MtG Flavor, Lore and Fiction

Well, they were also the god of Ambition. It's not like they were a good guy even before Bolas turned up.

What about the buggods?

Didnt read the story but from my understanding they pin the scorpion god to a monument which prevents it from respawning

Scorpion God's impaled on an obelisk, Locust God and Scarab God are doing god knows what.

They just do their thing and disappear.

>ambition
>evil

Black will always be the default Evil color. It makes marketing and writing easier for lazy designers. The evil AMBITION of black mages and bad men. There's and evil skeleman right in the mana symbol, and who wants to live in a swamp!? We're not going to get a set where freedom leads to anarchy, and white needs to control the masses. We're not going to get a set where blue's thoughtfulness and logic are the good guys when white's equality/fairness and red's freedom/passion can win the day. We're lucky the Aetherborn exist at all, given ruthlessness, selfishness, and utilitarianism are never celebrated for the food they can bring.

Blue has been the hero color more times than red or black. Blue is a solid third

You're an idiot. We've had exactly that stuff before and will again. And that's on top of the fuckton of white villains we've had. The fact that the black character is Bad is something DIFFERENT recently.

>Blue is a solid third
You got me there.
W>G>U>R>B
But my point still stands that we're not gonna get a Black-Is-Good set because it's easier to just well black as edgy or evil.

I feel like it's slightly different with bontu.

She wasn't ALWAYS with the God-Pharaoh, but when the time arose when the gods were out matched she realized that the only way to not get brain washed was to get on Nicol Bolas' side and help him out. None of the other colors would betray their family as much as black would, so that's why it's the evil in this set.

Also we had white/blue/red be the bad guys in the last two sets, with Nahiri wanting to screw up innistrad and the consul having baral and dovin baan fight against the renegade.

Of course tezzeret was still the main baddy in kaladesh and Emrakul is colorless, but still wizards is improving on this somewhat

Oooh look at me I'm Nicol Bolas, I'm so powerful and evil! Watch me betray my only ally and tear shit up just because I can!

What? Midlife crisis? Me? No! No, I can still get it up... I mean, I'm still just as powerful as I was before the Mending! Totally!

Bolas will take them and the eternals and planeswalk away to whatever plane he is trying to conquest, thats why tezz wanted a portal capable of transporting something gearhulk sized.

How could Bolas kill Bontu? She was indestructible.

Can an individual with no magical powers become a Planeswalker and if so, do they gain magic with it?

-x/-x

>Hazoret: WOW SAMUT YOU'RE SO COOL I TOTALLY WANT TO BE YOU

MtG "lore" is pure shit

You are literally a fucking retard, a worthless mental defective, if you spend any time thinking about the lore besides hating it.

It's the most derivative meaningless anti-art garbage. They are expressing nothing. It means NOTHING. It has no connection to the real world and it's made for people who are disconnected from reality in order to keep them that way.

It's entire point is 'OMFG LOOK HOW FUCKIN TOTALLY AWESOME THIS IS OMFG', which only appeals to infantilized retards with serious development issues.

Before (((Hasbro)))'s takeover, they actually made an effort to give the game the tiniest bit of substance in art direction. Since then it's just this acid trip conglomerate of every fantasy trope.

TL;DR
You're all totally fucking retarded. Kill yourselves.

Who shit in your cheerios today?

Toshiro Umezawa.

youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

Kamigawa block strongly disagrees with you. It's esentially 3 black legends go bitch slap white for being too controlling.

>perspective of the stick and the people is off

Cannot unsee

Yet here you're. You know, with all the other retards.

The lore is empty shit, but there has to be something or else it would mean even less.

Bontu is a fucking dumb ass. If they even thought for about 30 minutes about what Nicol Bolas was planning and is trying to get out of Amonkhet, she would have realized that once she has done what Nicol wants, he'd kill her.
The right move would have been to free the other god's from the mind-blocking shit as soon as Nicol left so the plane could get as ready as possible to fight back once Nicol comes back.

I assume they need to kill the Scorpion God because Bolas "programmed" it to kill the Amonkhet gods when it woke up, so while Locust and Scarab have fulfilled their duties already, Scorp presumably will keep trying to murder Hazoret until it's dealt with.

DO YOU THINK BONTU AND NICKY FUCKED

Um, yah. It's obvs she wanted the dragon D super bad.

