I don't think it's farfecthed that the new walkers could win against the Eldrazi titans. They were using the hedron network that was made by the old walkers long before them as well as the life-force of the plane of Zendicar itself as weapons to fight them. It's not like they just combined forces and all the sudden could slay anything, they needed a lot of help.
When the old walkers fought the Eldrazi previously, they were trying to imprison them, not vanquish them (although I'm not sure that the new walkers actually killed the titans or just exiled them from that existence or re-imprisoned them), so it's possible that the goal of the new walkers doesn't have all the constraints the old walkers had when they were battling in the past.
All that said though, Chandra's oath to join the Gatewatch is priceless. Pretty much just saying 'yeah I guess, I could use something to take my aggression out on'.
Reminder that if Ugin himself thinks "killing" the titans is a very bad idea, the Gatewatch isn't going to fix everything by doing so. It's entirely believable that Ugin could Ghostfire the Eldrazi right off the plane once his crew had trapped them, but he very deliberately chose not to, and is still working to prevent their "death" 6000 years later. It makes sense for the first victory of the Gatewatch to be pyrrhic- they're established as powerful and resourceful, but also inexperienced, as they proceed to save Zendikar by unwittingly making the Eldrazi a much greater threat to the Multiverse.
So much salt over the Eldrazi "losing". So. Much. Salt. I can hardly believe it, actually. How does it so defy expectations as to make you people upset? It speaks to a huge lack of understanding, the effort that it takes to defeat them. Sorry, not "them", only "2 out of 3 of them". They have to get the land to fight, they have to get the inhabitants of the land to band together, they have to get not two or three but four planeswalkers, whose power levels have been time and time again explained to us nice and slowly, and you people still don't buy it cuz "muh cool monsters". SMFH
So much salt over the Eldrazi "losing". So. Much. Salt. I can hardly believe it, actually. How does it so defy expectations as to make you people upset? It speaks to a huge lack of understanding, the effort that it takes to defeat them. Sorry, not "them", only "2 out of 3 of them". They have to get the land to fight, they have to get the inhabitants of the land to band together, they have to get not two or three but four planeswalkers, whose power levels have been time and time again explained to us nice and slowly, and you people still don't buy it cuz "muh cool monsters". SMFH
Because one old walker should be able to defeat any 5 or 6 neowalkers without breaking a sweat. They were god-like beings of incredible power, some of whom were actually worshipped as gods. Some of them even created entire planes of existence. Sorin (who was over 1000 years old at that point) and Nahiri combined could not defeat a single eldrazi titan while at their full oldwalker power. It took a third and even more powerful walker joining forces with them to defeat the titans, but not completely, just temporarily. The idea that 4 powerful mages could succeed where 2 oldwalkers failed is going to rub some folks the wrong way even if the neowalkers are drawing heavily on the work done by the oldwalkers over 6000 years ago.
Jace: "For the sake of the Multiverse"
Nissa: "For life."
Gideon: "Justice and peace."
Chandra: "Yeah, sure."
Even better, you can hear the "can we get this over with" in her voice, almost like the other three are just off camera scowling at her because she did just say, "Yeah, sure." and they want her to say something meaningful for the big occasion. The more I read it, the funnier it is.
So much salt over the Eldrazi "losing". So. Much. Salt. I can hardly believe it, actually. How does it so defy expectations as to make you people upset? It speaks to a huge lack of understanding, the effort that it takes to defeat them. Sorry, not "them", only "2 out of 3 of them". They have to get the land to fight, they have to get the inhabitants of the land to band together, they have to get not two or three but four planeswalkers, whose power levels have been time and time again explained to us nice and slowly, and you people still don't buy it cuz "muh cool monsters". SMFH
Because one old walker should be able to defeat any 5 or 6 neowalkers without breaking a sweat. They were god-like beings of incredible power, some of whom were actually worshipped as gods. Some of them even created entire planes of existence. Sorin (who was over 1000 years old at that point) and Nahiri combined could not defeat a single eldrazi titan while at their full oldwalker power. It took a third and even more powerful walker joining forces with them to defeat the titans, but not completely, just temporarily. The idea that 4 powerful mages could succeed where 2 oldwalkers failed is going to rub some folks the wrong way even if the neowalkers are drawing heavily on the work done by the oldwalkers over 6000 years ago.
