MTG Salvation

I don't see any similarities, but Nahiri was the creator of the hedrons, so it makes sense she'd repeat the same patterns.

If Creative is stupid enough to do this - and that, my friends, is something I have little doubts about -, they seriously need to get new characters, because too many of the current villain planeswalkers are Black, and the few that aren't are either saboutaged (Ral Zarek no longer being evil, Tezzeret, Tibalt and Garruk being shifted to Blue/Black, Black/Red and Black/Green respectively) or dead (Xenagos).

She, at least, always seemed to point in one direction to such a degree that reading her mind was generally pointless.

Some people weren't meant to sit still, and Jace would rather have her blasting Eldrazi than fidgeting through a plan whose details weren't going to interest her

DURR HURR HURR RED IS SO STUPID HURR HURR DURR DERP

Quote from Dregs of Dreaming »

Quote from Hackworth »

Emerakul reemerges from the void on Innistrad's moon and starts warping reality. Hence fish-people, various spoiler characters, and the Eldritch Moon. That's why all the plot threads tie together at SOI.

Ugin said "You must stop killing the Eldrazi!"
"No! I must kill the Eldrazi." Jace shouted Ugin Said: "No. You are the Eldrazis".
And then Jace was zombie.

The plot is actually going to be about goffs and preps.

Quote from MarkXero »

Just to say I want both peace and freedom (though I'm not American). Actually - does anyone *not* want peace?

People who would rather have chaos, anarcho-capitalism and/or holy wars.

Humans are full of hypocrisy and contradictions, and I think the conflicts between the five colours play out in us all. Sure - each of us may feel we are more defined by one or two colours than the others, but we are creatures of the full gamut. Or maybe it's just me.

Like I said, perspective and motivations play a key role. Everyone feels emotions, but only some people wish to give themselves to them and be passionate (red), everyone is forced to obey instincts but only a select number actually accept them (green), everyone wants agency but only a few wish agency above all else (black).

Just as a personal example, I value intelligent thought, perfection and knowledge, but ultimately they are all irrelevant to my goals of personal freedom and peace. That is why I am ostensibly Red/White and not Blue.

It's a matter of execution, yes. In recent years most of the good writers have been either fired or forced to inactivity, and subtility is being progressively dismissed in favour of quick, obvious marketing.

I do have to say that Creative has gone on to portray Red as more nuanced, though. Even early novels focused on its violent and harsh side, but now we have an emphasis on Red's other emotions.

He was White/Blue. The school based on his teachings, however, did gradually incorporate dark magics, though both White and Black remained second fiddle to Blue.

And nayan leonin kill godbeasts for the same reasons all the time.

Amusingly the old forums had a similar waterworld concept, only:

- White = seagrass plains (yes, those actually exist, go check them)

- Blue = islands (irony)

- Black = brine lakes

- Red = Underwater volcanoes

- Green = coral reefs

One of my created worlds, Ranmin, only has access to Blue, Green and Black mana, but it is a perfect underwater world all the same:

This is amazing. Pure, undaltered lovecraftian horror + triumph of the human will. It almost makes up for all the mistakes Magic has pulled this year.

Quote from Jay13x »

Here I think it's a little less offensive though. Coming from anyone but an angel, I would have rolled my eyes and sighed hard - but Love and Mercy are aspects of white and intrinsic in the angel's nature. I think it was more of a 'remember these feelings and our power will help you' kind of thing.

Love isn't White, though, but that's beside the point.

Quote from Trinite0 »

Having largely enjoyed the first two installments, despite agreeing with some of the criticisms of Vivien's character, this chapter has brought me around closer to the negative viewpoint. Looks like it was all pushing toward thinly-justified eco-terrorism the whole time. And also apparently she could have planeswalked out of the torture cells earlier, and just didn't. Okay.

I've been defending the writing style, but by this chapter was wearing thin on me, too. Stuff like:

"I'm really not sure what the protocol is on this." Unbidden, a smile anchored itself. "But I keep feeling like some measure of informational exposition is necessary."

So now the shamans of Skalla talk like Azorius lawyers, I guess.

And:

"Someone once described the death of a nation to me as a 'mercy.' I didn't really understand his point then, or where he was coming from. But now, now I find myself in perfect comprehension." Vivien drew lazy figure eights with her fingers, magic beginning to collect in her palm, spokes of glittering power. "Anyway. This is a mercy. This is the last that you will see of Luneau. By this time tomorrow, the wilds will have this place again and you will be nothing but a memory to be forgotten."

