Let's talk about Fountain of Ichor please.
That's the bloody Phyrexian liquid. Phyrexian liquid ON IXALAN.
At the end of WAR, Tezzeret claimed that, with Bolas out of the way, he's now free to act on his own accord. He was one with the Panar Bridge, and knowing him he probably has the means of recreating it: you know, the artifact capable of transporting entire armies of half-artifact zombies across dimensions. You know, half-artifact zombies SUCH AS THE PHYREXIANS. Phyrexians with whom Tezzeret has already interacted in canon, I hasten to add.
Am I reading too much into this?
As far as I am aware, modern phyrexians (and possibly old phyrexians) are not zombies (or at least not all of them are).
Of course, the portal can be used in its current state to transport glistening oil or be perfected to allow certain life to survive its use.
The flavor text for Lazotep Behemoth is a perfect example of what I mean. A monster like that should be absolutely terrifying, it's an enormous undead zombie beast, it's definitely not something that a normal soldier should be taking lightly.
Yup, even a charging normal hyppo would be enough to terrorize a normal soldier, an undead beast from an other world should be even more frightening. I know that on Ravnica there are wurms, giants and ogres, but the existence of these creatures shouldn't be enough to make light of something that could nevertheless kill you...
In the face of a stressful situation, some people will resort to humor as a coping mechanism. This is especially true when the stressful situation is particularly ridiculous and/or absurd. I know that I personally have cracked many jokes throughout occasions when I was in quite intense pain (appendicitis, breaking a bone, falling through a floor/ceiling to the floor below, etc...).
ROFL it destroys itself if the other player has no artifacts. This sword is GARBAGE!
It says up to one target planeswalker and up to one target artifact. As such, you can choose to destroy a planeswalker, an artifact, one of each, or absolutely nothing at your discretion once the equipped creature does combat damage to a player.
I don't get why Bolas randomly kills Domri for like no reason. I mean its not like he needs anyones spark specifically. So him stabbing his help in the back just seems dumb and to show look he is evil. Like killing your underlings cause they screwed up fine...killing your underlings for no reason doesn't make the bad guy look scary it makes them look dumb and incompetent.
I believe it was already brought up that Domri really didn't serve Bolas. He was in the war to spread chaos and tear down civilization, and wanted to offer his allegiance to Bolas in the middle of all the fighting since the latter was leading a major assault on Ravnica.
To Bolas, Domri was just a nobody, who may or may not be useful to him, offering to serve him out of nowhere (plausibly in a bid to ensure their survival). I really don't blame Bolas for just offing him without further thought.
I mean they killed all the characters established in the movie. Also technically Saw was established in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. So they did kill a character they established previously.
I am confused you wanted them to establish the main cast of Rogue One in some shorts before killing them? I think Alien established most of those randoms in shorts cause most of that cast did very little before getting killed.
It was brought up in this thread that Rogue One was a good example of setting the stakes high. I just wanted to point out the contradiction of this with the statements of posters in this thread that the deaths don't 'really matter' if the characters weren't established prior (the Alien Covenant bit was merely addressing the fact that Rogue One's characters could have been established prior to the movie even if they were only meant for the one movie).
To that end I proposed the question as to if people honestly thought that introducing an entirely new cast of characters to fight against, die because of, and stop Bolas would really be an improvement to what we got. I'm sincerely curious as to what people want out the Magic storyline as I get the impression that some people want nothing short of the decimation of the protagonists' numbers prior to their success.
Yes, Yawgmoth killed off more major characters than Bolas. SO WHAT?!? Nobody disputes that Yawgmoth was a bigger threat than Bolas, but that doesn't somehow mean that other antagonists can't be a threat unless they outdo him (especially since the majority of the means and people who managed to put up a defensive against Yawgmoth are now dead, gone, or no longer functional).
Yes, the Eldrazi didn't kill off many major characters. Our major characters are planeswalkers, and the Eldrazi never posed much threat to planeswalkers in the first place (as they are only concerned with consuming planes, all a planeswalker has to do is stay out of their way and/or leave and they'll be safe). The threat of the Eldrazi were always to non-planeswalkers and the planes themselves (which may or may not matter to a given planeswalker). Sorin and Nahiri weren't moved to imprison them out of concern for themselves, but for the safety of their planes and people (and in Nahiri's case, the safety of the people of other planes). The only threat the Eldrazi posed to a planeswalker was if said planeswalker deliberately got in front of one and refused to walk away (and the only one who did that on a regular basis was a practically invulnerable beefcake).
I mean they couldn't kill off established characters. This is right before the Original Trilogy Starts. I mean I guess they could have killed some minor characters but that be like killing randoms in the background.