Nissa needs bangs.

Imagine being Bolas in that set and having to be all like "damn, Bontu, you fuckin' fine, all playable with your indestructible body and horrific useless activated ability. I would totally play you, both as a Planeswalker and as a Legendary Creature." when all he really wants to do is read another book in his cave. Like seriously imagine having to be Bolas and not only sit on the throne while Bontu flaunts her disgusting body in front of you, the collapsing pyramids barely concealing her summoning sickness and crocodile head, and just sit there, play after play, hour after hour, while she perfected that attack. Not only having to tolerate her monstrous fucking visage but her haughty attitude as everyone on the plane tells her Black's STILL GOT IT and DAMN, CARD ADVANTAGE LOOKS LIKE *THAT*?? because they're not the ones who have to sit there and watch her mannish fucking gator face contort into types of grimaces you didn't even know existed before that day. You've been manipulating nothing but a healthy diet of Alarans and Madarans and later alleged Tarkirans for your ENTIRE CAREER coming straight out of the boonies in Dominaria. You've never even seen anything this fucking unplayable before, and now you swear you can taste the sweat that's breaking out on her reptilian stomach as she sucks it in to attack her sister, smugly assured that you are enjoying the opportunity to get paid to sit there and revel in her "ambitious (for that is what she calls herself)" servitude, the servitude she worked so hard for with personal viziers in the previous months. And then R&D calls for another set, and you know you could kill every single person on this plane before MaRo could put you on the ban list, but you sit there and endure, because you're fucking Bolas. You're not going to lose your future spinoff format deck over this. Just bear it. Hide your face and bear it.

...

I mean could you resist this?

Bolas is just great at exploiting gaps in reason and mental fortitude. It doesn't necessarily mean his pawns are all utterly evil.

Consider these pawns:

>Order of the Skyward Eye
>Gwafa Hazid
>The Marisi
>The Seekers of Carmot
>Malfegor
>Rakka Mar
>Tezzeret
>Sarkhan Vol
>Yasova Dragonclaw
>The Five Gods of Amonkhet
>The Three Corrupted Gods of Amonkhet

Sarkhan Vol notably just wanted an object of adoration. The mental weakness created by this zealotry was exploited by Bolas and turned him into a drooling slave at one point. The same can arguably be said for The Seekers of Carmot, The Marisi and Rakka Mar.

As for Bontu being evil, it can be said she succumbed to it due to self-preservation overriding compassion towards the initiates and her siblings. That made it easy for Bolas to control her.

I remember this.

I was about to say Jeska, but even before all the Phage and Karona shit, I think she slung some fireballs. It's hard to find M:tG characters who don't use magic at all.

Consider an Alt-Alara, where each shard was colored after the wedge tri-colors. How would each shard be like, and what would they lack from missing the enemy colored pairs?

Black has always been self serving above all else, and I can't recall any Black only Aligned Characer really being that great when it comes to long term planning. Combine that with Nicol Bolas completely wiping the floor with them last time and Bontu having no indication he would lose most of his power, it makes total sense for her to keep up the betrayal.

Garruk maybe? I'm not very familiar with him so does he use any magic before his spark ignites?

Well, Umezawa was very selfish and a dick sometimes, only we get to sympathize with him cuz we see things through his pov.

And here you are, screaming in to the wind "I'm not a retard unlike THOSE retards"

That's mainly why I was talking about he future. How long ago was Umezawa? Since then there hasn't been a strictly black hero. Liliana barely counts, and Sorin is more an antihero. We got metal green elf, white-red ghost patrol, green->GW elf boy, white-red revenge cat, Jace and Gideon, Retcon Nissa, Koth, kind of the red preator, white hero girl, Samut, and a bunch of other nonblack characters as the good guys (or least shitty guys).

I guess I should have said, "Black will usually be bad guy by default, but other colors get a regular variety of good and bad." Nahiri being a dick, Nissa fucking up, Dovin, Barral, white porcelain preator who's name I'm forgetting, Tezzeret, and the color variety of Eldrazi and Innistrad horrors do a good job making bad guys in all colors.

>BWG
A world that worships death and reputation. Life and energy are treated like currency to be used, spent, or stollen because it all evens out in the end. Without red or blue there's no thought or planning for the future as far as changing the endless cycle of power grabbing and accepting the inevitable.
Lifelink tribal go!

