Mercadian Masques (Masquerade Cycle, Book 1)
Hello, all. Welcome back to our exploration of MTG tie-in fiction and the adventures of the skyship Weatherlight.
As mentioned at the end of the Rath and Storm anthology review, the next chronological entries within the Weatherlight Saga, after Rath and Storm and the Artifacts Cycle, is the Masquerade Cycle. Unlike its predecessors (or the Invasion Cycle that served as the saga’s finale), this one was never uploaded to Kindle. They are only available on the secondhand market at a hefty markup.
Originally, I was going to skip straight to the Invasion Cycle. I actually did read that whole series and started its review. After I found a good deal for the three Masquerade Cycle novels, though, I decided to double back. We will keep these reviews simple, since it will be hard for you all to fact-check my criticisms.
The schedule for the Masquerade Cycle will look like this:
Today (Wednesday, September 23rd) - Mercadian Masques
Wednesday, September 30th - Nemesis
Wednesday, October 7th - Prophecy
Let’s take flight.
STATS
Title: Mercadian Masques
Series: Masquerade Cycle (Book 1)
Author(s): Francis Lebaron
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: September 1999
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for Mercadian Masques will be provided throughout this review. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections. I will keep the first paragraph of any given section spoiler-free.
Throughout this review, I will also be providing heavy spoilers for later events within MTG canon. While I will be steering clear of details that would spoil the progression of this book specifically, there is a strong chance that you will figure out certain spoilers if you pay attention to these bits of lore. I’ll confine the heavy spoilers that are relevant to this book into clearly marked sections.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers for previously reviewed Magic: the Gathering tie-in novels may also be provided, regardless of where they fall in the timeline relative to this book. I will also assume that you’ve already read my reviews of those books, though they aren’t essential to understand this one.
PREMISE
Per the back cover of my mass market paperback copy, we get:
Treachery stalks the Weatherlight
Escaping from Rath, the crew of the flying ship Weatherlight finds itself adrift. Grieving from their lost comrades and in need of repairs, they make their painful way to Mercadia, a city where everything is for sale.
But not everything is as it seems. In the streets of Mercadia, the heroes of the Weatherlight find that more than merchandise can be bought and sold.
Reaction
This premise describes maybe the first fifth if the book.
Mercadian Masquerades covers the entire story of the eponymous MTG expansion. While that does include the trip to Mercadia and the cutthroat intrigue if the city, it also includes:
Gerard and the Weatherlight crew training the Mercadian military in exchange for aid in repairing their ship
The rebellion of the Cho-Arrim and Ramosians against Mercadia
The journey to Rishada and Saprazzo
Mercadia’s connection to the Thran, and by extension, to the Phyrexians
Everything involving the Bones of Ramos
This book could very easily be described as, “non-stop plot Plot PLOT!!!!”. It zooms along. If all you are looking for is some easily digested escapism, it delivers.
The flip side of this is the shallow character work. Outside of maybe Orim, none of the Weatherlight crew feel like characters at all, and even in Orim’s case, we are Told most of her development. The “grieving their lost comrades” bit lasts maybe 6 pages in that first fifth of the book. So if you want more that fast-paced escapism, you will probably be disappointed.
TIMELINE
According to the MTG Wiki timeline, the events of Mercadian Masques extend from year 4204 AR to 4205 AR, picking up immediately after the end of Rath and Storm. (Depending on how one looks at it, all the events may have occurred in 4205 AR, with the new year starting at the exact moment of the escape from Rath.) This more or less aligns with the events in the book. It’s hard to keep track of exactly how much time passes, but we are Told of multiple timeskips that cover weeks or months, but not enough time for a full year.
Also, from what I can tell, there is zero timeskip between the closing scene of this book and the opening scene of Invasion. The Weatherlight quite literally teleports from one story to the next. This will be relevant to both this review and the Invasion review.
Mercadian Masques adapts the events of the 18th MTG expansion, which shares the same name.
RATING: 5.5/10
You know how I’ve rated a few works of tie-in fiction by saying it was better than it needed to be?
Well, Mercadian Masques is only as good as it needed to be.
