If Narset 1.0 DID depart Tarkir before Sarkhan's timeslip...that would be more interesting. It may mean she went elsewhere and remained unscathed, or she went elsewhere but as soon as Sarkhan fiddled with the past, she just straight up disappeared, because she never existed as 1.0. Interesting.
Doug has said that planeswalkers whose history are tied to Tarkir would not be exempt from the changes that may occur in their history. Narset 1.0 would have simply ceased to be where she was as if she had never been.
Since Narset is the topic of discussion, is there any particular reason why the original Narset didn't ignite her spark when she was cut by Zurgo? Most of the other walkers have had their sparks ignite under circumstances just as dire.
No event is guaranteed to trigger the spark. It theoretically could have, but there aren't really any certainties in dealing with that kind of probability.
Ugin now has a coterie of five Elder Dragons at his disposal. And a whole plane's worth of dragons. As well as the secret to time travelling via his nexus. Bolas believes Ugin is beaten. However, Ugin once healed, has the technology necessary to transport his Elder Dragons back to the age of the Elder Dragon War and prevent Bolas from ever coming into power.
There are two major problems with this:
The first is the fact that Ugin's Nexus is... his own dead body. It is likely that it was tied to a very specific moment of time rather than being capable of simply going back to a time of your choice.
The second is the mending stripping Ugin of the kind of power that would take in the first place.
They aren't going to pull this sort of Time Spiral silliness are there? Will we get a book to explain all of this?
That is an interesting perspective and I thank you for the observation. I agree that Ojutai had vengeance against the Jeskai for his race. Being a dragon I'm assuming that aggression, strength and violence are probably sewn into the core of his being. I am interested in his character moreso now because of this unique take on dragons (usually dragons are just vile bastards in Magic!)
Well, I do think it adds a little more understanding to his actions pertaining to Narset if he has a strong streak of loyalty in him for his brood. An attack against them being met with severe retribution could very well fit into the white ideals of "justice".
After taking on the Jeskai remnants, being very protective of them makes sense to me, even for the supposed heretics.
All over, the Ojutai are a distinct and intriguing blend of the two colors.
That I will agree with, good sir! I guess I just found it interesting that Ojutai and Narset smiled at each other at the end of the story. Perhaps Ojutai realized, before the fall of the khans, that he couldn't create the kind of balance HE thought was appropriate for the Jeskai unless the clans were revamped and dissenters against the new order had to be killed. It's probably why he decided to kill Shun Yu; because the Jeskai followed Shun Yu's teachings and he wanted them to follow his teachings instead.
All in all, though obviously Ojutai has murdered probably thousands in his lifetime, I cannot believe a being that seeks knowledge, zen and who clearly respects his pupils to be a heartless monster.
I, quite honestly, think there was a certain level of vengeance involved there. After all, the Jeskai had been murdering his brood for ages and really the only casualties of the coup were the Ghostfire warriors who... all earned their tattoos by killing a dragon.
Mind, I'm not saying your reading of the situation is wrong, just that it might have been multifaceted.
But Ojutai's teachings weren't lies, simply his version of history. At the end of the story her quest for knowledge led her to discover the truth of Tarkir which made her realize that Tarkir was a much stronger and better place because of Ojutai and perhaps the other dragon lords and that is why he smiled at the end of the uncharted realms; he wanted her NOT to follow a dragon but to find the dragon within herself, hence her transcendence.
But her spark had already ignited at that point and she'd chosen to stay on Tarkir until she understood.
It was the shock of learning that Ojutai had violently conquered the clan that triggered her spark.
We don't know when Narset left Tarkir, just it was before Sarkhan appeared in Tarkir1.1. Could she fill the roles Sarkhan played in Bolas's plots in Alera and Zendikar?
It's a possibility, but by the same measure, it'd be a little precipitous to speculate about that until we get a little more info.
Glad I'm not the only one who is wondering which plane was the first Narset planeswalked to when she awakened. If it was one full of knowledge, then I wonder if that plane was Blue-aligned, and perhaps was Ravnica?
I do not think it was Theros as Kruphix would have probably noted her the way he had Elspeth (assuming Theros is an old enough plane and his existence as god of mysteries there accommodates these time frames). Meddling gods hardly seems like an appropriate setting. Innistrad - maybe in the Avacyn days to see what a plane ruled by a superior benevolent power, and not humans, is like. But it still feels unlikely. Kamigawa would be the most intriguing plane for her to visit IMO, especially if she ended up near Minamo or Oboro.
