MTG Lore Thread: Ixalan Edition

vronos.com/magic-story-podcast-transcripts/magic-story-podcast-ixalan/

> On Jace
AL: So if we’re talking about we as in “the focus of the story,” Nicol Bolas, big, big, bad dragon, just stomped all over Amonkhet. Like all over. It wasn’t pretty, like a lot of the gods died—one god survived! But the Gatewatch went there without a plan, without any real idea of how to defeat him, and got their butts kicked. Like really hard. So yeah, it was kind of a smack down.

BR: Cool.

AL: Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

BR: So they got smacked down, then where do we open for Ixalan?

AL: So Nicol Bolas attacked each member one by one, delivering their defeats in charmingly poetic ways, as one is wont to do. Nicol Bolas attacked Jace first, splintering his mind, discarding his memories. It was excruciating and awful and oddly familiar; this has happened to Jace more than once before. And Jace instinctively planeswalked away.

So imagine a vortex of color and light. He didn’t consciously choose where to go, just to get away, and his destination was the result of pieces of memory as they fled from his mind. More than anything, it was an instinctive urge just to leave that made him get sucked down to the one specific very hidden place with absolutely no memory of who or what he is.

So this is our chance to remeet Jace. Who is he without his history, his titles, wins, or losses? Who is he when he chooses who he wants to be rather than playing by someone else’s instruction as he has for most of his life?

BR: So we’re definitely following just Jace right now. This is not really a Gatewatch story, is it?

AL: No, it’s really not. You will not see any of the Gatewatch other than Jace here.

>On Vraska
BR: Oh, okay. So we do know however that he’s not the only Planeswalker there. We’ve already seen from art and whatnot that Vraska, Jace’s old nemesis from Ravnica, is also on Ixalan. And I’m sure that we’re going to find out more about that, I’m not asking you to give away what Vraska’s doing there or anything like that. Were there any hints that we might have known Vraska was getting involved in Ixalan?

AL: Yes! So back on Ravnica, Ral Zarek developed a neat device to track Planeswalkers entering and leaving the plane. He recorded the assassin Vraska leaving Ravnica, but was unable to tell where she ended up, and I swear there’s a good reason for that.

The other clue came from Vraska’s dear bug friend, Mazirek. He’s Kraul and leader of a very marginalized group among the Golgari. Vraska cares about people like her, disenfranchised and downtrodden, and she and Mazirek became close friends. She didn’t tell him her plans, but he knows that she’s gone and has big plans for whenever she returns.

>On The Setting
AL: Ixalan is one continent on a larger world. This story focuses on the actual continent itself of Ixalan. It is lush jungles surrounded by rich azure seas, massive dinosaurs, and it’s home to empires all its own. It’s home to two major people: the dinosaur-riding Sun Empire and the merfolk River Heralds. And, to complicate all of this, these two groups are encountering two additional forces: the pirates of the Brazen Coalition and the vampire conquistadors of the Legion of Dusk.

BR: When you were writing this series of stories, where did you draw your inspiration?

AL: A lot of what inspires both the Sun Empire and the River Heralds comes directly from the Aztec and Maya and the succession of control from one to the other. One group having been there for much longer, the River Heralds in our case, now on the tail end of control over the continent of Ixalan, and another, the Sun Empire, directly confronting the other on their borders. Influence from the Incans can also be seen in the terraced farms near the Sun Empire cities of the mountains. So there’s a lot of real-world inspiration that went into all of this.

>On the Historical roots
Choosing the setting also meant actively deciding to tackle the imperialist baggage that comes along with it. The nice thing about fantasy is that we get to look at the real world and decide what stays and what goes. Those choices, in the creative for our set, were made thoughtfully with help from our Latin American office. We looked to them and asked them for help in making this not just a story that has a little bit of a foot in reality, but also recognizes that these places our real, these people are real. And we want to be able to make this about fun, not necessarily about drudging through the really heavy awful stuff that we don’t think belongs in our game.