I certainly hope they're deliberately pitching her as a villain, because that's certainly what this bit of dialogue does. I don't know if she's quoting Nicol Bolas or someone else, But it's something he certainly might say (with a bit of a G twist).

That being said, I'm down for non-heroic neo-walkers, and even a return to walkers in general being almost bad guys by default. But I'd rather they come off as smart and reflective, even in their villainy, rather than monomaniacal and kinda dumb.

I also agree with Lord Mektar above, that Vivien's personality and behavior come off as more R in nature, or RG. She seems to really enjoy watching violence, and has more regard for raw power than natural order.

But hey, I guess when you manage to use your -8 Ult, it feels pretty good to swing with everything.

Raw power is more of a mono G thing than mono R. I'm really seeing very little R in her character except on points that green and red share. Both value emotion, both value action and directness over planning and discretion. Neither like being constrained, and neither like pompous intellectuals or social elites (of note, I thought her suddenly changing her manner of speech during her evil monologue was intended to mock the vampires and the way they speak, specifically how they feign politeness and civility and madk malice with powdered words. She was telling them that she was going to kill most of them and destroy their city, and was mimicking their fake manners as a final **** you to show them how little she thought of it, in a very green way).

But red doesn't make connections the way green does, nor does it value them. Red is also not tied to nature unless tied to green, and then only tied to the destructive side. While Vivien is clearly destructive, she also values the nurturing and interconnected side of nature. Her destruction of the city is also indirect, she empowers the animals to take it down and to do what they will with it. A red character would destroy the city but want the peasants to rebuild from the ashes, a green one returns it to nature, because while the peasants are victims of the civilization they are also tainted by it, and thus die beside their masters. The personal connections she makes with the animals, even those she kills, empathy for their pain and her spiritual understanding of the process behind the arkbow, that's all green. And as impetuous as she is still far more patient than a red character would be.

I think Azorious is all but confirmed, and I could see Dovan or Tezz taking it over. Yes, Tezz is UB, but he has experience working in Kaladesh as basically the head of a beauracratic government that was mostly WU aligned, and he's from Esper which is WUB. There is no artifact guild on Ravnica either, so he isn't tied down by that.

I think that the Gruul are likely to join up, because they are sort of low hanging fruit for Bolas to pick. They aren't organized, at all, so if Bolas manages to form some sort of organization around Domri, who should be easy to manipulate, then he could capture most of the guild. The Gruul also have the most to gain out of all the guilds from overthrowing the system. They are completely out of power and the only guild that does not benefit from the system. It has been all downhill for then since the first guildpact was signed, and they already live in a post apocalyptic existence, scrounging for scraps in the rubblebelt, a wasteland of destroyed cityscape. If Ravnica is destroyed, it will look like where the Gruul already live, and that leaves them the most suited to surviving the aftermath and rebuilding Ravnica in their image. That's why I think they'd be the most willing to cooperate, because knowing that Bolas intends to destroy Ravnican society would sell them on Bolas more than any lie he could tell them.

The Orzhov I think will behave like the Dimir. They like the current system. They don't want to rule outright, they prefer letting others do that while they work their corruption from the shadows. The system works extremely well for them, and they are incredibly risk averse and tradition bound. The only way I see the Orzhov going to Bolas is if the Obzedat are annihilated and Teysa wrongly believes that Bolas will usher in the society she wants. As others have mentioned, Kaya could be key here.

The Rakdos I think will go to him. Again, he can be honest with them and they'd join up. Just tell them to go out and burn the place down, rape and pillage, cut some faces off, go nuts. Manipulating them would be as simple as sending in Liliana with the promise to reanimate them when they die so they can go out with a bang multiple times. It's already a necromantic guild, adding a really powerful necromancer to help them and to steer them to targets would be trivial. And Lord Rakdos would enjoy the show.

The Simic seem to have little and less to gain from helping Bolas. If they didn't want to join Ravnican society they could have simply stayed out of it and nobody would have been the wiser. They revealed themselves in RTR block because they wanted to fill the void left by Vig and be a part of Ravnica. They seem pretty on board with the state of Ravnica, and I don't see an in for Bolas, nor does he have any walkers to infiltrate it (as others have said, Tezz would not be welcomed there).

