The Gruulfriends Essay Part I
This one was inevitable, I suppose, from the moment I took up the pen to write nonfiction about Magic: The Gathering, my only roadblock being that I put it off for so long knowing it would be a colossal, exhaustive undertaking. Nissa and Chandra are the characters that hooked me into the world of Magic back in 2014, and they are still the characters that keep me coming back well over a decade later. The highs and lows of, in my opinion, Magic’s marquee couple (sorry Jace and Vraska: you come in second) have mirrored many of my own personal highs and lows throughout the years. Thus, I’ve always wanted to devote as much time and as many words as I can muster to dissect their relationship for everyone’s edification and celebrate them for my own satisfaction.
I guess this is it! Hope you like it.
Let’s get an important caveat out of the way before we dig into the meat of the essay, though: Gruulfriends is the story of a lesbian romance, and as a (mostly) straight cis guy, I won’t claim to be an expert on queer fiction or queer theory. I’ll discuss plot points and characterizations based on my own personal research and my humanities background, but if I get something wrong, I apologize!
With that in mind, let’s begin!
Chandra's cheeks go red. Nissa. Family. It isn't wrong. After everything they've been through together, they could never be anything else to one another.
- K. Arsenault Rivera, “First Over the Line” (2025)
Chandra Nalaar and Nissa Revane have played many roles in Magic’s narrative over the years: heroes, villains, lovers, exes, enemies, and finally, girlfriends, or gruulfriends as has become their more-or-less official couple name over the years. They have also played many roles to Wizards of the Coast and to legions of Magic players. Chandra, Magic’s iconic red-aligned character since her inception, and Nissa, temporarily Magic’s iconic green-aligned character during the 2010’s, first became friends with each other during the Battle for Zendikar saga (2015-2016), and their growing love for one another has inspired many opposing feelings among Magic fans over the years — joy, anger, pleasure, resentment — in very nearly equal measure. To me, the two of them have always been my window in the universe of Magic: The Gathering, the avatars that I experience the game through. As a green mage at heart, I always felt a deep kinship with Nissa, a feeling that grew over years as I got to know her character. I see much of myself in her struggles, like her social awkwardness and trouble with intimacy. During more mentally healthy times, I even see myself in some of her triumphs: her gentleness, kindness, and unbreakable loyalty to those who have earned her trust. As for Chandra, I’ve thought from day one that she is just really cool; she’s the kind of outspoken, fearless, and unrestrained character that I love to root for.
The depiction of romance in Magic story has always been a bit of a mixed bag. In line with the fantasy fiction of its time, many of the romances in the early years of Magic novels were one-sided, (Crovax and Selenia), unsettling (Yawgmoth and Rebbec), or tragic (Feldon and Loran). Whether those stories are engaging or not is, of course, a matter of taste, but since many of these tales were written before internet discourse defined how fans interact with Magic stories, these early explorations of love and relationships certainly have a different flavor to them than newer stories do.
However, since we do live in a time when internet discourse defines how fans interact with Magic and all its related media, when it became clear during the events of the Kaladesh block (2016-2017) that the Magic story writers were leading Chandra and Nissa toward a romantic relationship, opinions about it were varied and intense. As different writers and different iterations of Magic’s creative team took the reigns of Chandra and Nissa, these opinions became more varied and more intense. Years later on the other side of it all, as of Aetherdrift — the most current Magic story that features Chandra and Nissa as of the writing of this essay — the gruulfriends have bloomed into a memorable staple of Magic storytelling, embodying the changing times and the highs and lows of a creative team in flux.
Chandra’s and Nissa’s relationship is the beating heart of Magic: The Gathering fiction. It has been this way for quite some time, as the ups and downs of their fictional love life pretty directly reflects the nonfictional ups and downs of the creative culture at Wizards of the Coast. Beyond the shipping, beyond the varied perspectives and unmanageable discourse, beyond the at times shoddy prose and characterization, and beyond even War of the Spark: Forsaken, Nissa and Chandra and their messy, chaotic, passionate, and inspiring love for each other have come to define this current era of Magic story.
