My main issues with the praetors in MOM are

1: They have hardly any spotlight despite this literally being their set and story! Vorinclex doesnt even speak once, Jin-gitaxis does basically nothing most of the story, Urabrask and Sheoldred are written out before they get the chance to do anything. And Elesh Norn was fine actually

2: Urabrask and Sheoldreds rebellions mean nothing and their alliance is completely ignored. Both of these are such a cool plot points and the former is thrown away and the latter only gets a one off (?) mention in The Legends of Phyrexia: All Will Be One which sucks because an alliance between these two both makes a ton of sense and is a great way to give spot light to these two.

3: They look like complete chumps! I mean come on these are the 5 strongest phyrexians of all time (depending on how you view gix) and the phyrexians are one of the strongest factions in the series. The 5 leaders of them should all be portrayed as powerful or atleast compotent right? Urabrask and Sheoldred get beaten and captured off screen. Vorinclex gets one tapped. Jin-gitaxis gets hit in the by a literally unnamed character and dies a disney death.

And I think there's a pretty easy way to fix all 3 of these.

Just have the praetors fight eachother. Either Urabrask vs Vorinclex and Sheoldred vs Jin-gitaxis or Urabrask v Vorinclex and Jin-gitaxis v Sheoldred vs Voriclex or hell even a 2 v 2. I dont really care!

It solves the spot light issue with these 4 by giving them straight up fights instead of killing 2 right away and scrambling to kill the other 2 in one chapter.

It solves the rebellion and alliance issue by giving them direct story focus.

It solves them looking like total pushovers issue by giving them actual fights where they can show off how cool and powerful they are.

Idk maybe im too shonen pilled but I think this is way better then what actually happened (low bar)

Let me know what you think!

I know im like 3 years late and am probably beating a long dead horse but I just finished reading the march of machines episodes. I didnt expect the praetors to live even if i wouldve liked that but I expected atleast a satisfying ending.

The praetors are supposed to be the strongest phyrexians ever and their all done in so easily its almost laughable.

We all know Kaladesh was renamed to Avishkar due to real world connotations. In universe, it was explained the plane was renamed after the consulate fell and the Phyrexian invasion ended. However in the Echoverse, the consulate never fell as seen by Chandra, Chill of Compliance. That being said, it appears Kaladesh was renamed anyway despite the two main events that led to the renaming never occurred. Was there an explanation for this somewhere or are we to assume (because of the real world) it was always gonna change?

I was looking thru my bolas Planeswalkers and I noticed a lot of sevens popping up (god Pharaoh costs 7, starts with seven counters, and deals 7 damage in one ability, ravager costs 7 to transform, Planeswalker's ultimate has 3 sevens in it) and I wondered if that's a reference to something. I think it has to do with his siblings but I'm also stupid so I'm probably wrong

Tldr: Does Liliana still have her parts of benefit of the demonic / Bolas contract (more magical power, prolonged / eternal youth)? And how much of her original contract still holds?

So, from my understanding, Liliana entered into the contract with 4 demons (and Bolas by proxy) to regain magical prowess and youth, in exchange for some sort of bargaining chip for the demons and Bolas of which they can use to compel Liliana into service. Liliana intended to kill all 4 demons, which implies to me that her understanding was that killing them would not void whatever power she received at her end.

During War of the Sparks, Bolas punished Liliana's turncoat-ing by causing her to burn and rapidly age, but she survives thanks to some Gideon's shenanigans. But even during that whole process, Liliana seems to still possess whatever bargain her end gives her (namely, she didn't seem to visibly be weaker, nor did she start to age after Gideon's death). Did she get to keep all the benefits of her contract, despite having broken part of the deal against Bolas? Her youthfulness certainly seems to remain between WAR and post-Omenpath; her magical prowess seems difficult to judge for me, with the desparking muddying the water further. And now Bolas is somewhere in the wild, does her contract still exists?

sI will say that personally, I do wish her contract has ended when Bolas lost his name and power after WAR. We had this plot point of her being forced into situation by her contract once already, it seems boring to me to have her do it for a second time. Liliana getting to keep all the benefits of the contract, without being bind to it, would be the icing on the cake for me.

How big do Bloomburrow creatures get on other planes? It’d be quite a shock for you to be traveling with your new 2-foot otter friend Ral Zarek and go through an omenpath to suddenly find yourself next to a human who’s at least twice his previous size when you’re still a couple inches tall.

