Coldsnap Online

I've been saying that Kamigawa started a trend of the storyline mattering more and more, a trend that would last for years. There was another trend starting around the same time though; the trend of WotC asking themselves "But what is we printed even more cards?"

See, back in the day we got 3 standard sets per year, and a Core set every other year, which left a gap in the schedule every non-Core year. In 2004 it was filled with the non-tournament Unhinged, in 2006 they made their first extra Standard legal set with Coldsnap, in 2008 they just made a 4 set block with Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, as well as the first From the Vault and Duel Decks... and so the curve trends upwards to today where a set that came out a month ago already feels like ancient history because we've gone through 2 spoiler seasons since it's release!

Ow, that was dangerously topical for this blog! Quickly, back to 2006! So... Coldsnap! What a weird set! Nowadays all the extra sets have clear audiences, Modern Horizons is for Modern, Vintage Masters is for Vintage, Conspiracy is for draft fans (give me Conspiracy 3 Wizards! Pleeeeeeease!), everything is for Commander... even the original "fourth set", Unhinged, had a clear audience in the people who had been asking for a second silver-bordered set ever since Unglued had come out. But a third Ice Age set? Who was asking for that? Reading through some of the articles announcing it you get the idea that this was more about WotC having an in-joke about a missing set than catering to a specific audience.

I'm not going to complain though! Bizarre though it may be, Coldsnap gave the storyline a unique opportunity to revisit a previous era and I'm totally there for it! As much as I love the way early Magic set jumped centuries or even millennia apart and thus created a long and varied timeline, it is a bit sad this meant settings and characters would never be used again (a few immortals here and there notwithstanding). So when, after years of seemingly treating continuity as something to be avoided since it would just lead to obsessive fans complaining about it, WotC suddenly did such a deep dive there was a lot of excitement! And also some anxiety from obsessive fans about possible continuity issues.

Well... let's see what they've made of it!

Up first, the by now traditional Minisite! And- holy moly, what is this? The Ice Age comic!?

Yep. After years of sliding into obscurity due to being out of print, not to mention parts of it being thoroughly ret-conned in The Eternal Ice, suddenly the whole thing was just up on the mothership for everyone to read! The website has dissipated into the aether again by now, but the zip still works if you're interested. This was of course a brilliant gift, though some people in the storyline community would grumble about the fact it was presented without a big "pre-revisionist" sign next to it. In hindsight it doesn't seem to have left a big mark on people's knowledge of the Ice Age story though.

I've already reviewed the comic so I don't have much to add to that, other than that I think it's hilarious they also included some pages of a preview for an entirely different Armada comic that was stuck in the middle, which now appears to be a completely bizarre non-sequitor. Let's move on to the three new stories we get here:

The Horror of Ronom Glacier, by Doug Beyer

A guide gets hired by Arcum Dagsson to bring him to Ronom Glacier, where the old man hopes to destroy Phyrexian warmachines before the mad mage Heidar can resurrect them. They discover that most of them are already gone, but Dagsson tries to blow up one who didn't awaken properly. Unfortunately the mana he uses to activate his bomb brings the creature to life. One exciting action scene that doesn't summarize well later and the two blow up the monster before it can do more damage.

Using the art from Time Bomb, which itself originated in Ice Age! Nice!

This is great! Well, the story is just okay, mostly taken up by two men trying to outrun an explosion, but I love that we get to learn more about a character as minor as Arcum Dagsson! It used to be par for the course that other than a handful of planeswalkers we'd never see characters again. Or if we did it would be in stories like the Legends cycles, which invalidated large parts of their characters' previous appearances. To see a story that actually builds on what came before in a logical way is awesome!

This story was the first look we got at Coldsnap's story and it sets things up pretty well. We learn there are nefarious wizards about who want to stop the Thaw for some reason, and more importantly, we learn characters like Dagsson and King Darien are still in play. All very exciting!

Continuitywise we learn that Heidar is using scrolls from Lim-Dûl's Vault and that Arcum warned King Darien about him. We'll talk more about the timeline below.