That doesn't stop them from establishing the characters prior to the movie and their demise.
Alien: Covenant did this via the release of several shorts (2 prologues, a series of crew messages, and an advertisement for the crew's synthetic assistant) that introduced us to the characters prior to the movie's release.
Point remains that Rogue One offed a bunch of non-established characters in a scenario where we knew their mission would succeed. I fail to see how that's a case of higher stakes (especially since we knew that no major characters could possibly die since we'd already seen them alive afterwards0 in regards to the major characters of a setting dying than War of the Spark (where we at least get a major character death).
Different Medium. Movies have less time to play with and yet routinely make people care about characters. By your logic no one should ever be affected by the deaths in movies. Which is of course patently absurd. WOTC though uses what short stories and books? They have more time to develop walkers and yet didn't do much of anything with Dack or Domri before hand. Now I suppose you could argue that Domri and Dack will get good development in the actual book but given the number of characters this book juggles and based on Greg Weisman work on YJ S2 and S3...yeah I am going to say he won't pull it off.
I'd agree with you if Rogue One were a standalone movie, but it's not. Star Wars is a long-standing franchise, with many movies (and until recently an entire extended universe to draw from). They had the opportunity to kill off established characters (and did upon occasion in other movies) and the opportunity to establish the characters who were going to die. The fact, however, remains that they chose to introduce and kill off entirely new characters in Rogue One, which would be exactly like if an entirely new team was introduced in War of the Spark to beat Bolas and take heavy casualties in the process.
I mean, would people really be happier with the War of the Spark storyline if instead of what we have we got 5 brand new planeswalkers that worked together to beat Bolas but all/most were killed in the process/
Your last paragraph is therefore probably a strawman argument. You're debating with yourself a point I never made.
If Rogue One had good stakes because any of the characters (whom we had no investment in prior to the movie and who are only named main characters in the one movie) could have died, how would that have been any different than introducing a brand new group of planeswalkers/Ravnican citizens to War of the Spark so that they can stop Bolas and suffer heavy casualties? Would such a change have really improved the story?
Or would we just be getting complaints, as we are now, that few or no established characters were killed off?
In War of the Spark, we had 1 well established planeswalker, 2 relatively minor planeswalkers, and an unknown number of civilians and unnamed planeswalkers die.
In Rogue One, we had many characters die, all of whom either weren't established (having been created just for the movie) or were unnamed background characters.
When it comes to killing off characters that 'actually matter' (per the complaints voiced in this thread), War of the Spark managed at least one to Rogue One's zero.
You look at Rogue One in isolation. Then the movie has high stakes for everyone involved. Rogue One has high stakes in it. If the good guys fail things go bad. Just because it is a prequel doesn't mean that the stakes in the movie itself aren't high. The story and the characters can't predict the future. To them the stakes are high.
But it's not in isolation, so why would I treat it like it was?
Doing so would be like if I ignored the Chandra comic and spent the War of the Spark spoiler season worrying whether or not she and Tibalt would survive or being concerned that Bolas would succeed. At least with the Chandra comic I was left with the possibility that characters not known to be in it could die, but we knew anybody of importance in Rogue One that wasn't in the other movies wasn't going to make it (or if they did we'd be complaining about how their survival created plot holes x, y, and z).
Those of you who have seen some of my other posts know that I get a bit wordy. But whatevs, I will word it up again.
Stakes. Stakes, man.
One thing I really, really liked about Star Wars: Rogue One was the concept of ‘stakes.’ The fate of the universe hinges on this one team pulling off the impossible. And as they start proving successful, we’re feeling good, until, uh oh, one of them dies. Okay, well, that’s just one. And then another main character dies. And then another. And another. Suddenly, you realize this is *for real*. The Good Guys have gone up against the Bad Guys, and you begin to realize there’s a chance the Good Guys don’t make it out. Every moment, every death, has gravitas now, even though we’ve only just met them. Now we see just how powerful and dangerous the Empire is. Now we see why the galaxy is right to fear them. So much death and loss, and then, at the very end . . . Hope.
I can’t remember another movie like that. Maybe the original Magnificent Seven, with Brenner? In LOTR, none of the major characters really died apart from Theoden and Boromir.
Rogue One is arguably on of the worst movies to use as an example of setting the stakes well.
As a prequel, we knew the team would succeed in their mission because we'd already seen the results of their success in a movie that came out long prior to Rogue One. There was never a chance of failure.
You could argue that the deaths raise the stakes, but even that falls through when you put a bit more thought into it:
Who dies? Characters introduced specifically for this movie who we have no prior interest in (a small step above no name background characters since they are our central protagonists for this single movie).
