Oh hey, my special interest.
I've always found Zhalfir (and the continent it was previously a part of, Jamuraa) to be a fascinating construction. It started off as the pet project of art director Sue Ann Harkey, who decided to push for an African theme for the 1996 block Mirage. Writers were asked to come up with a setting to match that, so the continent of Jamuraa was born on the plane of Dominaria.
Now, to be clear, Zhalfir and Jamuraa were still fantasy Africa as depicted by an all-white team of artists and writers in the 90s with no background knowledge on African cultures or history. There's a good amount of Orientalism, the writers often design Black characters in ways that exaggerate their features in exactly the wrong way, and there's an infamous card that makes light of the idea of reparations. But it was fantasy Africa with actual characters and actual countries and an actual history, a fantasy Africa that wasn't treated as a superfluous addition to the fantasy European regions already in the game. For the first two sets of the block, there are no important white characters. It's Black wizards and Black prophets and Black warriors pursuing their own matters. By the standards of Western fantasy in 1996, it's kind of remarkable.
And some of the art was even good.
The last set of the block, Weatherlight, would eventually fuck it up by introducing Gerrard, a white boy created by magic eugenics to be a chosen one who had to be raised in Jamuraa to avoid assassins and proceeded to become so athletic and magnanimous that his rival and adoptive brother, Vuel, goes mad with jealousy and becomes one of the major villains of the next few sets. I hate that white boy, he's the worst part of the multi-year Weatherlight Saga arc, and MTG keeps trying to avoid the literal eugenics in his backstory whenever he becomes relevant.
In better news, Mirage would also produce one of Magic's most iconic Black characters: the planeswalker, time mage and Zhalfiran native Teferi Akosa
Teferi was a key figure in the history of Zhalfir and most of the plot of the Mirage block. Much of Zhalfir's magical culture was shaped by him, in part of an attempt to keep the country stable while he was out exploring other planes. When he finished exploring, he served as a court mage and advisor in Zhalfir for several decades, only to eventually abandon his post and spend years doing experimental time magic on an isolated island, eventually phasing the island out of the timeline for two hundred years and inadvertently attracting wizards to Zhalfir who'd embroil it in a war. Like many wizards in Magic around that time, he was well-meaning but also too focused on discovery and knowledge to avoid causing problems. This would culminate in him phasing all of Zhalfir out of existence to protect it from an invading force of evil cyborgs called Phyrexians - and from his former teacher and ally, Urza, who had a tendency to use people and cultures he saw as unnecessary as fuel in his fight against said Phyrexians.
Objectively, good decision to protect Zhalfir, and Teferi would keep it phased out for a few additional centuries because Dominaria attracted every kind of war, incursion, and magical fuckery you could imagine and bigger civilizations than Zhalfir had been wiped out by such events. This would eventually backfire when, due to metaphysical bullshit that we will not be getting into, Teferi lost the ability to phase Zhalfir back into existence, leaving him weakened and isolated in a world where his culture no longer exists.
That's where the game left him around 2006-2007 during Time Spiral, after which the game decided to move away from Dominaria as the main setting of the game. In 2018, they revisited Dominaria for the first time and Teferi got rebranded as light-skinned an immortal hero of an ancient, legendary age, kept alive by time magic and leftover power from his stronger days. I have feelings about this rebrand, and not just because of the skin-lightening, but the game does proceed to give him a good amount of focus, even dedicating Core Set 2021 to showing off bits of his history and giving new cards to characters from Mirage.
Teferi would eventually use a magical time-machine to travel several thousand years back in time to try and get some information from a younger version of Urza (as the Phyrexians had returned and, for all his faults, Urza's good at killing them), and a malfunction in the time-machine caused him to phase out and end up back in Zhalfir, where it turns out that time had slowed significantly and everybody was still mid-preparation to fight the old Phyrexians. Later, as part of a last-ditch attempt to stop the new Phyrexians, Zhalfir was dragged back into the multiverse and the Zhalfirans had the Phyrexian fight they'd been waiting centuries for, phasing the Phyrexian base plane out of existence in the process.
That was 2023. We've known that we'd be getting a set on Zhalfir eventually because otherwise there's no point to giving it a proper place in the Multiverse again. It is entirely possible that Wizards of the Coast might fuck this up - we're two years out from Magic using terra nullius to justify its Western set and deciding that the evil colonist vampires in Ixalan were secretly being manipulated by the pagan bat god and that the normal, pseudo-Catholic vampires are the nice and reasonable ones. But if they're putting this much work into highlighting that they did their research, I'm allowing myself to be hopeful.
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