The clans are going to return in Dragons of Tarkir, but they'll be more focused on their primary color.
That's a pretty baseless claim. There's no reason to think the clans would be restricted to only one of their colors--after all, the monsters of Innistrad were all in two colors each, but without much actual multicolor.
I would be quite shocked if the clans didn't show up in all of their colors. If they were to focus on one, it also seems a bit more likely that they'd focus on the shared enemy--after all, Dragons of Tarkir is set in the "fixed" version of Tarkir, they plan to showcase change, and Maro can't talk about why they based clan philosophies in one of the two ally colors.
Tezzeret didn't stand up properly for some reason--he kept falling over backwards. I tried to straighten him out and ended up popping his legs off. Now he's sittig next to Bolas, lying broken on the shelf.
I can't decide whether this is unfortunate or not.
The thing to remember on Dig Through Time is that it's looking into the past, not the alternate present. Moreover, the Mardu in that key art look organized--maybe even more organized than they are in Khans. Too organized for red-black without white.
Given that they've said they want the clan names to stick for the wedges, I don't think they'll be dropping the color that makes them distinct. I suspect we're going to see them shift in focus to the central enemy color, but also express their color identities in a very different way from Khans or Fate Reforged.
I don't buy that she'll "almost certainly" be a Returned. They've been pretty clear about the fact that she hasn't put the mask on, and is looking for other ways out of the Underworld. Is there a chance she might? Yes, but I consider it about as likely--maybe even less--than her finding an alternative.
Even if she does come back as a Returned, Phyrexia has made much more of an impression on her than Heliod. It seems more likely to me in that case that she would end up planeswalking to New Phyrexia without knowing what she was doing or how she was doing it--by the same argument that you claim she may not remember that she's a planeswalker, she may not remember enough to understand that what she's doing should be impossible.
Heliod betrayed her in an instant, but Phyrexia has loomed all her life. Since the Returned are said to seek out what was important to them in life, I just don't see a Returned Elspeth prioritizing Heliod.
Out of curiosity, what happened in the Ordeal of Erebos that makes her so eager to return to New Phyrexia?
It's not so much that she's eager to return to New Phyrexia as that she accepts that nobody ever promised her a peaceful life. She made the decision to fight instead of just accepting the life that she'd always dreamed of. She has abandoned the idea of escaping to an idyllic world somewhere in the multiverse, so it makes me suspect that she may try to confront the shadows that she has fled since she was a child.
I actually doubt that will happen by the way, until we see what happened to Koth. I feel like his return, or at least the discovery of exactly what happened to him, will herald the return to New Phyrexia.
We already know what happened to Koth. He survived the explosion and is lurking in the Furnace Layer.
i have an issue with just how easy of a time ob had in summoning demons capable of killing a whole plane i mean seriously two dead comrades if it were that easy some sick individual would of done it 1000 years before him.
They had. Seven times before him, in fact. At least, there's a fairly heavy implication that that's what the Cataclysms were. Ob Nixilis was just the first person who actually wanted to end the world--everyone else had wanted something less.
I believe it's Nahiri, we still don't have confirmation that she's still alive so if her return is a major plot element in the future they can't announce her for the game.
I find it unlikely that Nahiri will make her return in Dragons of Tarkir, and they're shooting for a fall 2015 release for the board game. There's not really time for a reveal of her still being alive. While she could show up in the last core set, that wouldn't really be a dramatic reveal or a major plot element--it would just be "Oh, hey, she's alive."
As I've said before, I really don't think her return would need to be tied to a Theros set--in fact, I'd argue it wouldn't make sense.
Either the block would have to be about her return from the Underworld, which wouldn't serve the needs of a return to a top-down world, or she'd have to come back to life as an afterthought, which would be a very poor move for such a significant event.
When she does return, it doesn't actually make any sense for her to remain on-world. There's nothing left for her--her position as Champion has been revoked and shown to be Heliod's posturing, she has no real tie to the people of the world, and the one thing that really could have kept her on Theros--her love for Daxos--was cleverly cut out of the picture by having him become a Returned.
Given Elspeth's character development in the Ordeal of Erebos, I find it more likely that she makes a beeline for New Phyrexia than that she remains on Theros.
It's almost certainly not Ajani, or they would have announced it at the time. The same is probably true of Gideon, besides which his focus isn't really on summoning or leading armies. A one-miniature force wouldn't be very compelling.
That really does leave us with Nahiri or Elspeth. I would have thought they would have announced Nahiri's inclusion when she was spoiled, but I could be wrong. Elspeth does make a lot more sense thematically--in a game about leading armies, it would make sense to have the military leader as one of the options.
I guess they could add a new white walker, but I somehow doubt it. Right after adding Nahiri, when white already had Ajani, Elspeth, and Gideon? Seems like a bit much in a color that is already tied for most planeswalkers.
The thing is, this time travel event is likely to cause a paradox, whatever the outcome.
