There is a reason WOTC spends millions of dollars on their marketing department and it is the same reason all big companies do which is that it is because marketing is an absolutely crucial part of whether a product will succeed or not. I would not be surprised if the marketing and public relations department over at WotC is considerably larger than that of the entire creative department.
The way WotC trickles out spoilers, times the release of their stories, crafts their teasers and trailers etc. are all part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign that countless man hours of research and implementation have gone into. The reason WotC is willing to sink millions of dollars into this marketing strategy is because it is a key part of promoting, hyping and selling their product. To suggest that having almost every hype generating and future meta defining card in a set spoiled two sets ahead of time won't have an impact on their bottom line is very silly. I am not a marketing expert nor do I work of WotC so calculating the exact details of the coming financial impact is beyond me but one thing is certain which is it has completely derailed their entire multi-million dollar marketing strategy for the next half a year.
With a company like MTG the intellectual property is the product. We will see most of the rare and mythic cards from Ixilan available to play on various third party MTG software proxies probably within a week or two. Half of that sets meta will be solved before a single card even hits the market. It's similiar to a movie in this respect. If a blurry incomplete copy of a movie is leaked months before it is released in theaters it's ticket sales are decimated. Sure watching that crappy blurry version is nothing like getting to see it glorious Imax 3d, but it will completely gut the hype regardless. Ixilan will literally be old news before it even hits the shelves. MTG is a huge game world wide. It's sales are upwards of 300 million dollars a year, so if the leak costs them even just a few percentage points of their sales for the set then the hit will be in the millions of dollars. Talking to a buddy of mine who is a marketing major he thinks the losses will likely be considerably higher than that.
It's a shame. MTG has been limping along for a while now. The last thing it needed was a huge kick in the teeth while it was trying to get back on its feet again.
If your old friend came by and got angry at you for breaking a promise, then slapped you and stated quite clearly that she was going to make you go do your job even if she had to use force would you then turn around and stab her in the face fearing for your life?
Bad comparison. Nahiri initiated the physical combat. Nahiri impaled Sorin by hurling pointed darts of stone at him while he is in a weakened state at one point. What if, given his drained state, that had been enough to kill him?
That's exactly what I just said. Sorin breaks his word and refuses to do his job in about as condescending and insulting manner as he can muster. Nahiri gets pissed and and does the planeswalker equivalent of losing her temper and slapping him across the face by running him through a couple of times while telling him that he is going to do his job even if she has to force him to. In old walker terms, that's basically a ***** slap followed by twisting somebody's arm to get them to say uncle, nothing even approaching a real injury let alone a life threatening one. Like I pointed out earlier Sorin has strait up shattered Nahiri's arm in the past during a simple training exercise just to show her how her body worked now that she was a planeswalker. Planes walkers play rough and their little sparing match after Nahirir tells him that she's going to make him do his job even if she has to force him to is nothing even remotely approaching mortal combat. Old walkers were essentially Gods.
The only point in the fight were things go from Nahari roughing Sorin up a bit for being a lying prick and twisting his arm to make him acquiesce to keeping his broken promise to actual real combat is when Sorin's newly created monster jumps in and actually tries to kill Nahiri. Even then Nahiri isn't really in mortal peril simply because she is an old walker and Avacyn is not. Nahiri gets the upper hand while fighting his rabid attack dog and this is the point where Sorin calmly steps in and banishes Nahiri to a fate worse than death and then leaves her there to rot in his own little personal sensory deprivation torture chamber for the rest of eternity. Go back and read that part of the story again. Literally everything Sorin says and does completely flies in the face of him in any way fearing for his life. He isn't even being attacked when he does it.
She was never Gisa's friend. Gisa thought she was, because Nahiri isn't an idiot and realized that Gisa would be easy to manipulate if she was nice to her. "Wow Gisa, you sure are cool and you raise such awesome zombies. If you raise a troop of zombie slaves to build me a temple we can be besties." Gisa was a useful pawn, one she tossed aside once her usefulness was at an end.
I would have to agree with that. Nahiri pulled a total Sorin with Gisa. She just strait up used her. Nahiri did apparently manage to pick up a few tricks from her old teacher.