>RWU
Progress. Progress progress progress. Nature is a resource. Death should be overcome. Knowledge and study fuel inspiration and inspiration breeds progress. But everything is a little too equal, with no help given to the lazy, the stagnant, or inefficient.

>GUB
A more violent, consuming Naya right out of the Phyrexia handbook. No white or red leads to only cold feeling of survival and trade-offs.

>WBR
Anti-Bant. Fortifications and armies and... basically a plane of Marduu marauders. No green leads to a massive consumption of resources by the war machine, and no blue means people tend to get caught up in the cause rather than think everything through. Like the BWG plane the whole place goes through cycles, but because of the resource problems. Everything gets eaten up, everyone starves, natures regrows, populations and armies regrow, repeat.

>URG
Not really sure. Not sure a plane of nature documentary researchers would make sense...

You mean Tarkir?

>How long ago was Umezawa
60 years ago (when the mending happened) + XXX years ago, due to Kamigawa block being essentially a history lesson made into a set.

>Lilliana isn't really B
She's super deep in black. She has been putting her selfish personal interests before the gatewatch the whole time by just doing the bare minimum for them to keep her there so they'll help her kill her demons.
When she got to amonkhet, she didn't even warn any of them about 1 of the demons being there, and Jace only knew because mind reading.

>Liliana
I meant she didn't count as a hero or a good guy. She's posterchild black.

>How long
I was more asking in real time. It was what, 2006? A decade.

I think user means a situation like Alara's shards, where the five mini-planes lack two colors.

>mardu shard
>massive battleworld full of nation states throwing armies at each other until every side loses

Please wizards, I don't ask for much. Please make mardu great

Oooh I get ya about the black evil thing

>URG is all about nature
>with no Black, there is no ambition and things are killed only through the need to survive
>with no white, there is chaos, but in the sense that you aren't really safe at any given moment
>the only humans that live there are basically a clan of biologists, learning more about the beasts and nature around them as they study from one central city.

How does this sound?

I thing URG would be something like a weirder Naya, with vast colorful jungles full of plants and beasts that look mutant and surreal. The lack of Black and White means that civilization is limited to tribes and small city-states, while Blue keeps it from total primitivism

>zombie apocalypse
>replace "zombie" with "lions and tigers and bears"
This idea I like. The main city being a less mutanty, more survivalist Simic guild.

Technology and survival techniques evolve and adapt, but society doesn't. Also a cool idea. Honestly, I wish Magic would take a risk and release another set or two with unbalanced color distribution. A mostly blue plane, or a plane lacking white and black, or a plane missing one color, followed by a set that balances the color totals out.

Underrated

So if you were the head of the design team to make a set with non-Eldrazi colorless mana as basically a sixth color, how would you go about it lore and mechanics wise?

>before Maro puts you on the ban list
I fucking love it

>what is Heliod
>what is Elesh Norn
>what is Nahiri
>what is Konda
>what is Radiant

Sengir, Yawgmoth, the Dimir and several others were good longer term thinkers

I want to penetrate it.

NORN! That's that bitch's name. Thanks user!

> Newly born plane full of pure not yet coloured mana. Everything is new and free mana surge from everywhere, eager to take new form
> Mysterious mystery about how the multiverse actually works
> Elemental everywhere
> Future elder beings/civilisation in their infancy (carefree and curious cephalids, young sprout treefolks, freshly spawned imp tricksters that don't know all the tricks yet...)
> Little to no graveyard interactions because no past
> Manifest
> Manaburn

forum.nogoblinsallowed.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5767&sid=25b645680d9cc4c8fde451852036ef5c

Where was this confirmed?
Artbook?

Awesome, fangz.

Artbook + "Undying Fury"

Sounds like the plane Ob Nixilis was originally from. I hope we get a flashback set located there someday.

Well shit, I guess we know what Valla and the Immersturm is.

Really tempted to drop £100 on all 4 "Art of" books, not into the Magic game but the lore and art really do it for me. The books sound like they'd be my thing but are they worth the investment?
Is there a "best" book of the bunch if I instead limit myself to 1 + Amonkhet?

Zendikar is probably the best one of the bunch, but I haven't read the Amonkhet one yet. Zendikar's got some really great art spreads and choices, nice details about the world, and a thankfully pretty short section on the whole channel-fireball gatewatch debacle, that still has good art.