Given Isperias death opening up the Azorious, a guild that would otherwise be unmotivated to join Bolas, no predictions are safe. Generally I'd say that the guilds that benefit from the system would want to keep it, and those seeking change would be more open to manipulation, and this mostly holds in GoR. Selesnya wants peace, the Lazav lead Dimir are happy operating in the shadows and pitting guilds against each other, the Boros live for keeping the established order. On the other hand, the Golgari are an underclass now lead by someone who hates the system and Niv never stopped trying to take over the world and thinks he's smart enough to come out of all this on top. That pattern holding would have matched my predictions, with the exception of the Azorious, but Isperia being killed and Bolas installing a puppet changes them. Because of this, all I can say is that those that benefit from the system will stand against Bolas unless he is able to change their leadership, which seems worthless and might be, but I don't actually think we're going to see more leadership changes, especially because if we did we'd need to see guilds that would be naturally inclined to join Bolas find a reason to oppose him, and that's more difficult than the reverse.

Quote from ryuplaneswalker »

Quote from OathboundOne »

Quote from Xeruh »

I like the new walker, though I wonder what exactly she will do. Not really complaining about a new female, though I wish we had less humans.

This is my main feeling on it as well. I don't really care that we're getting so many new female walkers, just... more humans? (my earlier "obligatory" comment was largely tongue-in-cheek.

Take Commander 2018: 1 male non-human, and 3 human females. Saheeli is an existing character, so she's fine. Aminatou I guess they had a specific sort of picture in mind of, cool. Estrid... was there ANY reason Estrid couldn't have been ANY other species? (For the record, the Estrid deck was/is the one that appealed to me the most, but I find Estrid herself incredibly bland and like both of the other Bant generals better than her. Being non-human would have made her more interesting to me.)

We are getting so many generic Female Human planeswalkers because they are trying to churn out as many females for some sort of stupid balance of male and female so they don't have any time to create a diverse set of lady walkers so for every Aminatou we get we get 4 Hualtli/Estrid/Not Doctor Strangess/Werewolf Lady whose name I don't care to remember.

None of the characters you consider "bland" would be better if they had been male, and them being female or male has zero to do with them not being human. That and of those characters I wouldn't really call any of them bland, especially given one of the four is someone we know nothing about really. We can't even really take a guess at her colors. I'm personally looking forward to seeing what she does.

And three of the guilds in the next block are under Bolas control? Sheesh, I can't wait until no more Bolas. I wonder if the Planeswalkers will have a 1:1 correlation in terms of colors. Could make it plausible to take a guess at who the three in the next set are based on color balance then.

Of course Vivien was meant to be a heroine by Wizards, they are the same who told us that the Tarkir Dragonlords are good guys!

Quote from AUTUMNTWILIGHT »

I don't think she is suppose to be a Villain. She reminds me of Garruk before Lili. But her actions and motivations can go that way hence why they sent Viv to a plane where she look good.

She shares some qualities with Garruk, though Garruk was really just focused on being a hunter and didn't have any desire to go burning cities down or chasing revenge. His whole motivation for going after Lili was getting rid of the curse she put on him when they happened to cross paths. Without that, Garruk's schtick doesn't really lead to villainy. Viv, though, is pretty far up her own ass, which is a really good way to start down the villain route.

I disagree that Ixalan is a plane where she can look good. I actually think this made her look really, really bad. Unless she approaches most civilizations this way, then her disdain for vampires may have made her more capricious in her destruction of the city. Perhaps she goes to Ravnica and starts a minor riot, or blows up a consulate office on pre revolt Kaladesh or something, but here she thinks that destroying the entire city, civilians included, is a good idea. It paints her in the worst possible light. Maybe against Innistrad vampires, but Ixalan vamps are downright reasonable compared to her. Until she starts killing them, they not only do not have a problem with her, they fete her, and this knowing she isn't a vampire.

Quote from Perkunas687 »

There's got to be a bit of black in Vivien. Using things/animals for her own purposes, actions bordering on the immoral, her goals vs. well-being of others. Unlike Sarkhan, who sought out dragons to worship them, Vivien is seeking them out solely on their usefulness. She hunts down a dinosaur for whatever reason to give over to a group? Why? Then she starts slaughtering them and using animal spirits to do it? Then she slaughters even more people while manipulating other living things?

Seems pretty B/G to me.

