gift shops and concessions...
  • Amusement Park of Doom: ...However, this being the Un-iverse, No OSHA Compliance is rampant, and attractions are frequently replaced because they either self-destruct or fall victim to the perils of space — asteroids, black holes, hostile aliens, etc.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Compared to Bablovia being largely self-contained, the Astrotorium is filled to the brim with references to Magic characters and lore.
• Friendly Zombie / Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: The Astrotorium has zombies and vampires in its employ who are largely benign, albeit somewhat overworked since they don't need to sleep. There are even a few as guests — as it turns out, a lifetime pass is still valid even when you're undead.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: The park has destroyed at least one planet in a "parking accident". The survivors got lifetime passes as compensation.
• Overly Long Name: "Myra the Magnificent's Intergalactic Astrotorium of Fun" is the full name; "The Astrotorium" is the short version.
• Over-the-Top Roller Coaster: A few are mentioned in flavor text, including Erebos' Whip, the Howling Mine, and the Time Spiral (which goes so fast it causes a time paradox, allowing the park to sell guests their own souvenir photos before they get on the ride).
• Starship Luxurious: The whole park is contained within massive domed spaceships, which are interconnected and function as a single vessel.

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