The residents of Ixalan, to kind of go along with this, are technologically advanced. They make steel, they build immense cities, already have empires of their own. Their stories do not involve sacrifice, getting duped by invaders, or any other tired trope like that. Instead, we wanted to give them a quest of their own. The invaders are a delightfully thin metaphor here in the form of vampire conquistadors, and those that invade here lack the weapons and diseases that our true history had. Instead, the vampires, the Legion of Dusk, sail on cathedral-like ships from the east and arrive to a hot, humid jungle, in very clammy armor, driven by religious fervor to reclaim a relic stolen from them centuries before.

I can’t emphasize enough how much the vampires stick out here. It’s really funny to look at some of these pictures. But I really want to emphasize that this is not a story of invasion. This is not a “let’s make a cool place just to blow it up in the next set” set. It is not about one group dominating another and wiping it out, but a race to a single goal by all parties. It’s a race.

>On Vampires
AL: So these vampires are part of the Legion of Dusk. It is an alliance between a powerful church and an iron-fisted monarch. The Legion of Dusk comes from the continent to the east, called Torrezon. The vampires who lead the Legion of Dusk are viewed as holy figures, dark paladins and their undead existence is full of ritual and taboo. Most importantly, they feed only on the blood of the guilty: enemies of war, rebels of the state, or heretics who defy the church. They seek an item called the Immortal Sun, which once belonged to them, but was stolen and brought across the sea to Ixalan. And they pray its power will allow the hopes of the church to be fulfilled and eternal life be available to all without the need to subsist on the blood of the wicked.

To kind of go into a bit more history about them, the Legion of Dusk began a series of wars centuries ago in Torrezon and eventually kind of took over the whole continent. So they spread their kingdom across this entire place, really disrupting pretty much everything else there. And they have brought their ships and their conquistadors to find this item that they think will allow them to live an eternal existence without needing blood to survive.

>Make all female characters prude, even a seductress like Liliana.
>Turn Jace into a sexy shirtless Twink Boy that makes panties moist.

What did they mean by that?

>On Dinos
AL: Dinosaurs. So dinosaurs are native to Ixalan. They have colorful feathers, like in science! The dinosaurs are closely tied with the Sun Empire, one of the four key groups of Ixalan. Like South America and Mesoamerica’s great empires, the Sun Empire are an empire with a capital and a central power structure. The Sun Empire has awakened after long years of quiet. Besieged by pirate raids and the advance of the Legion of Dusk, caught between the invaders from the sea and the wall of jungle behind them, the Sun Empire rises with the ferocity of a dinosaur and the righteous light of the radiant sun to fight off its enemies.

BR: Also with actual dinosaurs.

AL: Also with actual dinosaurs. The Sun Empire is in a new era of prosperity. Fueled by the magic of their sun priests and the dinosaurs that they command. Their cities are built to accommodate their dinosaur riders with high arches to allow their knights to pass through unobstructed. And just for some chronological stuff, the Legion of Dusk only started arriving maybe two years ago, like fairly recently. And the Sun Empire is strong enough that they can fight them off fairly easily. Also they have dinosaurs.

BR: And they ride them?

AL: And they ride them, yes. They can ride dinosaurs, they can command them, they are their steeds in their fight to not only rule their own empire on Ixalan but also to prevent other people from coming onto it.

BR: So are the dinosaurs all—domesticated isn’t quite the right word—but are there wild dinosaurs?

AL: Oh yes. There’s a lot of them. They are definitely not just like cows and horses. There are definitely wild dinosaurs, there are pterosaurs, there are all sorts of very familiar looking dinosaurs to our modern sensibilities. And there are also ones that the Sun Empire uses and rides for domestic tasks.

BR: Mkay. And with feathers?

AL: With feathers. Because they’re pretty and awesome and historically accurate.

...

>This is not a “let’s make a cool place just to blow it up in the next set”
Calling bullshit on this, that describes 99% of the plots for every set Wizards has done.