At this point Sorin was given yet another opportunity to choose to honor his oath and take the greater good into consideration and release from his dungeon the one person in the multiverse capable of sealing away the Eldrazi. Ugin, the other walker he had made an ancient pact with concerning the imprisonment of the Eldrazi, strait up demanded Sorin find Nahiri and put aside whatever petty differences he had with her so that they could all put right what had gone so terribly wrong and prevent further loss of innocent life.
He chose instead not to honor is promise or listen to Ugin. Rather than ruin his precious dungeon to free his old friend so that the Eldrazi threat could be properly taken care of he decided instead to let the multi-verse rot and condemned millions to die.
I'm curious to what do you base your ideas on, since Sorin went to Tarkir AFTER the Helvault was shattered, so he couldn't choose to keep it whole despite Ugin's words...
You're right I got one of the events slightly out of order although that really doesn't change much. Sorin doesn't go looking for Ugin until after he has botched his mission by choosing to bring a poorly qualified and hot headed neo-walker to the Eye of Ugin to try and get her to fix the Eldrazi mess rather than freeing the one person in the multi-verse that is actually qualified to do so. The results of that poor and selfish choice led to said hot headed elf freeing the Eldrazi. Sorin had already screwed things up so horribly by not letting Nahiri out to fix the problem before it was too late, that by the time he talks to Ugin there simply is no way to fix it. Sorin has already made his fatal and selfish errors in judgement prior to that conversation. Still, all of the mistakes he made and the selfish reasons behind them remain exactly the same regardless of whether he had the conversation with Ugin before or after the fact.
Nahiri never at any point in their initial confrontation threatened his life. She did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm behind his back to try and force him into honor the promise he had broken. Nahiri even strait up tells him her intent is to drag him back to Zendikar by force if necessary and make him do his damn job. She makes it quite clear she intends to drag him there alive so they can finish the work together. She doesn't leave it ambiguous. She at no point tells him or implies that she harbors murderous intent or even a desire to do him real harm. Planes walkers play rough. I mean Sorin strait up shattered her arm at one point while sparing just to teach her a lesson about how her body worked when she was younger.
You have to consider it from Sorin's point of view at that time. He's in a weakened state, he's only just finished his defenses for Innistrad and here Nahiri comes attempting to coerce him into coming to Zendikar right then and there. Yes, Nahiri made it clear she didn't want to kill him but you're assuming that Sorin actually believed that throughout everything that went. She obviously wasn't going to let him go and he was adamant he wasn't going to leave Innistrad. Nahiri resolved to beat him down to make him respect her and fulfill his promise. She initiated combat with him and then held him at sword point.
No matter what Nahiri says her intentions are at that point, Sorin obviously felt that he couldn't trust them and in his weakened state he has no real way to end the conflict by making her leave. Thus, he sealed her away.
Nahiri's actions and motivations are completely clear to the reader. But Sorin does not have that perspective and he's not really a mind reader.
Sorin has no reason to believe she is lying to him. She isn't some stranger who just shows up and attacks him without explanation. They are old friends. If your old friend came by and got angry at you for breaking a promise, then slapped you and stated quite clearly that she was going to make you go do your job even if she had to use force would you then turn around and shoot her in the face fearing for your life? Even if you look at it from a completely utilitarian and logical perspective and ignore the fact they are are friends, why would somebody who needs you alive to help them attempt to kill you?
She strait up told him what her intent was. Sorin at no point showed any indication he was actually afraid she was trying to kill him, or any fear at all of her for that matter, only irritation that she would have the audacity to confront him about his broken promise and to challenge him in his own home. Sorin didn't like that his student had gotten the upper hand and he was no longer in control of the situation and decided rather than take the defeat and agree to help her he banished her for eternity in a sensory deprivation torture chamber full of demons. Unless Sorin is autistic or perhaps seriously mentally ill there really is not excuse for his psychotic level of escalation and retaliation and certainly no excuse for him not letting her back out of his dungeon once he regained his strength.