Not only that, but from Bonds of Mortality you specifically see that they had to find the leylines and adjust them to make the Titans even able to be touced, which does fit the flavor of blue and green; two colors not found among Sorin, Nahiri, and Ugin. I mean, Ugin could presumably have done it, and I think they did use leylines to align the hedrons to do their thing, but adjusting the leylines is different. The point being, it didn't take immense power, just ingenuity, which funny enough would make this make sense. If you can brute force everything else you've encountered for 1000 years, you tend to forget how to be subtle and manipulative. Having omnipotent 'walkers try to smash through, then have to quick find a fix to stop the carnage while the weak-'walkers who have always had to mix cunning with their power (other than Garruk) would have to stop and devise a plan that actually works. That and they even went through all the trouble of altering Nissa's baseline personality from the racist elf to benevolent avatar of Zendikar itself to explain why she can realign the leylines, though I wouldn't be surprised if they just retconned her then realized it works for this bit of plot.
DC is not willing to put this work in. They had to reboot the Nolanverse movies because that trilogy has a definite end, and the Green Lantern was crap from what I've heard, but they're still making their ensemble movie for the Justice League even though only one of them - Superman - has been established in a leadup movie, and even that one is pretty crap.
But that's not true lol.
There's 5 movies before Avengers. There'll be 4 DC movies before Justice League.
Here's the sad truth: when DC announced they'd be doing a movie verse, everyone said they were copying Marvel. When they announced that they would not follow "the marvel method" and build their shared universe their own way, they got accused of doing it wrong. There's literally no winning. The Magic movie would have it the same if they're just bootleg Avengers, but worse because nobody knows who these weird 20somethings are.
Reminder that if Ugin himself thinks "killing" the titans is a very bad idea, the Gatewatch isn't going to fix everything by doing so. It's entirely believable that Ugin could Ghostfire the Eldrazi right off the plane once his crew had trapped them, but he very deliberately chose not to, and is still working to prevent their "death" 6000 years later. It makes sense for the first victory of the Gatewatch to be pyrrhic- they're established as powerful and resourceful, but also inexperienced, as they proceed to save Zendikar by unwittingly making the Eldrazi a much greater threat to the Multiverse.
Wow. I read through all the comments and I am baffled that no one has mentioned the following. There is proof that Eldrazi titans can't die flavor wise. Check the last effects on the Eldrazi Titans released on ROTE. If they touch the graveyard from anywhere, boom they bounce back to the deck. Flavor wise it makes sense, it means that you can't truly kill them, just their manifestation. It's like Wizards just read this and said: "Crap, how can we kill the unkillable? I know, let's retcon them and make'em "stronger" by removing the ability that literally made them unkillable." I really hope this means that indeed the Titans will be back and Ugin will say "I told you so" to Jace and his smug ass. Also they die by fire. I guess the meme "Kill it with fire" also applies to Eldritchian Cthulhuesque gods.
The "yeah, I'll keep watch" on Chandra's Oath flavor text is further proof that they are trying to not only do their own Avengers / Justice League, but also match the cringeworthy Hollywood lines and clichéd one-sided personalities. Card is nice, though.
I don't think it's fair to call out the single sentence at the end of a whole bunch of game text as being one-dimensional... the characterization is literally cardboard because that's where it's printed. The recent UR story giving Chandra's perspective was fine, and I thought the storyline mode on the Origins Duels game was very entertaining. Maybe not groundbreaking, but not bad either.
