Alara Unbroken

I was of two minds when it came to reading this: on one hand, the only other M:tG book I've read was really, actively terrible. On other other hand, though, Alara was the current set when I started getting interested in Magic again, and I really liked it as a setting.

Alara Unbroken felt a bit disjointed at first, but that made sense given the book's setting, which is a plane of existence that's been fractured into five “shards”, with each shard being home to a different type of magical energy. Now, though, the shards are being manipulated by evil dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas, who wants to steal their energy to something something (take over the multiverse, I think? It's not clear exactly).

This was a pretty fun read. The characters are all fairly archetypal (Ajani the reluctant hero, Rafiq the grizzled veteran who's too old for this shit, Bolas the scheming Bond villain), and the story is fairly straightforward, but Beyer keeps it moving along at enough of a quick, enjoyable pace that you don't really notice how archetypal everything is until you're thinking about it afterwards.

Wizards (the company that produces Magic) has been trying for the past few years to bring the whole concept of “planeswalkers as characters” to the forefront of the game, and stories like this do a good job of making those cards interesting. So it's enjoyable on a meta/transmedia level as well.