Now, that doesn't mean Sorin is squeaky clean, either. All he had to do when Nahiri came is be like "Nahiri, I'm sorry that my new protections messed up the call. I'll do what I can to help." Now, how he actually was out of line but Nahiri then escalated it further by threatening his life. And things went downhill from there...
Nahiri never at any point in their initial confrontation threatened his life. She did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm behind his back to try and force him into honor the promise he had broken. Nahiri even strait up tells him her intent is to drag him back to Zendikar by force if necessary and make him do his damn job. She makes it quite clear she intends to drag him there alive so they can finish the work together. She doesn't leave it ambiguous. She at no point tells him or implies that she harbors murderous intent or even a desire to do him real harm. Planes walkers play rough. I mean Sorin strait up shattered her arm at one point while sparing just to teach her a lesson about how her body worked when she was younger.
Sorin's actions right up until he casts her into the Helvault and then leaves her to rot are very understandable if a bit selfish and arrogant. I was seriously on his side up until this point. Nahiri has the right to be pissed, but she shouldn't have slapped him around like that. She should have been a bit more patient. This however in no way excuses what Sorin does next. He basically does the equivalent of reacting to his angry step daughter slapping him by chaining her up in a sensory deprivation torture chamber with a horde of Hell's most vile demons for the rest of eternity. This is a fate considerably worse than being tortured to death for days with blow torches and pliers. Seriously, that is some next level evil right there. He didn't just do this to some enemy or even a stranger, this is what he did to his old friend for no other reason than she got a bit rough with him after he broke his promise to her. Never was his life in danger. She had made it quite clear what her intentions were and they were not to kill him, but simply to force him to make good on his word whether he liked it or not.
Unexplained nothing. Many of this block's stories have featured her descent and the motivations behind it, and her sympathisers are desperate enough to ignore them.
I was pretty clear with what I meant, if you're going to respond to me, respond to me and not a strawman. Her turn to pure villainy isn't adequately explained from the character she used to be. Getting revenge on Sorin is one thing. Dooming his whole plane because of one guy's actions is a whole other level.
Your presumption is that her actions are villainous. They are at worst neutral in the grand scheme of things. She spared one innocent plane and directed Emrukul to Innistrad and doomed it instead. In the grand scheme of things her actions didn't kill any more innocent people than would have died anyway. Her reasons were a selfish sense of vengeance and poetic justice but her actual actions aren't really detrimental in the grand scheme of things. The universe pretty much breaks even for what she did. As she said herself, Emrakul had to go somewhere. This is in stark contrast with what Sorin pulled where his selfish actions directly led countless millions of more innocents dying than would otherwise have, ultimately including his own kin on Innistrad.
Had he not broken his oath and cast the Eldrazi's jailer into that eternal torture chamber he designed to hold his enemies then the Eldrazi's warden would have still been on the job preventing their escape. He wasn't just negligent in his duties to help keep them locked up, he directly interfered with and dispatched the one being capable of properly tending to their prison. Nahiri just switched some of the victims that resulted from Sorin's selfish and treacherous actions which ultimately led to the Titans being freed. Nahiri didn't really do anything to increase the grand death toll caused by Sorin's treachery. She just made sure that some of the people who were destined to die were the ones he cared about rather than the ones she did.
She's certainly no hero, but calling her a full blown villain is maybe pushing it a bit. Even if you consider her a bad guy, she certainly isn't the same caliber of villain that Sorin is, for instance. She reminds me of Beatrix from Kill Bill. Not really a villain, but not really a good guy either.
Where do I even begin?
- I take it you're not taking into account that she didn't intend to seal Emrakul. Meaning there was no reason she had to drop it on Innistrad. Per her own admission, she just wanted Emrakul out of Zendikar. Per her own admission, she wanted to damn a random plane, and just got decided to use Sorin's as means to get revenge.
This is not a case of sacrificing one thing for the greater good. This is by all means an extremely pointless, petty sacrifice.
- Except Sorin did eventually come to honour his deal (see: original Zendikar block). He thought that using Nahiri was his personal guard dog on Zendikar worked on the grand scheme of things, but came to understand otherwise. Granted, his actions to Nahiri were heinous, but he did realise that his negligence wasn't getting him anywhere.