The Battle of Kjeldor, by Monty Ashley

This is a description of an attack by Stromgald zombies on Kjeldor from the perspective of a Kjeldoran soldier. Things go bad, until King Darien duels Haakon and inspires the troops. It ends with the Kjeldorans not being able to celebrate victory because some other force is arriving (It's not stated explicitly, but it's the Phyrexian warmachines from the previous story)

Hmmm... this one I like a bit less. Yes, it's cool to see King Darien again, but we don't get any insight in his character like we did with Arcum. And the story itself basically boils down to "some people fight". If this was chapter 10 of the Coldsnap novel it would be fine, but if we're only getting a handful of stories I'd rather concentrate on something more character driven or lore intensive than a battle scene.

Continuity/Trivia: we're told Sek'Kuar's orcish horde is waiting on the outcome of the battle, looking for Kjeldoran weakness. Also, Haakon is 10 feet high! With a sword 20 feet long! Or at least, he seems like that to the narrator.

Vannemir’s Choice, by Adam Lee

Vannemir has been killed by orcish raiders. A valkyrie called Ysidra brings him back to life though and has him team-up with the elf Taaveti of Kelsinko on a mission to prevent Heidar from conquering Terisiare. They have to rescue an elvish girl, on whom the whole fate of the continent hinges... somehow, from a orcish band. Vannemir bonds with a Fylgja spirit, kills a whole bunch of orcs, and saves both the elvish girl and the sister of a blond boy they ran into along the way.

If The Battle for Kjeldor would've made a good chapter 10 of a novel, Vannemir's Choice should've been chapter 1. Or perhaps chapters 1 to 7, as it tries to do a whole lot in very little time. A resurrection, a chosen one, a Runeblade holding a nature spirit and more. Which results in some awkward info-dumping, as well as stuff like Taaveti going from a complete stranger to "one of the finest souls I've ever met" in the eyes of Vannemir in about two paragraphs, and then leaving for some unspecified other quest in Yavimaya. I'm not convinced trying to summarize an entire fantasy epic is the best way to handle a short story, but I admire the ambition.

What I like less is the "introducing a chosen one" plot when we're never going to see that person do anything. I didn't like this trope all the way back in Tapestries, I didn't like it in the Dimir Ravnica Allegiance story, and I don't like it now. It always feels like a story is wasting my time or if the writer is angling for a chance to write a sequel.

How this elvish girl is supposed to stop Heidar is never revealed. We will see some elves show up later, so presumably she's among them, but we'll never know why she was so special. The weirdness of this even made me wonder if this was supposed to be an ret-conned origin for Kaysa, who leads the Yavimayan elves at this point in time and who had her own "saving the chosen one"-origin story way back in The Feast of Kjeld and the Ice Age comic, but the mention of the Thaw makes that impossible. So we'll just have to place this story in the lead up to Coldsnap and make up a reason for why this girl is special ourselves.

Considering what elves are in Coldsnap, I'm going to say she trained a dinosaur and then... eh... turns into Griselbrand?

Something else that annoys me a bit is the seemingly huge revelation that there is a Valhalla-style afterlife on Dominaria that will never ever be mentioned again;

"Your time upon the earth is not yet complete. You must do one more task before you may drink with your forefathers in the Halls of Valor."

Vannemir was stunned. “So it is true? The tales of the great hall are true?”

“It is so.”

This raises so many questions! Where did they come from? Did they only allow Kjeldorans in? Are they still there? Are the people within the Halls of Valor wondering why no new people ever join them, or have they moved on to become some other culture's afterlife? You don't wonder about this stuff on places like Theros or Kaldheim where the entire world seems to be part of just the one culture but on a place like Dominaria where we know many cultures exist simultaneously and that they fall and disappear into the annals of history all the time... I wanna know more!

FEATURE ARTICLES & TASTE THE MAGIC & MARK ROSEWATER?

With Coldsnap being something of an interruption to the Dissension coverage already in progress there is slightly less to talk about here. And since one of the Feature Articles features (heh) Matt Cavotta and refers back to some previously released Taste the Magic articles on Coldsnap, I'm going to cover these all together rather than splitting them up as I normally do.