If Ugin lives (which he clearly does), Sarkhan Vol will have been born into a completely different Tarkir, where humans and dragons are at constant war with each other. This means that he will not grow up obsessed with finding and serving dragons (as they are clearly going to be abundant on post FRF Tarkir). This means that he would never seek out and serve Nicol Bolas, who would not send him to Zendikar and he would not play a part in unleashing the Eldrazi... so that would never have happened.
This would mean that Sarkhan Vol would lead a completely different life, and would not be led down the path that leads to him going back in time and saving Ugin, which means that Ugin would have to die...
The basic theory of time travel is that you should not be able to influence your own timeline.
I suspect that Wizards will explain it all away with "because of magic, that's why", but the only way to logically break the loop is to start a new timeline, where none of the events that have happened in the interim 1000 years happened in the same way... like the Star Trek reboot.
That depends on how time travel and alternate timelines work. It's possible to conceive of a model in which Tarkir switches from one state of being to another at the point at which Sarkhan initiates time travel. From the perspective of the multiverse, Tarkir would have suddenly been rewritten, but it would be an observable event. From the perspective of the people on the plane, however, things would always have been that way.
Since Chiantul is already capable of perceiving the alternate "now" of Dragons of Tarkir, it already exists in a sense. Things don't need to unfold all over again after Sarkhan changes the past--there's already a version of Tarkir's present in which that happened. The plane just needs to switch states. Think of it as loading a different save file. That doesn't unwrite the fact that you had previously loaded a different file--from an outside perspective, you've simply changed states.
This model would allow Sarkhan to change the past of Tarkir without influencing the past of other planes--the events leading up to Khans of Tarkir still occurred in the multiverse, and the state of Dragons of Tarkir becomes true at a defined instant in the present. Perhaps it creates a world in which Sarkhan was never born at all, but that doesn't matter, since he has still been born in the multiverse' timeline.
I remember she ( uhm guess she is genderless) pisses off that one izzet artificer in the comics, but i forget what plane that is set on.
Dack Fayden is neither a member of the Izzet League nor an artificer. He encountered Ashiok on Theros, where it was attempting to put the entire plane to sleep so that it could use the people as continuous source of sustenance.
but recently elspleth just screws things up whenever she is added to the storyline, lately she is feeling closer to old nissa and the incredibly dumb red devil PW. Why can't she just retire as an Azorius official at Ravnica.
Where exactly are you getting Elspeth as "screwing things up" in the story? She makes fairly reasonable decisions--certainly nothing on the level of releasing the Eldrazi. She has simply fought to protect the weak, often against overwhelming odds.
...are you saying that she's a bad character because she doesn't always succeed?
Just something I noticed on the bigger image, but look at his helmet: does the shape of the helmet and the horns look familiar to anyone else?
Actually, Doug confirmed that it's not only that, but also his armor that becomes his "skin" with the lines on the chest and the spikes on the shoulders as a demon.
I didn't like this reasoning, mostly because the Duels 2015 game implies the spikes are part of the process of being cursed by the veil. Garruk grows them when you defeat him, making him look VERY ob nixilis-like.
The two seem to have undergone the same process, with clothing and body being warped into a single demonic being. Garruk was just lucky enough to get the curse sealed before he went full demon.
Do you believe that it is possible for her to learn to develop humanlike emotions, to become more like a human? That idea is a very prevalent idea in ficiton, so I imagine that it would not at all be out-of-place in the story of this game.
Developing beyond the boundaries of her function could well lead to undesirable behavior, which could necessitate Sorin replacing her. It's best if she stays in her place.
The Jeskai aren't "clearly" using anything other than the Jeskai fires. Qi, rlung, and similar concepts may have served as inspiration, but you might as well complain that Ravnica isn't called Praha.
Sorry if I was unclear--my reference to "short blurbs" was talking about the duel deck description, not making any assumptions about your previous reading material.
I have to admit, I was really hoping to see this duel deck advance Elspeth's plot. It's a hell of a cliffhanger they left her on, so the sooner we know more, the better. At the same time, I can't really think of a planeswalker duel that could really do that.
I suppose the real question is whether they're going to give this duel deck an associated Uncharted Realms the way they did with Jace vs. Vraska. And, if they do, what on earth it would be about.
That's a pretty baseless claim. There's no reason to think the clans would be restricted to only one of their colors--after all, the monsters of Innistrad were all in two colors each, but without much actual multicolor.
I would be quite shocked if the clans didn't show up in all of their colors. If they were to focus on one, it also seems a bit more likely that they'd focus on the shared enemy--after all, Dragons of Tarkir is set in the "fixed" version of Tarkir, they plan to showcase change, and Maro can't talk about why they based clan philosophies in one of the two ally colors.
I can't decide whether this is unfortunate or not.
Given that they've said they want the clan names to stick for the wedges, I don't think they'll be dropping the color that makes them distinct. I suspect we're going to see them shift in focus to the central enemy color, but also express their color identities in a very different way from Khans or Fate Reforged.
