Does the March of the Machines artwork indicate Phyrexians are on Theros?
It looks like the Realmbreaker tree is going to connect the various planes of the multiverse to New Phyrexia.
So, yeah, I'd bet on it.
Truth be told the more I'm thinking about it the more worried I am about the whole story arc. Naturally you want to show the phyrexians invading the various worlds, the heroes on the brink of defeat, then getting their ***** together or doing one final desperate push finally taking the fight to New Phyrexia. Doing all of that in just one set is... ambitious to say the least. I'm not sure it is going to work well narratively, given the space constraints of one set.
I also wonder if the Realmbreaker is going to stay intact, which is the big change to the fabric of the multiverse they were talking about. (Maybe cured of phyrexian taint by Melira?) And if so, if they transplant the Realmbreaker to a different world which then acts as the actual, true, most-literal-sense-of-the-word capital-letter-N Nexus of the Multiverse. (probably either going to be Dominaria or Ravnica)
Well what I think we’re all on the same page about
phyrexia Will lose again and it’s looking like it’s gonna be the end of the mending and they use the realmbreaker or plant more the world trees on planes so non-planar travel is possible for non-walkers
I get the feeling it'll be something like that, yes. The whole fact that we have an "aftermath" set and the set symbol itself kinda implies Phyrexia wins, at first.
One thing that just occured to me though. Nobody (except Karn) knows about the realmbreaker yet. From everyone's perspective, based on the information they have, the top priority to stop phyrexians would be to stop Tezzeret and his planar bridge, at least prior to Tamiyo's and Ajani's compleation. Yet it's never talked about by any of the characters. It's another case where everyone has read the script.
Well what I think we’re all on the same page about
phyrexia Will lose again and it’s looking like it’s gonna be the end of the mending and they use the realmbreaker or plant more the world trees on planes so non-planar travel is possible for non-walkers
I do not know whether they win or lose. Remember Urabrask and all the fuss about Elesh Norn fearing Elspeth.
in any way, yes, I think that the Realmbreaker will connect the multiversal planes somehow and end up being a mean of crossplanar travels also for non-walkers, hence relegating the planeswalkers to slightly less special role.
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100% Vorthos Spike and Storyline Expert
Former Fact Prospector of the Greek Alliance.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
Maybe Phyrexia win this time, everybody dies, and wizards stop spending money creating new characters and planes, and just focus on adapting pop franchises to the card game. That or they bring Eleven, The Doctor, Elminster and some space Marines to fight the Phyrexian Menace. (Contains vorthos bitterness...)
While the Phyrexians winning in March of the Machine is very possible, I personally believe WotC is ready to end the current Phyrexian storyline. After all, it began in 2011 with Scars of Mirrodin (technically, in 2003 with the original Mirrodin) - 11 years is long enough. For what it is worth, I don't think this will be the end of the Phyrexians - either New Phryexia will be sealed off or it will be destroyed, but the Phyrexians survive somewhere else in the multiverse, and will begin building anew.
On a related note, I love the idea of creating a travel network between worlds. After the Mending, WotC set the rule that only planeswalkers could travel between planes (e.g. no more Weatherlight travel or planar portals) because they wanted planeswalkers to still be special after they were made mortal. Which was fine, except it had the side effect of making every non-planeswalker character in every world feel less important by comparison.
As an example, let's take the new Weatherlight crew - I genuinely believe they have potential as characters, but they will never develop or become "important" as long as we only see them when we happen to be on Dominaria. But give them the ability to travel the muliverse like the classic Weatherlight crew, and suddenly they could potentially show up in any set, creating wonderful opportunities to showcase them as characters.
Even with this change, planeswalkers are still unique - they are the only ones with innate planeswalking powers, and they are the only ones who can travel beyond the worlds touched by the Realmbreaker.