So... One all-consuming, indestructible, mountain-sized walking deity of annihilation, and one equally large, sanity-destroying, reality-shaping, completely incomprehensible Titan of pure madness (one which JUST RANDOMLY SHOWED UP OUT OF NOWHERE TO CATCH YOU OFF GUARD). Both of which were able to withstand the combined forces of three near-godlike individuals in the past. Oh, and you just collectively got pimp-slapped by a SINGLE relatively de-powered demon, who ruined all your well laid plans, decimated your army, and sent your "soul of the world" elemental packing.
And you somehow win by setting them on fire.
Makes sense.
Read up on the story, then comment, okay? Again: they didn't kill Ulamog and Kozilek. Just their avatars.
I'd advise you to do the same, because if you did you would know Jace's intent was to pull the entirety of the Titans out of the Blind Eternities using the hedrons, thus opening them up to be destroyed completely. If that is what is happening in Bonds of Mortality, then Ulamog and Kozilek are done for good.
Exactly what a lot of people seem to have missed in tht UR: Jace thought that the trap, reworked a bit, could not just trap the avatars, but actually pull the entire entity onto a plane. If that is what they did, then killing them means they are dead and gone. I'm not impressed by the diabolus ex machina UR that had Ob curb-stomp Gideon and Nissa, though. Seemed to come completely out of nowhere, from "unpowered ex-planeswalker" to "immediately able to beat 2 powerul Planeswalkers, then call out Kozilek."
To be fair, Ob is an Oldwalker who, of his own power, has conquered multiple planes. By the way he says it in the UR it sounds like possibly upwards of a hundred. Dude isn't someone easily messed with.
To be fair, Ob is an Oldwalker who, of his own power, has conquered multiple planes. By the way he says it in the UR it sounds like possibly upwards of a hundred. Dude isn't someone easily messed with.
Not anymore. They no longer exist. And on that point, Ob didn't go through the Mending when the other oldwalkers did: he should have been expecting to return to the height of his power, only to get a pale shadow of what he once was. It just seems like he isn't a realistic threat, he's the entire team turned up to 11: more power than Nissa, a better fighter than Gideon, a better planner than Jace, and better at casual destruction than Chandra (yeah, reaching on that last one.) It just seems like he got a narrative power boost in the UR, well beyond what he should have been capable of as someone who's spent (centuries? millennia?) trapped and then regaining a small portion of the power they used to have.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
To be fair, Ob is an Oldwalker who, of his own power, has conquered multiple planes. By the way he says it in the UR it sounds like possibly upwards of a hundred. Dude isn't someone easily messed with.
Not anymore. They no longer exist. And on that point, Ob didn't go through the Mending when the other oldwalkers did: he should have been expecting to return to the height of his power, only to get a pale shadow of what he once was. It just seems like he isn't a realistic threat, he's the entire team turned up to 11: more power than Nissa, a better fighter than Gideon, a better planner than Jace, and better at casual destruction than Chandra (yeah, reaching on that last one.) It just seems like he got a narrative power boost in the UR, well beyond what he should have been capable of as someone who's spent (centuries? millennia?) trapped and then regaining a small portion of the power they used to have.
I guess Nicol Bolas isn't a realistic threat either, seeing as he has more power than Nissa, a better fighter than Gideon, a better planner than Jace, and better at casual destruction than Chandra.
Just seems to be an 11th hour supervillain: he needed to be a threat in the story, so suddenly he has enough power to be a threat. This really is a story complaint, I guess, having him suddenly ramp his threat level. It seems like the logic was just "Nixilus is going to be a threat- writers, find a way to make him scary!" rather than it coming through him being built up into more than a cardboard cut-out. And I just realized my entire complaints with the UR belong in the Lore forum, so I'm going to stop posting here about it and move it to the right forum.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
The storyline from BFZ resembles a really bad anime aimed at the age 10-14 population.