In 2015, I was well into my second year of working at The Game Closet in Waco, Texas, a staple of the tabletop gaming scene in the area for many years at that point. As a relatively new Magic player (I started slinging spells soon after I got hired there, since Magic: The Gathering was the most-played game at this LGS by far), I very quickly found myself drawn to the stories. After all, I entered the tabletop world through a decades-long obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and other tabletop role-playing games. My favorite character from the very beginning of my Vorthos journey was elf planeswalker Nissa Revane. Some of this was due to the fact that Nissa, Worldwaker (the standard-legal Nissa planeswalker card at the time I began and one of the marquee cards from the 2015 Core Set) was incredibly powerful and one of the centerpieces of my standard mono green devotion deck. Additionally, as an angsty twenty-something dealing with a lot of untreated mental stuff, I felt a certain kinship with Nissa’s characterization at the time as someone with a lot of regrets trying to atone for serious mistakes. My other favorite character as I was getting to know the game and the depth of its lore was human pyromancer Chandra Nalaar. I’d always felt that if I were braver and had less inhibitions that I would be like her, and as I mentioned in the introduction, Chandra is just really cool. I love the 'chaotic-good' character archetype, and stories that feature Chandra as one of the main characters are always more fun to follow than ones without her. As allied color (green and red) planeswalkers, I recall thinking in the lead up to Battle for Zendikar that Nissa and Chandra would be good friends if they met, but romance hadn’t played much of a role in the Magic stories I had read so far, so the two of them ending up together did not cross my mind at first.
However, the narrative birth of Chandra’s and Nissa’s romance does in fact begin all the way back in the Battle for Zendikar stories. This arc grew out of an era of change at Wizards of the Coast. Magic Origins, released in the summer of 2015, was supposed to represent a paradigm shift in how Magic products were released, both in terms of gameplay and story. Gameplay-wise, Magic Origins was supposed to spell the end of the Core Set model. Previously, standard sets were released using the three set block model. The first set of a new story arc would be released in the fall, and the next two would be released in the winter and spring of the following year. To round up the fourth standard-legal set of a year, a core set would be released in the summer. Magic Origins was supposed to alter this model entirely and replace it with three two set blocks a year and no core set. One of stated reasons for this was that the third set of each block was usually the weakest, both mechanically and narratively. Alongside the gameplay changes, the story of Magic: the Gathering was supposed to take a front seat, with players following a single, continuous narrative across many years. Exemplifying this was the creation of the “Origins Five”: five planeswalkers, each of a single color in Magic’s color pie, who would be the main characters of most stories going forward. Two of these five characters were Chandra the pyromancer and Nissa the animist.
Leading into Battle for Zendikar, the set directly succeeding Magic Origins and the first set of this new paradigm, it wasn’t quite clear what this new narrative structure would look like. How did these five new main characters know each other? What is their relationship going forward? This question was answered quickly as the Battle for Zendikar stories trickled down: they were going to more-or-less be a team of superheroes. Of course, Magic story is no stranger to marquee character team-ups — Urza’s Nine Titans and the Weatherlight crew, to name just a few — but during the 2010s, in a world where the Marvel Cinematic Universe had taken over pop culture, it was easy then and even easier now to see Magic’s newest planeswalker team being inspired by the overwhelming success of superhero movies.
The plot of this block — which includes stories from Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch — tells the origin story of the Gatewatch, a team of planeswalkers who have dedicated themselves to fighting the kinds of battles across the multiverse that only planeswalkers can: interplanar threats, the types of monsters and tyrants who are happy to spread chaos and/or conquest beyond simply one world. The Eldrazi are one such threat. Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the veil of reality, the Eldrazi were wreaking havoc on Zendikar, which is the elf planeswalker Nissa’s homeworld, consuming its mana-rich environment until there is nothing but the lifelusk husk of a world remaining. The Eldrazi had been trapped there for millennia (long story) and had been recently set loose (even longer story told across a handful of novels and comics, all of which vary widely in both quality and current canonicity). Nissa’s magic ties her to the world of Zendikar, and in fact, she has befriended an elemental that seems to be the embodiment of the plane’s soul. If ‘stopping the apocalypse of her home’ isn’t enough motivation by itself, her emotional, magical connection with the plane itself drives her to extreme lengths in order to save it.