Dragons of Tarkir takes place in the present.
And this is PRECISELY the reason why I kept ranting against those stupid souls from M15.
No world, from a flavor standpoint, leans towards any one color. Anything MaRo says about a world leaning towards a color is in regards to his position in design.
For all we know, she could have turned up on Iquatana. But it doesn't actually matter because this is a line of speculation that people are building on false premises, the idea that a walker will subconsciously be drawn to some world rather than the relatively nearest one.
And Ravnica isn't particularly any more full of knowledge than say... Dominaria or Kamigawa.
I just had another thought pop into my head. This continues the tradition we've had for awhile now of one of the first hints of a planeswalker spark is an unusual/prodigious affinity for magic. One of the few I've seen who didn't have it was Tibalt (and it shows) but even then, he may have been a prodigy just studying the wrong kind of magic.
Gideon and Tezzeret aren't particularly gifted mages either.
Also, I deleted some posts at the behest of the users (and posts pertaining to them)
Well, I wouldn't deem autism as touchy a subject as gender identity, but I'll grant your point nonetheless...
I'm probably being a little over-cautious, but I just feel it is safer to err on that side.
I know perfectly well that the first plane, speaking in terms of probability, isn't necessarily going to be the kind of learning experience Narset needs. For every Kamigawa and Ravnica, there's also a Mercadia (comparatively placid, although who knows what she could get from the Ramosian tradition) and a Muraganda (and as I mentioned before, a Muraganda may just be what Ojutai's best-case scenario is). But I'm thinking in terms of popular fiction tendencies. I suppose that at least, Kamigawa or Ravnica is likely to be the first place Narset visits that gets lots of narrative attention. Emphasis on "likely".
I think relative location in the multiverse plays a very large part of this too. For example, it seems astronomically unlikely that a walker would end up on say... Equilor, on their first walk. (because it is on the literal edge of the multiverse.)
There is a weird non-euclidian geography to Dominia, but there are relative positions within it. We've seen some of those clusters before.
Elder Dragons of Dominia are still that. Elder Dragons of Tarkir are what they are. They are different, but they are of the same creature type.
The problem is that they actually aren't the same creature type.
Now, I'm not one that has been ranting about it, I've just expressed annoyance at how convoluted this makes the entire issue. And CLEARLY it is not cut and dry because people don't seem to grok the difference between the two natures of the elder dragons. Your statement alone proves that.
Elder Dragons weren't just older dragons. They were a separate removed species.
The new elder dragons are just older dragons who have accumulated power. This doesn't make them the same ilk as Nicol Bolas despite them having the same creature type.
(and as an aside, Dominia is the ENTIRE MULTIVERSE, so making a distinction of Tarkir and Dominia is sort of like putting a cup into a larger cup)
Hmmmm. So not ADHD but autism (possibly high functioning Aspergers or something similar) You know, that's kind of cool in it's own way.
So this block we've got a trans character and one on the autistic spectrum. Hmmmmmm. Good job to the author. I'd have never hit on that.
I think that might have been reading into it a bit too much, but Death of the Author and everything.
But even then, I really don't want to open this can of worms considering how the Alesha stuff went, so can we drop that please?
But it would be interseting to theorize, where would Narset go instinctivly? The plane has to embody seeking of knowledge, I don't think the plane has to be red, because think about it, just by GOING into another plane Narset would be red, as she'd be breaking the rules of her world. As such the Plane in my opinion would be a blue/white one. Or atleast one that lends itself to it.
There is an intrinsic problem with making the assumption that the place a walker ends up instinctively HAS to correlate with their subconscious in some fashion. There's enough there that maybe you can talk about it, but there's also a LOT of proof contrary from the annals of history.
So yeah, I don't think we should really speculate because it goes a step further than just speculation, but assumes something that isn't even necessarily true.
I apologize, I think using Bolas and his generation was a bad idea - just think of the question as a whole "What created the Old Elder Dragons species?" I thought the Neo-Elder-Dragon species could provide some insight on that, but seeing Creative's current stand on it as an age title for Tarkir, not so much now.
As far as we can be aware, NATURE "created" the Elder Dragons.
There is simply no reason to make the assumption that they are an artificial race.
I apologize for any errors I've made - I don't have a clear memory of the exact details of some of these aspects, so thanks for clearing the up, so I can refine what I think happened.