Why do they die? Simple, the Star Wars franchise has experience with prequel-related plot holes. By killing off any and all new 'important' characters introduced in this prequel, they avoid the question of where these 'important' people were during the movies that followed them and why they weren't helping out. And we know this is the case, because they used that same tactic with the Solo movie and killing off characters in it.
With no chance of failure and the no chance for brand new characters to survive, how were the stakes high again?
I mean, would people really be happier with the War of the Spark storyline if instead of what we have we got 5 brand new planeswalkers that worked together to beat Bolas but all/most were killed in the process/
Yeah, this set feels a little bit like a "Return to Amonkhet". Samut should have brought Djeru to help fight, but I guess ordinary people can't planeswalk. Makes me wonder how that chinese planeswalker guy is able to bring his dog wherever he goes..
He summons the dog just like we summon all the creatures we play... but summoning someone isn't the same as them being there, it isn't really them it's more like a copy of a memory (they aren't pulled out of their life, and the next time you summon them they shouldn't remember the last time you summoned them for example).
Not a big deal for a pet dog, but for a human friend... doesn't work.
I seem to remember MaRo confirming that Jiang actually planeswalks with Mowu, and that his ability to transport a non-planeswalker applies exclusively to Mowu.
Everything, including worn items, seems to turn to stone with Vraska's gorgon gaze. Given this statue's golden horn sheathes and eyes, I'd guess that this statue is, and has only ever been, a statue.
As was pointed out in the Ixalan story, Ravnica is practically inundated with hieromancy. As we should also remember from the Ixalan story, Azor originally planned to pull Bolas onto Ixalan using his skill with hieromancy boosted by the power of the immortal sun to target a specific point in the multiverse at Ugin's signal.
Project lighting bug then provides the method of targeting those who are planeswalking/trying to planeswalk and then pull them toward Ravnica by utilizing the plane's natural hieromancy. Then, the immortal sun stops them from leaving.
In other words, no other known plane possesses strong natural hieromancy to draw Bolas's tragets to the plane. Add into that the role the guildpact and immortal sun would seem to play in casting the elder spell (Nissa's vision), and Ravnica becomes the plane of choice even without full control of it.
As far as I am aware, modern phyrexians (and possibly old phyrexians) are not zombies (or at least not all of them are).
Of course, the portal can be used in its current state to transport glistening oil or be perfected to allow certain life to survive its use.
In the face of a stressful situation, some people will resort to humor as a coping mechanism. This is especially true when the stressful situation is particularly ridiculous and/or absurd. I know that I personally have cracked many jokes throughout occasions when I was in quite intense pain (appendicitis, breaking a bone, falling through a floor/ceiling to the floor below, etc...).
Honor and glory sounds too much like it would be RW to me. I vote King and Country for the GW sword.
It says up to one target planeswalker and up to one target artifact. As such, you can choose to destroy a planeswalker, an artifact, one of each, or absolutely nothing at your discretion once the equipped creature does combat damage to a player.
I believe it was already brought up that Domri really didn't serve Bolas. He was in the war to spread chaos and tear down civilization, and wanted to offer his allegiance to Bolas in the middle of all the fighting since the latter was leading a major assault on Ravnica.
To Bolas, Domri was just a nobody, who may or may not be useful to him, offering to serve him out of nowhere (plausibly in a bid to ensure their survival). I really don't blame Bolas for just offing him without further thought.
It was brought up in this thread that Rogue One was a good example of setting the stakes high. I just wanted to point out the contradiction of this with the statements of posters in this thread that the deaths don't 'really matter' if the characters weren't established prior (the Alien Covenant bit was merely addressing the fact that Rogue One's characters could have been established prior to the movie even if they were only meant for the one movie).
To that end I proposed the question as to if people honestly thought that introducing an entirely new cast of characters to fight against, die because of, and stop Bolas would really be an improvement to what we got. I'm sincerely curious as to what people want out the Magic storyline as I get the impression that some people want nothing short of the decimation of the protagonists' numbers prior to their success.
Yes, Yawgmoth killed off more major characters than Bolas. SO WHAT?!? Nobody disputes that Yawgmoth was a bigger threat than Bolas, but that doesn't somehow mean that other antagonists can't be a threat unless they outdo him (especially since the majority of the means and people who managed to put up a defensive against Yawgmoth are now dead, gone, or no longer functional).
Yes, the Eldrazi didn't kill off many major characters. Our major characters are planeswalkers, and the Eldrazi never posed much threat to planeswalkers in the first place (as they are only concerned with consuming planes, all a planeswalker has to do is stay out of their way and/or leave and they'll be safe). The threat of the Eldrazi were always to non-planeswalkers and the planes themselves (which may or may not matter to a given planeswalker). Sorin and Nahiri weren't moved to imprison them out of concern for themselves, but for the safety of their planes and people (and in Nahiri's case, the safety of the people of other planes). The only threat the Eldrazi posed to a planeswalker was if said planeswalker deliberately got in front of one and refused to walk away (and the only one who did that on a regular basis was a practically invulnerable beefcake).