Nah, mono green covers her behavior just fine, survival of the fittest, nature over civilization, etc. She isn't using things just to have power over them, she has practical reasons that advance a goal that isn't just self aggrandizement. She wants to kill Bolas for destroying her plane, and she needs powerful support to do it. Yes, she kills the animals that get stored in the arkbow, she's a hunter, and hunters are mono green just fine. Their deaths serve a purpose, they preserve the animals in a way, not just their form but also their spirit in a sort of gentle slumber unless called upon. The whole thing seems to have served some sort of ritual purpose among the shamans of Skalla. The process certainly isn't her collecting the animals to gain personal power. She also expressed a clear revulsion to many black aligned concepts, such as death, undeath, cruelty, forms of power other than natural ones such as strength, luxury, wealth, etc.

She is what mono green villain looks like.

Quote from Joao Wockeez »

Quote from OrzhovPlaneswalker »

Quote from Urabrask »

We know that Firemind's Research is a story spotlight card and if we look at the promo we might see why. I could be totally off, but it could be Bolas using his manipulations, like we saw in the M19 story to influence Niv, by acting like him talking to himself, tempting him.

I wondered if that card was a story spotlight yet I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to depict given that there was no flavour text and Niv’s experiments are often complicated and hard to describe even at best.

Both the original and promo versions of the art show some sort of illusion of Niv, Niv is always depicted as having a strong personality and ideals, i'm hoping that's enough to protect him from Bolas, if he turns out to become another puppet it would be quite anticlimactic IMO.

Bolas is gonna go all Darth Vader and reveal that he's Niv's father, I've been tellin' ya!

Then Niv's gonna find out what the B in UBR means when daddy Bolas stabs him in the back.

I like the Baron as a villain, but unfortunately I actually like him more than Vivien as a person, since while he's detestable for being an elitist vampire who tortures animals for science, Vivien is a tiresome charcter who is totally on board with mass murder to save a TRex. She wouldn't be getting tortured if she didn't kill a bunch of people. Yeah, I'm going to hate the Baron for being a guy that tortures people, but that's not going to make me sympathetic to Vivien. When she was trying to get the Baron to let her use the bow, I was thinking "Just kill her already dude, just slit her throat and let her bleed out on the floor like Littlefiger."

Vanpire society is twisted, but you end up in a situation where you have to ask if it's any worse than alternatives. Yeah, they drink people's blood, but they specifically don't kill them, and the response to the guy claiming he wanted to leave wasn't threatening violence or imprisonment, but saying "Yeah, you won't leave, because if you did you'd actually have to work rather than selling us your blood." Those human sailors sure seemed happy to get home in the first story, just saying. Mortal nobles would be asking for a lot more in terms of agricultural product than would be required to replace the blood the vamps take.

The whole thing has been too simplistic, and pretty dumb. Ixalan sucked from a story perspective. The concepts were cool but terribly executed, and the quality of the relationship between Jace and Vraska helped mask the problems with the plane. This is the first time I've ever said that the focus on the Planeswalkers was a good thing. Without Jace and Vraska, Captain Capslock is the high point of the story. Otherwise you have the bland warrior poet, tag team one note vampires, some pirate tropes, and a villain whose weakness is windows. Oh, and a rigged Geo cache contest.

And damn does creative have a problem writing mono green charcters. Vivien is at least more interesting than Nissa, but they come off as so one note. It's all "nature good, everything else bad" and "look at me, I'm so special, im a loner, I've suffered at the hands of society." We've seen different flavors of red, of black, of blue, and of white. We've seen those colors approach their philosophy from different perspectives. But green, green is always the same, and done poorly at that. Green is right now sitting in the same spot that Jace was in at his worst, grating, cliche, unsympathetic, and fake.

Bolas and Ugin being twins was one of the better retcons in recent memory. Magic Story will always have problems in the long run since they can only plan ahead so much. It's not like a comic where it's just an illustrated story - in Magic, the card game is the main component and the story has to adapt to it. As far as I can tell, Magic's storyline has always been pretty bumpy. So if that's how it's going to be, I'd rather read free articles on the mothership and adjust my expectations accordingly rather than buying books, expecting more and being let down in the end.

Quote from Goryo »

BOLAS.

CAN.

READ.

MINDS.


You don't bluff Bolas. He looks into your eyes and sees what cards you're holding; that's why Jace has to erase Vraska's memories of their sabotage plot. And he loses now by being lied to?