>On Merfolk
AL: Yes. So merfolk are the River Heralds, that is the name of their group. So they are people of the water. They wield the natural, raw force of nature to protect the world from disaster. They were once the dominant inhabitants of Ixalan with a large power of their own, and their strength was once enough to drive the Sun Empire out of the interior. Nowadays that the Sun Empire is a lot bigger and a lot more powerful, they live a more nomadic lifestyle. Powerful shamans can shape the rivers and jungles around them and they believe that this place that—no one really knows where it is—called the Golden City, houses the Immortal Sun and must be kept hidden from all, even themselves.

The merfolk in the set are visually striking; jade jewelry and weapons and armor. And their appearance is one of my favorite depictions of them in Magic. Their fins are colorful and bright like tropical freshwater fish and a lot of Ixalan, the continent’s, history is between the struggle of the merfolk and the humans who live there. Kind of like struggling against each other like who’s in charge, who’s not. Their history is pretty vast. I’m certain part of it will end up in the art book later, which you should totally buy because it’s really pretty, but yeah.

So most of Ixalan’s history is kind of this power struggle. And at the center of it all is this mysterious place known as the Golden City that houses that Immortal Sun that was stolen all those years ago. But no one knows where it is.

BR: Hmm. Interesting.

So, not even the pirates?

AL: Not even the pirates, not even the merfolk, not even the Sun Empire. No one knows where it is.

The merfolk have kind of taken it on themselves to defend the Golden City since they believe that no one should have the power that lies inside of there. So to protect its secrets, the kind of know where it is, but not the exact location. They’ve been making sure no one gets there for centuries.

They became aware of the meme and are working to deal with it. Thats why Ixalan lived and Innistrad just got slightly more monstrous.

>yfw Baron Sengir is the villain of Ixalan

>On Pirates
BR: Let’s talk pirates!

Is it all treasure, walking the plank, and adorable monkeys and parrots?

AL: So it is, but our pirates are also the descendants of refugees. Their ancestors are from Torrezon, the continent to the east. The Legion of Dusk conquered the continent over hundreds of years of war, and the pirates we see today are the children’s children etc. of those that escaped to the sea. They formed the Brazen Coalition, a society that answers to no one but themselves. They may not have a land to call their’s, but they own the seas. They seek the Immortal Sun as well, an ancient prize rumored to be more valuable and powerful than any other in existence. One that could possibly be the key to returning to Torrezon and driving out the Legion of Dusk to reclaim their ancestral lands.

BR: Mkay. But there’s definitely adorable monkeys and parrots?

AL: There is, there is. There definitely are.

>On Story
so with those four groups, you’ll notice a common theme in that all of them want something and there is this mysterious item somewhere in the jungle that can help each of them attain that.

BR: That sounds like a plot point.

AL: Sure does!

BR: So let’s go back to Vraska. Were you writing stories when Return to Ravnica was a thing?

AL: I was not.

BR: So Vraska’s a new character for you as far as writing is concerned. So how did you catch up on Vraska for these stories?

AL: So I reread her old story appearances in Jenna Helland’s The Shadows of Prahv and Doug Beyer’s The Gorgon and the Guildpact. Those provided a great background for her, but not a good bridge to get her from sneaky, isolated assassin to brave and bold pirate captain.

So most of the work that I did was investigating what it would take to get someone with a history like her’s into a headspace where she would want to take this sort of leadership job. The answer was in Jenna’s story. Vraska’s backstory is horribly sad and all of it comes down to things happening to her that she had no choice in. So when I think of Vraska, I think of someone who was never allowed to be anything other than what they were born to do. She’s a gorgon, so what would she be good for other than killing? I don’t buy that. Vraska has been imprisoned, beaten nearly to death, marginalized again and again. And until now she compensated by injecting her sense of justice into which assassin contract she would accept, but I think she’s tired of being unseen. She deserves more agency than that, and I can’t wait to explore what she wants to do when someone believes in her talents.

BR: Ooo. Someone believes in her talents. Interesting.

AL: Yeah! Interesting.

>refugees from a war-torn land who become pirates and seek treasure and riches on other continents

Don't know where I've heard this one before.

Don't play with my heart like that. I've been waiting for a new Baron Card for more than a decade. Had high hopes with the Vampire Commander Set, but The Baron is obviously mono B, not like that pretender Edgar Markov.

