Monthly Shōnen Ace, the monthly shōnen manga magazine in Japan, has revealed the cover for its May 2020 issue, and it features the officially licensed romance manga about Japanese teenagers playing Magic: The Gathering in the 90s. It's called Destroy all humankind. They can't be regenerated.
Check out the fantastic cover featuring two of the manga's main characters, Sawatari Emi and Kanou Hajime:
The "youth graffiti" romance comedy manga centers on two middle school students Hajime and Sawatari (wearing a Liliana costume in the cover above) during the late 90s. Kanou is a regular otaku and chuunibyou (a derogative colloquial term in the Japanese language used to describe a person who manifests delusional behavior), and Emi is a model student, with impeccable social standing and perfect grades.
Kanou then discovers that Emi plays Magic: The Gathering, the popular trading card game from Wizards of the Coast, which Kanou is enamored with. They quickly make an unlikely friendship through the game, which might lead into romance.
Even those who are not familiar with MTG will be able to follow the story of this manga series well thanks to the manga artist Takuma Yokota, who uses facial expressions and character acting to immediately signal the game's flow.
Unlike the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga by Kazuki Takahashi, which was originally conceived to be a Magic: The Gathering story in the first place, Destroy All Humankind is focused less on the games themselves than on how they affect the relationship between Kanou and Emi, and the manga's storyline has nothing to do with the lore of MTG, so don't expect any actual planeswalkers in this series.
Overall, this series brings a lot of 90s nostalgia so if you want to re-experience the 90s and old school MTG, this is the manga for you.
Related: MTG Video Essay Explains The Pastoral & Pastiche of Theros
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