Look at the art. Areas once barren now have temples, camps, dwellings. You missed the temple in the case of Blossoming Sands. :)I'm wondering who's living on the enemy colored refuges since the broods are all allied colors.
Actually it's the other way around. The places were inhabited during FTF and became deserted over the course of history on KTK.
As for what happened to them in DTK, nobody knows. They are not shown anywhere in the new timeline. Considering how the dragons changed the landscape by their mere presence, it could very well be that the lands would be unrecognizable at this point. The Thornwood Falls would be scorched and molten and the Swiftwater Cliffs would be frozen over. It stands to reason that some of them would even lose their second colour.
The Rakdos certainly are lacking depth, the Gruul too.
Are we talking about the cards only or the lore too? Because lore-wise the Rakdos were one of the moor deep and complex guilds, due to the fact that they ranged from simple restaurants over mines to suicide circuses.
Primarily mechanics, since that's the reason I suspect for the comparisons between Rav and Dragons.
If you're talking mechanics, I fear you've come to the wrong subforum.
I also don't see how you can talk about "lore depth" when looking at the mechanics. That seems insanely backwards to me.
Secure the wastes is also the perfect example for why you shouldn't use card mechanics to judge the lore of a faction. The card exists for both the Warriors subtheme (which has cards in both Abzan/Dromoka and Mardu/Kolaghan) as well as the Ojutai/Jeskai noncreature-spell theme.
I would like to see a block about the plane working together against a common foe. Maybe that's too boring though. I just miss pre-mending epic epics.
If anything, I'm sure BFZ will be less about infighting.
I miss the days when stories weren't all about the destruction of the local world and/or threats to the Multiverse. Stories about changing conditions on a continent (Fallen Empires), striving to defeat a petty conqueror (Mirage), attempting to free a member of a ship's crew and good old-fashioned swashbuckling (Weatherlight Saga pre-Invasion), even planewide events like a conspiracy against the guilds (Ravnica), a quest to find a missing sun (Mirrodin), a war with the local spirits/deities (Kamigawa, Theros) or surviving a time of transition (Lorwyn). With the exception of Theros and Innistrad, pretty much all the recent stories have to be about threats to the very existence of planes or the multiverse.
Return to Ravnica was all about the multiverse going belly up, am I right? Or Alara... And Kahns of Tarkir...
The only blocks in recent history that feature multiverse-threatening dangers is Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin. I guess you could count Tarkir, for Ugin being dead, but that was actually solved by the end of the block.
The Rakdos certainly are lacking depth, the Gruul too.
Are we talking about the cards only or the lore too? Because lore-wise the Rakdos were one of the moor deep and complex guilds, due to the fact that they ranged from simple restaurants over mines to suicide circuses. Their motivations are also different. I mean, we only got the insane suiciders on the cards, but that's mostly because a barkeeper doesn't lend itself much to a game where the goal is to reduce your opponent's life total. (To be fair, some artistic decisions like the skeletons were also way forced, because what do skeletons have to do with a guild centered around entertainment? But that's a different story.)
As for the Gruul, their unifying theme is that they hate civilization, but there are still nuances among them. There are your run-of-the-mill savages, but also nature shamans and cripples who wage war against the other guilds due to personal history.
I don't think anyone's objecting to either Ravnica the setting or Ravnica the mechanics. But doing the same thing only a block and a half after a Ravnica block, with half the guilds but almost exactly the same take on most of those, is something it's fair to criticise. Especially when the resulting setting is both inconsistent with what went before and inferior in terms of depth.
The only clan that's largely the same as their associated guild is the Dromoka. For the others they're largely different:
The Ojutai are (supposedly) about knowledge and discipline, while the Azorius are all about control and stagnation. You could make a point that Ojutai displays Azorius values and methods, but the clan as a whole does not.
The Silumgar are about power through... well, power. The Dimir are exclusively about gathering information in secret.
The Kolaghan are about war and the thrill of killing, while the Rakdos are about entertainment as a whole. Unfortunately we were only shown the murderous side of the Rakdos on the cards, but they're not exclusively about slaughtering people.