I'm working on a homebrew/original plane as a little pet project (you can find it here), and the general idea is that a White/Blue faction called the Azorian Collective are suppressing, or trying to suppress, the other colors of mana. To add some variety, I was planning to add three smaller factions within the larger whole :

• White/Blue/Black (also encompasses White/Black and Blue/Black)
• White/Blue/Red (also encompasses White/Red and Blue/Red)
• White/Blue/Green (also encompasses White/Green and Blue/Green)

The two-color divisions represent specialists/those who lean different ways within the overall factions.

But I'm overall stumped on how to flavor them. What kind of things have been done with these combos in the past? What kind of things would fit thematically?

Anyone disappointed by not seeing a mono red Atraxa in Reality Fracture? Jace created this phyrexianless multiverse and we didn’t even get to see one of the most prominent compleated characters in her “what if phyrexia never took her” version.

Just asking so I know what to skip. It seems to be a bit vague from my search.

Wanted to make a separate post to talk clearly about what Eldritch horror means and why the eldrazi used to be a great example in MTG

Eldritch, in modern use (especially Lovecraftian horror), isn’t just "spooky" or "weird". It’s something so alien to human understanding that the mere attempt to grasp it can break you and your mind. It’s not a big monster that wants to eat you. It’s a force whose motives, scale, and existence sit outside anything your brain evolved to process. The horror is the incomprehensibility itself.

The original Eldrazi, from Rise of the Eldrazi through Eldritch Moon, were textbook eldritch:

- They come from the Blind Eternities, a place that isn’t even a place in any normal sense.

- Their "bodies" on a plane are more like appendages or projections of something far larger and formless.

- They don’t just kill, they rewrite physics, biology, and reality itself (Ulamog’s entropy, Kozilek’s warped space, Emrakul’s biological mutations).

- Their hunger and purpose operate on scales and logics that characters, and us readers, could only approximate with words like "consume".

That’s pure eldritch: you can fight it, but you never really understand the thing you’re fighting.

Eldritch Moon was the peak of that feeling. Nahiri summoned Emrakul to Innistrad as revenge against Sorin. When the titan arrived, she didn’t just rampage; she rewrote the plane. Living things (people, animals, even some of the plane’s monsters) began mutating into nightmarish horrors. Entire towns twisted into something that no longer belonged to Innistrad’s gothic horror, but to something older and far stranger. All while the infected chanted variations of “Come’mrakul. Be’mrakul. Are’mrakul. We’mrakul. One’mrakul. I’amrakul.”

Jace himself nearly broke after looking into a mind already touched by Emrakul’s influence, being saved later by Tamiyo. He later tried to peer into the titan directly:

He looked into Her enormous magenta eye. It was warm and welcoming. He wondered what he would find if he went inside. He held himself back, just on the precipice.

What is your name? he asked. What do you call yourself?

A deluge of words echoed from all corners of his mind:

The eternal infinity—this world is mine.

The absolute—I shall have all.

The beginning—I shall be all.

The being—all are’mrakul.

The end.

The end.

The end.

Jace pulled back, gasping for breath.

That moment is pure eldritch. Emrakul doesn’t answer in anything resembling conversation. She gives countless answers till language itself collapses.

Then we have the classic chess scene we all remember, which I recommend to just go and read it yourselves.

The Gatewatch and the plane’s survivors fight desperately, but they couldn’t truly defeat her. In the end, Emrakul chose to be sealed. She forces Tamiyo to cast a forbidden spell that locked her inside Innistrad’s moon. Her words made it clear this wasn’t a loss, it was a decision made for reasons no one fully understood.... and the most the heroes could do is survive the aftermath.

Fast-forward to Reality Fracture, and the tone has shifted. Emrakul is still vast, still consuming, still otherworldly… but she’s no longer purely incomprehensible. She does communicates with Tam through sensations, alien impressions, and words that are not quite words. But she explains her role/nature:

I prune worlds. When one grows sick, threatens the wilderness of eternity, or fails to blossom fully, I aid the broader forest by felling a single tree.

Once Emrakul explains herself, once she confirms this theory herself, she becomes a little more legible. She has a philosophy, a metaphor for her role in the Multiverse, and a way of justifying her actions.