The remaining members of Gatewatch — Chandra, Gideon, and Jace — however, are not from Zendikar, but for some reason or another, they all feel a duty to stop the Eldrazi for good and save the world from annihilation. These three planeswalkers all know or are at least aware of each other from past encounters, though none of them appear to know anything of Nissa. Gradually, over the course of around twenty stories, the four of them band together to create the Gatewatch. It’s here where Chandra and Nissa first meet. Just minutes before the team’s creation, Chandra had rescued the other three from the machinations of rogue demon planeswalker Ob Nixilis (who, it must be said, has one of the better Magic villain moments: recognizing that Gideon was immune to physical damage, the demon simply shoves our hero’s head underwater in an attempt to drown him). Afterward, each of them, realizing that they all had the power to leave Zendikar to its fate and escape to safety but that none of them would, swore their own personalized oath to their new best friends, vowing to protect those threatened by other planeswalking foes. Nissa and Chandra tearfully embrace after their oaths are given, but it’s not for a few more stories when the two of them have their first major interaction with one another.
In the climax of the Battle for Zendikar ark, the Gatewatch decide to magically pull the entirety of the Eldrazi Titans Ulamog and Kozilek into physical reality in order to imprison them again, using Nissa’s mastery of Zendikar’s leylines to hold them in place for good. This plan goes awry in the moment, however. The titans prove too powerful to trap, so Chandra attempts to simply burn them away with her pyromancy, but they prove too powerful for that too. I’ll post the following section in whole, as it is one of my favorite blocks of text from the Gatewatch era of Magic Story:
Chandra felt a hand resting softly on her shoulder.
And then she felt the mana of an entire world streaming into her.
The leylines. Nissa had been the focus for all of Zendikar's fury, and now, with Nissa's touch, that fury poured into Chandra instead.
Chandra was the focus now, the nexus that connected Zendikar to the titans. She knew she couldn't hold their reins as Nissa had done. So she tried something else.
She screamed.
And in her scream, she willed all of Zendikar's fury through herself, into her spell, into her fire.
The leylines themselves caught fire, igniting like a spark hitting streams of fuel. Flames spiraled from Chandra into the streams of mana and branched out across the sky, following the paths of the leylines, enveloping the titans.
Either Chandra was still screaming, or everything else was.
The world flashed with a roar of apocalyptic orange, then went blinding white. Chandra's legs buckled, and she collapsed.
Ulamog and Kozilek are incinerated by Chandra’s pyromancy fueled by Nissa’s channeling of Zendikar’s wrath. Apart from providing a suitably dramatic end to months of stories, many Magic players have interpreted over the years that Nissa and Chandra are metaphorically casting channel/fireball, famously the first game-ending combo in Magic’s history.