The Atarka don't really have an agenda, honestly. They are just trying to survive by feeding their fat dragon lady. This contrasts with the Gruul, who actually make it their goal to tear down civilization.
The Ravnica guilds may not have lacked depth (with exceptions), but the original clans in Khans had an unusual degree of depth (except the Sultai), based as they were primarily on real (albeit caricatured, especially the Jeskai) societies. And the Dragons counterparts are caricatures of the guilds.
I actually found the Jeskai to be one of the most shallow clans. Their planeswalkers guide read like 50 different flavours of "super-disciplined monks doing all sorts of rather pointless things just for the sake of discipline".
Plus, I suppose the way the colour wheel works, it's somewhat a given that a culture appears as less complex if you remove a colour from it.
Compare with Lorwyn, which followed two blocks after the original Rav block. This was also mostly dual-coloured, but it had a stronger core theme, better-realised societies for each combination, and the takes on the guild combinations were distinct - faeries were very different from Dimir, elves and merfolk hard to even compare with Golgari or Azorius. In Dragons, by contrast, Kolaghan is sheer Rakdos aggro - not even as distinct as the Eldrazi BR tokens theme I'd expected them to go with. Atarka are Gruul (which is fair enough - they always are. This isn't a combination with much depth, which is probably why it was the one allied-colour combination Lorwyn avoided).
I don't know why you're bringing up the gameplay. Not only is it only tangentially related to the "depth" of a faction, but it's also not so clear cut. The Mardu for instance have a token subtheme, but some token generators are flavoured Abzan. The mechanical themes transcend the flavour borders often enough for this to be a point at all.
The others are a little more distinct: sacrifice effects are a new area for Dimir, and Ojutai are more aggro-focused than Jeskai. But they aren't huge distinctions, and many of the same elements are there. +1/+1 counters and tokens are what WG is all about in Rav - all that differs here is that there are more counters and fewer tokens.
I'm not sure if we were playing with the same sets. The Dimir play entirely different than the Silumgar, the same with the Azorius and the Ojutai.
I'm also not sure were you saw a counter theme in the selesnyans, or reversely, a token theme in the Dromoka.
I would like to see a block about the plane working together against a common foe. Maybe that's too boring though. I just miss pre-mending epic epics.
If anything, I'm sure BFZ will be less about infighting.
Wasn't that Scars of Mirrodin?
I'm also pretty sure the infighting in BFZ will be kept at a minimum.
The big factor though in these is I'm assuming average person growing up in one of these worlds. The dangers are internalized and tactics for mitigating and avoiding them would be taught by the parents and elders of whatever environment you were in. I mean, I think most children on Naya are taught that when the ground shakes they need to be up in the trees or something. On Theros we know kids are taught to beware of the returned in the same way we're taught stranger danger in the U.S.
We totally forgot Fiora, right? As long as you stay the hell away from all that intrigue and backstabbing, it should be a fine place to be?
I mean, since apparently the first Ravnica earned them so much money, we have to return to Ravnica TWICE, amirite?
I don't understand the hate for Ravnica. I suppose it's hip to hate on it, because it's popular?
Plus, I don't think the guilds are lacking depth. It should be remembered that each guild is only a part of the Ravnican civilization, so naturally they would be less complex than an entire culture, like the Abzan.
I like Dromoka a lot, but one thing bothers me:
Didn't Dromoka say she was impressed by the Abzan's tradition od adopting Krumar? If so, why in this new society do they not practice it anymore?
I find both the premises of Kolaghan and Atarka hard to comprehend. For Kolaghan If you are merely a band of kill-enthusiasts without any sense of structure and basically follow continuously a lighting-crazed dragon with little regard for their lives, how are they producing offspring? I mean, do the childbearing humanoids rush into battle sword in hand and baby on their back? I mean I guess socially it wouldn't have to be females that do this, but seeing as they mostly appear mammalian and there isn't infant formula around it would be difficult to raise offspring successfully if your clan is centered on everybody joining the raid. Sombody's gotta watch the kids,whether its papa orc or mama orc maybe doesnt matter but SOMEBODY has to right?
Well, some people said the timetravel doesn't need to make sense, because MAGIC. So I guess that's where babies come from: MAGIC.