Only thing that could make me more exited than a new Sengir card would be motherfucking GIX in Dominaria.

>hey guys can we have our life sustaining relic back
>FUCK OFF REEEEEEEEEEEE
The Legion of Dusk did nothing wrong

RIP this game is all I can say after the Ixalan reveals.

Current events?

Nobody know where it is though.

>Story Hook

BR: We obviously can’t go deep into the Ixalan story, as that’s the point of reading the story, but can you tell us some tidbits that we can maybe look forward to in the Ixalan story? Are there vampires riding dinosaurs? Are there pirates battling dinosaurs? Are there merfolk fighting dinosaurs? Are there dinosaurs riding dinosaurs?

AL: [laughs] So when I was trying to workshop how all of these stories would fit together, I literally made a chart of “Pirates vs. Dinos, Dinos vs. Pirates, Dinos vs. Merfolk, Dinos vs. Vampires” and made sure that one of those ended up in every single story that we did.

BR: Ah, that’s amazing.

AL: Or at least in the really action-heavy parts of the story. That’s not a guarantee like “every single one” but that was definitely part of it; making sure that we saw all of those combinations that make the actual gameplay of this set so much fun.

But as for an overarching theme to this set, this is a story about desire. It is desire for power, desire for companionship, desire for approval, desire for discovery, and everyone is racing to get what they want first. Everyone wants the Immortal Sun, no one knows where it is inside the Golden City that no one also knows where it is, but everyone needs to be the one to get there first.

They genocided an entire continent.

>"Fuck you if you expected pirates, have a fat grandma and strong independent womens who don't need no man of ebony color instead" - Wotc
The dinosaurs are alright, I guess, but the """pirates""" surely aren't what I expected...

>genocided
>he Legion of Dusk began a series of wars centuries ago in Torrezon and eventually kind of took over the whole continent
It's more comparable to the roman empire/Napoleon than a genocide.

They drink the blood of nonbelivers and PoWs. I doubt their are any non Vamps left in their empire.

Unless they have like blood farms of orcs , sirens and humans like how the Catholics used jews for banking.

That Legion of Dusk lore sounds great.

>vampires
>merfolk
>pirates
>dinosaurs

What colors are all four? I'm curious to see how the color pie is broken down for each tribe seeing it's not evenly split.

AL: So if we’re talking about we as in “the focus of the story,” Nicol Bolas, big, big, bad dragon, just stomped all over Amonkhet. Like all over. It wasn’t pretty, like a lot of the gods died—one god survived! But the Gatewatch went there without a plan, without any real idea of how to defeat him, and got their butts kicked. Like really hard. So yeah, it was kind of a smack down.

BR: Cool.

If I recall correctly:
>Vamps: WB
>Merfolk: UG
>Pirates: UBR
>Dinos: WRG

A thousand times during human history?

WB Vampires
RBU Pirates
GRW Dinosaurs
GU Merfolk

Wait a few weeks to discuss Ixalan lore. Hopefully people will have stopped incessantly posting their /pol/ scripts by then.

>like in science!
Just a daily reminder that if you put feathers on anything that's not a small/medium theropod, it's quite the opposite of "scientifically accurate".

Bruh, why are you getting mad at women being pirates? They're still pirates. What the fuck are you looking for? Lazy pirate stereotypes?

Ugh, so many female pirates.

The toxic amount of female and non-white pirates in this game is really problematic.

True but these are also magical dinosaurs so I guess it's fine and that pteranodon looks dope. The team does sound pretty gosh darn dumb saying it's historically accurate though since it's still theoretical.

it is symmetrical actually. Both the native factions (sun empire + merfolk) and invading factions (pirates + vampires) have 5 colors each.

Like, could Wizards just stop with all these female pirates? It's so gross.

Ugh. Look at all of those black pirates. So SJW.

Super problematic female pirates all over the place.

Well, black people are known for violence and thievery...

Like, all of these female pirates is really yucky and there's no male pirates in any positions of power, like as captains.

