Guild Wars 2

The Mists are described as the building blocks of reality, and Magic is described as being intertwined with the world and everything in it. What is the difference? Are they the same thing/substance? The wiki was kind of confusing about this.

edited to update question

My current understanding of this is that Magic is sort of like the lifeforce of the planet and it permeates all life on Tyria. The Mists are a place you can go to between worlds and it is made of Magic. The Elder Dragons awaken every 10,000 years or so to consume Magic and restore balance, or else we will use that Magic to destroy one another like the Mursaat did to the Seers.

Technically, we don’t really know the physics behind magic. The wiki article likes to claim we do but all we can say is that it is (the manipulation of) energy. This energy seems to permiate most at locations of great death and can be conductive in certain metals, water, and runes. Souls also seem to hold this or very similar energy. But it isn’t clear in it’s full what magic is – just where one may find it and that it is very hard to be rid of as well as some means of utilizing it.

On top of this, there are multiple kinds of magic, as said by Narcemus. Divine magic which the gods have, “normal magic” for lack of a better word which is standard magic in Tyria that the Elder Dragons circulate, and the magic which the Forgotten – and possibly the sylvari- have which is somehow untouchable by the Elder Dragons. At least those three given all indications.

The Mists is a multitude of things. In this sense, it is protomatter which itself becomes physical things. Even souls. Magic as far as we know can animate and manipulate physical matter but it does not make such.

The Mists protomatter might be capable of making magic, but it isn’t the same as it.

The mists are somewhere that you can actually go. So magic may well be the means by which the mists work.

Although it should be noted that there are different kinds of magic. The magic of Tyria is vastly different from the magic that is embodied in the human gods, and could very well be different from the “magic” that makes up what the Mists truly are.

My current understanding of this is that Magic is sort of like the lifeforce of the planet and it permeates all life on Tyria. The Mists are a place you can go to between worlds and it is made of Magic. The Elder Dragons awaken every 10,000 years or so to consume Magic and restore balance, or else we will use that Magic to destroy one another like the Mursaat did to the Seers.

Is this accurate?

Strictly speaking, we don’t know that there’s a direct casual relationship between life and magic, only that all life can apparently tap into magic. Nor do we know that the Mists are made of magic- actually the opposite is true; all current lore states that the Mists are the origin of everything, which would include magic. What happens without the Elder Dragons balancing magic in catastrophic fashion is currently up in the air- there’s been no information on what would happen, likely because it never has happened. I can say that the mursaat destroying the seers was not caused by the build-up of magic; it was just a war between two opposed races.