Magic Story Lore Thread: Press F Edition

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/hour-promise-2017-06-28

Todays story is Hour of Promise. More gods Bite the Dust. Still no Bolas. Also is Hapatra supposed to be a leader of the city?

How do marauding mummies move through the sandy desert?

With grit.

What was the point of mentioning gideon and lily on this story? They did nothing

I didn't get the joke

They're mentioned to show how the people of amonkhet feel about planeswalkers.

Up until this point in the nu-story when people find out planeswalkers exist the biggest reaction was "huh that's pretty weird" and then start calling them some original name that derived from how they found out about their existence. However with amonkhet, they still use an original name, "trespassers" (due to the fact that nicol bolas trespassed and messed everything up) but now they despise every planeswalker that comes to their plane

I really liked this story, but goodness the phrase "marauding mummy" was used too much for me to not notice.

Also F

I've been having a lot of fun with Hapetra in EDH recently, so it's nice to see my new waifu get her story spotlight.

It is nice the past two stories have been mostly sans pw group.

Best god confirmed to survive.

>best god

That isn't Oketra

Get off of Veeky Forums, Gideon.

Thanks for posting this, I an at work, do you have more senpai?

Oketra and Kefnet are killed by the Scorpion God. Gideon is next to Oketra as she dies (Depicted in Solemnity)

Bontu and Hazoret fight each other to earn the God-Pharaoh's favor. Bontu is victorious and brings the defeated Hazoret to Bolas as tribute; Bolas kills Bontu, because that's how the Bolas do. Hazoret escapes when the Gatewatch distract Bolas

Hazoret is the only survivor of the Amonkhetu gods. She vows to protect the people of the plane

Hazoret, Djeru, and Samut, along with some initiates, manage to defeat the Scorpion God. Samut sparks afterwards for unclear reasons

The Scarab God is the leader of the army of Eternals. They retain their skills, but are mindless

Jace is baited into trying to read Bolas' mind, at which point Bolas destroys his. Jace goes catatonic and (reflexively?) planeswalks, presumably to Ixalan

The Gatewatch struggles to fight without Jace to coordinate

Liliana is forced to use the Chain Veil against Bolas but she still is overcome. She retreats
Nissa attemps to use the leylines of the plane but can't

Chandra tries to burninate Bolas, but he grabs her. She planeswalks away before she's crushed

Gideon is last man standing. Bolas taunts him about his failure as a leader and tries to impale him. Gideon too is forced to flee

The destruction of the Planar Bridge is noted to be no hindrance to Bolas' plans

Bolas released the Eldrazi because he wanted to see what planeswalkers would do about it

Bolas knows Ugin is alive now because of Ugin's involvement on Zendikar

Bolas is attempting to manipulate the Gatewatch to do something unspecified

There's a bunch of bitchin' art of Bolas and the Gatewatch fighting

>Bolas released the Eldrazi because he wanted to see what planeswalkers would do about it
Really? That sounds like a really lame motivation to me desu. Is Wizards even trying anymore?

>Bolas released the Eldrazi because he wanted to see what planeswalkers would do about it
What makes him think they wouldn't be a typical walker and just plane walk the fuck out of there

Intredasting. So only Jace is mindraped and lost in the multiverse. The rest just escapes. They'll probably meet up later (with the exception perhaps of Liliana) with Ajani, get a severe "I told you so" from him and then startr looking for Jace. But before we get al this we'll get the adventures of captain Jace Sparrow on Ixilan. It'll be another beach episode block probably. The whole of MtG lore is starting to sound like a bad soap opera. I can stop following it for the next six months and then come back without having really missed anything.

The phrasing was something like "seeing who responded and how." In that light it makes a bit of sense -- when a multiversal threat surfaces, the people responding to it would also be the people who would respond to Bolas if he moved more overtly, so it basically gave him a list of who his enemies were. And it *did* lure Ugin out of hiding.

I am hoping that there's more to it than just that, though.

Isn't that how it always used to be? With nothing happening for years at a time?

Shhh, we have to pretend the old magic story was high literature. How else can we complain about the new stuff?

>I can stop following it for the next six months and then come back without having really missed anything.
I mean, yes, that's a desirable quality in an ongoing episodic story of nonspecific length. It needs to be easy to pick up without doing too much research into past episodes, which makes it easy to come back to if you were previously up to date.

Whether it's a desirable quality of stories in general is another question entirely, but it does have a function here.

>Isn't that how it always used to be?
I really don't know. I only recently started following the lore closely, starting with SOI. I liked that story a lot. It got me following the lore. Kaladesh was just ok. But this arc is just dissapointing. Probably because of Bolas. I had expected more from him than a zombie army. I mean, seriously Bolas, how is this going to help you become an oldwalker again.

Return to Dominaria means a return to thrulls and to the tribe I wish most was viable, pic related.