I don’t mean this as shade to Lebaron. He was tasked with cramming a sprawling story with a large cast and many diverse locations into a single mass market paperback. The book is split into thee parts, and each one could easily have expanded to be an entire mass-market paperback novel on its own. Even before we take schedules into consideration, this was a daunting assignment. Lebaron does as well as could be expected. The plot is coherent, the worldbuilding is rich, and the character work at least makes sense.
The issue is that everything is so shallow. There’s no time to build investment in anything or anyone. This book relies on the audience already being deeply invested in MTG to the same degree that certain Romantasy titles rely on investment in tropes and power fantasy.
Ultimately, I settled in this middle-of-the-road rating because, outside of the depth issue, there are only one or two relatively small issues with this story. If all you want is a tie-in story, it’s satisfying. Otherwise, it is inoffensive.
CONTENT WARNING
Mercadian Masques features a lot of violent death that is at least implied to be bloody and gruesome. We are shown a genocidal attack on civilians. A member of the Weatherlight crew is tortured via crucifixion. Also, Orim has to help a woman give birth to a child who has breached. None of this is gory, though, and the story moves so fast that the traumatic nature if these events never has the chance to property sink in.
Also, Orim is naked in a couple scenes, one of which explicitly calls attention to that fact. Much like with Medea Bentacore’s scenes of partial undress in Malleus, these moments are diegetic. It’s just that, given how the nudity isn’t relevant to the story, and given how Orim is usually illustrated on MTG cards, these do come across as sexual fanservice.
CHARACTER
Orim is the only genuine character in this story. I wouldn't say she necessarily has an arc, but you can tell that the time she spends with the Cho-Arrim impacts her at a spiritual level. Certain scenes she gets later on in the Invasion Cycle feel like payoffs to her adventures in this book. Her romance with Cho-Manno may be bland and mostly Told to us, but at least it is believable.
Lebaron does at least try to explore other members of the Weatherlight’s crew. At the very least, he provides scenes to serve as continuity from Rath and Storm, which will in turn receive some continuity in the Invasion Cycle. There are isolated scenes to touch of Tahngarth’s shame over Volrath mutilating him, Gerard’s lingering shame over his role in creating Volrath, and Karn being a pacifist. On the tladt point, there is a scene where Karn throws pacifism out the window and tries to kill Volrath in sight, but with the context of “Karn’s Tale", it is clear he snapped in that moment. The thing is, these scenes feel very disconnected from the wider narrative. It’s like Lebaron was going through a checklist of character moments mandated by WotC.
I was really hoping that Sisay, the captain of the Weatherlight (shown alongside Gerrard on this book’s cover), would get some characterization here. She gets none in the Invasion Cycle, and I can’t recall her even getting dialogue in Rath and Storm. Unfortunatelty, that does not happen. I was going to make a joke here about how she is basically the crew’s Uber driver, but I said the same thing about the various rogue trader characters who worked with Eisenhorn and Ravenor, and they actually did get characterized with clear personalities and motivations.
WORLDBUILDING
Mercadia feels like a vibrant, lived-in workd with multiple cultures. While Lebaron does not linger on setting descriptions the way that Abnett does, he is still effective at giving each of the major locales in this story - Mercadia, the Rushwood, Saprazzo, Ouramos - its own distinct vibe. The differnet presentations of the Ramos mytg given different cultures both distinct identities and a sense of shared history. He also does a good job making the various references to game lore feel diegetic.
That said, the most plot-relevant worldbuilding feels tacked-on. The Ramos myths may feel diegetic, but the explanation behind those myths bring the story to a screeching halt. The whole Mercadia-Thran connection also gets no exploration, to the point that a throwaway line in The Thran ends up doing more heavy-lifting than the dramatic revelation of a Phyrexian presence in this book.
Also - and this isn’t necessarily an issue with Mercadian Masques itself, more a cautionary tale about not thinking through later additions to the lore - thanks to The Streets of New Capenna, it makes no sense that the Phyrexians don’t openly rule Mercadia. They have the means to readily open portals to here (which is how the Weatherlight got here in the first place). If I understand the lore of Capenna correctly, the Phyrexians are actively invading that plane at the same time that the events of this story were going on. If they were willing to deploy world-conquering armies to other planes on the eve of the big invasion of Dominaria (the one world Yawgmoth is obsessed with), why would they not simply steamroller Mercadia as well?
PLOT
The plot of this book is honestly quite good. I think it needed time to breathe and Show has things, plus more character work to emotionally anchor it, but there is very little wrong with the execution in and of itself.