Actually, since it's a map TO Zendikar, it establishes that whoever wrote the scroll must more or less be a planeswalker and since pretty much only planeswalkers would draw maps to planes, the map and manual together must be intentional. Although I wonder why would Nahiri need a map to Zendikar if she's definitely capable of returning to Zendikar without any issues - I would actually think Sorin would need the map more, relatively speaking.
Well, there's a bit of a catch 22 because sorin apparently erased the memories of how to GET there from the planeswalkers involved. That little tidbit was in the Teeth of Akoum.
EDIT: Actually being part of a set seems to imply the writer's interest at artifacts/knowledge of power
Well, in fairness, we really don't have any clue what is on the rest of those scrolls.
You guys called it: Narset is indeed a Planeswalker. and She did indeed stumble across the old scrolls. Nice call on those.
I'm just glad everyone can seem to accept the fact that it isn't the Narset from Khans and she in fact DIED back then. That was the biggest problem I had, is the thought she'd somehow be the same person.
We only know that 5 Elder Dragons survived the Dragon War. Which means we only know there were more Elder Dragons before that. We don't know what created the Elder Dragons - they may be an entirely different species from dragons, but nothing implied they didn't "evolve" from "regular" dragons through some unknown method / some unknown force did that to them.
Well, it was a gray area before and normally it shouldn't be raised, but with the Dragonlords revealed to be Neo-Elder-Dragons, I thought it now exists as a possibility - I didn't state any specific methods, just implying Ugin achieved the same thing whoever created Bolas did, except on a "smaller scale", which the Mending may or may not be involved in.
2 things blow this completely apart:
1) The Elder Dragons of old did not evolve from regular dragons. Regular dragons DEVOLVED from them. It went the opposite direction from all sources we know.
2) There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Bolas was "created". In fact, given the fact that he actually had siblings and cousins, that implies a strong biological component, meaning creation is NOT viable.
The Tarkir dragons are, first and foremost, WEIRD anomalies. Every other instance, in the ENTIRE HISTORY of Magic has biological dragons. We can't try and pin correlation from an aberrant source. They are an exception, not a data point to be applied to anything else.
And as a final note, Doug specified they are elders only because of age, and are NOT the same as the previous Elder Dragons.
does it mean a planeswalker's memories of Tarkir completely gets retcon'ed in their heads and they all now remember the actions they "did but never did" on Tarkir 1.1 instead of 1.0?
Doug told us that this is what would happen.
Since the Dragon Scroll has Ugin's knowledge and a map of Zendikar on it, unless Ugin wrote it himself (Which I personally think of it as unlikely, how big was the scroll in size?) it means whoever wrote the scroll has been to both Zendikar and Tarkir within this 1280 years. Nahiri never knew of Tarkir, Sorin and Sarkhan reached Tarkir and Zendikar respectively too late to have done that.
No, it was clearly of Zendikari origins, but it was apparently written in Draconic, meaning that it pretty much had to be Ugin or someone copying Ugin's work to have written it.
Even if Ugin wrote the scroll, it must have been for Sorin or Nahiri at best, we all know Ugin doesn't want to release the Eldrazi, so why write the secret at all - only plausible reason was in case the Eldrazi really needed to be released and he wasn't around, at least Sorin and Nahiri could find a pyromancer planeswalker to attempt it with instructions. I can't imagine any one of those 3 "accidentally" losing the scroll or donating it to another plane as a museum piece, which is why I think the Dragon Scroll had nothing to do with the 3 planeswalkers.
Of the two, it would probably be Nahiri... and quite frankly, it isn't looking like she's still around, so if it was in her possession, could have been part of the things lost after her disappearance.
Considering that the Dragon Scroll was a lot less detailed, so it seems more likely that whoever wrote it ran out of paper, took out a map of Zendikar instead and scribbled on it vaguely copying the Shu Yun Scroll - Zendikar's environment changes all the time, so the accuracy of the map is not an indicator of whether it was a real map or a copied one. Of course, I don't think it was that much of a coincidence - whoever wrote it was conscious of the Hedrons on Zendikar.
It isn't a map OF Zendikar... it's a map TO Zendikar.
Check the webcomic "The Veil's Curse" and the Purifying Fire for those details.
There are two major problems with this:
The first is the fact that Ugin's Nexus is... his own dead body. It is likely that it was tied to a very specific moment of time rather than being capable of simply going back to a time of your choice.
The second is the mending stripping Ugin of the kind of power that would take in the first place.
We won't get a book, just Uncharted Realms articles.