Innistrad isn't terrible, but I question some of its choices pretty heavily. It kind of focuses at little too hard on SOI and EMN, and not enough on original Innistrad, but it's got great things. I'm still pissed they used the shitty picturing of Griselbrand though.

Kaladesh is a really nice artbook, but much like the plane, is full of a lot of cool stuff that never gets explored. I don't give a shit about Ghirapur, I want to know about all the other cities, and the top of the world, and the Dark Schematic, and everything they just ignored for the actual set. That said, the gallery-section where they put the Masterpiece arts as if they were proper gallery pieces is great.

>but are they worth the investment?
Yes, as I own all the current ones, expect for Amonkhet, which ships in few weeks. Pick one between Zendikar and Innistrad, Kaladesh wasn't that good DESU.

Reminds me a bit of the planeforger threads from a month or so ago.

And hell yes manaburn. That lantern from Ravnica was so fun to ping people without mana dumps with.

Which is the best setting book to run DnD with? The Planeshift articles always say to look to the Art Books, but I'm having a hell of a time picking just one.

Sweet, thanks for the input, I've played a lot of Ravenloft adventures which Innistrad reminds me pretty heavily of so I'll just stick to Zendikar for now

Zendikar before the Eldrazi invasion

I'd love to do a Kaladesh one, as a weird high-society kind of magic shadowrun, but for classical d&d adventuring nothing beats pre-eldrazi Zendikar.

That said, Innistrad's pretty fun too

Almost everyone in Magic uses SOME sort of magic.
Except the people from Kaladesh, and all three planeswalkers from Kaladesh are mages, which are exceedingly rare on the plane.

and he -4'd dealing 7 damage

I literally read it as
>"samut, do something useful for once and defend people while i save the day"

Eh, mages arent "exceedingly" rare afaik. Pyromancers are, but mages, while not common, are not that rare either. They just keep in hiding to avoid persacution.

Yes, but there are no nuwalker examples yet.

And as other anons pointed out, most planes have "magic". On Kaladesh it's rare, on Dominaria is was forgotten for a long time, but places like Ravnica feature magic as matter-of-course.

Pretty sure you have to have some proclivity toward magic since planeswalkers are described as mages

>MtG "lore" is pure shit
and so is your life

To be fair, I only wanted to know if there was an example of it in canon after I read a MLP crossover fanfic

I know one of the Masterpiece flavour texts expresses disbelief in the idea of mages, and it's written by a consulate worker.

Theres inconsistency or something else then because Barals role as enforcer is specifically to contain mages which is why he specilizes in counter magic

I always figured it was a combination of Kaladesh not having a lot of mages as a matter of course combined with a general kind of distrust and secrecy about them, ADDITIONALLY combined with Baral's job being "get rid of them before they wreck things" and being specialized in just noping their stuff. People don't think they exist because either they're in hiding or they get Baral'd.

>the whole channel-fireball gatewatch debacle

The gatewatch killed two eldrazi titans by pulling a channel fireball combo. It was pretty dumb.

Urza was an ordinary guy with no magic training or previous spell use. Didn't even grow up knowing magic was a thing. I think he's an exception to the rule though.

Is anyone technically not able to use magic? Not just not adept, or untrained, or not predisposed, but actually unable?

I feel almost certain weve had that but I cant recall any specific examples. I was under the impression the people kaladesh were totally unable to use magic unless they were born with it. Maybe it specifies in the Kaladesh art book.

Oh right that was retarded.

>You know...
We still haven't really gotten an understanding of how the gods were before The Bolas-Event.
With the exception of Bontu? (Probably?)

It's still 50/50 that all the gods could as nurturing as they are now OR could have been just as big of dicks as the Theros ones, and that it was Bolas's tampering that made them nice/nurturing for his purposes.

Just feel like I should point that out.

And this was an assumption, but I thought that was more of a no one is teaching magic situation. You have the Chandras and Jaces of the multiverse that are hard wired to a specific type of magic, you have your average person that has to be taught, and you have the person who is shit at magic.

An user posted this story.
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/arcana/lorans-smile-2014-10-27
In it it says Loran couldn't use magic, but doesn't go into any detail. It's so pre Mending lore, so who the fuck knows.