It’s also not too much of a stretch to see Chandra’s and Nissa’s magical connection as a metaphor for physical intimacy. While it’s doubtful that the story team intended readers to interpret the scene this way, it’s also not uncommon in fiction for a writer to show characters engaging in a non-sexual activity but treating it like a sex scene in its purpose: to show how the relationship between characters are shifting. In previous eras, this was often done to avoid censorship and legal issues when it was taboo to write about such things. Either way, when one interprets this scene with that in mind, it becomes clear that this will be one of the defining moments of the two women’s relationship: Nissa touches Chandra, uniting them in a way neither of them had ever felt before, heightening their physical, mental, and emotional states which all culminates in a world-shaking explosion. Nissa reflects that “Chandra had stepped in at the moment that Nissa had felt the world coming apart. Chandra had reached out to Nissa and they had connected in a way Nissa had never connected to another being, not even to the soul of Zendikar.” In the story of Nissa’s and Chandra’s romance, this scene comes back time and time again. In “Homesick,” for example, the first story of the Kaladesh block, Chandra, driven to the point of a panic attack by facing living remnants of her traumatic childhood, seeks out Nissa to bring her back to the peace she felt when the two of them connected. She says:
You know that time on Zendikar, when our minds touched? I felt Zendikar's anger, right? The power of a whole world. Your world. And it was amazing. The most incredible thing ever. But behind Zendikar, behind the anger and the power, I felt you. Your mind. And it was real tranquil, you know? You kinda...centered me, I guess … When I touched that part of you, it was like when you're swimming, and you just lie back and float, looking up at the sky. Nothing below. Just blue and air above, and everything's cool and still. You can see forever, and don't have to worry…
The connection the two of them felt in that moment changed the course of their lives forever. Whether you interpret the climax of Oath of the Gatewatch as, well, a climax or not, Nissa’s and Chandra’s stories become inexorably intertwined from this point forward. There is evidence of this in the very next story, Zendikar Resurgent, the last chapter of the Battle for Zendikar saga. Late at night in the weeks after their victory against the Eldrazi Titans, wrestling with the thought of leaving Zendikar to fulfill her oath to the Gatewatch, Nissa plants the seeds that will one day rebirth Zendikar’s flora. Chandra approaches her:
‘For what it's worth, I know it's going to be hard for you to leave.’ Chandra's voice startled Nissa; she had been so lost in thought that she hadn't heard Chandra approach. That was a strange thing. Nissa was not usually caught unawares. Stranger still was the way Chandra's words had reached the deepest layer of Nissa's consciousness, touching the feeling that was present but unwilling to wholly manifest … Nissa looked up, meeting Chandra's eyes. They were wide, amber pools of sincerity, and in that moment Nissa felt they could see straight into her soul. She was unused to others being able to grasp her perception of things, let alone understand how she was feeling. Chandra had done both in a matter of moments. Perhaps that's why Nissa responded so honestly. ‘I don't know if I can leave.’ The words out of her mouth, Nissa held her breath.
But Chandra didn't say anything right away. Instead she lowered herself to the ground at Nissa's side.
This moment clearly shows immense character growth in both of them. Up to this point in Magic Story, Chandra was most often portrayed as the prototypical red mage: passionate, chaotic, and noisy with an inability to sit still. But here she immediately understands Nissa from the deep connection they shared and accepts unconditionally that the elf needs time to meditate and gather her thoughts before she speaks. Nissa too finds herself willing to open up to a real person, something she has not done for somewhere around forty years (educated guess, as neither Nissa’s exact birth date nor the timeline of her origin story are specifically stated). Immediately after meeting, saving a world together, and swearing oaths to their new friends together, Chandra and Nissa have already made each other better and happier than they were before.
That’s it for part one! I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing it. Writing nonfiction about Magic: the Gathering has been one of my favorite pastimes that I’ve picked up in recent years, and connecting the literary, historical, and personal threads that make Nissa, Chandra, and the tale of their romance so special to me has been a real passion project. This was only part one, though! I’ve drafted out much more, but I can’t say for certain when I will be able to create time to finish the following sections. Here’s hoping the Adderall keeps working.
For a teaser, though, here’s a small excerpt from part two:
"It was immediately evident upon reading 'Homesick,' the starting line of the Kaladesh arc, that Magic’s story team had finally hit its stride. The Battle for Zendikar and Shadows over Innistrad stories had many inspired, memorable moments, but they were also criticized — perhaps a little too harshly — for issues with unexceptional prose and inconsistent characterization. 'Homesick' and the stories following, however, represented the Gatewatch-era story team at the top of their game."
References and Further Reading
Beyer, Doug. Zendikar's Last Stand. 2016
Helland, Jenna. Magic Origins: A New Era. 2015
L'Etoile, Chris. Homesick. 2016
Magic Story Team. Zendikar Resurgent. 2016
Rivera, K Arsenault. Aetherdrift | Episode 5: First Over the Line. 2025
Bader, Daren. Open the Way. 2023
Rallis, Chris. Bonds of Mortality + Fall of the Titans. 2016
Rallis, Chris. Zendikar Resurgent. 2016
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