We can start categorizing her as a cosmic gardener, an ecological regulator, or a predator that believes its feeding serves a greater purpose.

That doesn't make her ordinary, but it gives us a framework for understanding her.

She is still terrifying, but the mystery surrounding her has been dialed back in favor of clearer agency and plot utility. The older story made us feel the limits of comprehension. The newer one invites us to comprehend her, diminishing the very eldritch mystery that made her so terrifying in the first place.

Hi all, it's your regular check in from MTG Wiki admin RivalRowan, here with the latest and final Alchemy flavor text update.

With each release, the Arena team gives us a small number of cards with additional flavor text unique to the set. As Jace's story concludes, so does our long journey of tracking Alchemy flavor text. This set has a couple of nice addendums to main story pieces and [[Potential Horizon]] gives us a look at the process of overlaying the Echoverse onto the Multiverse.

If you want to check out any of the past Alchemy set flavor texts, we've grouped them all here: https://mtg.wiki/page/Category:Alchemy_flavor_text

Big shout out to fellow admin HolyMTG for grabbing all the screenshots this time.

There's been a lot discussions about the echoverse, and a common response is that "it's morally okay because Tam says they're not people", but that's just taking an unreliable narrator as face value. So I ask the question. What is the definition of a person in magic?

The obvious answer is souls. And indeed I've seen many make the argument that the echoverse people are soulless. However, this is directly contradicted by the story; Liliana explicitly says that the echoverse people do have souls, just incomplete ones. Which actually puts them ahead of certain peoples that are considered people: angels and demons. Pure Angels and demons are confirmed to be soulless by their very nature as beings of mana, and in fact this is the reason why there are no pure-born angel or demon planeswalkers. The fact that the echoverse does have planeswalkers also backs this up.

The second common objection is that they aren't sentient, but that's contradicted by cards like [[budding insurgent]] and echo-Ral's side story in secrets of strixhaven. Even the 'empty cadet' that Tam encounters and the basis for all the 'they're soulless' claims have doubt cast on it, as Lore master Jay suggested that one was being directly mind-controled by the Theorist.

The final objection is that, even if they are sentient, they aren't people because they are inheritantly illusions, which implies a degree of unrealness and thus not people. But we have a counter-example for that too. [[Akroma, angel of wrath]]. She was a sentient illusion created by [[ixidor, reality sculptor]] (who shares a title with [[Jace, reality sculptor]], huh) and she was a person. She's such a person that she eventually fused into Karona, and defused when Karona died. There's still even a serran order that honors her. So clearly being an illusion doesn't disqualify someone's personhood.

So... Where exactly is the line? At what point does it become okay to commit genocide? Is it in fact ethically okay to genocide angels? What's the rule here? Genuinely all of it seems like double standards to me.

If you look at how the MTG multiverse works, the explanation for mana, planar lifecycles, and the Eldrazi always feels a bit disjointed. But if you imagine the Blind Eternities through a biological and information-theory lens, there's kinda-sorta framework there.

So, this is how it all actually fits together: Mana is cellular material, and the Eldrazi are the multiverse’s metabolic garbage collection system. Eldrazi are weird and unknowable because, in a way, they're the multiverse eating itself.

Colorless mana is like totipotent stem cells. A newborn plane doesn’t begin with leylines and color alignments. It starts as raw unpatterned colorless mana. It holds pure potential, but zero information.

As the plane ages, sentient life emerges, ecosystems develop, history happens and events leave their mark. The mana begins to differentiate specializing along pathways, the five colors of the color pie.

Differentiation is a one-way street, tho. As a plane accumulates history, physical matter, spent magic, and memory, it becomes hyper-encoded. The specific mana colors start getting very defined flavors. Eventually, the plane hits maximum information density. The mana becomes locked into rigid identities. It loses its capacity to adapt, entering a state of cosmic senescence. The plane itself isn't dying per se, it's just not going anywhere.

That's when the Eldrazi come in like metabolic decomposers. What they do is basically decompose information. Ulamog strips stuff from physical properties. Kozilek strips reality itself from structure, spatial and logic rules. Emrakul mashes biological information together into increasingly undifferentiated soup.

When they're done, planes are left as raw, undifferentiated, colorless mush, full of potential and ready to begin the cycle anew.

A lot of older Magic settings that haven't managed to be really built up over the years really do be "Coastal Fantasy locale".