1. The story specifies that Yasova was using her counter-magic to prevent Bolas from reading her and Baishya and Naiva's minds. Remember, this is a shaman who'd been one of the five most powerful non-dragon magic users on Tarkir, whose own mind magic was powerful enough to let her take control of dozens of dragons at once. She might not be on par with a planeswalker like Jace, let alone an ancient draconic planeswalker like Bolas, but she's about as powerful as a mortal planebound mind mage can get. It's completely believable that she would be able to hold her own against Bolas' mental assault, at least for a limited time, and a limited time is all that was required here.

2. The story also specifies that the hedrons were also providing their minds with extra protection, like a "whisperer's headdress" (which is presumably some kind of artifact that Temur shamans use to shield their minds from telepathy) but extended to cover multiple people. Again, I have no doubt that Bolas would've eventually been able to overcome Yasova and Baishya's mental defenses, even with this added protection, but it would've cost him time that he believed he didn't have.

3. In spite of these protections, Bolas was still able to keep influencing Naiva's mind, since he'd already gotten his hooks into her psyche. If Naiva had actually been standing outside with Yasova, there's a very good chance that she would have killed her grandmother when he commanded her to. It's only because Naiva and Baishya switched places that Bolas' plan didn't work; the fake Naiva was able to seemingly resist Bolas' spell because it wasn't really targeting her at all. And there's a very good chance that Bolas immediately realized exactly what had happened, but at that point it was irrelevant because Yasova's bluff gave him bigger problems to worry about.

4. This point is more subtle, because it requires a lot of reading between the lines, but it's key to understanding what happened. Some people have argued that, even if he couldn't read their minds directly, Bolas should've guessed they were deceiving him because their minds were shielded. After all, if they were being honest with him, they shouldn't have anything to hide, right? This makes sense to me, but it's actually all the more reason why it makes sense that their bluff succeeded: He did realize that they were trying to deceive him, which made their threats of a trap all the more believable from his perspective. Their bluff was centered around him realizing that he was being tricked, but not knowing what the trick itself was - that's the brilliance of it. They pulled a Kansas City Shuffle on him, and that type of con is very likely to succeed against a mark who's too clever and too paranoid for his own good.

5. This is an even more subtle point, but it's important to remember that when he read Ugin's mind during their battle, he wouldn't have seen anything about the hedrons, because they hadn't been part of Ugin's original plan to imprison Bolas. It was Sarkhan who brought the hedrons to Tarkir, at the behest of Ugin's ghost. While living, the idea that he could use hedrons to resurrect himself wouldn't have been present in Ugin's mind, or at least not among his thoughts relating to the imprisonment plan. To Bolas, the hedrons were a powerful new unknown factor that had suddenly come into play, despite the fact that they didn't fit with what he thought he knew about Ugin and Azor's plan. This would've made it seem all the more likely that Ugin had pulled a Thanatos Gambit on him, with the hedrons serving as a secret part of the imprisonment plan that Ugin had somehow managed to keep hidden from him.

6. Compounding the previous two points, Ugin was the only being in the multiverse who Bolas truly viewed as an equal, or at least close to one. If anyone could pull the wool over Bolas' eyes, it would be Ugin. And if there was even the slightest chance that Ugin had gotten one over on him, Bolas wasn't going to take any risks, not when the stakes were so high. It makes perfect sense that he'd flee as soon as possible, without taking the time to examine the situation further. I'm sure that Bolas was fully aware that Yasova might have been bluffing, but would calling her bluff have been worth the possibility of being bound to a single plane forever?

7. As for why Bolas didn't go back to Tarkir later to investigate more, why would he take the risk? From his perspective, he had nothing to gain and quite literally everything to lose. Remember, as far as he could tell, Ugin genuinely was dead and wouldn't be coming back again. Yasova's bluff was mainly meant to scare Bolas away, but it also served to provide him with an alternate explanation of the hedrons' purpose, drawing his attention away from the fact that they could be used to resurrect Ugin. Granted, he could've sent minions to go to Tarkir in his stead (and maybe he did, for all we know), but it's unlikely they would've been able to tell Bolas anything he didn't already know. Bolas also became bound to Dominaria at some point between this story and the present day, and then trapped in the Madaran rift as a disembodied spirit following his death, so there's a long period of time in which he simply couldn't have gone back to Tarkir.