Magic: the Gathering - T: Add Three Mana Of Any One Colour To Your Mana Pool

[Lycodrake]

Lyco, you got some time tonight?

Didn't see this the other day, apologies, Seika.

[Nihilm]

Down 0-1 against Siriel... until next time *shakes fist*

I'm Nil

[Lycodrake]

2-0 win in Nihilm's favor.

[Nihilm]

Teleportation gearhulk was too strong, won 2-0 vs Lyco

[Lycodrake]

UnStable reveals happened thanks to MaRo tonight/today at SDCC.

WU color pair

UB color pair

BR color pair

RG color pair

GW color pair

Steamflogger Boss reprint confirmed, squirrel tribal support, full art basics, draftable by itself...and "more to come".

[aldeayeah]

Hour of Bolas Kicked the Gatewatch's Arse :D

[Rafflesiac]

SO WE JUST RUN UP AND KILL THE DRAGON

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Though I was expecting Bolas to rip their sparks out and fling them into random places or something. This works too, I guess.

At any rate, Ravnica's really going to be in the lurch now.

[Lycodrake]

"The Guildpact forgot he's the Guildpact...is he still the Guildpact?"

[Seika]

I really enjoyed the way Bolas' perspective was written at the start, though comic book villainy "I shall let them go as part of my GRAND MASTER PLAN and this will definitely not inevitably backfire" is pretty disappointing.

E: Interested to see what this does to the Ral/Jace 'shippers.

[Seika]

Now I have lots of thoughts on Bolas and the Gatewatch storyline. Hm ...

So, Bolas has functionally appeared as more than a vaguely looming background figure three times in MtG mainline lore. (Pre-Weatherlight storytelling was such a mess, so utterly unavailable, and also often dubiously canonical because of outsourcing, so it doesn't factor in; Agents of Artifice similarly doesn't count because it was a book totally divorced from the blocks, and therefore basically no-one read it except me). Time Spiral, which I think might have dealt with him best, then Alara, then Amonkhet.

In Time Spiral, he's a omen of doom who only really gets set loose to fight another villain. They're both old-walkers, so they throw around abilities of enormous, reality-altering power, alter a few coastlines, and then it turns out that Bolas has outsmarted Leshrac all along. It's very cool, and it shows off Bolas' might and age and cunning.

In Alara, we've gone through the Mending but he's still the oldest and most powerful being in the Multiverse by a significant margin. Ajani is batted around like a little kitten, until he has a breakthrough and uses his own unique power combined with the particular circumstances of the battle to create Bolas Mk.2, and cause a draw. This is a reasonable way to approach the problem that Bolas is so unapproachably beyond new-walkers: here are the exceptional caveats; here's the hero's destiny, as it were, shining through; and he still can't be outright beaten. Feels a bit cheap all the same, that Ajani can genuinely conjure up a match to Bolas, but it gets a pass.

Then they send the Gatewatch up against him in Amonkhet, and he crushes them like he logically ought to, but ends up just ... sending them off. He outmatches them so badly, given that the circumstances are all in his favour, that they don't even get desperate last minute escapes: he allows them to leave, chuckling happily all the way. And it's hugely underwhelming, because this is one of the great all-time clichés of fiction: villain beats heroes, underestimates heroes, heroes get an unwarranted reprieve, heroes beat villain. It's the stuff of Bond films and comics - bad ones at that - which anyone should be aspiring to rise above, even given the frankly unambitious standard of MtG writing.


And I think some of the problem here is one that has actually bedevilled Magic's stories from their inception. Namely, how does one seriously write about a Multiverse of planes and planeswalkers, which is the most basic foundation of the game?

Once planeswalkers had initially been nailed down, after that period of lore-chaos at Magic's beginning, the writers found that it was understandably difficult to write about godlike beings to whom decapitation wasn't particularly more than an inconvenience, and whose minimum collateral damage level started at cities and tended to average out at continents. So, instead, we saw things through the eyes of Jodah and Xantcha and Gerrard and Hanna and Sisay and Kamahl and all these others, and the 'walkers themselves mostly hovered in the background being weird and terrifying and inscrutable until five minutes to doomsday.

Except then they realised that a) their stories had thoroughly trashed Dominaria which is where they'd stuck for so long barring the minor Rath/Mercadia stopovers; and b) they really weren't fulfilling the promise of a multiverse filled with planes.

So we see Mirrodin and Kamigawa and Ravnica. And we find this odd problem where tying a plane to a single block does make your story want to affect that whole plane. So we're actually still running through civilisation-ending storylines, at a rate and scale unmatched even by what had been done to Dominaria, and yet we're still avoiding the use of 'walkers lest the thorny problem of "our protagonist is extremely immortal" comes up.

Okay, MENDING TIME. Reset everything, 'walkers are now just at the level of powerful mages. We can run stories featuring them directly now, and we think we've got a handle on this plane-hopping stuff too now. Finally, we can write about Magic as it was first described. Happy times?

Well, no, because Magic fans are not inclined to happiness as a rule, and especially not when confronted with change.