Next up: Kamigawa: OG, Neon Dynasty, and something fun and hypothetical.

After that, Ravnica.

I liked the Reality Fracture story overall, but I really didn’t like what they did to the Eldrazi.

They took away most of the eldritch factor. Emrakul was presented as way too understandable. Crystal clear goals, straightforward motives, and she even straight up offers help. If you can negotiate with it or just have a clear conversation with it, it’s no longer eldritch.

The original Eldrazi felt closer to natural disasters that happen to have agency, or to processes that simply are. Their motives, if they even had any we could recognize, were deliberately left opaque and never meant to be fully explained.

However, in the story Tam perfectly understands Emrakul’s nature and her willingness to help. That stands in sharp contrast to Jace’s chess meeting years ago. Back then he barely grasped anything. He thought winning the match would matter, when it didn’t. When the psychic link broke he was left understanding almost nothing. No real understanding of why Emrakul possessed Tamiyo or how she altered the scroll to seal herself in the moon.

I hope they don’t keep going down this path or start fully explaining the nature of the Eldrazi. Some things are better left incomprehensible.

Hey folks, MTG Arena has dropped its final Alchemy set before the format gets taken down next year, and it includes some additional color-swapped characters that weren't in the main set. Not sure if Alchemy is supposed to be canon or not, but figured I'd share for people interested.
You can puruse the full Scryfall set and see if I missed any:

• Oko, Lord of the Fae --> White Oko, makes oxen instead of elks
• Valgavoth, the Lifeline --> White angel Valgavoth
• Boisterous Clique --> Not legendary, but very clearly a black riff on Vendellion Clique
• Etali, Primal Garden --> Green stego-Etali. I know Ghalta had a main-set swap but is "Etali" a title the same way "Ghalta" is?
• Nylea's Oracle --> Not really a character, but a fun swap for Thassa's Oracle.
• The Bloodbile Swarm --> Ygra, but for blood instead of food. (We wrote about this one and the Oracle above)
• Dina, Flesh Sower --> Vigorbloom Dina
• Killian, Spotlight Chaser --> Stingerquill Killian
• Quintorius, Fate Splitter --> Fatehold Quint
• Rootha, Ardent Artisan --> Konstrari Rootha
• Zimone the Calculating --> Theorix Zimone, good at math with negative numbers?

Shame we're never really seeing any of these again. Would've been kinda neat to see the Strixhaven students encounter the Echoverse versions of themselves.

1. illusions are mana constructs
2. illusions are tethered to the living caster and break down or dissipate back into mana if something happens to the caster
3. Jace constructed an entire one-to-one multiverse-scale replica of the multiverse as an illusion
4. Jace died (a necessary act performed by Vraska to save the multiverse with the assistance of Jace’s various personalities, especially the child soldier)
5. An illusion with an amount of mana necessary to be an imperfect mirror of the multiverse was now destabilizing and going to dissipate back into raw mana across the whole multiverse
6. that much mana could not safely dissipate without any negative effects on any of the non-illusion planes — this is implicated by Emrakul’s reference to the echoverse as being ill or degenerating in a way that requires termination
7. and the most impacted plane would be Arcaivos where Jace had concentrated and centrred his overlay attempt

These seven statements may or may not be given as true, but if you do accept these statements, I don’t think we really can question why Tam acted as if she had no choice but to invite Emrakul to play cleanup.

Note… though with magic what is gone always leaves echoes behind (even echoes of Echoes) and those that made a lasting impression might find a million ways via magic both intentional and unintentional to be embodied again…

I'm (trying to) read through some of the recent Set stories on the Wizards website but it seems like there are parts missing?

When reading the 1st Chapter of the ONE story, the audiobook version at the end says Chapter 3 Episode 2.Where are chapters 1 and 2??

Are they only available as audio or am I missing something?

A very interesting visual motif among the Echoverse cards, I've heard people say the main set doesn't reflect the "Echoverse denizens aren't real" idea from the story but this definitely supports that.

Where does the story go from here? I actually love Reality Fracture; it feels tragic, bittersweet.

But it feels like the end of an era. It highlights the last three big arcs.

So what are the bets on the next big thing? Are we going to do another Eldrazi or another Bolas, now that they're free? Is Zalfir a nod to a lingering Phyrexian shadow? Is Valgavoth finally going to get his day in the...err...shadows?

Or will we get something...new?