(There is a cynical voice in my head telling me this change is being driven by Commander's popularity, with its focus on Legendary creatures over planeswalkers, and this change allows for WotC to better develop Legendary creatures as new focal (storytelling, but also merchandizing) characters alongside Jace, Chandra, Liliana, etc. If popular Commanders start showing up on other worlds, that will confirm this for me.)
While the Phyrexians winning in March of the Machine is very possible, I personally believe WotC is ready to end the current Phyrexian storyline. After all, it began in 2011 with Scars of Mirrodin (technically, in 2003 with the original Mirrodin) - 11 years is long enough. For what it is worth, I don't think this will be the end of the Phyrexians - either New Phryexia will be sealed off or it will be destroyed, but the Phyrexians survive somewhere else in the multiverse, and will begin building anew.
On a related note, I love the idea of creating a travel network between worlds. After the Mending, WotC set the rule that only planeswalkers could travel between planes (e.g. no more Weatherlight travel or planar portals) because they wanted planeswalkers to still be special after they were made mortal. Which was fine, except it had the side effect of making every non-planeswalker character in every world feel less important by comparison.
As an example, let's take the new Weatherlight crew - I genuinely believe they have potential as characters, but they will never develop or become "important" as long as we only see them when we happen to be on Dominaria. But give them the ability to travel the muliverse like the classic Weatherlight crew, and suddenly they could potentially show up in any set, creating wonderful opportunities to showcase them as characters.
Even with this change, planeswalkers are still unique - they are the only ones with innate planeswalking powers, and they are the only ones who can travel beyond the worlds touched by the Realmbreaker.
(There is a cynical voice in my head telling me this change is being driven by Commander's popularity, with its focus on Legendary creatures over planeswalkers, and this change allows for WotC to better develop Legendary creatures as new focal (storytelling, but also merchandizing) characters alongside Jace, Chandra, Liliana, etc. If popular Commanders start showing up on other worlds, that will confirm this for me.)
I don't know. This may be personal opinion, but I don't think MtG is the right setting for character-driven stories.
MtG is, at its core, about the planes. A plane is quite literally an environment. A card set shows us the lands, the peoples and various events on that plane. Environmental stories is that MtG excels at.
In fact most of the more interesting stories Magic has told were environmental in nature: Urza's entire saga wasn't about Urza so much as it was about how much it affected the environment around him. Invasion, Scars of Mirrodin, Amonkhet, the whole Tarkir plot. All of these were environmental stories with characters as a plot-driving force, but not the ultimate focus of the plot itself. Battle for Zendikar is an exception here, because it was handled absolutely poorly.
The weatherlight saga is another exception but in the opposite direction, although its ultimate focus wasn't the characters but tying the various worlds together so we get to see Rath, the phyrexians on Mercadia and finally Dominaria, before the invasion happens. So you could argue it was a bit of a hybrid. Even so, the weatherlight saga was very constrained because it followed a very rigid cast. The big advantage of the current system is that you can rotate the roster. Not every planeswalker needs to be part of every plot, they can come and go as the story demands. But if you tried to develop the new weatherlight crew, you'd run into the problem that they become the central characters of the multiverse, at least as far as the game is concerned, because it's either show all of them or show none of them for each given plot.
The realmbreaker solution (if it indeed is going to a thing, which we don't know yet) mitigates this somewhat, but I am worried about the planes becoming either too blurry, where any character/tribe can show up on any world whatsoever, or the multiverse becoming irrationally rigid. Like, when something like that happens, what would realistically happen is that some of the more militaristic and expansionist empires will naturally want to spread to the backwater planes that can't defend themselves. What's going to stop the Torrezon vampires from conquering Lorwyn? Following such a change, there should be massive upheaval as the powerful forces will start colonizing the rest of the multiverse. And we haven't even talked about other planes besides New Phyrexia that could become a threat, like that one shard of Rabiah that was consumed by evil.
Ultimately I fear the setting will fall apart on a suspension of disbelief level. Magic is already not very good at making things make sense under scrutiny, but this is just going to add to it. But I can already see the justification being "Superhero franchises do it too." like how they justified embracing retcons, lmao.