So a game made by Hasbro with the premise that you're casting spells at each other or attacking each other with goblins appeals to middle school students... I'm not really seeing the complaint here. Again, maybe you expect too much. It's like people complaining that a Doctor Who episode has plotholes. So? These things are, at their core, for the kids.
Loving the cards in this set compared to BFZ, but the the Titans losing is just comical and was a huge punt by the design team. Zendikar should have died at the hands(tentacles?) of Ulamog and Kozilek.
You're missing the big purposes for this: They need a threat so large no single PW could solve, but TOGETHER they can. They need to win, otherwise the Gatewatch fails at its first and primary purpose. They need their first win, and it needs to be a spectacular win, to unite the GW together. Furthermore, if Zendikar is destroyed, WotC loses that property for revisiting. It's lose-lose for WotC's PoV.
Now, will the NEXT Gatewatch intervention go so easily? Probably not; there is always a wrinkle in the second story. But it makes perfect sense for their first outing as the GW to be a success or the idea fails.
I completely disagree. 1. People care more about the Eldrazi titans than they do planeswalkers 2. Sacrificing one plane to heighten then drama associated with the Eldrazi is well worth the cost 3. Dumping and creating planes happens all the time and there is infinite design space to do both 4. The planeswalkers we have now a days are shadows of there former selves. Its completely unrealistic that Jace and his band of merry men could so easily succeed when other planeswalkers of much greater power had failed over and over again.
This easy victory completely undermines the mythos that wizards has been cultivating with the Eldrazi titans. They might as well be another demonic bad guy or some crappy god from Theros or a praetor from New Phyrexia.
The Eldrazi aren't the heroes; the GW is. More people like the Joker than Batman, but that doesn't mean he should win in The Dark Knight. WotC are setting this group up as the new Faces of Magic; ever since Origins their faces are plastered across MTG's art. This is the first outing that puts them "together" and WotC wants them to have a success, not a failure, as their first outcome. If they didn't, you might preserve the "menace" of the Eldrazi, but you've completely undermined the heroes and proven them ineffective, weak and useless. They might as well stay home or run far, because their is nothing they can do against powerful foes. Heroes often succeed where "more powerful" mentors fail: Dumbledore can't stop Voldemort, Yoda and Obi-Wan can't stop the Sith, Elrond, Gandalf and Galadriel can't take the Ring to Mt. Doom.
Yeah, its the classic "heroes unite to stop ultimate menace" that is as old as dirt, but it sells well because it works. Sorry that WotC doesn't share your interest in a dystopian Magic setting.
Unfortunately, there is a pattern in speculative fiction, where a lore's original writers will craft a genuinely Lovecraftian threat, in order to create a sense that there are forces in the universe that cannot be defeated, but must instead be worked around. And then a bunch of less talented writers will come in and completely destroy the threat's raison d'etre, by having the heroes miraculously find a way to beat it.
In the Star Trek: TNG episode Q Who, Roddenberry created the quasi-Lovecraftian Borg, as nemesis to Picard's hubris. It was awesome to hear Picard boast about Starfleet's capabilities, only for Q to show him how little his little Federation really was in the grand scheme of things. When Picard realised he couldn't defeat the Borg, he evolved as a character, as he was forced to eat humble pie and beg Q to help him escape. And the Borg themselves, a force against whom resistance really was futile, made the Star Trek universe suddenly seem far larger, more dangerous, and more compelling. That made me want to watch further.
Contrast that with Voyager's depiction of the Borg, where Brannon Braga (et al.) had Captain Janeway run through the Borg city, *****-slapping them to death before finding and hulk-smashing the "Borg Queen" (which was another stupid idea). Thus, Janeway single-handedly defeated what was by all accounts the gravest threat in the galaxy, invalidating any reason to suppose that she or her crew would ever be in any real danger again. And I stopped watching.
