Magic: The Gatheringplayers have voted one of the game’s most obscure and underused settings as where they’d most like to see a future expansion be based, following its appearance inMarch of the Machine.
Alongside well-known planes like Fiora, Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, and Kaladesh, the plane of Xerex topped polls, despite it only ever having had three cards depicting it.
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Magic’s head designer Mark Rosewaterran a pollasking which planes that appeared in March of the Machine readers would most like to see get a full set in the future. It only asked about planes that hadn’t already received a major, Standard-legal set, and included Belenon, Fiora, Gobakhan, Kylem, Segovia, Shandalar, Vryn, and Xerex.
Having received 27.5 percent of the vote, Xerex stormed away with it. The only other planes to come close were Vryn, the homeworld of main characterJace Beleren, Segovia, a joke world where everything is miniature, and Fiora, home of the popular Conspiracy sets. All three planes have been in the game for much longer, and were already in the community’s consciousness before March of the Machine.
Xerex has only ever appeared on three cards, and one of those was a normally not-legal Stairs to Infinity card from Planechase. The other two, Invasion of Xerex and Xerex Strobe-Knight, where the plane’s first appearance in a premiere set, rocketing the world from complete obscurity into being one of the most hotly requested places in the multiverse.
Xerex is described as a world where physics and mathematics don’t follow our normal understanding. The art we’ve seen has been heavily inspired by the artist M.C. Escher, with impossible staircases, disorienting gravity, and optical illusions commonplace. In the story of March of the Machine, it was said that the Phyrexians struggled to even invade Xerex, because they simply couldn’t understand how the world worked.
Rosewater seemed surprised at Xerex’s popularity, replying to a later question with “It is not the plane I expected to win this poll”, before asking readers “what would you expect of a Xerex set?”.
The cool thing about Xerex is that it is defined by being weird and unknowable. After years of sets playing up pop culture tropes like gothic horror, gangster movies, and cyberpunk, seeing how Wizards handles a set instead based on more abstract concepts like maths and illusions would be interesting. Whether Xerex’s concept is strong enough to support a whole set remains to be seen, but lots of players would love to see Wizards try.
Rosewater followed this up with asecond setof polls for settings that have received the full booster treatment already. Of these, Alara (a setting we’ve not revisited properly in almost 15 years), Tarkir, and Lorwyn-Shadowmoor came out on top, suggesting a desire for long-absent worlds instead of recent successes like Innistrad, Kamigawa, and Zendikar.
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