Bruh, I get what you're doing and you're right but you look salty for no reason. Especially since it was one dude who complained and he already looked like a retard in his post.

So many yucky niggers in this art. Ugh.

At least post a different card at this point. You've managed to make your shitposts stale in less than a week

I was considering checking out the story again after stopping from the lackluster ending of innistrad 2, this person being interviewed for the summaries however makes me hesitant. Have they got their shit more together yet? Like do they actually complete all their plot points and give proper resolutions to the people of the plane?

No, you see, we all know they went this way simply because apparently no one at wizards knows anything about dinosaurs (or how science actually works), but they could have used the feathered serpents mythos as an excuse. Anmd it would have been fiiiine.The problem is they didn't and instead insisted on every given chance that feathers are here cuz they're scientifically accurate while they simply aren't.
>still theoretical
it's theoretical in the same way God is theoretical. No actual proof for and a lot of valid arguments against, supported by actual fossils that show scales were everywhere. At best what's debatable is whether large theropods had some proto-feathers on them (note: not really feathers), but the discussion whether actual feathers could exist beyond small/medium theropods is impossible (it's an advanced trait that was developed long after the main differentiation of dinosaur categories happened).

> I doubt their are any non Vamps left in their empire.
If the lore so far is to be believed, there're, they only drink the blood of their enemies and heretics, so that means they don't drink the blood of their allies and fellow believes. Clerics fast themselves. It's pretty implied that there're still living beings in the old Empire that follow their beliefs

I think Kaladesh and Amonkhet were both pretty lackluster? I didn't keep up with Amonkhet but I know the only thing that people really took away from Kaladesh was Chandra talking like a teenage girl and that she almost went Nuclear until Gideon used his fucking ABS OF STEEL MAGIC to save her and people got hot in their genitals for it.

Kaladesh and Amonkhet sucked because instead of focusing on worldbuilding they focused on advertising diversity.

I think his point was that all the captains and pirates in power were females? Wasn't there a planeswalker male pirate captain?

>all those random spikes an patches of flight feathers all over the place

Anyone has that cathedral warship art from previous thread?

I'm not trying to argue with you. They fucked up with that line and they didn't bring in any dinosaur experts like when they brought in experts on black people and Egypt.

I'm just saying that while they goofed hard I think it provides a fun artistic opportunity for the art team to make some pieces that make MTG Dinosaurs more unique than your generic Jurassic Park dudes, even though the art director is pretty stupid for not looking into this and catching any of the dinosaur issues as well.
Gonna be mad if Steve Prescott didn't get any dinosaur cards to do though.

>it's theoretical in the same way God is theoretical
Like, I agree? That was my point. Even if there was harder evidence a theory is still just a theory and isn't completely true or cemented in stone.

So how does Vraska manage being a pirate captain when her crew will turn to stone if they look at her?

Very carefully.

A gorgon's stone gaze is activatable.

I like that flavor text
>"Keep your friends close and your enemies within range."

I'm not getting mad at women being pirates. If anything I'm mad about the complete absence of noteworthy male pirate cards, or at least some female pirates that don't look like complete dogshit.

See:

holy fuck, that's by Steve Prescon? I'm getting a boner. Where is this from, some sort of social profile or an artbook?

>it provides a fun artistic opportunity for the art team to make some pieces that make MTG Dinosaurs more unique than your generic Jurassic Park dudes
Yea, a lot of people like the idea of feathered dinosaurs and think it looks cool (hence why the movement is so successful even within scientists). Sadly I'm not one of them. I've been obsessed with dinosaurs since I was in kindergarten and feathered dinosaurs are simply painful to watch at. Tho that's just my taste.

Dinosaur sketchbook. He has a pretty baller instagram page.

neat, thanx.
I'm a sucker for spiky dinos.

Yea the writing has gotten really atrocious save for a select few stories. The problems aren't so much to do with the plot, which is boring but at least ties up neatly, but more with the complete lack of depth of any of the characters, the tween speaking style of the characters, and the lack of imagination in general (this plane will be Egypt with magic, this one will be cyberpunk india with magic, this one will be pirates v. dinosaur rawr!). Again, there are some exceptions, but for the most part I would avoid it. Alison luhrs, while I'm sure is well-intentioned, is the "Narrative Designer," a sterile title for essentially what the position entails now, which is appealing to the greatest mass of potential new players as possible while relegating to the sidelines the type of depth that only invested players appreciate.

