More thoughts about tie-in fiction

[Albertosaurus Rex]

Well, I've done it. I've bought a copy of The Quest for Karn and commenced reading it as my new train book. (At home I'm still reading Tigana. It's taking me a while - it's a good book, but very long.)

One of the things I liked about the old MtG novels was how interconnected they all were. Most books were based on card sets and grouped in trilogies, and while many told their own story, there were links between all of them. Aside from the decrease in quality, the increasingly thinner links between the stories caused me to lose interest. Well, the interconnectiviness has come back in recent years. The main characters have all been introduced in previous books and this book makes no effort to explain who they are and why they're here. If I wasn't familiar with some of the elements, like the Phyrexians, I would be completely lost.

Which brings to my first niggle with this story. A previous storyline involved the massive invasion of Dominaria by the Phyrexians, which involved an all-out war. In this storyline, an infectious oil is slowly turning the inhabitants of Mirrodin into Phyrexian monstrosities. If the oil is all it takes, why didn't they do that with Dominaria???