But no, Doug has already made a pretty definitive statement saying they don't intend to use this to do anything outside Tarkir.
http://dougbeyermtg.tumblr.com/post/107288733454/i-love-time-travel-stories-but-time-travel-in-the
Well, I do think it adds a little more understanding to his actions pertaining to Narset if he has a strong streak of loyalty in him for his brood. An attack against them being met with severe retribution could very well fit into the white ideals of "justice".
After taking on the Jeskai remnants, being very protective of them makes sense to me, even for the supposed heretics.
All over, the Ojutai are a distinct and intriguing blend of the two colors.
Mind, I'm not saying your reading of the situation is wrong, just that it might have been multifaceted.
But her spark had already ignited at that point and she'd chosen to stay on Tarkir until she understood.
It was the shock of learning that Ojutai had violently conquered the clan that triggered her spark.
And this is PRECISELY the reason why I kept ranting against those stupid souls from M15.
No world, from a flavor standpoint, leans towards any one color. Anything MaRo says about a world leaning towards a color is in regards to his position in design.
For all we know, she could have turned up on Iquatana. But it doesn't actually matter because this is a line of speculation that people are building on false premises, the idea that a walker will subconsciously be drawn to some world rather than the relatively nearest one.
And Ravnica isn't particularly any more full of knowledge than say... Dominaria or Kamigawa.
Gideon and Tezzeret aren't particularly gifted mages either.
Also, I deleted some posts at the behest of the users (and posts pertaining to them)
I think relative location in the multiverse plays a very large part of this too. For example, it seems astronomically unlikely that a walker would end up on say... Equilor, on their first walk. (because it is on the literal edge of the multiverse.)
There is a weird non-euclidian geography to Dominia, but there are relative positions within it. We've seen some of those clusters before.
Now, I'm not one that has been ranting about it, I've just expressed annoyance at how convoluted this makes the entire issue. And CLEARLY it is not cut and dry because people don't seem to grok the difference between the two natures of the elder dragons. Your statement alone proves that.
Elder Dragons weren't just older dragons. They were a separate removed species.
The new elder dragons are just older dragons who have accumulated power. This doesn't make them the same ilk as Nicol Bolas despite them having the same creature type.
(and as an aside, Dominia is the ENTIRE MULTIVERSE, so making a distinction of Tarkir and Dominia is sort of like putting a cup into a larger cup)
I think that might have been reading into it a bit too much, but Death of the Author and everything.
But even then, I really don't want to open this can of worms considering how the Alesha stuff went, so can we drop that please?There is an intrinsic problem with making the assumption that the place a walker ends up instinctively HAS to correlate with their subconscious in some fashion. There's enough there that maybe you can talk about it, but there's also a LOT of proof contrary from the annals of history.
So yeah, I don't think we should really speculate because it goes a step further than just speculation, but assumes something that isn't even necessarily true.
There is simply no reason to make the assumption that they are an artificial race.
Well, in fairness, we really don't have any clue what is on the rest of those scrolls.
I'm just glad everyone can seem to accept the fact that it isn't the Narset from Khans and she in fact DIED back then. That was the biggest problem I had, is the thought she'd somehow be the same person.
The Myojin most DEFINITELY have their own agendas.
2 things blow this completely apart:
1) The Elder Dragons of old did not evolve from regular dragons. Regular dragons DEVOLVED from them. It went the opposite direction from all sources we know.
2) There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Bolas was "created". In fact, given the fact that he actually had siblings and cousins, that implies a strong biological component, meaning creation is NOT viable.
The Tarkir dragons are, first and foremost, WEIRD anomalies. Every other instance, in the ENTIRE HISTORY of Magic has biological dragons. We can't try and pin correlation from an aberrant source. They are an exception, not a data point to be applied to anything else.
And as a final note, Doug specified they are elders only because of age, and are NOT the same as the previous Elder Dragons.
No, it was clearly of Zendikari origins, but it was apparently written in Draconic, meaning that it pretty much had to be Ugin or someone copying Ugin's work to have written it.
As a fun little thing though, the Dragon Scroll was part of a set (as can be seen in Fuel for the Fire) and its path was ALWAYS anchored on Zendikar.
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/stf/74
This talks about some of the Dragon Scrolls history.
Of the two, it would probably be Nahiri... and quite frankly, it isn't looking like she's still around, so if it was in her possession, could have been part of the things lost after her disappearance.
It isn't a map OF Zendikar... it's a map TO Zendikar.
Check the webcomic "The Veil's Curse" and the Purifying Fire for those details.