Coming in from the Cold is Rei Nakazawa introducing the setting to us. As he says himself, he's in the unusual position to be explaining a setting that is already well known by the storyline fans, and unfortunately he stumbled a few times. Among the mistakes are stuff like General Jarkeld supporting King Darien, even though The Eternal Ice (and the flavor text of Lost Order of Jarkeld) made it clear he he died a long time ago, Varchild being convinced by the Order of Stromgald to move against the Balduvians, when she helped stand against the Order and didn't go rogue until 15 years later, an most bizarrely the weather growing "colder and darker"... during Alliances? With the end of the cooling period not being revealed until The Shattered Alliance? The World Spell happened at the end of Ice Age, with Alliances showing off the beginning of the Flood Ages!

These errors seem to come in part from Rei basing himself on the cards rather than the novels (the Varchild/Stromgald thing seems to stem from the flavor text of Agent of Stromgald hinting at a Stromgald infiltration of Varchild's forces), but even then it's just sloppy. In general Coldsnap will do a pretty good job continuity-wise, and I can understand a few mistakes slipping into the weekly Taste the Magic articles as Matt Cavotta doesn't have to time to research everything constantly, but... this article is the introduction to the setting! The first thing many people will learn about the Coldsnap story, and considering how long it had been, probably the first introduction to the Ice Age and Alliances stories for many as well! As such I had expected a better researched opening article, but alas...

I mean, there's a reason Thawing Glaciers is in Alliances!

• After that we are introduced to Heidar, who apparently uses Phyrexians remains "stolen from Soldev". It's up to us, the player's, to discover how he was defeated... unfortunately we're not told where we can find that information, but we'll cover that next week.
• The preview card for the article is Dark Depths, and Rei gives us the following info on Marit Lage: "a sorceress whose power was so great, some worshiped her as a goddess." Which is... more information than we had ever gotten on her than ever before. She was mentioned in The Eternal Ice, but only as possibly being a planeswalker or "some avatar of power". Curiously her status as a "sorceress", which seems to imply a humanoid origin before she turned into a big tentacly-thing has been dropped from her Wiki article at some point, which prefers to quote an Ask Wizards answer by Brady Dommermuth from a few months later that merely calls her "a being of immense power".
• Rei closes the article with the following:

"Will Rabiah tell more stories, or Ulgrotha get another look? Who knows? That may be partly up to you, the players, and your reactions to this set."

Dammit, I knew I should've bought more Coldsnap boosters!

Next we get I’m Mr. 100 Below, which introduces us properly to Heidar, the baddy of the piece. We learn that the Rimewind initially studied magic that worked with the cold, finding a way they could magnify it, after which they lived lavishly throughout the centuries. And now the end of the Ice Age is robbing them of their power and they’re pissed. Pretty basic.

Some timeline points:

• This article, and Coming in from the Cold too for that matter, says the Ice Age lasted 2000 years. It was actually closer to 2500, but we’ll call that rounding off roughly.
• We're also told that after discovering their special magic the Rimewind "slid easily through the remaining thousand years of the Ice Age", which would put their discovery around 1900 AR (or just 2000 AR, rounding off roughly). We'll see some conflicting information about that next week though.

Hot Temper, Cold Eyes delves into Lovisa Cold-Eyes. We don't learn much new here, as it's mostly a flavor text showcase, and the one big revelation is a bit of a blunder: Matt says Lothar is the son of Lovisa and Darien. We’ve seen in The Shattered Alliance though that those two are actually just parents-in-law, as Lothar, the son of Lovisa and an unnamed partner, marries Alexandrite, the daughter of Darien and his deceased wife.

As you can imagine, that annoyed quite a few hardcore storyline fans back in the day. After Scourge, the contradictions between Legends I and II and the inconsistencies with the Mirrodin timeline the community didn't have much faith in the creative team's grasp of continuity anyway, and the little issues in Rei's "Coming in from the Cold" article hadn't helped much either. This error was pretty blatant though. I remember writing an e-mail about it to Matt Cavotta and as we'll see below Matt eventually admitted the mistake. This also led to Brady Dommermuth sharing Lovisa's entry from the Forgotten Archive on the MTGSalvation forums, which revealed that in pre-The Eternal Ice continuity Lothar didn't even exist! Instead Lovisa had a daughter called Tolsa and a grandson (probably, the text is a bit vague) called Greywolf. No hint if either of those ever married Darien's daughter.