- If anything, Sorin is much more justified here since he isn't killing thousands for pointless reasons.
I never implied what Nahiri did to sate her lust for vengeance and justice was for the greater good. All I did was point out that what she did basically didn't cause anymore loss of innocent life than was already going to be lost due to the series of events Sorin's selfish and treacherous actions set into motion to begin with.
Sorin broke his promise to his allies, Nahiri and Ugin, and when confronted about it, cast the Edlrazi's only warden into a dungeon with a pack of demons for a thousand years. In the warden's absence the Eldrazi inevitably ended up getting free and started munching on planes killing millions of innocent people.
At this point Sorin was given yet another opportunity to choose to honor his oath and take the greater good into consideration and release from his dungeon the one person in the multiverse capable of sealing away the Eldrazi. Ugin, the other walker he had made an ancient pact with concerning the imprisonment of the Eldrazi, strait up demanded Sorin find Nahiri and put aside whatever petty differences he had with her so that they could all put right what had gone so terribly wrong and prevent further loss of innocent life.
He chose instead not to honor is promise or listen to Ugin. Rather than ruin his precious dungeon to free his old friend so that the Eldrazi threat could be properly taken care of he decided instead to let the multi-verse rot and condemned millions to die. Sorin didn't just make one or two careless mistakes. He intentionally put his own selfish desires ahead of those of his friends and the entire multi-verse repeatedly. He broke his oath, condemned his former friend and ally to an eternal Hell of his own design and in doing so condemned countless millions to be devoured by the Elrdrazi. Unlike Nahiri his selfish and treacherous actions led to a net loss of millions of innocent lives.
Interesting topic. I've been playing since back when mirage came out and the only time I have noticed a real difference in card complexity and wordiness is between the core sets and the normal blocks. The core sets were always very noticeably simplified and lacking in complexity. Magic has always had some wordy and complex cards. I would say that the craziest cards, as in the ones I could not understand without reading through them multiple times, are generally limited to some of the really old sets.
Unexplained nothing. Many of this block's stories have featured her descent and the motivations behind it, and her sympathisers are desperate enough to ignore them.
I was pretty clear with what I meant, if you're going to respond to me, respond to me and not a strawman. Her turn to pure villainy isn't adequately explained from the character she used to be. Getting revenge on Sorin is one thing. Dooming his whole plane because of one guy's actions is a whole other level.
Your presumption is that her actions are villainous. They are at worst neutral in the grand scheme of things. She spared one innocent plane and directed Emrukul to Innistrad and doomed it instead. In the grand scheme of things her actions didn't kill any more innocent people than would have died anyway. Her reasons were a selfish sense of vengeance and poetic justice but her actual actions aren't really detrimental in the grand scheme of things. The universe pretty much breaks even for what she did. As she said herself, Emrakul had to go somewhere. This is in stark contrast with what Sorin pulled where his selfish actions directly led to countless millions of more innocents dying than would otherwise have, ultimately including his own kin on Innistrad.
Had he not broken his oath and cast the Eldrazi's jailer into that eternal torture chamber he designed to hold his enemies then the Eldrazi's warden would have still been on the job preventing their escape. He wasn't just negligent in his duties to help keep them locked up, he directly interfered with and dispatched the one being capable of properly tending to their prison. Nahiri just switched some of the victims that resulted from Sorin's selfish actions. Nahiri didn't really do anything to increase the grand death toll caused by that chain of events he set into motion by casting his old friend into the Hell vault for a thousand years of torture. She just made sure that some of the people who were destined to die because of him were the ones he cared about rather than other innocents.
She's certainly no hero, but calling her a full blown villain is maybe pushing it a bit. Even if you consider her a bad guy, she certainly isn't the same caliber of villain that Sorin is, for instance. She reminds me of Beatrix from Kill Bill. Not really a villain, but not really a good guy either.
He's not dead. He got carbonited for when Creative wants another revenge story.
Although I guess, sooner or later, one of them will die for good. Don't see a way out of that little spiral of hate.
Surely now that they are even, or at least they will be after Sorin spends a thousand more years with his insides being put through a stone blender, they will hug it out and have a good laugh about their little spat.
