Coldsnap Player's Guide & Theme Deck Inserts

Last week we saw that Magicthegathering.com had a number of articles setting up the Coldsnap story, but where the conclusion of that story would be told was a bit obscure. Well, it is right here, saved for everyone who bought a Coldsnap Fatpack!

The Fatpack also contained a novel, but that novel was The Gathering Dark. I wonder what people who weren't already deep into the storyline thought of that. Coldsnap is supposed to be set 3 of the Ice Age block, so... what is a The Dark book doing here? Wasn't Homelands the set originally considered the third part of the Ice Age block that got booted by Coldsnap? Reading the book wasn't going to make things much clearer either. Yes it is billed as "Ice Age cycle - Book 1", but the main thing linking it to the rest of the cycle are the characters of Jodah and Mairsil, neither of which is in the Coldsnap story. Personally I'd have put The Eternal Ice in the bundle. Yeah, it might be weird to only include "Ice Age cycle - Book 2", but at least that story is clearly tied to Coldsnap: it tells of the end of the Ice Age, thus setting up Heidar's grievances that kick off the new story.

But enough about a book I already reviewed a million years ago. If we want a new story, we have to look at the Player's Guide booklet also included in the fatpack. As always it includes a description of new mechanics in the set, a top 10 of Coolest Coldsnap Cards (Dark Depths at number 1 checks out, but Garza Zol at 2 and Zur only at 5? Lightning Serpent at 3? Rimefeather Owl gets in, but Counterbalance, Martyr of Sands and Rite of Flame don't?) and a visual guide to the entire set. There's also an article that talks about various snow creatures in the set that meanders from talking about card design to flavor, though you're not going to get much more than "Yeti's evolved to become the stealthiest creatures in Terisiare" or "Thermopods used to just be big slugs, but when the ice came they developed an internal furnace" from it.

Unique to this edition though are a storyline overview that doesn't just do some set up before pointing you to a novel, but which includes a conclusion, and an actual story, in the form of a monologue by Heidar, written by none other than Ice Age Cycle author Jeff Grubb!

Oddly the story summary is included on page 4 and 5, and the story on page 12 to 23. But the final battle isn't included in the story, so if you go through the booklet you first get a quick summary of how the story ends, before getting a deep dive into the psyche of the main villain... which is a bit odd, so I'm going to cover the story first, and then the summary. Let's dive in!

Keeping the Cold, by Jeff Grubb

For those interested in reading it, the whole story has been scanned and can be found in its own Wiki entry.

It's the morning before the big battle and Heidar is telling his lover Lindra about his life. How he always loved the cold and was apparently immune to under-cooling, and how that led to him becoming the apprentice of her father Gendrin, the previous master of Rimewind. After the World Spell Heidar leads the Rimewind in using magic to keep their lands cold, but eventually even the ancient histories and philosophies carved in their ice caves starts to melt. Underneath those Phyrexian etchings are revealed though. These teach him secrets that can bring back the cold. He takes those findings to Gendrin, but an argument breaks out and Heidar kills him. Heidar and Lindra (who thinks her father just slipped) take over Rimewind Keep. 

Heidar then makes a deal with the Knights of Stromgald, who now rule Tresserhorn, teaching them how to maintain their undead bodies with ice in exchange for access to Lim-Dûl's vaults, revealing to him the location of buried Phyrexian weapons. He also deals with the vampiric leaders of Krov, gaining knowledge from the elementalists in exchange for "warm bodies from the halls of Kjeldor". They can't animate the Phyrexians though, and Kjeldor and Balduvia find out about their plans. Facing invasion, Heidar prays to "the gods of these great machines" and suddenly learns how to create ice-based powerstones. The first activated Phyrexian defeats the attacking Balduvians, and Heidar himself kills Lovisa Coldeyes. In the wake of this victory he and Lindra fight, as she has now seen how horrible the Phyrexians are and doesn't think they should be used.

Now Heidar has animated the rest of the Phyrexians and is planning on moving on Kjeldor. Finally it is revealed Heidar has been talking to a dead Lindra. In their argument he impulsively froze her and she shattered. All he could save was her head, which he places in a window so she can watch his upcoming victory...