Lovisa + Darien = Angry Storyline Fans

In hindsight I'm a lot more forgiving to someone who has to pump out an article on Magic's story every week (hey, I know can't manage a weekly schedule for long!) and other than these articles I can applaud Coldsnap for handeling continuity well. Keeping well known characters like Lim-Dûl or Jaya Ballard out of the set because the story had written them out was nicely restrained (although knowing they were going to do flashback characters in Time Spiral must have helped with that decision!) and as we'll see next week there isn't anything in the main story that clashes with what came before.

I Freeze, Therefore I Am shows why certain creatures have the “Snow” supertype, giving a few insights in what they are like. 

• The Snow Phyrexians are snow because they are powered by Coldsteel Hearts created by the Rimewind
• Marit Lage is described as a Demigod and hints that her covers might soon be coming off… we never did get a story for her though, so we don’t really know why she remained frozen. I assume Jodah rounded up some Rimewind mages who didn’t get along with Heidar and had them cast another freezing spell. (Yes, yes, I know, there is more I could say here, but that would be spoilers for... actually, saying what it is spoiling would itself be a spoiler. I'll do an article about that some time in the future.)
• The Tresserhorn Sinks were “snow-covered” by Heidar to help create Haakon’s army.

Magic of the Flesh has a short story based on Rite of Flame as an introduction to a discussion about tattoos in Magic art. This one isn’t on the Wiki's list of Taste of Magic/Savor the Flavor stories (though some of the stories from the mini sites are listed as Taste the Magic articles, I notice), perhaps because it is only the first part of the article, but hey, everything counts in my book! It's just a quick description of a guy doing a ritual, nothing much to review there though.

Now we return to the second and final Coldsnap Feature Article: The Italicized World of Coldsnap: Interviewing Cavotta and a Continent. In it Doug Beyer interviews not only Matt Cavotta, but also various characters from Terisiare. Mostly it's very silly, but there are some points of interest in here, mostly considering that eternal question "What is canon?". Be warned though, it spoils the fates of Lovisa Coldeyes and Heidar in an attempt to showcase the non-linear nature of telling the story through cards.

On to the canonicity discussion. Matt restates that they don't put the storyline on the cards anymore like they did in Tempest, and then gives us this quote:

"As for Heidar's army marching across refrozen Adarkar, it is not described on cards. Instead, the cards set the scene for the march and provide extra bits of character development for Heidar and the other major players in the story. This allows players who are less concerned with our story to "feel" the setting and, if they choose, create a story for themselves."

A reiteration (or actually, foreshadowing, since we're covering things slightly out of order) of his "you make the story" position we saw last week. But the later we get this:

"Matt: I actually think this a good time for a little lesson for everybody. Just because something is not specifically stated on cards doesn't mean that it does not happen at all. For example, nowhere on the cards does it say that Garza Zol rules the plague-ridden husk of a town called Krov."

He later points us to the novels, the short stories, the Coldsnap Player's Guide... and to Taste the Magic for places were you can read the "true" story that doesn't make it into the cards. So... we're left to make our own story, but at the same time there is stuff that definitely counts? It's all a bit muddled, and will get more muddled in the future (which we saw last week) when Matt changes his stance to "Taste the Magic isn't absolutely official" (his words).

And then it gets entirely bonkers. At the end of the article Matt and Doug kill Taaveti of Kelsinko with a Deathmark, and declare that the art and flavor text of the card now canonically to his death. This is the minor character death that I redacted from the last review. Told you it would be weird! To refresh your memory, in the article where he states Taste the Magic isn't 100% set in stone canon he says the following:

"There was a time when I would have said that they are absolutely official, like the death of Taaveti of Kelsinko. I won't do that today."

In that article Taaveti's name links to the Feature Article we're covering today. I don't think even Matt would say it's canon that Doug Beyer blew up Taaveti in canon, the idea seems to be that if Matt says that card X shows character Y, that's now canon. Except he walks that back a few weeks later. This has led to some bizarreness with people half-remembering (or perhaps half-accepting) what happened with poor Taaveti. His Wiki article just says he was "killed under unknown circumstances" during Coldsnap. They don't link to either this Feature Article or the Taste the Magic article, even though those are the only sources we have on his supposed death. It seems people think "Matt and Doug decided to have him retroactively killed to show the power of writers" was just too silly, but the idea that he somehow died has stuck.