No, the real life equivalent is fire bombing a corrupted ghetto filled with murders, rapists and drug lords, because the king pin pissed you off. That's how Nahiri sees it.
Really? Where did she voice a sentiment like that?
And, quite frankly, even if she did, that argument is just asking to get Godwined.
The only time we are given any inkling of what Nahiri thinks of Inistrad is in the following excerpt:
"They called her the Harbinger. They weren't wrong, these fanatics and cultists, and they had followed her here, growing in number as she set about her work on Innistrad. They were devoted to her, and they reminded Nahiri that the only thing worth saving in this whole damned world was her revenge."
Nahiri obviously doesn't think much of Innistrad, but at no point does she say this is her primary reason for diverting Emrakul from murdering Zendikar or where ever else she may have been, to doing the same to Inistrad. She quite clearly states that her reason for changing Emrakul's target was because Emrakul had to go somewhere and she figured what better place than the home town of the guy who is most responsible for Emrakul being set free. It also just so happens that this is the same guy that condemned Nahiri to a fate worse than death by banishing her to a featureless Hell populated entirely by the most vile and evil entities found on all of Inistrad for a thousand mind breaking years.
So she basically saved one plane and exchanged it's fate with Inistrad's because she figured if any plane needs to die it might as well be the one that belongs to the dick whose betrayal led the Eldrazi to being freed in the first place. Plus she personally wants to see the guy responsible shed tears of blood for what he has done. It's very hard to argue that Nahiri is the good guy at this point. She is seeking personal vengeance more so than serving a greater sense of justice. In the big picture her actions are basically neutral as far as the greater good goes. She has saved as many people as she has condemned. She saved one plane by dooming another. This is in stark contrast to Sorin whose selfish actions have led to the death of millions more innocents than would have otherwise died. Had the Eldrazi's jailer been there to watch over their prison instead of trapped in a featureless Hell of Sorin's making, both Zendikar and Inistrad would have been spared.
Nahiri heading after Ugin seems very likely now. And her toolkit seems to be pretty impressive. Being able to mess with leylines so easily. Though I wonder if that's only because of all the cryptoliths, might be she can't do that normally.
Nahiri doesn't really have a beef with Ugin other than that she might be slightly peeved and curious as to why he didn't answer the Godzilla hotline when she called. It's not like with Sorin where he basically intentionally broke his oath. Then when Nahiri confronted him about it and did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm to force him to make good on his broken word, he responded by casting her into the Hellvault, a fate considerably worse than death.
Basically he sentenced her to eternity in a featureless void and screaming Hell populated entirely with the darkest and most evil beings on Instradad. Nahiri then spent the next thousand years rotting in Sorin's ultimate torture chamber while her home plane was eaten by the same monsters he had sworn to protect it from. Worse than that, by locking her away and refusing to re-open the vault to let the Eldrazi's warden out to do her job, he was the one that ultimately doomed Zendikar and allowed the Titans to lay waste to most of the living things on the plane.
I mean there is a huge difference between that and not answering the Godzilla phone which so far is Ugin's only sin. Now if Nahiri goes to ask Ugin what's up with the blocked phone calls and he turns around and has demons rape her for a few thousand years while he time travels back to gather her family and torture them to death in front of her, then she would have a similiar level of motivation for some vengeance on Ugin.
I like Stormbreath Dragon better as the second five drop midrange dragon. Hexproof this is not.
Hexproof this certainly is not, but in some instances this is considerably better than hexproof. The other thing to keep in mind is this is a red card. How often does red get a solid beater with any sort of decent removal protection? This is a unique card. I would rather have a solid unique card that allows different deck building options than a slightly better card that is just more of the same that already exists in the card pool.
I have a vampire deck this might work in, particularly now that we have reached the critical number of viable discard outlets for that shell. It already runs Avaricious Dragon so I usually end up Hellbent in pretty short order anyway.