I agree, MTG is about the planes, with the characters in service of showcasing the new worlds. We do need flagship characters as the marketing of planeswalkers was what kickstarted the modern vorthos popularity, but its telling that the best stories are never about them.
I do think we're jumping ahead too much with realmbreaker; as Creative stated, planeswalkers are the only ones to planeswalk because that's what keeps them unique. Doing away with this would admit that their creative decisions since The Mending were wrong, and I don't think they want to go there.
Though from a personal perspective, I do want the planes to be connected. I do want thhe flow of information and cultures to occur, to make the Multiverse better.
i was just thinking. Having some flow of information or even migration between the planes could actually be a good thing for storytelling purposes, maybe. So I was thinking, if I had my way, I'd make it so that interplanar travel options exist, but they always require a planeswalker and are rather limited, like a planar ship powered by a planeswalker spark. Barely enough to allow an invasion force to be transported through, which gives small and undeveloped planes a better fighting chance against invaders.
But then it hit me, what if that's how the realmbreaker works? That the tendrils will burrow into other planes, but the portals will only activate with a planeswalker's help, which is why the phyrexians compleated planeswalkers in the first place. This way they could have their cake and eat it too. Planeswalkers are still unique in the multiverse, but you can get non-planeswalkers to different planes as well, and even do cross-planar conflicts.
Yeah it will just boil down to how easy it will be for non-walkers to be able to travel (if the planes do end up connected), how connected they will be post Phyrexia war and if the tree needs planeswalkers (I agree that it will in some form need planeswalkers to allow travel).
That said I do think the knowelge of other planes and of planeswalkers will be more common known, something we saw unfold on Ravnica with the before and after of War of the Spark and this certain will change how planeswalkers will be go about. The boom comics has a story line;
where Ravnica turns against planeswalkers seemly and "outlaws" them so I could see that happening on a plane after this. Maybe have a plane where Planeswalker (witch) trial happen where people are hunting down if they are found to have a spark.
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Yeah it will just boil down to how easy it will be for non-walkers to be able to travel (if the planes do end up connected), how connected they will be post Phyrexia war and if the tree needs planeswalkers (I agree that it will in some form need planeswalkers to allow travel).
That said I do think the knowelge of other planes and of planeswalkers will be more common known, something we saw unfold on Ravnica with the before and after of War of the Spark and this certain will change how planeswalkers will be go about. The boom comics has a story line;
where Ravnica turns against planeswalkers seemly and "outlaws" them so I could see that happening on a plane after this. Maybe have a plane where Planeswalker (witch) trial happen where people are hunting down if they are found to have a spark.
huh that could work.
I heard Jace dies in the comics so in “March of the machine” he could be are Gideon's Sacrifice of the story so the phyrexian lose.
I don't know. This may be personal opinion, but I don't think MtG is the right setting for character-driven stories.
MtG is, at its core, about the planes. A plane is quite literally an environment. A card set shows us the lands, the peoples and various events on that plane. Environmental stories is that MtG excels at.
On one hand I see where you're coming from, but I ultimately disagree. While it's true that Magic has prioritized setting over character in recent years, Magic's best stories - The Brother's War, the Thran, Nemesis, Chainer's Torment, the Kamigawa Block - have been very character driven. Grub's Ice Age books and Herndon's Ravnica Novels, while certainly drawing a lot of appeal from their settings, also invested a lot in their characters.
I would love to see more of that.
The counterargument would be, of course, that all those stories happened back when novels were a thing. But I'd argue that the best online fiction series we've seen so far was the character-driven Chronicles of Bolas, which delved deep into Bolas, Ugin, and the human relationships of Yasova's family. That series was practically a character study, and as far as I remember it was pretty well-received.
Magic fiction in recent years has been lacking insofar as it hasn't been exploring its characters to their full potential.
Now that the story for Dominaria United is apparently over and there's no more side stories: Did they really bring back Ertai just to unceremoniously toss him off the mana rig?
