MTG lore question

This question has bugged me for the longest time, and I figured I might as well get it answered right now.
Just how powerful is a Planeswalker?
Also, unrelated, but what is a mana bond? I heard the term before and I'm not certain what it means.

I'm talking out my ass here, but assuming the various planes are what we would call dimensions, a planes walker would be someone with the power to shift through the fabric of reality, so pretty powerful I'd say

And to add to this, if the card art is any indication, we at least know that planeswalkers can conjure up some pretty serious shit. Chandra can male volcanoes erupt, Liliana can raise legions of the dead, Jace can create hurricanes and typhoons the size of Texas etc

They're the most powerful beings out there, save for Eldrazi.
They pretty much only get endangered when they do something dumb or fight another walker.

Modern Planeswalkers are only as powerful or weak as the writers need them to be to fit the narrative. There's no objective yardstick of measure, their power is all relative to other Planeswalkers, which isn't a measure at all.

The fact that they don't die in stories when in conflict with other Planeswalkers is also a problem. It would be practical and prudent for defeated Planeswalkers to die at the hands of their enemies but because it would prevent Wizards from marketing that asset in the future they don't die. Nor are they subjected to tortures or mindscrambling worse than death, they need SOME way of coming back.

It's a shit world where you are just wasting your time talking about power levels. Play it for the game.

The OG Planeswalkers were basically really powerful wizards who could cross dimensions. It doesn't sound like they need to have any additional or specific power beyond that ability, besides Plot Armor in some cases. Saying they are all-powerful doesn't really make sense, from a story perspective, they just happen to share a very powerful ability. The whole premise of magic is you are powerful enough to cast all the spells in the game as long as you have the mana.

Which is why every plane introduce new planeswalkers that never leave the plan doesn't make any fucking sense (except to the merchants at Wizard$ of the co$t)

Imagine just one day leaving this world and then a few years later you come back and you have the power to raise the dead, control animals, turn people to literal dust and the like. A planeswalker only becomes more powerful as they age as their potential for magic is astounding. They can learn of magics completely foreign and unknown of on their home plane I can imagine the gods of some worlds actually would seek to deal with planeswalkers for knowledge and powers of other worlds that they themselves cannot reach.

However being a planeswalker in and of itself does not make you powerful, pre mending walkers (if you don't know what that is I suggest you look it up) were essentially ascended to godhood upon their spark igniting and could do a whole bunch of crazy shit like: Change form at will, harness entires world's supply of mana, Were Immortal, and could planeswalk literally at the blink of an eye. I wouldn't be surprised if igniting your spark still gave you a power boost but planeswalkers that aren't 300+ years old could probably be defeated by an Arch-Mage of any magical plane.

>save for Eldrazi.
Nissa and Chandra recently "Killed" Ulamog and Kozilek so seems like the writers disagree.

I have a weird plane question.
Is Ravnica the best place to go to if a planeswallker wants to learn like... a new type of magic?

I mean the entire plane is one huge city, controlled by guilds. I'm sure a walker could find a way to slip into one and learn any sort of magic there is.

They didn't win alone. 1 planeswalker never beat 1 Eldrazi.

And when they tried that trick on Emrakul it didn't work.

Depends on the walker

Ravnica is one of the "safer" planes but it really relies on just how open guilds are to recruitment I can see one of the requirements to join Azorius or Orzhov would be to have a noble birth. I think one of the best places to learn would be Lorwyn its a very magical plane with very little actual threats.

...

Planeswalkers are gods. They can create entire worlds and dimensions, exist in multiple places at once, alter their physical form in any way with a thought, and are effectively immortal.

At least at first. Wizards of the Coast has made them weaker and weaker, and now the "new" Marketing Department created Neowalkers are no more powerful than anyone else, although they do have effectively unlimited opportunities to learn new spells and powers.

Hell, Neowalkers can be killed by a dude with an axe.

Are Reddit and Memey technically planeswalkers?

No

You try to be funny, but you just come off as retarded and edgy. I would reconsider my life if I were you.

...

What's supposed to be funny about that post? It's just a question.

No different planes often have entirely different and new magical traditions.

If you resurrect a planeswalker as a zombie would it still have its spark?

No

That's not actually Lorwyn. Moag is pretty nice though.

In and of themselves, planeswalkers are no more powerful than any planebound mage. The planeswalker's spark provides the ability to move between planes, and nothing more.
However, being able to do that in and of itself is a huge advantage. They can learn things from other places that the planebound mage would never have the opportunity to because it literally doesn't exist in their world. It's the difference between someone who can only use cards from a single set versus someone who can use cards from four separate blocks. Or all of Modern. Or, in Bolas's case, run a tuned Vintage deck designed solely to make you hate living.
And yes, they can forge mana bonds much easier just because they can travel easier to all kinds of places - mages in magic form connections with the places they've been and draw on those connections to power their spellcraft. Literally tapping lands for mana. The planebound mage has to physically go about their plane, and there's only so much to one plane. The planeswalker gets to pop around and get a few from Alara, a handful from Ravnica, a dash of Lorwyn, etc.