I do agree with you though, that's kind of a big oversight. I now imagine Kolaghan warriors riding into battle with babies strapped to their back.
Well, there's no real logic to this... Maybe Atarka ate that too. (Sheesh, that's now my favourite explanation for everything. Maybe Atarka ate Taigam too, that's why he's missing from the cycle.)
Atarka quickly devoured most of the shamans of the former Temur clan, partly because those beings were not useful for obtaining food, but mainly out of fear of their elemental magic.
\
Well, at least that more definitively answers what happened to Temur's U. And yeah, I'm not particularly happy about Kolaghan. Being B/R, I never expected her to be "nice", but I did expect her R to show up more, and not be ruled by typical B "complete disdain for everyone".
Her Red is more prevalent than the Black in my opinion. Black is not about being mean, it's about power. And Kolaghan doesn't give a flip about power, she just wants to do what she wants to do. Honestly she could actually work as a mono-R character.
The closest to a "safe" world is probably pre-conflux Bant, but they had wars even there.
Well one could make the argument that Lorwyn isn't so bad and it's Lorwyn for 300 years at a time before Shadowmoor flips over. Pre-Conflux Bant or Naya I think would have been fine too honestly. And if you want the honest truth, Theros in the grand scheme of things doesn't seem horrible either. At least before Xenagos starts acting up. The average Meletian is unlikely to deal with monsters and danger much more than the average person in a large fantasy city uninvolved in massive, plane shaping events. Akros and Setessa seem slightly more dangerous but all warrior cultures were dangerous. Top it off, I don't remember hearing about grand scale conflicts between the mortal city states as they were militarily more concerned with dealing with the monsters and Leonin. Yes you run the risk of running afoul of some diety but most humans on earth already feel like they're doing that anyway.
I was thinking about Lorwyn, but honestly, there seem to be more ways to die than on planes riddled with monsters. Getting killed by elves, because you're an eyeblight; stepped on by a giant; getting killed by accident by a boggart prank gone awry... It's certainly less dangerous than your average world, but I think pre-conflux Bant would be safer.
As for Naya, you'd probably end up the meal of some wild animal sooner or later, at least until you're flattened by a gargantua.
And on Theros you can be turned into a harpy, simply because you fall in love with the wrong person.
Sure, I'd pick those places over 90% of the other planes available, but honestly they still don't sound safe to me. Or maybe I just have high self-preservation standards.
So, while on the whole Tarkir 1.1 is better off, it's not by much. And it's well away from Dominaria, Shandalar, Kamigawa, or Alara in quality of life, whether we're talking 1.0 or 1.1.
Let's be brutally honest here: We haven't seen a single plane in the multiverse that is a nice place to live in. There are planes that are less worse than others, but you can get killed literally everywhere.
The closest to a "safe" world is probably pre-conflux Bant, but they had wars even there.
To be honest, I think ultimate blame goes not to Bolas or Yasova, but to Ugin himself, for creating that balance-through-deadlock in the first place. Instead of balance through symbiosis or even commensalism, he set it up via what is essentially a constant stalemate--a constant conflict. BOTH sides became overused to battle and violence. And given that balance and equilibrium are pretty much the only things we know Ugin to value, the means probably wasn't important to him. Granted that Ugin's survival is good for Dominia as a whole, but I fear he isn't exactly a virtue elemental. Although whether he sees himself as a virtue elemental is another story.
Do we actually know for a fact that Ugin actively balanced the khans with the dragons? As I remember it, it is a mere fan theory, explaining how in one timeline the khans took over and in the other the dragons.
I fear that if people keep stating this as fact, it becomes another huge uproar later in when WotC "retcons" something, that was never canon to begin with.
I'm not sure who's more psychotic--Rakdos, or Kolaghan.
Kolaghan by a mile. Radkos just wants to be entertained.
I don't know. In Rakdos' eyes slaughter, torture and ritual sacrifice is considered entertainment. I find that to be way more psychotic than "just" killing other people.
No one ever had a chance of dethroning the Rakshasa either.
Not the Rakshasa, who were content to govern from the shadows, but the Naga. The random human could rise in rank enough to be trouble, like a Taigam to a Sidisi. You have NO hope of dethroning Silumgar and his dragons.