Like, what was the point of bringing back a character who was unambigiously dead if you don't do anything relevant with them? Did they just try to cash in that nakedly on the nostalgia?
Yeah, that confuses me. Is Ertai that popular a character?
On the other hand its doubtful the phyrexian presence on Dominaria is over. Rona and her pets have an actual standing army and thousands of cells to make sleeper agents.
Did they just try to cash in that nakedly on the nostalgia?
Isn't that why we got a new Braids, Zur, Astor, Nemata, Rith, Sol' Kanar, Windgrace?
And they bringing back the heirs of older characters?
(and the remade Legend legendaries)
Did they just try to cash in that nakedly on the nostalgia?
Isn't that why we got a new Braids, Zur, Astor, Nemata, Rith, Sol' Kanar, Windgrace?
And they bringing back the heirs of older characters?
(and the remade Legend legendaries)
None of those characters you listed were explicitly dead, except maybe Braids, but dementia space could have funky properties, so I never took the sentence "And then she was just dead." at face value.
And Windgrace did not return, what are you talking about?
And yes, all that is trying to cash in on that sweet sweet nostalgia money, but at least there's possible explanations why these characters are there. (And Legends Retold is not bringing anyone back, it's simply giving them new cards. Their status in the lore didn't change.)
But this is not true for Ertai. He was capital D Dead. If you bring a character back who was explicitly dead, incinerated even, then you better have a damn good reason to do so.
Turns out that WotC didn't. Unless this is foreshadowing to them bringing back other Dead characters, such as Gix or Yawgmoth, which is worrying in itself.
There's Soul of WIndgrace, but I think that's supposed to be some kind of nature spirit/a combination of the non-corporeal remains of Windgrace and the mana of Urborg. I don't know about Astor, but for all the others, you could come up with an easy explanation for why their still around ... most of the time, it would boil down to "they naturally live long lives" or "they have access to powerful magic that enables them to become near immortal." All that is different from bringing back a character that literally got disintegrated. If he got stabbed through the chest or fell off a cliff and shattered on the ground, you could still say that the Phyrexians harvested the parts and built him a new body. But when there's nothing more than ash left ... that explanation doesn't really do it.
I don't think they brought the character back to "cash in" on nostalgia. It doesn't seem like the number of players who know the character is high enough for such a decision to have a measurable impact. Watching the worldbuilding panel, it felt like the main reason was self-indulgence. There were some people in the company who thought it would be cool do bring Ertai back and nobody told them no, so they just did it.
There's Soul of WIndgrace, but I think that's supposed to be some kind of nature spirit/a combination of the non-corporeal remains of Windgrace and the mana of Urborg.
Well, exactly. It's not Windgrace, but like an echo of him. It doesn't have the same personality as him, but embodies more the idea of him than him.
I don't think they brought the character back to "cash in" on nostalgia. It doesn't seem like the number of players who know the character is high enough for such a decision to have a measurable impact. Watching the worldbuilding panel, it felt like the main reason was self-indulgence. There were some people in the company who thought it would be cool do bring Ertai back and nobody told them no, so they just did it.
In that case I worry about the future of Magic storytelling.
I don't know if it's true, but it feels like this time the returns/references of old characters felt really really forced, while last time it was much more natural.
I really don't like, for instance, that apparently there is nothing new happening on Dominaria. No new societies, no new organizations, every named character has a famous last name. It's like Dominaria is not a living world anymore, but more of a museum. I think toning down on the references would make Dominaria not only feel more alive, but also give each reference a bit more weight.
I really don't like, for instance, that apparently there is nothing new happening on Dominaria. No new societies, no new organizations, every named character has a famous last name. It's like Dominaria is not a living world anymore, but more of a museum. I think toning down on the references would make Dominaria not only feel more alive, but also give each reference a bit more weight.
