Contrasting a high magic society to the rest of a setting

[Misereor]

What storytelling tools and delivery methods have you found particularly helpful or otherwise experienced as impactful that I might adopt here?

In your stead, I would focus on the three following rules:
- For something to make an impact, it has to be non-trivial.
- Good storytelling makes the audience invest emotionally in the story.
- Theme is good, but not knowing what the story was actually about until the end can be great (the surprising plot twist)


An example:

Begin by brushing up on your flavor text. When the powerful move through town, it is not just a coach and a driver, it is a vertiable parade of magical guardians and floating carpets, showing off their power and influence. Even the lowliest shop keeper wears clean, colorful garments, nor does the city smell like you average medieval city. Let the players get their hands on a few things that they can feel excited about.

Next, once they have gotten used to the exotic, show the players the negative impacts of magic and use it to get them to invest. Mutated ore miners, the occasional deadly explosion, lazyness and decadence, otherworldy terrors attracted to overuse of the ley lines, people that need rescuing and things that need fixing.

And finally, once they have gotten comfortable with what they think is fixing the problem, twist the story around. If they have found magical seeds that solve the problem, make the seeds cause other crops to become sterile and cause famine. If they found a magical paint brush that can protect houses from rogue fire elementals, make the paint react with rain water and become poisonous. The magical key to the palace somehow ended up in the hands of an assassin rather than the lovestruck chambermaid the party intended it for. If your players are invested enough, they will engage in the story and merrily bust their behinds to fix the problem they unintentionally created, not minding in the slightest that you set them up from the beginning.