That doesn't stop them from establishing the characters prior to the movie and their demise.
Alien: Covenant did this via the release of several shorts (2 prologues, a series of crew messages, and an advertisement for the crew's synthetic assistant) that introduced us to the characters prior to the movie's release.
Point remains that Rogue One offed a bunch of non-established characters in a scenario where we knew their mission would succeed. I fail to see how that's a case of higher stakes (especially since we knew that no major characters could possibly die since we'd already seen them alive afterwards0 in regards to the major characters of a setting dying than War of the Spark (where we at least get a major character death).
I'd agree with you if Rogue One were a standalone movie, but it's not. Star Wars is a long-standing franchise, with many movies (and until recently an entire extended universe to draw from). They had the opportunity to kill off established characters (and did upon occasion in other movies) and the opportunity to establish the characters who were going to die. The fact, however, remains that they chose to introduce and kill off entirely new characters in Rogue One, which would be exactly like if an entirely new team was introduced in War of the Spark to beat Bolas and take heavy casualties in the process.
If Rogue One had good stakes because any of the characters (whom we had no investment in prior to the movie and who are only named main characters in the one movie) could have died, how would that have been any different than introducing a brand new group of planeswalkers/Ravnican citizens to War of the Spark so that they can stop Bolas and suffer heavy casualties? Would such a change have really improved the story?
Or would we just be getting complaints, as we are now, that few or no established characters were killed off?
In War of the Spark, we had 1 well established planeswalker, 2 relatively minor planeswalkers, and an unknown number of civilians and unnamed planeswalkers die.
In Rogue One, we had many characters die, all of whom either weren't established (having been created just for the movie) or were unnamed background characters.
When it comes to killing off characters that 'actually matter' (per the complaints voiced in this thread), War of the Spark managed at least one to Rogue One's zero.
But it's not in isolation, so why would I treat it like it was?
Doing so would be like if I ignored the Chandra comic and spent the War of the Spark spoiler season worrying whether or not she and Tibalt would survive or being concerned that Bolas would succeed. At least with the Chandra comic I was left with the possibility that characters not known to be in it could die, but we knew anybody of importance in Rogue One that wasn't in the other movies wasn't going to make it (or if they did we'd be complaining about how their survival created plot holes x, y, and z).
Rogue One is arguably on of the worst movies to use as an example of setting the stakes well.
As a prequel, we knew the team would succeed in their mission because we'd already seen the results of their success in a movie that came out long prior to Rogue One. There was never a chance of failure.
You could argue that the deaths raise the stakes, but even that falls through when you put a bit more thought into it:
Who dies? Characters introduced specifically for this movie who we have no prior interest in (a small step above no name background characters since they are our central protagonists for this single movie).
Why do they die? Simple, the Star Wars franchise has experience with prequel-related plot holes. By killing off any and all new 'important' characters introduced in this prequel, they avoid the question of where these 'important' people were during the movies that followed them and why they weren't helping out. And we know this is the case, because they used that same tactic with the Solo movie and killing off characters in it.
With no chance of failure and the no chance for brand new characters to survive, how were the stakes high again?
I mean, would people really be happier with the War of the Spark storyline if instead of what we have we got 5 brand new planeswalkers that worked together to beat Bolas but all/most were killed in the process/
I seem to remember MaRo confirming that Jiang actually planeswalks with Mowu, and that his ability to transport a non-planeswalker applies exclusively to Mowu.
Tibalt survives and lacks a plus ability on his card.
Everything, including worn items, seems to turn to stone with Vraska's gorgon gaze. Given this statue's golden horn sheathes and eyes, I'd guess that this statue is, and has only ever been, a statue.
As was pointed out in the Ixalan story, Ravnica is practically inundated with hieromancy. As we should also remember from the Ixalan story, Azor originally planned to pull Bolas onto Ixalan using his skill with hieromancy boosted by the power of the immortal sun to target a specific point in the multiverse at Ugin's signal.
Project lighting bug then provides the method of targeting those who are planeswalking/trying to planeswalk and then pull them toward Ravnica by utilizing the plane's natural hieromancy. Then, the immortal sun stops them from leaving.
In other words, no other known plane possesses strong natural hieromancy to draw Bolas's tragets to the plane. Add into that the role the guildpact and immortal sun would seem to play in casting the elder spell (Nissa's vision), and Ravnica becomes the plane of choice even without full control of it.