Big agree on this. I'm still a bit miffed that they decided to basically completely undo the environmental damage from the Rift Era (and its consequences) upon the first return in 2018. Sure, maybe the environment of the Time Spiral block was a bit too bleak and samey and they wanted to liven things up and bring old stuff back. But by doing so they gave up on creating a strong through-line for the world.
One of my favorite cards (art-wise) from Future Sight is New Benalia. An old medieval-style kingdom went through the apocalypse and is now adapting to the new state of the world by covering the sinkholes (that they used for shelter from the saltstorms) with domes of stained glass, symbols of their civilization's tradition. It's such a cool combination of the old, the recent past and the new. And then we get to Dominaria (2018) and somehow Benalia seems to have completely reverted to their pre-Time Spiral stock medieval kingdom state.
"Powerful mana fixed everthing, all is back to how it was before" is just kind of lame. By making Dominaria "the history world," focused on the past, they can now never do something truly new with it. The most recent Phyrexian storyline has some neat elements, but in the end it's kind of a retread of things that came before.
Soramaro, I think that the New Benalia integrated its history with the new look, the stained glass visuals (used for the first time in the dome on the FS card) became a defining element in Dominaria (even the set logo is a New Benalian shield).
And the NB card never implied that the knight tradition vanished. In fact, the opposite. The knights endured through the temporal crisis.
New Argive is probably what you look for. A civilization that evolved along and now has heavily technological background.
They did make a new society, there is the spirit/undead people of Urborg who (along with the Windgrace knights) are the good side of black on the plane. It ended up being one of the the least liked* aspects of the set since people complained that it wasted space that could have been legacy/reference of something.
*wasn't hated but people enjoyed the callbacks more.
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“There are no weak Jews. I am descended from those who wrestle angels and kill giants. We were chosen by God. You were chosen by a pathetic little man who can't seem to grow a full mustache"
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
They did make a new society, there is the spirit/undead people of Urborg who (along with the Windgrace knights) are the good side of black on the plane. It ended up being one of the the least liked* aspects of the set since people complained that it wasted space that could have been legacy/reference of something.
*wasn't hated but people enjoyed the callbacks more.
My problem with that is that they came completely out of nowhere. Societies emerge from existing onces. When the roman empire fell, it wasn't like new people and societies just popped into existence to fill the void.
The spirit people of Urborg have no throughline with the rest of the world. They're just there. And we haven't even gone into the whole thing of: They're spirits and apparently they have villages and even trade? How does that work? What does a being that does not need sustenance need to trade? Why are they forming villages? None of it makes sense as is and requires a bit more worldbuilding framework to make sense. Like the necropoleis of Theros are made of returned which are echoing their former lives. So it makes sense that they come together in cities and do things living beings do, even if they technically don't have to. But this does not apply to the spirits of Urborg.
Another gripe I have with them is that I feel Urborg is the wrong place. We already had the cabal and the Windgrace acolytes on Urborg, yet the largest black-aligned area on Dominaria, Nakaya, has not been mentioned since Prophecy and based on half the cards we know from it, the shade, spirit folk might be right up it's alley. Sometimes it feels like everything black happens on Urborg.
Or instead of spirit folk, make them some sort of benign thrull people from Sarpadia, who have been exiled because they were faulty and left to drift on the "endless" ocean. (Idea probably needs some refinement.) Suddenly you have a throughline with the rest of Dominaria's history without retreading the same names.
New things are fine, but for a history world like Dominaria which has such a rich history to it, don't make something entirely new, entirely unrelated to the rest of the world. Make it come from somewhere.
Related to that, where did the new elves aesthetic come from? Why are they suddenly wearing colorful fungi and flowers?
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How i feel about competitive players and casual players in EDH: The competitive are german tourists, the casual are italian tourists, both in a italian beach. The italians asking themselves "why are the germans here?" make a legitimate question, the answer is because the beach is beautiful, no matter the country you came from. The italians wanting to ban the germans are dumb, because if the germans pay for their stay and follow the rules like everyone else, they have the right to be in the beach. Hovewer, if the germans started to ask themselves "why are the italians here?"... they would be dumb as hell.