The way WotC trickles out spoilers, times the release of their stories, crafts their teasers and trailers etc. are all part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign that countless man hours of research and implementation have gone into. The reason WotC is willing to sink millions of dollars into this marketing strategy is because it is a key part of promoting, hyping and selling their product. To suggest that having almost every hype generating and future meta defining card in a set spoiled two sets ahead of time won't have an impact on their bottom line is very silly. I am not a marketing expert nor do I work of WotC so calculating the exact details of the coming financial impact is beyond me but one thing is certain which is it has completely derailed their entire multi-million dollar marketing strategy for the next half a year.
With a company like MTG the intellectual property is the product. We will see most of the rare and mythic cards from Ixilan available to play on various third party MTG software proxies probably within a week or two. Half of that sets meta will be solved before a single card even hits the market. It's similiar to a movie in this respect. If a blurry incomplete copy of a movie is leaked months before it is released in theaters it's ticket sales are decimated. Sure watching that crappy blurry version is nothing like getting to see it glorious Imax 3d, but it will completely gut the hype regardless. Ixilan will literally be old news before it even hits the shelves. MTG is a huge game world wide. It's sales are upwards of 300 million dollars a year, so if the leak costs them even just a few percentage points of their sales for the set then the hit will be in the millions of dollars. Talking to a buddy of mine who is a marketing major he thinks the losses will likely be considerably higher than that.
It's a shame. MTG has been limping along for a while now. The last thing it needed was a huge kick in the teeth while it was trying to get back on its feet again.
That's exactly what I just said. Sorin breaks his word and refuses to do his job in about as condescending and insulting manner as he can muster. Nahiri gets pissed and and does the planeswalker equivalent of losing her temper and slapping him across the face by running him through a couple of times while telling him that he is going to do his job even if she has to force him to. In old walker terms, that's basically a ***** slap followed by twisting somebody's arm to get them to say uncle, nothing even approaching a real injury let alone a life threatening one. Like I pointed out earlier Sorin has strait up shattered Nahiri's arm in the past during a simple training exercise just to show her how her body worked now that she was a planeswalker. Planes walkers play rough and their little sparing match after Nahirir tells him that she's going to make him do his job even if she has to force him to is nothing even remotely approaching mortal combat. Old walkers were essentially Gods.
The only point in the fight were things go from Nahari roughing Sorin up a bit for being a lying prick and twisting his arm to make him acquiesce to keeping his broken promise to actual real combat is when Sorin's newly created monster jumps in and actually tries to kill Nahiri. Even then Nahiri isn't really in mortal peril simply because she is an old walker and Avacyn is not. Nahiri gets the upper hand while fighting his rabid attack dog and this is the point where Sorin calmly steps in and banishes Nahiri to a fate worse than death and then leaves her there to rot in his own little personal sensory deprivation torture chamber for the rest of eternity. Go back and read that part of the story again. Literally everything Sorin says and does completely flies in the face of him in any way fearing for his life. He isn't even being attacked when he does it.
I would have to agree with that. Nahiri pulled a total Sorin with Gisa. She just strait up used her. Nahiri did apparently manage to pick up a few tricks from her old teacher.
You're right I got one of the events slightly out of order although that really doesn't change much. Sorin doesn't go looking for Ugin until after he has botched his mission by choosing to bring a poorly qualified and hot headed neo-walker to the Eye of Ugin to try and get her to fix the Eldrazi mess rather than freeing the one person in the multi-verse that is actually qualified to do so. The results of that poor and selfish choice led to said hot headed elf freeing the Eldrazi. Sorin had already screwed things up so horribly by not letting Nahiri out to fix the problem before it was too late, that by the time he talks to Ugin there simply is no way to fix it. Sorin has already made his fatal and selfish errors in judgement prior to that conversation. Still, all of the mistakes he made and the selfish reasons behind them remain exactly the same regardless of whether he had the conversation with Ugin before or after the fact.
Sorin has no reason to believe she is lying to him. She isn't some stranger who just shows up and attacks him without explanation. They are old friends. If your old friend came by and got angry at you for breaking a promise, then slapped you and stated quite clearly that she was going to make you go do your job even if she had to use force would you then turn around and shoot her in the face fearing for your life? Even if you look at it from a completely utilitarian and logical perspective and ignore the fact they are are friends, why would somebody who needs you alive to help them attempt to kill you?
