Magic Story Lore Thread: Bontu is a Women Croc Edition

I'd say Innistrad

What planes did they ruin?

Zendikar could be blamed on Nissa/Jace/Chandra's actions before they became the gatewatch. Though this could be further construed to be the fault of Sorin/Ugin/Nahiri earlier actions.

Innistrad was saved as much as it could be. None of the gatewatch are to blame for what happened there.

Kaladesh was saved by overthrowing Tezzeret. People complain about the gatewatch coming and conflicting with cultural/people of the plane and subjecting them to their own ideal, but Tezzeret was already doing that himself to kaladesh.

Is it confirmed to be a planeswalker spark farming operation?

No hard confirmation, but everything points to it.

All the complaining looks like it's just for things to go back to the way things were before Alara. When Planeswalkers were tourists instead of protagonists.

A strange narrative in which the Gatewatch is to blame for any dissatisfaction they feel with things. Same as the narrative that Maro is to blame for everything mechanically bad about the game, when there are a lot more hands in the game without a public face on them.

Confirmed that Bontu willingly submitted to Nicol Bolas instead of being mind controlled or killed?

I dunno. I initially thought that as well, but this card+flavortext gives me some doubts. Unless Bolas is straight up farming just the Sparks, and not Planeswalkers.

REEEEEEEEEEE NISSA IS BLUE
UG da bes tho

Well if their spark ignited they would be sent huddling across the blind eternities. Possibly to the meditation realm since everyone has a stiffy for old Nicky B

Glorious death just means death in the trial
People who complete Hazoret's trial get dusted

What else would it be?

Life on Amonkhet boils down to one thing, and one thing only, training for the trials. The trials themselves are designed to cull everyone but the strongest applicants. Any applicant capable of completing all 5 trials is then killed by Hazoret.

All of this does seem to point to planeswalker farming.

When a Planeswalker's Spark ignited they end up on a plane that "need" to be, right, or that fits their personality? Gideon ended up on Bant, Chandra ended up on Regatha, Liliana on Innistrad, etc. So Bolas creates the trials as a way to force any potential Planeswalkers into a personality that puts them on a specific plane when they spark. Makes since.

Sense*, not since, sorry.

>before Alara
Nah, the best stories started with Alara, and ran through Tarkir. When planeswalkers were protagonists, but the conflicts belonged to the worlds themselves, rather than always having to tie into something interplanar.

The Gatewatch ruining things isn't an in-universe issue, but a meta one. We don't see as much worldbuilding detail as we did before because we have to have N cards per set dedicated to showing them in the world and telling us what they're up to.

So if Bolas is farming for his Legion of Doom, why haven't we seen ANY of them. Like there hasn't even been mention of an Ascended Hero that survived Hazoret. Nothing like a winner walking around to cheer on the masses.

The only conclusion we reach otherwise is Bolas is just farming Zombies for his eventual invasion of other planes

They're probably in other planes doing shit or training more
Besides, if they returned to the plane, then they would be considered failures for not being dead

The simple answer is that no PW-sparked potential ha ssurvived Hazoret.

>why haven't we seen any of them

Because they all planeswalked away.

If Bolas was trying to farm zombies, why bother with the trials and the constant training.

The most logical thing to farm zombies would be to increase the population + population growth as much as possible.

Said worldbuilding stuff is in the artbooks rather than on the cards these days.

I don't think it can be a planeswalker farming operation for the simple reason that he put a deadline on it. If he was just farming walkers, he'd want to collect every so often, not end the entire project all at once without any confirmation of success or failure.

He's accumulating some kind of definite resource.

Are we really sure Amonkek is a walkerfarm. As I understand the character, the main goal of Bolas is to regain his oldwalker powerlevel. So everything he is doing should be leading to that goal, right?

How is sparking walkers or invading other planes going to help him do that?