Explicitly no.
Which is why Theros has its weirdass underworld, so that Elspeth could die without being dead dead. And why she won't be a Returned.

Here's the metric.
A normal wizard can range from about as strong as a man with a gun to about as strong as a fighter plane. Take out a platoon of troops with their devastating magic, maybe destroy a whole city. Lowest level mages can hit you with a fireball and make a badly burnt hole, which is lethal depending on where you get it. The strongest non-planeswalker mage, Barrin, managed to destroy a whole island by unleashing all his mana in one destructive blast.

A current era planeswalker starts out as the strongest of all mages. Each one has the strength of a platoon. The highest level planeswalkers are nearing godlike, capable of destroying whole cities with single spells, and ravaging areas beyond that. The spell that Barrin cast is something any planeswalker can cast with enough mana.

Note that EVERYTHING depends on type, compatibility, and mana reserves. Given sublime and compatible mana reserves, a planeswalker could destroy a planet. But that'd require preposterous amounts. And even with extra magic, Jace couldn't really do that, for example. He is a mind-mage, and given more mana and a ripe target, the greater effects he draws is less "explosions" and more "larger, more complicated illusions", such as a labyrinthine false-city that you could wander for years and never cross your own path or something.

Old era planeswalkers were yet more godlike, capable of reworking planes and building them from scratch mana. Their physical forms were wrought of mana, and so attacking them without magic was impossible, as they'd simply will any damage undone. Their greatest spells would affect whole planets, too, and they were capable of finding reserves of mana to accomplish such deeds much more freely.

Thanks i'm sure it's just as good a place.

Venser died. Xenagos died. Elseph died (albeit on a plane with a loophole). Garruk has killed a few literal who planeswalkers.

There's some merit to your criticism, but it's not 100% true. I think what it boils down to is that they've introduced too many planeswalkers and not fleshed them out enough. Especially now that they're primarily following the Gatewawtch. In order for a character's death to mean something, there has to be some level of investment in the character, and there are too many one-off planeswalkers like Tibalt or Domri Rade that we haven't really been given a reason to care about if they get killed off.

Yeah, of course.

Briefly speaking:

Oldwalkers (pre-Mending): super-powerful entities whose physical bodies emanated from their consciousness. They could directly pull mana from the Blind Eternities, were immortal, didn't need to eat, sleep, or rest, and were game-breakingly powerful in general, able to create and destroy entire planes all by their lonesome (though the degree to which the plane survived and was dependent on them to maintain it could vary).

Neowalkers (post-Mending): A very different beast. Here, the Spark does not grant the god-like powers of an Oldwalker. What it grants is the ability to move between planes and (arguably) increased facilitation with translation magic. They are by no means the most powerful kids on the block, and the Spark isn't going to directly help them in a fight (except for with running the fuck away).

However, this is where mana bonds come in. See, a mage can grow stronger in power by forming more and more mana bonds, giving them more to draw on for spells and such. For a plane-bound mage, this is necessarily limited, because they can't go to more than one plane. If there are only X amount of places they can form mana bonds on their plane, then they can only get X. For a Planeswalker, one who can traverse Dominia, this limitation does not exist. A walker could have bonds on Ravnica, Azatlan, Innistrad, Theros, Tarkir, Dominaria, and half a dozen other planes, all of which would feed them the power they need. Meanwhile, the plane-bound mage only gets one plane. So a Planeswalker is theoretically unlimited in the number of mana bonds they can acquire, and in how powerful they can be. And the older they get, the stronger they are (Nicol Bolas is a good example of this).

For an example of how the Spark affects mana bonds, look at Ob Nixilis when his spark reignites during BfZ. He explicitly mentions feeling some of his mana bonds on other worlds come back when his Spark reignites, restoring a portion of his lost power to him.

old walkers are like thanos tier.

Honestly, the more they make things, the more I'm inclined to believe that it's less that the spark helps with translation as it is that each plane just so happens to have the same damn language as the dominant one, like D&D's Common only moreso and even more nonsensical.
There's other languages, sure, but the main one is always Common. Sometimes there's accents.
Mostly it's that Wizards doesn't think lingual differences are interesting unless they can make funny flavor text out of them. Goblin word for X, Elvish phrase meaning Y, etc.
But I don't think such things came up even when nonwalkers were able to fuck about between planes.