LEGENDARY HOMARID WHEN

>means a return to thrulls
I mean, it's not like we got new thrulls within the past five years or anything.

Yeah but legendary Thrull potential, Thrull tribal, Thrull meta.

I mean, Ravnica also has legendary thrull potential. It's almost like nobody cares.

I imagine it's suppose to stop any foolish samurai wielding magic swords stepping forth to oppose him. He's gotten blown out by that before.

Seriously though, it's probably to stop people from interfering with his plans. I'm sure he would have wanted them on Alara when he was trying to eat the Conflux, but that was a time sensitive thing.

>Be Dominaria
>60 something yrs since the mending so still mostly a time raped mad max kinda place
>But there is hope, tribes starting to rebuild, nature regrowing
>Gatewatch arrive
>Oh fug :DDD

the phyrexian invasion did took years to eventually occur
so yeah, i expect they follow that path again, only instead of Yawgmoth is Bolas and instead or Urza and his titans we have Jace and his bros
still nothing like the Weatherlight, sadly

>a zombie army
the flavor text of the blue eternal priest quotes Jace as he wonders what Bolas created the eternals for
i would like to, once again, remind Veeky Forums lily managed to fight emrakul using zombies because the undead are invulnerable to Eldrazi corruption, so perhaps Bolas wants to weaponize Emrakul
he also has Tezzeret doing stuff in phyrexia
he could be gathering a great army to do something crazy like consume the spark of a thousan nuwalkers as a way to rekindle his spark into its old power level

yeah but Sarpadian thrulls are a whole society by themselves, not somebody's pet

>rekindle his spark into its old power level
Is this even possible tho? Didn't Jeska literally rewrite the laws of multiverse physics at the end of the Timespiral arc so that no walker could ever again draw that much mana that easily like the used to since that's what ultimatly caused the time rifts? Unless he can somehow re-rewrite the physics al the sparks in the multiverse shouldn't help him be an oldwalker again, right?

>Is this even possible tho?
for the authors of the lore, sure
>>Unless he can somehow re-rewrite the physics
karns still about, he could force him to make his a mirari sort of gizmo, have it suck many planes of mana and then Karona his own ass to re-write the laws of the universe so only he can be an old walker again

if anything, the eternals are a mean to and end, and maybe their function is just to guard bolas as he dicks around, but i am also saying they could be a stepping stone for bolas getting something else that will more directly relate to restoring him to his former glory

Maybe he's trying to cause another event like that so he can rewrite himself back into being godlike?

The last story "The promised end" shows that undead are not immune to Emerakul

"She could feel the Eldrazi's blighted touch, a touch now so powerful it affected even the dead. But even that baleful touch was no match for Liliana's necromantic prowess backed by the force of the Chain Veil. She felt her zombies return to her."

>Gideon didn't even get to have Oketra sit on his face

Truly it is suffering to be Gids.

Could this somehow be connected to the return to Dominaria? Dominaria is the nexus, right? Al mana passes trough it. If he could somehow make himself the nexus of the multiverse al mana would now be his.

The story was fine, but it also highlights a problem of modern magic stories: I don't give a shit about Hapatra. She was an afterthought who thus far had shown up in a single story, and now all of a sudden I'm supposed to follow her viewpoint and care. If only the stories revolved around the native inhabitants of the plane and gave them time to develop, instead of being focused on a superhero team.

God, I know what you mean. The actual planes haven't been the focus of the story since Origins, and it shows.

Kaladesh's revolution made no sense, and it was resolved in a completely nonsensical way. Now we have Amonkhet, where the only thing to care about is Bolas, not any of the awesome Egyptian shit.

that's some abysmal fucking writing

That's because the stories didn't connect to each other before. It used to be, for tge most part, 'thing happens on a plane', and we'd see that story unfold and then go somewhere else with little or no connection. Now, because everything is linked together by the Jacetice League, the lack of actual story progress is a pretty different thing.

>back when the events in a set were dictated by the plane, rather than the overarcing plot
I miss it

I am actually relieved to know Hazoret survives. That at least anyone one of them survives.
Dog is all we have now

pls no nuwalker riding everything by the power of friendship.

>Return to Urza's Saga when?

your lying, I refuse to believe you.

>quick! Everyone get in my vagina!
>>Hazoret, there's no immediate danger
>oh, I know.
>>.....maybe we'll be fine without a god

>Play in the 90s
>Graduate high school during Invasion block
>Can't play anymore because of college
>Come back years later

Wtf is this?

>No plot in flavor text anymore
>Story revolves around the same group of color pie Wikipedia entries
>No more fantasy planes, now it's just a bland tour of Earth culture

MtG wasn't Tolkien or anything but it sure as fug wasn't this

>>No plot in flavor text anymore
The fuck are you smoking? If anything, there's too much.