But let's also look at the next storylines. First, Lorwyn, where if you read between the lines you can see that the story was written before they were sure they could get the card type working in time for the set. So the 'walkers showed up on their own cards and didn't interact with literally anything else. Instead, we got an exactly old-style story with Random Dude Rhys and the kinda-sorta end of the world, again. Alright, not exactly the poster child for our new paradigm yet, so let's move on.

Next, Alara. Five planes, -ish, being annihilated this time, and Bolas still being a 25,000 year-old Elder Dragon. Local new-walker has to deal with him by kinda unconvincing desperate measures. Huh.

And so on it's gone, through the Eldrazi, the Phyrexian invasion, the Dark Ascension, the restoration of the Guildpact, &c., with very few exceptions. They want to tell planar stories because that's the overall setting of the game, and because we've been trained to care about the plane as the default unit. But scaling your protagonists up so that they're capable of fighting planar threats week-in and week-out has the problem of making them inhuman and totally unsuited to anything on a smaller scale. Which means we've now got arguably the mirror of the Urza problem - before, stories like the early parts of Kaladesh would have been totally unbelievable and entirely without tension, because old-walkers would have been about as bothered by the Consulate as they were by a gnat. Currently, stories like defeating the Eldrazi or even surviving Bolas in the midst of his schemes provoke equal amounts of contrivance of the writers' parts and disbelief on the readers'.

[aldeayeah]

PT Hour of Devastation Day 1: PV and Manfield (both on mono red) lead the pack.
Againt all odds, Hostile Desert proves itself a Constructed worthy card.

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Then they send the Gatewatch up against him in Amonkhet, and he crushes them like he logically ought to, but ends up just ... sending them off. He outmatches them so badly, given that the circumstances are all in his favour, that they don't even get desperate last minute escapes: he allows them to leave, chuckling happily all the way. And it's hugely underwhelming, because this is one of the great all-time clichés of fiction: villain beats heroes, underestimates heroes, heroes get an unwarranted reprieve, heroes beat villain. It's the stuff of Bond films and comics - bad ones at that - which anyone should be aspiring to rise above, even given the frankly unambitious standard of MtG writing.

Correct me if I wrong, but has Bolas ever been presented as anything other than a moustache twirling, Xanathos-rouletting (pardon my TVtropish), Bond villain?

I didn't expect ruthless efficiency from him, I expected gloating and playing around and overconfidence. I expected him to be the sort of villain that WANTS heroes around to toy with and prove his superiority - and the last story provided exactly that.

The thing is, according to his stated capabilities, Bolas could just mindwipe and enslave any sort of opposition that's not on his godlike level. Him going easy on the heroes was unavoidable to rid us of the horrible plot device that mind control is.

tl;dr: Bolas is supposed to be so powerful and intelligent, him seriously taking on the Gatewatch on his home turf wouldn't make a good story.

[Nihilm]

Aldeayeah want to finish our bo3? I am just one round win away from a clean sweep, even if the tourney is dead I can declare myself the winner.

[aldeayeah]

Sure! I will try my best to stop your ascension.

[aldeayeah]

Against all odds, I win 2-1. Game two we both missed the fourth land drop for a while, game 3 was pretty fun.

[Nihilm]

And there goes my clean sweep 2-1 Aldeayeah wins, if the tourney ever finishes I guess we can see if anyone else only loses once and how the tiebreakers are.

[Lycodrake]

So how about that Top 8 for Pro Tour HOU? Aggro of a few Jund flavors, especially just Desert-happy RDW, dominating the top tiers.

[aldeayeah]

PV's combination of extreme skill and extreme luck wins the day yet again!

[Seika]

Correct me if I wrong, but has Bolas ever been presented as anything other than a moustache twirling, Xanathos-rouletting (pardon my TVtropish), Bond villain?

I didn't expect ruthless efficiency from him, I expected gloating and playing around and overconfidence. I expected him to be the sort of villain that WANTS heroes around to toy with and prove his superiority - and the last story provided exactly that.


The thing is, according to his stated capabilities, Bolas could just mindwipe and enslave any sort of opposition that's not on his godlike level. Him going easy on the heroes was unavoidable to rid us of the horrible plot device that mind control is.


tl;dr: Bolas is supposed to be so powerful and intelligent, him seriously taking on the Gatewatch on his home turf wouldn't make a good story.

Yes, ego's always been a big part of Bolas' character, but he's previously tended to justify it by already being many steps ahead and winning as a result. And, really, this doesn't read like him winning. (The Gatewatch is still alive; he's taking no more profit away from this than if they'd never showed up and he'd just harvested the plane anyway). This instead reads directly like the writers running into that problem I wrote about above, where they've set up a villain whom the Gatewatch cannot believably hold even a candle to. Which kicks me right out of my cocoon of suspended disbelief. And because of that, and because it looked so transparently like that problem, and because the resolution was awful and tired and stupid, that's also a bad story.

[Lycodrake]

We don't know the full Ixalan set, obviously, but I'm sorely tempted to preorder playsets of each and every dinosaur and dinosaur-related/supportive card from the set when it is revealed.

[Siriel]

Sorry for not being around to play, I've been somewhat busy recently. I should be available starting tomorrow if anyone wants to get the standard matches in.