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It looks like the Realmbreaker tree is going to connect the various planes of the multiverse to New Phyrexia.
So, yeah, I'd bet on it.
Truth be told the more I'm thinking about it the more worried I am about the whole story arc. Naturally you want to show the phyrexians invading the various worlds, the heroes on the brink of defeat, then getting their ***** together or doing one final desperate push finally taking the fight to New Phyrexia. Doing all of that in just one set is... ambitious to say the least. I'm not sure it is going to work well narratively, given the space constraints of one set.
I also wonder if the Realmbreaker is going to stay intact, which is the big change to the fabric of the multiverse they were talking about. (Maybe cured of phyrexian taint by Melira?) And if so, if they transplant the Realmbreaker to a different world which then acts as the actual, true, most-literal-sense-of-the-word capital-letter-N Nexus of the Multiverse. (probably either going to be Dominaria or Ravnica)
phyrexia Will lose again and it’s looking like it’s gonna be the end of the mending and they use the realmbreaker or plant more the world trees on planes so non-planar travel is possible for non-walkers
https://twitter.com/pleasantkenobi/status/1560954136941793282
plewsant Kenobi theorizes it’s gonna be a “infinity war” situation (phyrexians actually win but later down the line they will get their you lose)
One thing that just occured to me though. Nobody (except Karn) knows about the realmbreaker yet. From everyone's perspective, based on the information they have, the top priority to stop phyrexians would be to stop Tezzeret and his planar bridge, at least prior to Tamiyo's and Ajani's compleation. Yet it's never talked about by any of the characters. It's another case where everyone has read the script.
I do not know whether they win or lose. Remember Urabrask and all the fuss about Elesh Norn fearing Elspeth.
in any way, yes, I think that the Realmbreaker will connect the multiversal planes somehow and end up being a mean of crossplanar travels also for non-walkers, hence relegating the planeswalkers to slightly less special role.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
On a related note, I love the idea of creating a travel network between worlds. After the Mending, WotC set the rule that only planeswalkers could travel between planes (e.g. no more Weatherlight travel or planar portals) because they wanted planeswalkers to still be special after they were made mortal. Which was fine, except it had the side effect of making every non-planeswalker character in every world feel less important by comparison.
As an example, let's take the new Weatherlight crew - I genuinely believe they have potential as characters, but they will never develop or become "important" as long as we only see them when we happen to be on Dominaria. But give them the ability to travel the muliverse like the classic Weatherlight crew, and suddenly they could potentially show up in any set, creating wonderful opportunities to showcase them as characters.
Even with this change, planeswalkers are still unique - they are the only ones with innate planeswalking powers, and they are the only ones who can travel beyond the worlds touched by the Realmbreaker.
(There is a cynical voice in my head telling me this change is being driven by Commander's popularity, with its focus on Legendary creatures over planeswalkers, and this change allows for WotC to better develop Legendary creatures as new focal (storytelling, but also merchandizing) characters alongside Jace, Chandra, Liliana, etc. If popular Commanders start showing up on other worlds, that will confirm this for me.)
I don't know. This may be personal opinion, but I don't think MtG is the right setting for character-driven stories.
MtG is, at its core, about the planes. A plane is quite literally an environment. A card set shows us the lands, the peoples and various events on that plane. Environmental stories is that MtG excels at.
In fact most of the more interesting stories Magic has told were environmental in nature: Urza's entire saga wasn't about Urza so much as it was about how much it affected the environment around him. Invasion, Scars of Mirrodin, Amonkhet, the whole Tarkir plot. All of these were environmental stories with characters as a plot-driving force, but not the ultimate focus of the plot itself. Battle for Zendikar is an exception here, because it was handled absolutely poorly.