>goal is to make the story and flavor more accessible
>shoves all the setting details into a $40 supplemental product that isn't available until the end of the block
>when the delay between set releases and book releases was one of the reasons they moved the stories to the website in the first place

I can only assume, he eats the sparks in some fashion.

How else could you gain your old powers, if not by devouring a bunch of other sparks?

a. He could just be farming the Spark itself to gain its power
b. If he's God-Pharoh of the multiverse that's kinda like having your godlike power back

>How else could you gain your old powers,
Well, time travel obviously. It's been done several times already so we know it's possible inuniverse.

If I was Bolas, over 25.000 yrs. old allknowing walker, and so pissed off about losing my godlike powers, I'd travel back in time and try to prevent the thing that caused the mending to happen.

He's fucking Bolas, right? He should be able to figure it out. Could be epic if they do it right I think. Re-visiting Urza and old Phyrexia.

It'll never happen off course, I understand why they did the mending and all. But would be awesome story I think.

As opposed to leaving it to be eaten by the Eldrazi?

I like Gideon more with every story. I hope the rest of the Gatewatch bites the dust.

How do you fags read this shit?

Without taking it seriously.

Bontu's sassy as fuck and Gideon's a culturally insensitive bumbling moron with a hero complex. It's hilarious.

This.

It was mentioned in previous stories that the trials existed pre-Bolas but was reserved to an elite few.

My guess is that the blessed afterlife is an actual thing, and that is what Bolas is gonna farm, like with the Maelstrom on Alara.
The Hours is basically a countdown until it has reached max capacity of souls to harvest.

I get that. It's not funny though (subjective) and it's difficult to read with the poor writing (objective). Dear god, the writing.

This one was particularly difficult to follow because it was just poorly written.

>tfw we will never have stories as good as "The Thran" ever again

Gideon getting roasted by Bontu. Delightful.

Sometimes people can take the stick out of their ass and just enjoy something that isn't high literature. Crazy, I know.

I'm mean yeah sure the story is not great and a half of other things about the game aren't going well but I really just look at it like scenery, as we are but tourists to this Desert shithole stuck following around some incompetent power rangers.

The thing is that the mending happened because of so many clusterfucks being piled on top of each other. If he just stopped the mending itself, the multiverse would have been torn apart. The best thing to do would be to go back to Thran times and smother Yawgmoth in his crib.
But that would create more problems and probably more rifts and magic cancer since the Thran wouldn't have died.
Maybe take the world bombs Urza had made and blow up Phyrexia right after Yawgmoth gets sealed off

Even the act of time travel and altering the course of time on that level would probably exacerbate the destruction of the Multiverse.

Wasnt what made the mending neccessary in the first place that time travel had damaged reality and all of time and space was coming undone?

Trying to solve that with more time travel sounds bad.

Funny enough, time travel actually helped. A rift was created when Karn went back in time to save his friends but made beyond repair when Barrin obliterated Tolaria. Knowing this, Karn went back in time again to seal the rift right after it happened with his own spark.

What if he's harvesting Sparks to try and change the Mending in some way - even if just for himself? Regain some of his former power.

I don't blame the gatewatch for all the issues, I blame the SJW pandering and those Magic the Armaturing women for this diversity push.

>Smother Yawgmoth

Congrats. Wizards has already confirmed that if yawgmoth hadn't become the Father of machines then Urza would have instead.

I blame you for not killing yourself.

fuck wotc and fuck (mono) white planeswalkers

I still feel like this whole plane was converted into a Planeswalker farming realm for Bolas to get people loyal to him from birth to serve under him.

I think the reason why no one's survived Hazoret's trial (ie., having their Spark ignite before dying and Planeswalking away) is because of the trials themselves; these people are expected to train and serve from birth to death (which we're lead to believe is them dying due to the Trials by their early 30s). They are so used to death and strife that when they go to Hazoret and get dusted, they think they'll just be reborn when Bolas shows up. Compared to the other Planeswalkers we know of, their Sparks ignited upon being faced with a great revelation and/or are shocked so deeply that they just 'NOPE' out of the plane.