A similar case occurred with Games Workshop. In the late 1980s, Rick Priestley, Andy Chambers, and others created the Chaos Gods. They began as very much Lovecraftian beings, with one Chaos God, Tzeentch, described as sitting at the centre of a nine-dimensional labyrinth, and having daemonic servants who took the form of twisted Birds of Paradise, with plumages of incomprehensible colours. Their merest presence warped human flesh, and their gazes caused insanity.
Early in GW's lore, Tzeentch and his brother Gods would toy with human beings from their realm beyond the universe, playing them like puppets for unknown reasons, but speculated to be merely their own amusement. Meanwhile, they sought to enter our universe by ripping open holes in space, but were prevented by The Emperor of Mankind, a drooling, psychic savant-carcass sitting on a life-support machine. As time went on , the Emperor got weaker and weaker, and the fabric between our universe and the Realm of Chaos (known as the Warp) became more fragile.
I found this universe utterly riveting, and it was in no small part due to the sense of scale, terror and mystery exuded by the Chaos Gods.
In the mid 90s, Games Workshop was floated on the stock exchange, and suddenly had to start catering to shareholders. GW fired Rick Priestley and the other writers who'd created the original lore, and replaced them with new blood. They then decided to take Warhammer 40K into a new direction: maximum profitability.
Over the next decade, the Chaos Gods ceased to be an unfathomable threat from beyond. Instead, they became more and more like Bond Villains, with human plans and human motivations. New GW writers like Matt Ward came along, and created new heroes, one of whom was a guy called Draigo. This guy was so powerful that he personally entered the Warp (akin to the Blind Eternities), destroyed the daemonic armies of the Chaos Gods, and then proceeded to lay the smack-down on the Gods themselves. While beating down one of the Gods, Draigo grabbed the God, held him down, and then LITERALLY wrote a signature on the God's heart.
Needless to say, GW has seen massive depreciation of its stock, and faces doubts over its future.
Yet, neither it nor other companies have learned the lesson. The same pattern, of unfathomably powerful villains being reduced to hero-fodder, can be found in pretty much any mainstream franchise featuring "Lovecraftian" entities, to such an extent that the very word "Lovecraftian" is now misused more often than it is used.
All the signs point to WOTC's writers continuing the trend, which really depresses me. If nothing else, I just hope they understand one simple point: Lovecraftian monsters exist to tell us that there are some problems in life that HAVE NO solutions. The compelling part comes not in "how will our heroes defeat them?", but in "how will our heroes learn to live with the knowledge that they can't defeat them?"
Like I pointed out in another thread, heroes can still be heroes in a Lovecraftian story, but they need to be heroic with subtlety, such as by successfully evacuating some innocents, or sacrificing themselves to save their friends. But if the heroes defeat the Eldrazi -- the most powerful beings in the entire lore -- then there will no longer be sufficient grounds to take any future threat seriously.
Oh, what's that, Jace is up against a grand alliance of Bolas, Liliana, Nixilis and Phyrexia? Bah, he'll beat them, just like he beat the Eldrazi.
Throughout the BFZ URs I had kinda assumed that the Eldrazi were going to be defeated, though probably by resetting the original prison. When the OGW URs opened with Ob Nixilis and Kozilek appearing stand causing havoc, I was hopeful that the previously-unbeatable eldrazi would be able to remain a credible threat.
For the story to really make sense, there are still a few possibilities
1) The Mending affected the Eldrazi. While nothing has indicated this, it seems a reasonable way to essentially retcon how powerful the Eldrazi were (being beaten by four neowalkers AFTER the disaster of Kozilek and Ob ruining the original plan. Eldrazi don't have sparks (which the Mending affected), but they are even more connected to the Blind Eternities than walkers, so maybe the Mending weakened them even more than it weakened planeswalkers. If this is the case, it still means that wotc wanted the Gatewatch to win for future stories, but also gives a bit more of a reason why the neowalkers succeeded where the oldwalkers failed (keep in mind the original hedron prison took decades to build, it's not like the oldwalkers just tried to use brute force, they WERE well prepared)
2) Jace's idea to force the Eldrazi to fully manifest so they could be killed for real didn't work, and Ugin is soon going to be saying "I told you so" as Ulamog and Kozilek show up on another plane, meaning they really just wasted their best chance (zendikar's ability to defend itself as well as the pre-existing hedrons) for a temporary victory
3) The Oath wasn't a general "we will protectorate multiverse" but rather Gatewatch KNOWINGLY only killed the physical forms of the Eldrazi, and the Oath was "we will keep watch over the multiverse so that we can just keep killing the physical manifestations of the Eldrazi wherever they show up.