Makes me think of Monster Hunter

>imperial baggage
For fucks sake, if the whole plot is a race for treasure, why the fuck bring up sjw talking points

I like that they're avoiding the tropes, they're just doing it for the wrong reasons.

Yea I don't know why they went jurassic park themed when there is a deep pool of beasts to draw inspiration from, especially in green (ravenous baloth, rhox, feral throwback, blastoderm, thragtusk, etc). Onslaught-era beasts looked really cool and i was always impressed with the weird designs and names.

>You will not see any of the Gatewatch other than Jace here.
So no Ajani?

>I only want Strong White Male characters on my cards. black guys are okay if they're cool black guys and subordinate to the Strong White Male in the lore.

>If there are going to be women characters, they must be young, busty, beautiful white women OR of an indeterminate brown with white facial features. Asians are okay too, as long as they're the GOOD Asian women.

Not in this part. Maybe in the second set.

He'll probably show up when the new set is introduced to save Jace's stupid ass.

>for the wrong reasons.
Not putting political bullshit in your card game that people play for fun is a pretty good reasons.

I agree, like you can have all the other shit but give me like a handful of cards like this.

>I want a game created by mostly white people with a playerbase dominated by white males to pander to woman and non-asian non-whites despite neither groups being actually interested in the game

The fact that they have to harp on about "imperialism" and "racism" and shit like that shows how shallow their understanding is.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense and education would know that the events of the Conquista were decided long before anyone involved was born. A combination of lack of tamable animals in the Americas (because they ate them while they were still hunter gatherers) while Eurasia beasts had time to adjust to humans all lead to cities in Europe/Asia/Fertile Crescent and no cities in the Americas.

No proper animals to tame because they've all been eaten = no tamed animals.
No tamed animals = no cities.
No cities and tamed animals- no plagues.
No cities = no advancement of technology
No advancement of technology = no demand for greater and greater resources
No demand for greater resources = no exploration.

Simply by showing us that the Sun Empire has actual cities, metal tools, and tamed dinosaurs is enough to show (not tell) us that while they may be stylistically similar they function very differently from historical civilizations.

Actually, they're trying to avoid one kind of political bullshit so much that they've fallen into the opposite, and the only reason they can't tell is because it's clear that WOTC is an ideological echo chamber.

this. wotc's disdain for the fans who've supported the game for so long is really disappointing. I can understand having some sort of proportional representation, but they've gone completely off the rails recently.

The set has a literal yutyranus, which is a feathered big dino

Also funny enough you are posting a pic of a pteradon, which isnt a dino irl but is in mtg (like how they had arachnids as insects or hounds for all dogs)

Ignore/report this guy, this is the third time he has shat post this same stupid thing

I'm not arguing against what you are saying in general, but to me the whole "they're uncivilised because no animals for taming" thing sounds like bullshit. Non-egyptian africans doesn't have any non-european origin cities too, but they had plenty of animals to choose from and even domesticated several in certain regions.

Which is exactly what they said.
>The residents of Ixalan, to kind of go along with this, are technologically advanced. They make steel, they build immense cities, already have empires of their own.

They're purposefully separating themselves from stereotypical imperialist stories by having tamed animals and cities in their Not!Mesoamerica. This was intentional on their part. Rather than "harp on about" imperialism and racism, they've taken steps to avoid it that include providing their Not!Mesoamericans with the necessary technology to make Conquista-style imperialism impossible.

The creative team has gone through the necessary hoops to avoid imperialism being a problem. This story isn't a melodramatic tale about how bad imperialism is, this story sidesteps the issue of imperialism entirely to tell another story unrelated to it.

BR: So at the time we’re recording this, you’ve written this whole story, right?

AL: Yes.

BR: Yeah, so you know what’s going to happen.