Instead, I think Bolas is going to show up, see that no one's had their Spark ignite, and just Wrath of God + Armageddon the plane, chalking up this planar experiment into the study of 'Spark ignition' a failure, and move onto the next plane.

... Which, funnily enough, might be what makes one of these idiots have their Spark ignite; seeing their God-Pharoh arrive, be greatly disappointed, and decide to nuke the plane because fuck humans, what use to me are you alive or dead. Oh, and btw, your whole, "reborn in the Afterlife" thing is fake, too.

I'm starting to think Bolas doesn't really give a shit about the population of Amonkhet so much as he's letting something tick down until he's ready to consume the last of the plane's power and the remaining gods all in one go. If the warped trials produce useful pawns in the process this is merely a convenient bonus.

I notice they continue to not have Gideon use Heiromancy in the stories. Still just the invincible aura and hand-to-hand combat.

Which is making me wonder if they just forgot that Gideon is, in fact, a fairly powerful mage as well as a soldier and has magic powers BESIDES his aura, or if Gideon is for some reason unable to use his Heiromancy because his faith's been broken for years and Amonkhet is forcing him to confront that with a new set of gods rather than ignore it.

Timetravel in MtG is oddly specific:

1) not even walkers survive time travel, only silver can withstand it

2) Time travel rips the multiverse, and leads to mending-like crysis

The only actual time traveler is Karn (karona was clearly experiencing delusions), and even him did it only a handful of times, and ended up being stranded on new phyrexia, losing his old spark and with memory mostly wiped out

Also Sarkhan, whose dragonboner is so hard that he fucked a hole in Tarkir's timeline until he was blue in the face.

Technically that was Ugin, but yeah, it basically broke all the pre-extabilished rules for time traveling.

It's implied that Sarkhan was able to time travel thanks to Ugin's corpse making a portal back to the moment he died, back when Bolas showed up to fight Ugin. And Sarkhan might or might not have been possessed by Ugin's spirit, which was having him be so crazy to begin with.

Fuck you, I like the cat man and the knight girl.

Ajani and Elspeth are (to my knowledge) well-liked Planeswalkers, because they actually have some sort of personality and character growth.

Compared to Gideon, who is pretty boring as, "soldier boy beefcake."

I dunno, I kinda feel like Gideon's the only member of the gatewatch that reads like a person more than a stereotype, even if it seems like half the writers have no fucking idea how to write him.

Anybody has scans of the artbooks?

The one intetesting thing there is tgat Sarkhan didnt actual travel physically, he basically just astral projected into the past, and only was able to do that because Ugin summoned him.

Which might get around the silver restriction, but also means that you can only travel as far back as to when the spell was cast by someone else, not before or to anywhere else.

Gideon is aggressively steortypical white. He is literally what would happen if you took Savannah Lion and made it a mythic.

If you all didn't realize Bontu was female even before her card came out, you are miserable at both identifying sexual dimorphisisms and also bad at pattern recognition,
Because WotC always does 3/2 split with women being the majority.

>3/2 split with women being the majority

The amonkhet gods are opposite sexed of the theros mono-color gods. Which means they did a 3/2 split with men being the majority.

It's literally just a gender reversal of the Theros Gods, there's nothing sinister behind it.

worded poorly, but Theros had a 3/2 split with men being a majority

They do a 3/2 split that alternates from set to set. Half the time it's guys half it's girls.

Mono legends in aether Revolt
Khans in ktk
Mono gods in Theros (which amonkhet gods were mirroring)

Would explain the lack of a mask.

Time travel only caused ONE rift.
The rest were caused due to Dominaria suffering about a dozen apocalypses

How many years Zendikar has been eaten by Eldrazi before Gatewatch showed up?

I think about a year passed between Rise of the Eldrazi and Battle for Zendikar.