4) We get some other explanation that explains how four neowalkers who have lived a combined total of around 100 years can come up with a working plan to kill Eldrazi in a few weeks, but 2 or 3 VASTLY more powerful oldwalkers whose ages are measured in centuries had to work for YEARS to accomplish a lesser result. (We know Sorin and Nahiri couldn't stop them without Ugin's help, and that Ugin couldn't trap them alone, we don't know if the three oldwalkers together would have been able to kill them if that had been their goal)
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When the old walkers fought the Eldrazi previously, they were trying to imprison them, not vanquish them (although I'm not sure that the new walkers actually killed the titans or just exiled them from that existence or re-imprisoned them), so it's possible that the goal of the new walkers doesn't have all the constraints the old walkers had when they were battling in the past.
All that said though, Chandra's oath to join the Gatewatch is priceless. Pretty much just saying 'yeah I guess, I could use something to take my aggression out on'.
Because one old walker should be able to defeat any 5 or 6 neowalkers without breaking a sweat. They were god-like beings of incredible power, some of whom were actually worshipped as gods. Some of them even created entire planes of existence. Sorin (who was over 1000 years old at that point) and Nahiri combined could not defeat a single eldrazi titan while at their full oldwalker power. It took a third and even more powerful walker joining forces with them to defeat the titans, but not completely, just temporarily. The idea that 4 powerful mages could succeed where 2 oldwalkers failed is going to rub some folks the wrong way even if the neowalkers are drawing heavily on the work done by the oldwalkers over 6000 years ago.
Even better, you can hear the "can we get this over with" in her voice, almost like the other three are just off camera scowling at her because she did just say, "Yeah, sure." and they want her to say something meaningful for the big occasion. The more I read it, the funnier it is.
Not only that, but from Bonds of Mortality you specifically see that they had to find the leylines and adjust them to make the Titans even able to be touced, which does fit the flavor of blue and green; two colors not found among Sorin, Nahiri, and Ugin. I mean, Ugin could presumably have done it, and I think they did use leylines to align the hedrons to do their thing, but adjusting the leylines is different. The point being, it didn't take immense power, just ingenuity, which funny enough would make this make sense. If you can brute force everything else you've encountered for 1000 years, you tend to forget how to be subtle and manipulative. Having omnipotent 'walkers try to smash through, then have to quick find a fix to stop the carnage while the weak-'walkers who have always had to mix cunning with their power (other than Garruk) would have to stop and devise a plan that actually works. That and they even went through all the trouble of altering Nissa's baseline personality from the racist elf to benevolent avatar of Zendikar itself to explain why she can realign the leylines, though I wouldn't be surprised if they just retconned her then realized it works for this bit of plot.
GENERATION 11: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and add 1 to the generation. social experiment.
My Have/Want list (MTGO)
But that's not true lol.
There's 5 movies before Avengers. There'll be 4 DC movies before Justice League.
Here's the sad truth: when DC announced they'd be doing a movie verse, everyone said they were copying Marvel. When they announced that they would not follow "the marvel method" and build their shared universe their own way, they got accused of doing it wrong. There's literally no winning. The Magic movie would have it the same if they're just bootleg Avengers, but worse because nobody knows who these weird 20somethings are.
Your mods are terrified of me.