Non-Stop Action
By this, I’m not referring to the action scenes themselves. Those are very bland And Then They Fight setpieces with the occasion thing that is thrown in just to seem cool. Rather, I’n referring to the face that there is rarely a quiet moment. Barley a scene goes by without a new plot beat or set piece.
There are definitely pros and cons to this. The fact the story is always in moment means that there is never a dull moment. The story zooms from one adventure to the next. This makes the depth issue harder to notice, too … unless you are looking for meaningful character work. Because if you are looking for meaningful character work, then it’s hard to ignore that it’s all as shallow as The Queen of Vorn / The Path to Power. This story gets by on Telling, because there is simply no time to Show things properly. The reason Mercadian Masques got a higher rating than those previous books is due purely to how well the plot works and how relatively small its holes are.
The Twists (Heavy Spoilers)
I do not think the twists of this book are necessarily bad. It is just that one is executed in a way that dimishes its impact, while the other loses its impact when one realizes that Invasion begins immediately after this book ends.
Volrath
Those of you familiar with Volrath’s lore will know he is a shapeshfiter. I don’t remember if this was confirmed in Rath and Storm itself, but Volrath did have shapeshifters worming for him. The possibility of him entering the story in disguise was therefore in the table.
Volrath spends most of this book disguised as Takara, daughter of Starke, one of the people the Weatherlight was trying to rescue in Rath and Storm. I think this twist was set up pretty subtlety and effectively. (Admittedly, I did see right through it, but that's only because I read Invasion first, knew Volrath would pop up in and that it is physically impossible for Takara to be with the Weatherlight crew at this point in the narrative, and connected the dots.) Lebaron characterizes “Takara” are someone driven by hate who tries to influence Gerrard into a spiral of self-destruction. When she starts talking about a “brother” who betrayed her, her being Volrath was a logical next step.
The issue is that, right after the “brother" reveal, Lebaron telegraphs the twist. He has Karn simply decide that they can’t trust “Takara”. We then get a “Takara” POV scene where she murders Starke, reveals himself to the goblins of Mercadia, and takes over the city. From that point, his deception of the Weatherlight’s crew is played purely for dramatic irony.
This isn't a bad way to run this twist. It just feels like Lebaron could have gotten more punch out of it by having “Takara” be vaguely ominous until after the Phyrexian presence in Mercadia is revealed and “she” has stolen the Bones of Ramos.
War and Legacy
The events of Mercadian Masques are presented as a definitive blow to fend off the Phyrexian invasion of Dominaria.
The Weatherlight and her crew destroy a shipyard of Phyrexian airships being built under Mercadia.
The Matrix and the Bones of Ramos, key components of the Legacy, are retired and integrated into the ship.
Both of these are nonsense when one stops to actually think about them.
What does this fleet of airships actually mean to Phyrexia? I cannot emphasize strongly enough that Invasion begins immediately after this book. Vast armies, including fleets of airships, are being staged on Rath at the same time that the climax of this book unfolds. The Phyrexians already have air superiority, portals, and the Rathi overlay. What was a fleet of another few hundred ships going to contribute?
As for the Legacy, how and why did Urza account for artifacts on another plane, which broke off of Ramos in an event he couldn't have seen coming, and that clearly weren’t part of his development of Legacy artifacts that happened in the background in Bloodlines? What was his plan for retrieving them if the Weatherlight didn’t accidentally end up on Mercadia?
THE ASCENDANT
Mercadian Masques is not a great book. It is, however, a book that fulfills its purpose: tell of the many adventures the crew of the Weatherlight had on Mercadia. It is escapist fun written for fans of MTG. While it doesn’t aspire to be more than that, at least it does not ask the audience to turn their brains off to enjoy it. I do believe it could have been something quite epic if given more time and pages to tell its compressed but still functional story.
Next week, we’ll turn out gaze back to Rath. It’s time to see what became of Ertai, Crovax, and the world that Volrath and the Weathlight left behind. I hope you’ll join me for the review of Nemesis.
If you’re looking for more stories of magic and intrigue, I recommend my ongoing necromancer serial, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones. Chapter 1 through Chapter 10 Part 2 are now posted. Join in for the ongoing adventure!
Thank you all for joining this week. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your week.