She strait up told him what her intent was. Sorin at no point showed any indication he was actually afraid she was trying to kill him, or any fear at all of her for that matter, only irritation that she would have the audacity to confront him about his broken promise and to challenge him in his own home. Sorin didn't like that his student had gotten the upper hand and he was no longer in control of the situation and decided rather than take the defeat and agree to help her he banished her for eternity in a sensory deprivation torture chamber full of demons. Unless Sorin is autistic or perhaps seriously mentally ill there really is not excuse for his psychotic level of escalation and retaliation and certainly no excuse for him not letting her back out of his dungeon once he regained his strength.
Nahiri never at any point in their initial confrontation threatened his life. She did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm behind his back to try and force him into honor the promise he had broken. Nahiri even strait up tells him her intent is to drag him back to Zendikar by force if necessary and make him do his damn job. She makes it quite clear she intends to drag him there alive so they can finish the work together. She doesn't leave it ambiguous. She at no point tells him or implies that she harbors murderous intent or even a desire to do him real harm. Planes walkers play rough. I mean Sorin strait up shattered her arm at one point while sparing just to teach her a lesson about how her body worked when she was younger.
Sorin's actions right up until he casts her into the Helvault and then leaves her to rot are very understandable if a bit selfish and arrogant. I was seriously on his side up until this point. Nahiri has the right to be pissed, but she shouldn't have slapped him around like that. She should have been a bit more patient. This however in no way excuses what Sorin does next. He basically does the equivalent of reacting to his angry step daughter slapping him by chaining her up in a sensory deprivation torture chamber with a horde of Hell's most vile demons for the rest of eternity. This is a fate considerably worse than being tortured to death for days with blow torches and pliers. Seriously, that is some next level evil right there. He didn't just do this to some enemy or even a stranger, this is what he did to his old friend for no other reason than she got a bit rough with him after he broke his promise to her. Never was his life in danger. She had made it quite clear what her intentions were and they were not to kill him, but simply to force him to make good on his word whether he liked it or not.
I never implied what Nahiri did to sate her lust for vengeance and justice was for the greater good. All I did was point out that what she did basically didn't cause anymore loss of innocent life than was already going to be lost due to the series of events Sorin's selfish and treacherous actions set into motion to begin with.
Sorin broke his promise to his allies, Nahiri and Ugin, and when confronted about it, cast the Edlrazi's only warden into a dungeon with a pack of demons for a thousand years. In the warden's absence the Eldrazi inevitably ended up getting free and started munching on planes killing millions of innocent people.
At this point Sorin was given yet another opportunity to choose to honor his oath and take the greater good into consideration and release from his dungeon the one person in the multiverse capable of sealing away the Eldrazi. Ugin, the other walker he had made an ancient pact with concerning the imprisonment of the Eldrazi, strait up demanded Sorin find Nahiri and put aside whatever petty differences he had with her so that they could all put right what had gone so terribly wrong and prevent further loss of innocent life.
He chose instead not to honor is promise or listen to Ugin. Rather than ruin his precious dungeon to free his old friend so that the Eldrazi threat could be properly taken care of he decided instead to let the multi-verse rot and condemned millions to die. Sorin didn't just make one or two careless mistakes. He intentionally put his own selfish desires ahead of those of his friends and the entire multi-verse repeatedly. He broke his oath, condemned his former friend and ally to an eternal Hell of his own design and in doing so condemned countless millions to be devoured by the Elrdrazi. Unlike Nahiri his selfish and treacherous actions led to a net loss of millions of innocent lives.
Your presumption is that her actions are villainous. They are at worst neutral in the grand scheme of things. She spared one innocent plane and directed Emrukul to Innistrad and doomed it instead. In the grand scheme of things her actions didn't kill any more innocent people than would have died anyway. Her reasons were a selfish sense of vengeance and poetic justice but her actual actions aren't really detrimental in the grand scheme of things. The universe pretty much breaks even for what she did. As she said herself, Emrakul had to go somewhere. This is in stark contrast with what Sorin pulled where his selfish actions directly led to countless millions of more innocents dying than would otherwise have, ultimately including his own kin on Innistrad.