Well, technically the khan was never the highest being in the Sultai, since the Rakshasa had all the power and only gave it to the khan out of their own volition. The Rakshasa were really pulling the strings behind everything the Sultai did.
I mean, I agree with you that generally Tarkir is worse off for the Tarkirians, but in the Sultai's case I don't think anything of significance has changed.
not even close to it. a whole intelligent species was whiped completely out nothing the dragons have done is remotely comparable to genocide.
You'd have a point about genocide, if it weren't for the fact that the clans merely defended themselves. The dragons kept attacking and killing the humanoids on Tarkir and the Tarkirians -rightfully so- used lethal force to keep the dragons at bay.
If someone comes into your house and is seriously endangering your childrens' lives and you kill that intruder, no court in the civilized world will accuse you of murder, because it was clearly self-defense. The same happened on Tarkir, except on a much larger scale.
also from the post before the post you quoted bolded for emphasis.
Considering neither my post nor the one I was quoting was talking about the dragons' behaviour after the storms stopped, I fail to see why you assume I did talk about that. The "kept attacking" was refering to how the dragons never stopped waging war on the Tarkirians while they still had the choice.
um since we don't have anything saying one way or another as far as to if the dragons continued attacking or not isn't it smart to not make an argument that's biased on them either doing so or not doing so?
This is a hilarious thing to say, because you were the first to bring this up as an argument in the first place.
.
no I didn't you were the one to first say that they kept attacking while they were being whipped out my response said we had nothing saying that was the case. which is not the same as claiming the opposite by the way.
nothing says the dragons were continuing to attack as their numbers dwindled in fact we have the opposite stated by them saying the khans HUNTED them to extinction. also I disagree that defense makes genocide ok it does potentially make it necessary it doesn't make it ever be right.
Bolded emphasis mine.
You made an argument based on an assumption and I called you out on the fact that it is a mere assumption and then you said that it doesn't make sense to use an argument like this to make a point.
The arcana states that the changes reflect the fact that the plane has been torn by war for more than a thousand years. Of course things are going to look different, and maybe even a bit worn out.
However, why anyone would believe that the lands would look any different under dragon rule is beyond me. Quite the opposite infact, we know the former Temur tundras are now scorched earth and the Jeskai mountains are now frozen. I'd say that's somewhat worse than what we got in the KTK timeline.
As a side note, I found the example they used to be kind of funny. If you look closely at the art of the KTK Tranquil Cove, you actually see that the grass isn't dead or anything, it's literally just harvest time, as you can see the grains on the ears of the plants in the foreground.
um since we don't have anything saying one way or another as far as to if the dragons continued attacking or not isn't it smart to not make an argument that's biased on them either doing so or not doing so?
This is a hilarious thing to say, because you were the first to bring this up as an argument in the first place.
At any rate, what many people here forget is that the dragons were the aggressors. It was them who attacked the Tarkirians, and they paid for it in the KTK timeline. On most worlds the dragons are just there and don't wage a war against the Tarkirians in particular. The closest to this is Jund, but there the dragons were simply at the top of the food chain, but they didn't just destroy everything because why not.
On Tarkir however the dragons attacked the humanoid population. It was them who started the entire conflict. And it was also them that let everything escalate by not backing away once the Tarkirians fought back. The dragons never made the conscious decision to stop attacking the Tarkirians, until maybe at the very end. But I have no sympathy for a murderer who "sees the error of his ways" only once there's no way to escape the situation. If you do, however, then there is no more room for discussion, because our opinions are just too different.
With these dragons, you can't really expect that Elder Dragons would have the same mindset as humans. While dragons can exert mastery over their emotions, there's no good reason for them to follow the same moral and emotional compass as humans. Thoctar, I agree with you there. To the dragon's alien perspective they aren't doing any sort of injustice at all. It is a fantasized example of nature in action. The stallion that attacks and kills a foal that isn't his isn't doing anything wrong. We'd rightly call a human that did this to a child a murderer. Or as thoctar says we'd see the dragons as jerks while the dragons, Silumgar in particular, wouldn't see himself as a jerk.