Wow. I read through all the comments and I am baffled that no one has mentioned the following. There is proof that Eldrazi titans can't die flavor wise. Check the last effects on the Eldrazi Titans released on ROTE. If they touch the graveyard from anywhere, boom they bounce back to the deck. Flavor wise it makes sense, it means that you can't truly kill them, just their manifestation. It's like Wizards just read this and said: "Crap, how can we kill the unkillable? I know, let's retcon them and make'em "stronger" by removing the ability that literally made them unkillable." I really hope this means that indeed the Titans will be back and Ugin will say "I told you so" to Jace and his smug ass. Also they die by fire. I guess the meme "Kill it with fire" also applies to Eldritchian Cthulhuesque gods.
I don't think it's fair to call out the single sentence at the end of a whole bunch of game text as being one-dimensional... the characterization is literally cardboard because that's where it's printed. The recent UR story giving Chandra's perspective was fine, and I thought the storyline mode on the Origins Duels game was very entertaining. Maybe not groundbreaking, but not bad either.
Many thanks to DNC at Heroes of the Plane Studios
Not anymore. They no longer exist. And on that point, Ob didn't go through the Mending when the other oldwalkers did: he should have been expecting to return to the height of his power, only to get a pale shadow of what he once was. It just seems like he isn't a realistic threat, he's the entire team turned up to 11: more power than Nissa, a better fighter than Gideon, a better planner than Jace, and better at casual destruction than Chandra (yeah, reaching on that last one.) It just seems like he got a narrative power boost in the UR, well beyond what he should have been capable of as someone who's spent (centuries? millennia?) trapped and then regaining a small portion of the power they used to have.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Many thanks to DNC at Heroes of the Plane Studios
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Same. I don't think they would have put it on Bonds of Mortality for no reason, and neither Ulamog or Kozilek have hexproof.
edit: In quality, if not in style per se.
So a game made by Hasbro with the premise that you're casting spells at each other or attacking each other with goblins appeals to middle school students... I'm not really seeing the complaint here. Again, maybe you expect too much. It's like people complaining that a Doctor Who episode has plotholes. So? These things are, at their core, for the kids.
Bhogal83 summed it up:
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
For the story to really make sense, there are still a few possibilities
1) The Mending affected the Eldrazi. While nothing has indicated this, it seems a reasonable way to essentially retcon how powerful the Eldrazi were (being beaten by four neowalkers AFTER the disaster of Kozilek and Ob ruining the original plan. Eldrazi don't have sparks (which the Mending affected), but they are even more connected to the Blind Eternities than walkers, so maybe the Mending weakened them even more than it weakened planeswalkers. If this is the case, it still means that wotc wanted the Gatewatch to win for future stories, but also gives a bit more of a reason why the neowalkers succeeded where the oldwalkers failed (keep in mind the original hedron prison took decades to build, it's not like the oldwalkers just tried to use brute force, they WERE well prepared)
2) Jace's idea to force the Eldrazi to fully manifest so they could be killed for real didn't work, and Ugin is soon going to be saying "I told you so" as Ulamog and Kozilek show up on another plane, meaning they really just wasted their best chance (zendikar's ability to defend itself as well as the pre-existing hedrons) for a temporary victory
3) The Oath wasn't a general "we will protectorate multiverse" but rather Gatewatch KNOWINGLY only killed the physical forms of the Eldrazi, and the Oath was "we will keep watch over the multiverse so that we can just keep killing the physical manifestations of the Eldrazi wherever they show up.
4) We get some other explanation that explains how four neowalkers who have lived a combined total of around 100 years can come up with a working plan to kill Eldrazi in a few weeks, but 2 or 3 VASTLY more powerful oldwalkers whose ages are measured in centuries had to work for YEARS to accomplish a lesser result. (We know Sorin and Nahiri couldn't stop them without Ugin's help, and that Ugin couldn't trap them alone, we don't know if the three oldwalkers together would have been able to kill them if that had been their goal)