Oh, and Matt also points to the comics on the minisite as an official story source, without mentioning that large chunks of them have been ret-conned by The Eternal Ice. What a mess! At least he also includes an acknowledgement for screwing up the Darien/Lovisa family tree earlier! He doesn't give us the proper family tree though, he just points you to The Shattered Alliance.

Fixed it for you!

I knew all along I was going to have another "what is canon?" conversation once Taste the Magic started rolling, but I didn't realize it would be a subject Matt talked about so often that I'd have to return to it almost every review!

Well, once more time then: Taste the Magic contains a whole bunch of silliness, but also interesting looks at information that never made it into the set or the novels. It might be clear to Matt which is which, but for us there's no clear way to cut the chaff from the canon, so as far as I'm concerned it all counts as long as it isn't contradicted anywhere else. If there are contradictions the novels and other stories take prescedent, as I'm a firm believer that the stories should be the main part of the storyline, and since it's fair to hold novels that were written, edited and published over the course of many months to a higher standard than an article that had to be quickly knocked out each week. So yeah, I guess that is a dead Taaveti on Deathmark.

If you think it's all too silly though, take solace in the fact that Matt's additions are generally minor enough to ignore without much trouble. The larger canon isn't going to buckle if you prefer to think it's just a nameless nobody in that art, or if you throw out the origin of Leashling.

The real intriguing question is, who is that in the more recent art of Deathmark?

Finally, we will turn to an unlikely source of storyline information: Mark Rosewater. In the article Of Ice and Men Mark previews Arcum Daggson and gives us the write-up the Creative Team gave him for the character. It mostly matches up with what we saw in The Eternal Ice, though Jodah's involvement is not mentioned at all. What is interesting to us though is this bit:

"Two years after Soldev was wrecked by rampaging artifacts, Arcum died of a failed heart. Between the fall of Soldev and the heart attack (when Coldsnap takes place), Arcum dedicated his life to making up for the destruction he caused. He was instrumental in stopping the ice Phyrexians from taking over Kjeldor."

This has gone through some Chinese whispers to become the generally accepted knowledge "Coldsnap happens 2 years after Alliances" (I even mentioned that myself back when I did the Shattered Alliances review). But technically we just know that at that point Arcum dies, and that Coldsnap happens somewhere in between. In face, the previously mentioned "I Freeze, Therefore I Am" mentions the Ice Age as "20 years ago", which could be rounding off, but could also be a hint that Coldsnap happens closer to The Shattered Alliance than we think. 

To stick to our sources, all the Coldsnap stories are going into the 2954-2956 gap on my timeline. Technically "Vannemir's Choice" could happen at any point between the World Spell and the final battle with Heidar (who knows how far those mysterious valkyries could look into the future?) and "Magic of the Flesh" isn't really tied to anything, but I'll invoke my "If there aren't any other temporal references, stories tied to a certain set go at on the timeline alongside that set"-rule for them. They do merit a "probably" qualifier though.

Warning Darien about Heidar AND giving us a timeline placement for Coldsnap? Truly Arcum is the greatest hero of this set!

MAGIC ARCANA

Finally, we have only a handful of Magic Arcana's for Coldsnap. Mostly they are just art showcases.

• Recipe for a Phyrexian Army tells the story of Coldsnap through, eh... bakery.
• Order of the White Shield is an art showcase. It says the person in the art “may” be Lucilde Fiskdotter. Now that hedging of bets is just about the opposite of the Taaveti/Deathmark declaration!
• Sketches: Lovisa Coldeyes
• Sketchec: Arctic Nishoba
• Raptor/Sphinx Mural
• The Martyr’s Talisman

And that's it really. Apart from the short stories Coldsnap didn't get a whole lot of coverage before attention shifted back to Dissension. All these articles have set up pretty clearly that Heidar was up to big bad stuff, but most of them left us hanging when it came to the question of a resolution! Usually Rei Nakazawa would plug the set's novel in his opening article, but there is no set novel this time around. In that last Feature Article Matt Cavotta mentions the Coldsnap Player's Guide though, so next week we'll look at what secrets are hidden there.