It doesn't matter in the slightiest. Humans are capapable of consciously making the decision to spare non-human lives, even though evolutionary speaking non-human lives are not important for us. There are laws against animal cruelty, because we make the effort to put ourselves into the position of the animal in question.
Dragons are able to do the same, but they choose not to, so they have no excuse.
nothing says the dragons were continuing to attack as their numbers dwindled in fact we have the opposite stated by them saying the khans HUNTED them to extinction. also I disagree that defense makes genocide ok it does potentially make it necessary it doesn't make it ever be right.
Nothing says the dragons stopped either. It has been shown that dragons in the entirety of Magic are very proud beings, even more so for Tarkir. It's not hard to imagine that they continued attacking even after the storms stopped. And even if they stopped, the mindset of killing dragons was so ingrained in the Tarkirians' culture, that the momentum kept them from stopping.
Plus, it all boils down to the question of wether capital punishment is justified or not. It's somewhat of a grey area, and a moral dilemma that is being discussed even to this day, so I wouldn't really say right or wrong either way, but if you say the Khans were just as bad as the dragons or even worse, simply for defending themselves, then that seems like an insane notion to me.
The last several posts demonstrate a frightening amount of missing the point. Tarkir is worse now yes, at least for humanoids. That's a given but it doesn't matter as much as having Ugin back. The multiverse as a whole is better off now though and that's what needs to be focused on. Perspective ya know.
But the argument is about wether Tarkir is better off or worse. The fate of the rest of the Multiverse is unimportant for the sake of the argument.
Plus, the Tarkirians couldn't care less about the rest of the Multiverse, so the point is kind of moot.
Some of you are treating animals like people. The dragons are animals with a very different mindset than our own.
This point is irrelevant to the topic at hand. If a wild animal tries to hunt and kill me and my only way is to kill it first (because I can't outrun it for instance) then I'll do that, regardless of wether it's the animal's fault or not.
Furthermore, it always strikes me as needlessly apologetic to claim that we need to treat other forms of intelligences differently. They don't treat us differently. I agree that killing them just because they're different is wrong, especially for other intelligent forms of life, but if they threaten my existence, I will not sit there idly and get myself killed while thinking "Well, I can't blame them, they have a different mindset."
If humans can overcome their instincts and emotions (for instance when concerning environmental pollution, animal cruelty, etc.), then other intelligent beings can do that too, no matter how alien their thought processes are.
Actually it's the other way around. The places were inhabited during FTF and became deserted over the course of history on KTK.
As for what happened to them in DTK, nobody knows. They are not shown anywhere in the new timeline. Considering how the dragons changed the landscape by their mere presence, it could very well be that the lands would be unrecognizable at this point. The Thornwood Falls would be scorched and molten and the Swiftwater Cliffs would be frozen over. It stands to reason that some of them would even lose their second colour.
If you're talking mechanics, I fear you've come to the wrong subforum.
I also don't see how you can talk about "lore depth" when looking at the mechanics. That seems insanely backwards to me.
Individual cards don't make a theme.
Secure the wastes is also the perfect example for why you shouldn't use card mechanics to judge the lore of a faction. The card exists for both the Warriors subtheme (which has cards in both Abzan/Dromoka and Mardu/Kolaghan) as well as the Ojutai/Jeskai noncreature-spell theme.
Return to Ravnica was all about the multiverse going belly up, am I right? Or Alara... And Kahns of Tarkir...
The only blocks in recent history that feature multiverse-threatening dangers is Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin. I guess you could count Tarkir, for Ugin being dead, but that was actually solved by the end of the block.
Are we talking about the cards only or the lore too? Because lore-wise the Rakdos were one of the moor deep and complex guilds, due to the fact that they ranged from simple restaurants over mines to suicide circuses. Their motivations are also different. I mean, we only got the insane suiciders on the cards, but that's mostly because a barkeeper doesn't lend itself much to a game where the goal is to reduce your opponent's life total. (To be fair, some artistic decisions like the skeletons were also way forced, because what do skeletons have to do with a guild centered around entertainment? But that's a different story.)
As for the Gruul, their unifying theme is that they hate civilization, but there are still nuances among them. There are your run-of-the-mill savages, but also nature shamans and cripples who wage war against the other guilds due to personal history.