Nissa and Gideon were there fighting them most of that time, though.

Nah. What made the mending necessary was the planeswalker card type. Kinda bummed by this actually. You know that they'll never reverse this fluffwise so you kinda already know Bolas has lost. You can strech it but but basically Bolas has already been defeated by marketing.

meta. Also, depressing. Fuck planeswalker cards, I much prefer the idea of the players being the only planeswalkers.

I do have to wonder what "Bolas the God-Pharoh" Planeswalker card will be though.

>Implying Bolas doesn't try to timetravel to Old Phyrexia to try meld himself to the plane like Yawgmoth did
>Implying the dead Dragon that Yawgmoth found on Phyrexia isn't Bolas.

She wanted that dragon dick

Hey cuck your wife called to say Tyrone miss placed the key to your cock cage.

Or atleast she was willing to suck it to not be killed/mind-controlled.

But if there's no Yawg then the Brother's War doesn't happen, Mishra isn't compleated by Gix because he doesn't exist either.

Urza would have eventually planeswalked, and discovered phyrexia.

Wizards has confirmed that the only difference between Urza and Yawgmoth is that Yawgmoth found Phyrexia first

It's been confirmed that the leylines on amonkhet are manipulated so that every dead eventually comes back to life. Maybe it's just a temporary dead. Either the spark gets ignited when they come back to life, or Bolas is just farming sparks somehow and not planeswalkers.

The Brother's War and the Golgothian Sylex was what ignited his Spark. Without the War, there is no Guarentee that Urza's Spark ever ignites.

Well, yeah, that much is true. I mean, look what happened in the story when Urza decided to join up with Yawg.

Except Phyrexia had nearly fallen apart when Yawg was handed it by the dumbest planeswalker ever.
The plane wouldn't have existed by the time Urza was born.

>dumbest planeswalker ever.
>Not Urza

Urza was a clever imbecile, it's different.

There's a lot of competition for Second Dumbest Planeswalker Ever.
There's none for the #1 slot, because that will always be held, in perpetuity, by Dyfed, the Thran planeswalker. A squeeing fangirl of the artificer Glacian, she went to up and visit him and tell him he's totes a planeswalker too he just hasn't become one yet, all within earshot of his doctor. She then decided to give said doctor his VERY OWN PLANE of nested spheres and mechanical horror and glistening oil that she'd found, because ??? and the old owner died so hey nobody's claimed the place.
And to be extra helpful, she even made a portal from Dominaria to this brand new plane just for ol' Yawgy, so he could use it as his special hospital. Right in front of him. This was obviously a smart idea.
For her efforts, he pithed and vivisected her, because those are his fetishes.

this. When the hobby started to open itself up, the decline began.

Emrakul saved Innistrad, not the gatewatch.

Thanks for the cringe, friends.

Two iirc, but even with the Roil the plane was being eaten faster than it could recover. Wizards shouldn't have ended it the way they did, but Zendikar was straight-up saved by the Gatewatch
Kaladesh wasn't in the same kind of pinch and Tezz's (Bolas') plan is fairly abstract at this point, but it seems safe to say that if the portal was going to be used to import Phyrexian oil, they saved it too. If not then they just went America all over everybody's ass for personal reasons

I did quite a few back in the day right before oath of the gatewatch came out (My art book came early for some reason).

I haven't done a total scan mostly because my scanner is small, the book is big, and a little weirdly shaped in such a way that its near impossible to get everything in there.

One of these days i might schlep these books to the library and use one of those big book scanners they got for old documents.

I got the books through kaladesh.

I think there are some folks that think Ashiok might be from Amonkhet. He has some shoulder armor that showed up on some of the characters on either the cover for the art book or some other obscure characters on the cards.

All I can say is that they've got the horn motif.

Something to keep in mind, there is going to be some "Archenemy" kit coming out too.
So maybe that might allow bolas to be more "Oldwalker styled"