The weatherlight saga is another exception but in the opposite direction, although its ultimate focus wasn't the characters but tying the various worlds together so we get to see Rath, the phyrexians on Mercadia and finally Dominaria, before the invasion happens. So you could argue it was a bit of a hybrid. Even so, the weatherlight saga was very constrained because it followed a very rigid cast. The big advantage of the current system is that you can rotate the roster. Not every planeswalker needs to be part of every plot, they can come and go as the story demands. But if you tried to develop the new weatherlight crew, you'd run into the problem that they become the central characters of the multiverse, at least as far as the game is concerned, because it's either show all of them or show none of them for each given plot.
The realmbreaker solution (if it indeed is going to a thing, which we don't know yet) mitigates this somewhat, but I am worried about the planes becoming either too blurry, where any character/tribe can show up on any world whatsoever, or the multiverse becoming irrationally rigid. Like, when something like that happens, what would realistically happen is that some of the more militaristic and expansionist empires will naturally want to spread to the backwater planes that can't defend themselves. What's going to stop the Torrezon vampires from conquering Lorwyn? Following such a change, there should be massive upheaval as the powerful forces will start colonizing the rest of the multiverse. And we haven't even talked about other planes besides New Phyrexia that could become a threat, like that one shard of Rabiah that was consumed by evil.
Ultimately I fear the setting will fall apart on a suspension of disbelief level. Magic is already not very good at making things make sense under scrutiny, but this is just going to add to it. But I can already see the justification being "Superhero franchises do it too." like how they justified embracing retcons, lmao.
I do think we're jumping ahead too much with realmbreaker; as Creative stated, planeswalkers are the only ones to planeswalk because that's what keeps them unique. Doing away with this would admit that their creative decisions since The Mending were wrong, and I don't think they want to go there.
Though from a personal perspective, I do want the planes to be connected. I do want thhe flow of information and cultures to occur, to make the Multiverse better.
But then it hit me, what if that's how the realmbreaker works? That the tendrils will burrow into other planes, but the portals will only activate with a planeswalker's help, which is why the phyrexians compleated planeswalkers in the first place. This way they could have their cake and eat it too. Planeswalkers are still unique in the multiverse, but you can get non-planeswalkers to different planes as well, and even do cross-planar conflicts.
Did the mana rig get destroyed? I heard the self destruct sequence but no mention on the…
BOOM!!!
(It’s building sized)
That said I do think the knowelge of other planes and of planeswalkers will be more common known, something we saw unfold on Ravnica with the before and after of War of the Spark and this certain will change how planeswalkers will be go about. The boom comics has a story line;
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
huh that could work.
I heard Jace dies in the comics so in “March of the machine” he could be are Gideon's Sacrifice of the story so the phyrexian lose.
On one hand I see where you're coming from, but I ultimately disagree. While it's true that Magic has prioritized setting over character in recent years, Magic's best stories - The Brother's War, the Thran, Nemesis, Chainer's Torment, the Kamigawa Block - have been very character driven. Grub's Ice Age books and Herndon's Ravnica Novels, while certainly drawing a lot of appeal from their settings, also invested a lot in their characters.
I would love to see more of that.
The counterargument would be, of course, that all those stories happened back when novels were a thing. But I'd argue that the best online fiction series we've seen so far was the character-driven Chronicles of Bolas, which delved deep into Bolas, Ugin, and the human relationships of Yasova's family. That series was practically a character study, and as far as I remember it was pretty well-received.
Magic fiction in recent years has been lacking insofar as it hasn't been exploring its characters to their full potential.
Like, what was the point of bringing back a character who was unambigiously dead if you don't do anything relevant with them? Did they just try to cash in that nakedly on the nostalgia?
On the other hand its doubtful the phyrexian presence on Dominaria is over. Rona and her pets have an actual standing army and thousands of cells to make sleeper agents.
Isn't that why we got a new Braids, Zur, Astor, Nemata, Rith, Sol' Kanar, Windgrace?
And they bringing back the heirs of older characters?