Had he not broken his oath and cast the Eldrazi's jailer into that eternal torture chamber he designed to hold his enemies then the Eldrazi's warden would have still been on the job preventing their escape. He wasn't just negligent in his duties to help keep them locked up, he directly interfered with and dispatched the one being capable of properly tending to their prison. Nahiri just switched some of the victims that resulted from Sorin's selfish actions. Nahiri didn't really do anything to increase the grand death toll caused by that chain of events he set into motion by casting his old friend into the Hell vault for a thousand years of torture. She just made sure that some of the people who were destined to die because of him were the ones he cared about rather than other innocents.
She's certainly no hero, but calling her a full blown villain is maybe pushing it a bit. Even if you consider her a bad guy, she certainly isn't the same caliber of villain that Sorin is, for instance. She reminds me of Beatrix from Kill Bill. Not really a villain, but not really a good guy either.
Surely now that they are even, or at least they will be after Sorin spends a thousand more years with his insides being put through a stone blender, they will hug it out and have a good laugh about their little spat.
The only time we are given any inkling of what Nahiri thinks of Inistrad is in the following excerpt:
"They called her the Harbinger. They weren't wrong, these fanatics and cultists, and they had followed her here, growing in number as she set about her work on Innistrad. They were devoted to her, and they reminded Nahiri that the only thing worth saving in this whole damned world was her revenge."
Nahiri obviously doesn't think much of Innistrad, but at no point does she say this is her primary reason for diverting Emrakul from murdering Zendikar or where ever else she may have been, to doing the same to Inistrad. She quite clearly states that her reason for changing Emrakul's target was because Emrakul had to go somewhere and she figured what better place than the home town of the guy who is most responsible for Emrakul being set free. It also just so happens that this is the same guy that condemned Nahiri to a fate worse than death by banishing her to a featureless Hell populated entirely by the most vile and evil entities found on all of Inistrad for a thousand mind breaking years.
So she basically saved one plane and exchanged it's fate with Inistrad's because she figured if any plane needs to die it might as well be the one that belongs to the dick whose betrayal led the Eldrazi to being freed in the first place. Plus she personally wants to see the guy responsible shed tears of blood for what he has done. It's very hard to argue that Nahiri is the good guy at this point. She is seeking personal vengeance more so than serving a greater sense of justice. In the big picture her actions are basically neutral as far as the greater good goes. She has saved as many people as she has condemned. She saved one plane by dooming another. This is in stark contrast to Sorin whose selfish actions have led to the death of millions more innocents than would have otherwise died. Had the Eldrazi's jailer been there to watch over their prison instead of trapped in a featureless Hell of Sorin's making, both Zendikar and Inistrad would have been spared.
Nahiri is no saint, not anymore anyway.
Nahiri doesn't really have a beef with Ugin other than that she might be slightly peeved and curious as to why he didn't answer the Godzilla hotline when she called. It's not like with Sorin where he basically intentionally broke his oath. Then when Nahiri confronted him about it and did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm to force him to make good on his broken word, he responded by casting her into the Hellvault, a fate considerably worse than death.
Basically he sentenced her to eternity in a featureless void and screaming Hell populated entirely with the darkest and most evil beings on Instradad. Nahiri then spent the next thousand years rotting in Sorin's ultimate torture chamber while her home plane was eaten by the same monsters he had sworn to protect it from. Worse than that, by locking her away and refusing to re-open the vault to let the Eldrazi's warden out to do her job, he was the one that ultimately doomed Zendikar and allowed the Titans to lay waste to most of the living things on the plane.
I mean there is a huge difference between that and not answering the Godzilla phone which so far is Ugin's only sin. Now if Nahiri goes to ask Ugin what's up with the blocked phone calls and he turns around and has demons rape her for a few thousand years while he time travels back to gather her family and torture them to death in front of her, then she would have a similiar level of motivation for some vengeance on Ugin.
Hexproof this certainly is not, but in some instances this is considerably better than hexproof. The other thing to keep in mind is this is a red card. How often does red get a solid beater with any sort of decent removal protection? This is a unique card. I would rather have a solid unique card that allows different deck building options than a slightly better card that is just more of the same that already exists in the card pool.