War of the Spark: Forsaken (Magic: The Gathering) Hardcover – November 12, 2019

Do you hate previously established MtG lore? Greg Weisman does. Do you want to see character relationships carefully established over many sets and years get burned to the ground? Greg Weisman does. Do you want to question whether a novel should be canon at all? Greg Weisman wants you to. Do you love Rat more than anything and think she should be the main character of MtG and get special lore-defying treatment at all times? Greg Weisman sure does!

This author should not have been given a second chance at this story. The first was bad enough to prevent this tragedy.An author that ignore his readers, has no readers and writes to an audience of one.

PLEASE, DON'T BUY THIS BOOK.If you intend to buy it anyway. You can not say you were not warned of the horrors ahead of you.If you're not a Magic The Gathering fan be warned that the story telling and writing is atrocious. In the simplest terms, without giving away spoilers. It's supposed to be a magical adventure. It comes off as if it's written by a freshman college student. Unfortunately, I believe he would of gotten a D. Which is sad because the beautiful universe was already written for him. You would be better off reading fanfiction than this book.IF You Are A Magic The Gathering Fan This "Novel" Will Be Even Worse For You.Without giving out spoilers, the author took almost 20 years of canon and chunked it out the window as he was driving down the road. Never to be seen again. He took amazing characters that had beautiful historys, then he decided that he was god of a universe he didn't create. He wiped out years of story telling with horrible writing.It's truly sad to see the fall of an Empire.Our only hope is that Wizards will wipe this from the canon forever.

I've read every single piece of official printed Magic fiction. Some have been good. More of them have been bad, but I enjoyed them anyway because at least they were about Magic. None of them have taken such a blatantly pathetic approach to handling existing canon and lore established by people who lovingly created characters we could all come to love and appreciate as much as this book does.The author basically wrote a sequel about his terrible self-insert character Teyo and how he's actually a super bad ass and modest, while having him get the underage girl (probably Kelman's idea) and running with his other creations that have nothing to do with the 30+ established characters he had to choose from to write about the world in the previous story. The only reason I'm not returning the book is because I already have every other printed book they've ever released for Magic story and because this way I can loan this terrible piece of trash to friends who may be curious instead of having them buy it and increase any money the author might get for writing this horrid piece of garbage.

You cool with throwing away a relationship that had been built over a decade, really well, and seemed to be fully bloominh last book in an incredibly cool bait and switch? Then you might be okay with this book. I'm not and I'm not.The rest isn't worth trying to look past that. If o could give less than 1 star, I would

This is not a good book. It is not a good book on many levels. The writing is beyond simplistic. It often comes off as something that you'd find in a poorly written middle grade novel. I do not mean to insult middle grade novels simply I mean that it has the maturity of a middle grade novel and is also poorly written.Additionally this book seems to either ignore or do away with a lot of character development that has otherwise been established in the lore of Magic the Gathering. This is upsetting as a fan because watching relationships between characters like Chandra and Nissa develop only to see them crash and burn in this slog of a novel is a bit like taking a sip of spoiled milk. It's disgusting and now I have a stomach ache.Would I recommend this novel to anyone? No, I wouldn't even recommend it to someone I disliked. If you are a fan of MtG better to skip this one over and just imagine your own storyline.

Whilst I had never found that the author quite got the flavour of some of the characters right I still enjoyed the last book. This seemed like a rushed job to undo everything though. Whatgot me most was the destuction of the building relationship between my two favourite characters that had been subtly and carefully built up over a long period of time and multiple other writers. It seemed to completely ignore what lore had been built up between the two - where previously Nissa's presence calmed Chandra and being around Chandra was bringing Nissa out of her shell now apparently Chandra exhausts Nissa because of her emotions thus it can never work and just feels like the work of these other writers have just gone to waste. It also just screams "I don't want to write about two girls being in love" to me, despite the fact there is a male gay couple in the story. Lazy and sloppy writing around this and I take it somewhat personally as I identified with the calm that Nissa gave to Chandra as my loved one does the same for me....so if you're in the same boat and want to feel paranoid that you're actually a burden to your partner then go ahead and read this. Otherwise I'd say give it a wide berth and I sincerely hope this issue is fixed in later lore.

This was a Christmas present for my son.

Awesome book, well deserved treat. Great for any magic the gathering player or collector as a different side gift away from the cards and also on a budget but wish to buy a cool hobby gift.

Simply bad

For the sake of transparency I'm going make where I'm coming from in my review. I've never played MtG outside of dabbling in a few MtG video games, and I see myself more as a Ravnica fan then an MtG fan, as it's D&D Ravnica and the Ravnica novels that I'm primarily interested in, with following MtG in general as a secondary ancillary interest.So I haven't read all the Gatewatch novels, just ones primarily on Ravnica.Also Gathering Storm was clearly an important prequel to WotS Novels, I count it as part of the War of the Spark, hence why I call it a trilogy.Now let me start off by saying I loved the novel, I enjoyed Greg Weisman's and Django Wexler humour, I found the characters sympathetic, I love the plot twists and the political intrigue, and I felt truely immersed in Ravnica more so than any Ravnica books since the original Ravnica trilogy.I issues with these novels are issues with WotC not with the writers who were left holding the bag. First off The Gathering Storm should have been released before the War of the Spark novels, it's so much better reading WotS novels after reading The Gathering Storm, Ravnica literally starts off right where The Gathering Storm ends.Also it's extremely clear that the straightening of Chandra was coming from higher up the food chain then Greg Weisman, Greg had no problem writing for gay characters like Ral and Tomik and a vampire in a really positive way, there is no way he was the source of Chandra's straighting, he just had to execute it on WotC's orders. Nor is this Netflixes choice, they have lots of bisexual and gay characters. It's obvious why WotC did this because they are trying sell to China with Chandra as a key part of that. Which means we won't be seeing Ral, Tomik, and other simular characters in any Chandra products going forward that are targeted at the Chinese market.Speculation on my part, but this will likely lead to two major seperate plotlines, a Chandra centric Chinese communist party friendly plotline and a seperate Ravnica centric gayer diverse plotline involving the likes of Lazav, Kaya, Ral, Tomik, Rat, "Ana Iora", Teyo, Vraska, and eventually the bisexual twins Wil and Rowen Kendrith. The Gatewatch will be the link between the two plot lines.Also more speculation, the third 2021 Setting, the new Setting will be Kaya's home plane, with a return to New Phyrexia and Alara as the other 2 Settings. The final novel, Forsaken hinted at greater interplanar intrigue and alliances in the future.