Even if she does come back as a Returned, Phyrexia has made much more of an impression on her than Heliod. It seems more likely to me in that case that she would end up planeswalking to New Phyrexia without knowing what she was doing or how she was doing it--by the same argument that you claim she may not remember that she's a planeswalker, she may not remember enough to understand that what she's doing should be impossible.
Heliod betrayed her in an instant, but Phyrexia has loomed all her life. Since the Returned are said to seek out what was important to them in life, I just don't see a Returned Elspeth prioritizing Heliod.
It's not so much that she's eager to return to New Phyrexia as that she accepts that nobody ever promised her a peaceful life. She made the decision to fight instead of just accepting the life that she'd always dreamed of. She has abandoned the idea of escaping to an idyllic world somewhere in the multiverse, so it makes me suspect that she may try to confront the shadows that she has fled since she was a child.
We already know what happened to Koth. He survived the explosion and is lurking in the Furnace Layer.
They had. Seven times before him, in fact. At least, there's a fairly heavy implication that that's what the Cataclysms were. Ob Nixilis was just the first person who actually wanted to end the world--everyone else had wanted something less.
I find it unlikely that Nahiri will make her return in Dragons of Tarkir, and they're shooting for a fall 2015 release for the board game. There's not really time for a reveal of her still being alive. While she could show up in the last core set, that wouldn't really be a dramatic reveal or a major plot element--it would just be "Oh, hey, she's alive."
Either the block would have to be about her return from the Underworld, which wouldn't serve the needs of a return to a top-down world, or she'd have to come back to life as an afterthought, which would be a very poor move for such a significant event.
When she does return, it doesn't actually make any sense for her to remain on-world. There's nothing left for her--her position as Champion has been revoked and shown to be Heliod's posturing, she has no real tie to the people of the world, and the one thing that really could have kept her on Theros--her love for Daxos--was cleverly cut out of the picture by having him become a Returned.
Given Elspeth's character development in the Ordeal of Erebos, I find it more likely that she makes a beeline for New Phyrexia than that she remains on Theros.
It's almost certainly not Ajani, or they would have announced it at the time. The same is probably true of Gideon, besides which his focus isn't really on summoning or leading armies. A one-miniature force wouldn't be very compelling.
That really does leave us with Nahiri or Elspeth. I would have thought they would have announced Nahiri's inclusion when she was spoiled, but I could be wrong. Elspeth does make a lot more sense thematically--in a game about leading armies, it would make sense to have the military leader as one of the options.
I guess they could add a new white walker, but I somehow doubt it. Right after adding Nahiri, when white already had Ajani, Elspeth, and Gideon? Seems like a bit much in a color that is already tied for most planeswalkers.
Still hoping for Elspeth.
That depends on how time travel and alternate timelines work. It's possible to conceive of a model in which Tarkir switches from one state of being to another at the point at which Sarkhan initiates time travel. From the perspective of the multiverse, Tarkir would have suddenly been rewritten, but it would be an observable event. From the perspective of the people on the plane, however, things would always have been that way.
Since Chiantul is already capable of perceiving the alternate "now" of Dragons of Tarkir, it already exists in a sense. Things don't need to unfold all over again after Sarkhan changes the past--there's already a version of Tarkir's present in which that happened. The plane just needs to switch states. Think of it as loading a different save file. That doesn't unwrite the fact that you had previously loaded a different file--from an outside perspective, you've simply changed states.
This model would allow Sarkhan to change the past of Tarkir without influencing the past of other planes--the events leading up to Khans of Tarkir still occurred in the multiverse, and the state of Dragons of Tarkir becomes true at a defined instant in the present. Perhaps it creates a world in which Sarkhan was never born at all, but that doesn't matter, since he has still been born in the multiverse' timeline.
Dack Fayden is neither a member of the Izzet League nor an artificer. He encountered Ashiok on Theros, where it was attempting to put the entire plane to sleep so that it could use the people as continuous source of sustenance.
Where exactly are you getting Elspeth as "screwing things up" in the story? She makes fairly reasonable decisions--certainly nothing on the level of releasing the Eldrazi. She has simply fought to protect the weak, often against overwhelming odds.
...are you saying that she's a bad character because she doesn't always succeed?
Garruk has had spikes on his mantle since Garruk Wildspeaker. They can also be seen on Garruk, Caller of Beasts and Garruk, Primal Hunter, in addition to the obvious Garruk, Apex Predator.
The two seem to have undergone the same process, with clothing and body being warped into a single demonic being. Garruk was just lucky enough to get the curse sealed before he went full demon.
Developing beyond the boundaries of her function could well lead to undesirable behavior, which could necessitate Sorin replacing her. It's best if she stays in her place.
I have to admit, I was really hoping to see this duel deck advance Elspeth's plot. It's a hell of a cliffhanger they left her on, so the sooner we know more, the better. At the same time, I can't really think of a planeswalker duel that could really do that.
I suppose the real question is whether they're going to give this duel deck an associated Uncharted Realms the way they did with Jace vs. Vraska. And, if they do, what on earth it would be about.