AL: I do.


Iclipped that because it wasnt story details but yeah they do.

They even stopped indivdual credits since the writers room produces it all

>Its a 4/6
>That only takes 2 power to crew

I don't get it. It's a fuckin' card game. What is there to read? It's cards. Like how.... I'm not even trolling I'm literally confused.

>The set has a literal yutyranus, which is a feathered big dino
No it doesn't. I bet noone at wizards even knows yutyranus's name. And yutyranus wasn't feathered you dingus. Proto-feathers aren't actual feathers, try to grasp it. And it lived in colder climate (hence the proto-feather layer for heat-insulation).

>Also funny enough you are posting a pic of a pteradon, which isnt a dino irl but is in mtg
you understand that how we classify things has nothing to do with the argument, right? It's not technically a dinosaur, but still a reptile that lived among dinosaurs, so they just called it a dinosaur for simplicity's sake (because anormie doesn't know those things and puts it among dinosaurs). The point is that they have skin membrane, not feathers as their wings, which is as far as anti-scientific as you can get.

I remember that shroud hasty bug.

I really wish there was a better P/T scale. Because stuff like this makes zero sense.

I understand its nothing some exactly feasible, there always will be odd situations and outliers.

But this giga-ship could be taken by 3 bears.

To draw comparisons to other 'dodgy' stuff they've pulled over the years:

Kynaios and Tiro, the interracial gay Theros kings. Acceptable because A) Ancient Greece was both very gay and was a melting pot from around the Mediterranean, as well as the difficulty in creating a four color legendary.

Ashiok and Aetherborn- Both groups are genderless, Ashiok because they've became more nightmare than human, and Aetherborn because they're not biological at all. Aetherborn are even pushing it, since, for example, Yahenni was written as female while Gonti was written as male. Additionally, since Wizards have exclusively been using they/them (a format accepted by many credible places) and haven't tried pushing it on bullshit stuff, is acceptable.

Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying. I suppose it's better for everyone that they divulged this information solely through a podcast rather than in the story itself (fingers crossed) but I'd still prefer if it didn't need to be said at all.

Actually 6+ bears.

Assuming you are talking about Grizzly Bears the card.

hey, Skysovereign is similar in that matter. Still the biggest failure is Demolition stomper, which demands a crew of 5 while we clearly see that one single dude is enough to control it.

MTG has always had stories associated with the cards. It used to be that they produced books that could be bought at a book store that told a story of what was happening during the events of the set and the cards would sometimes reference those events.

Now it's all posted online to read with new sets. Legendary creatures are legendary because they play large roles in the plot of the stories. Planeswalkers as well.

?
6 bears would be 12 power, 6 power over.

Three bears would destroy the boat, alongside the bears, but that still doesnt make any sense.

.... Crewing isn't just controlling it.

Or do you pretend that only a pilot is needed to launch an airplane and ignore fueling and such.

I like it when they are like hair or headdress/crests.

Like Tyrantrums beard and pimp collar

Maybe that guy is just on the level of Magus of the Arena or something.

>I block your dreadnought with my three bears
>My three bears block it by invading the ship
>No one on your ship is prepared for three invading bears
>The bears destroy the ship from the inside
>They sink with the ship.

MTg story was never good.

The lore/worldbuilding are the best parts.

They basically make campaign settings.

>Yahenni was written as female while Gonti was written as male.
You mean, Yahenni had some effeminate mannerisms while Gonti had some masculine mannerisms. Why is this a problem? How would you write a race of genderless creatures that interacts with gendered creatures in their formative years without them acquiring gendered mannerisms? Heck, how would you even write a character that solely has genderless mannerisms?

I don't see much of a problem with that. You can get camp guys, you can get butch girls, you can get camp and butch genderless Aetherborn. What's hard to understand there?

>Crewing isn't just controlling it.
but it is. That's literally what the mechanic is about. One dude sitting inside the vehicle and controlling it. Google the definition of the words "to crew something"

Observe these two bears.

Based on the art and name, the card Grizzly Bears represents a pair of bears, not just one.