The only clan that's largely the same as their associated guild is the Dromoka. For the others they're largely different:
The Ojutai are (supposedly) about knowledge and discipline, while the Azorius are all about control and stagnation. You could make a point that Ojutai displays Azorius values and methods, but the clan as a whole does not.
The Silumgar are about power through... well, power. The Dimir are exclusively about gathering information in secret.
The Kolaghan are about war and the thrill of killing, while the Rakdos are about entertainment as a whole. Unfortunately we were only shown the murderous side of the Rakdos on the cards, but they're not exclusively about slaughtering people.
The Atarka don't really have an agenda, honestly. They are just trying to survive by feeding their fat dragon lady. This contrasts with the Gruul, who actually make it their goal to tear down civilization.
I actually found the Jeskai to be one of the most shallow clans. Their planeswalkers guide read like 50 different flavours of "super-disciplined monks doing all sorts of rather pointless things just for the sake of discipline".
Plus, I suppose the way the colour wheel works, it's somewhat a given that a culture appears as less complex if you remove a colour from it.
I don't know why you're bringing up the gameplay. Not only is it only tangentially related to the "depth" of a faction, but it's also not so clear cut. The Mardu for instance have a token subtheme, but some token generators are flavoured Abzan. The mechanical themes transcend the flavour borders often enough for this to be a point at all.
I'm not sure if we were playing with the same sets. The Dimir play entirely different than the Silumgar, the same with the Azorius and the Ojutai.
I'm also not sure were you saw a counter theme in the selesnyans, or reversely, a token theme in the Dromoka.
Which is why we'll never see an utopia-like plane. At least not in a core product.
Wasn't that Scars of Mirrodin?
I'm also pretty sure the infighting in BFZ will be kept at a minimum.
We totally forgot Fiora, right? As long as you stay the hell away from all that intrigue and backstabbing, it should be a fine place to be?
So that's where Emrakul and Kozilek went!
The riddle has been solved!
I don't understand the hate for Ravnica. I suppose it's hip to hate on it, because it's popular?
Plus, I don't think the guilds are lacking depth. It should be remembered that each guild is only a part of the Ravnican civilization, so naturally they would be less complex than an entire culture, like the Abzan.
Well, some people said the timetravel doesn't need to make sense, because MAGIC. So I guess that's where babies come from: MAGIC.
I do agree with you though, that's kind of a big oversight. I now imagine Kolaghan warriors riding into battle with babies strapped to their back.
Well, there's no real logic to this... Maybe Atarka ate that too. (Sheesh, that's now my favourite explanation for everything. Maybe Atarka ate Taigam too, that's why he's missing from the cycle.)
Her Red is more prevalent than the Black in my opinion. Black is not about being mean, it's about power. And Kolaghan doesn't give a flip about power, she just wants to do what she wants to do. Honestly she could actually work as a mono-R character.
I was thinking about Lorwyn, but honestly, there seem to be more ways to die than on planes riddled with monsters. Getting killed by elves, because you're an eyeblight; stepped on by a giant; getting killed by accident by a boggart prank gone awry... It's certainly less dangerous than your average world, but I think pre-conflux Bant would be safer.
As for Naya, you'd probably end up the meal of some wild animal sooner or later, at least until you're flattened by a gargantua.
And on Theros you can be turned into a harpy, simply because you fall in love with the wrong person.
Sure, I'd pick those places over 90% of the other planes available, but honestly they still don't sound safe to me. Or maybe I just have high self-preservation standards.
Let's be brutally honest here: We haven't seen a single plane in the multiverse that is a nice place to live in. There are planes that are less worse than others, but you can get killed literally everywhere.
The closest to a "safe" world is probably pre-conflux Bant, but they had wars even there.
Do we actually know for a fact that Ugin actively balanced the khans with the dragons? As I remember it, it is a mere fan theory, explaining how in one timeline the khans took over and in the other the dragons.
I fear that if people keep stating this as fact, it becomes another huge uproar later in when WotC "retcons" something, that was never canon to begin with.
I don't know. In Rakdos' eyes slaughter, torture and ritual sacrifice is considered entertainment. I find that to be way more psychotic than "just" killing other people.