(and the remade Legend legendaries)
None of those characters you listed were explicitly dead, except maybe Braids, but dementia space could have funky properties, so I never took the sentence "And then she was just dead." at face value.
And Windgrace did not return, what are you talking about?
And yes, all that is trying to cash in on that sweet sweet nostalgia money, but at least there's possible explanations why these characters are there. (And Legends Retold is not bringing anyone back, it's simply giving them new cards. Their status in the lore didn't change.)
But this is not true for Ertai. He was capital D Dead. If you bring a character back who was explicitly dead, incinerated even, then you better have a damn good reason to do so.
Turns out that WotC didn't. Unless this is foreshadowing to them bringing back other Dead characters, such as Gix or Yawgmoth, which is worrying in itself.
I don't think they brought the character back to "cash in" on nostalgia. It doesn't seem like the number of players who know the character is high enough for such a decision to have a measurable impact. Watching the worldbuilding panel, it felt like the main reason was self-indulgence. There were some people in the company who thought it would be cool do bring Ertai back and nobody told them no, so they just did it.
Well, exactly. It's not Windgrace, but like an echo of him. It doesn't have the same personality as him, but embodies more the idea of him than him.
In that case I worry about the future of Magic storytelling.
I don't know if it's true, but it feels like this time the returns/references of old characters felt really really forced, while last time it was much more natural.
I really don't like, for instance, that apparently there is nothing new happening on Dominaria. No new societies, no new organizations, every named character has a famous last name. It's like Dominaria is not a living world anymore, but more of a museum. I think toning down on the references would make Dominaria not only feel more alive, but also give each reference a bit more weight.
One of my favorite cards (art-wise) from Future Sight is New Benalia. An old medieval-style kingdom went through the apocalypse and is now adapting to the new state of the world by covering the sinkholes (that they used for shelter from the saltstorms) with domes of stained glass, symbols of their civilization's tradition. It's such a cool combination of the old, the recent past and the new. And then we get to Dominaria (2018) and somehow Benalia seems to have completely reverted to their pre-Time Spiral stock medieval kingdom state.
"Powerful mana fixed everthing, all is back to how it was before" is just kind of lame. By making Dominaria "the history world," focused on the past, they can now never do something truly new with it. The most recent Phyrexian storyline has some neat elements, but in the end it's kind of a retread of things that came before.
And the NB card never implied that the knight tradition vanished. In fact, the opposite. The knights endured through the temporal crisis.
New Argive is probably what you look for. A civilization that evolved along and now has heavily technological background.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
*wasn't hated but people enjoyed the callbacks more.
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
My problem with that is that they came completely out of nowhere. Societies emerge from existing onces. When the roman empire fell, it wasn't like new people and societies just popped into existence to fill the void.
The spirit people of Urborg have no throughline with the rest of the world. They're just there. And we haven't even gone into the whole thing of: They're spirits and apparently they have villages and even trade? How does that work? What does a being that does not need sustenance need to trade? Why are they forming villages? None of it makes sense as is and requires a bit more worldbuilding framework to make sense. Like the necropoleis of Theros are made of returned which are echoing their former lives. So it makes sense that they come together in cities and do things living beings do, even if they technically don't have to. But this does not apply to the spirits of Urborg.
Another gripe I have with them is that I feel Urborg is the wrong place. We already had the cabal and the Windgrace acolytes on Urborg, yet the largest black-aligned area on Dominaria, Nakaya, has not been mentioned since Prophecy and based on half the cards we know from it, the shade, spirit folk might be right up it's alley. Sometimes it feels like everything black happens on Urborg.
Or instead of spirit folk, make them some sort of benign thrull people from Sarpadia, who have been exiled because they were faulty and left to drift on the "endless" ocean. (Idea probably needs some refinement.) Suddenly you have a throughline with the rest of Dominaria's history without retreading the same names.
New things are fine, but for a history world like Dominaria which has such a rich history to it, don't make something entirely new, entirely unrelated to the rest of the world. Make it come from somewhere.