Not by much though, but still.
Well, technically the khan was never the highest being in the Sultai, since the Rakshasa had all the power and only gave it to the khan out of their own volition. The Rakshasa were really pulling the strings behind everything the Sultai did.
I mean, I agree with you that generally Tarkir is worse off for the Tarkirians, but in the Sultai's case I don't think anything of significance has changed.
Considering neither my post nor the one I was quoting was talking about the dragons' behaviour after the storms stopped, I fail to see why you assume I did talk about that. The "kept attacking" was refering to how the dragons never stopped waging war on the Tarkirians while they still had the choice.
Bolded emphasis mine.
You made an argument based on an assumption and I called you out on the fact that it is a mere assumption and then you said that it doesn't make sense to use an argument like this to make a point.
I found that to be pretty ironic.
The arcana states that the changes reflect the fact that the plane has been torn by war for more than a thousand years. Of course things are going to look different, and maybe even a bit worn out.
However, why anyone would believe that the lands would look any different under dragon rule is beyond me. Quite the opposite infact, we know the former Temur tundras are now scorched earth and the Jeskai mountains are now frozen. I'd say that's somewhat worse than what we got in the KTK timeline.
As a side note, I found the example they used to be kind of funny. If you look closely at the art of the KTK Tranquil Cove, you actually see that the grass isn't dead or anything, it's literally just harvest time, as you can see the grains on the ears of the plants in the foreground.
This is a hilarious thing to say, because you were the first to bring this up as an argument in the first place.
At any rate, what many people here forget is that the dragons were the aggressors. It was them who attacked the Tarkirians, and they paid for it in the KTK timeline. On most worlds the dragons are just there and don't wage a war against the Tarkirians in particular. The closest to this is Jund, but there the dragons were simply at the top of the food chain, but they didn't just destroy everything because why not.
On Tarkir however the dragons attacked the humanoid population. It was them who started the entire conflict. And it was also them that let everything escalate by not backing away once the Tarkirians fought back. The dragons never made the conscious decision to stop attacking the Tarkirians, until maybe at the very end. But I have no sympathy for a murderer who "sees the error of his ways" only once there's no way to escape the situation. If you do, however, then there is no more room for discussion, because our opinions are just too different.
It doesn't matter in the slightiest. Humans are capapable of consciously making the decision to spare non-human lives, even though evolutionary speaking non-human lives are not important for us. There are laws against animal cruelty, because we make the effort to put ourselves into the position of the animal in question.
Dragons are able to do the same, but they choose not to, so they have no excuse.
Is humor really such an alien concept in the storyline forum? :/
Nothing says the dragons stopped either. It has been shown that dragons in the entirety of Magic are very proud beings, even more so for Tarkir. It's not hard to imagine that they continued attacking even after the storms stopped. And even if they stopped, the mindset of killing dragons was so ingrained in the Tarkirians' culture, that the momentum kept them from stopping.
Plus, it all boils down to the question of wether capital punishment is justified or not. It's somewhat of a grey area, and a moral dilemma that is being discussed even to this day, so I wouldn't really say right or wrong either way, but if you say the Khans were just as bad as the dragons or even worse, simply for defending themselves, then that seems like an insane notion to me.
But the argument is about wether Tarkir is better off or worse. The fate of the rest of the Multiverse is unimportant for the sake of the argument.
Plus, the Tarkirians couldn't care less about the rest of the Multiverse, so the point is kind of moot.
This point is irrelevant to the topic at hand. If a wild animal tries to hunt and kill me and my only way is to kill it first (because I can't outrun it for instance) then I'll do that, regardless of wether it's the animal's fault or not.
Furthermore, it always strikes me as needlessly apologetic to claim that we need to treat other forms of intelligences differently. They don't treat us differently. I agree that killing them just because they're different is wrong, especially for other intelligent forms of life, but if they threaten my existence, I will not sit there idly and get myself killed while thinking "Well, I can't blame them, they have a different mindset."
If humans can overcome their instincts and emotions (for instance when concerning environmental pollution, animal cruelty, etc.), then other intelligent beings can do that too, no matter how alien their thought processes are.