REVIEW

This was pretty okay. It's interesting that the story does more set-up, like the online stories we looked at last time, rather than giving us the conclusion to the story (more on that below), but fleshing out Heidar is also a good thing to focus on. That interview article we covered last time revealed he was basically thought up to explain why the third Ice Age set would still have a snow-covered theme despite being post-World Spell, and his plan of making stuff cold again is pretty strange without more backstory. We've seen Tevesh Szat with a similar plan in the past, but we knew he was a maniac who wanted to kill everyone on the planet after his sister died. Heidar's goal of saving his way of life should in theory be more relatable, but in practice I think very few of us can understand why you want to live in a setting where one bad weather day will freeze half the town to death...

This story deals with this in part by focusing on the extinctions, plagues and refugees (presumably from the flooding) caused by the World Spell, but mostly by showing Heidar was a bit of an outsider from the start and quickly having him go insane. It doesn't make him the most compelling villain, but at least it elevates him from a plot device to a proper character.

Despite being written by Jeff Grubb, the story is pretty light on continuity, which is a bit of a bummer. In the Ice Age cycle we learned that Tresserhorn stood where the Conclave of Mages, and before that the Monastery of Gix, used to be, thus explaining the bottomless pit with a connection to Phyrexia underneath it. I would've liked to get a hint here about what the Rimewind Keep used to be to explain why there are Phyrexian etchings in their caves. Or how about what happened to the Knights of Stromgald? Last time we saw them they were seemingly mindless zombies attacking Tresserhorn, which was still held by Chaeska and his Lim-Dûl-decoy. Now they are ruling the place themselves and at least Haakon seems intelligent. How did that happen? What happened to Avram Garrison, the former leader of the Knights?

There is also very little continuity in the description. The World Spell is merely mentioned thusly:

"They were maniacs, elves, wizards with more power than sense, Great bumbling idiots who thought of the world as their plaything, something they could change like an old fur cape. They had cast a spell, powered by gods and things like gods, and in casting it cracked the ice that protected and cushioned the world."

Which fits very well with the description of planeswalkers as mammoths trampling over everything in the novels, but there is no mention of 'walkers in general or Freyalise specifically. Lovisa Coldeyes and King Darien are name-checked, but not fleshed out in in way. This makes sense considering it is all written from Heidar's perspective, and he was up north playing with snow while the last two novels happened, but still, a bit more continuity would have turned this story into more than just a kinda cool look at a fairly minor villain.

We got a flavor text reference to Darien's Roost, first mentioned in The Duelist #14 though, that's cool!

The Weather Outside is Frightful

That's the name of the story summary at the start of the booklet. It's only two pages, and the first of those covers all the set up we already know by now: there used to be an ice age, now the Thaw has begun, Heidar doesn't like it, makes an alliance with all the local baddies and activates some Phyrexians.

Page two then covers what happened after Heidar and his Phyrexians arrived at the end of the online short story that covered the battle with Haakon. "In a moment of mad arrogance" Heidar attacks both his allies and his enemies, but is then assassinated by Garza Zol's minions. The Phyrexians keep going and attack the city of Kjeld, but the Yavimayans arrive (Darien send some skyknights to ask them for aid earlier) and cast a spell that melts all their icy bits.

Ehm... yeah. Remember Theros: Beyond Death and what a let down it was when after all the build-up we only got a quick storyline summary? This feels very similar. At least we got some stories here, but all of them are just to build up to the final battle, so to then get only a single page to tell us Heidar gets killed almost immediately and some elves show up to cast a spell... Anti-climactic is the only word for it. If we could've gotten just one more story to actually cover the battle, perhaps instead of Vannemir's Choice (the set-up there really didn't work, as the elf girl isn't mentioned here at all), or if Matt Cavotta had given up one Taste the Magic article to tell that ending, the Coldsnap could have a complete, and probably pretty good, storyline. Unfortunately it stumbles right at the end.

Continuitywise there isn't a whole lot to talk about. Heidar's story is nicely wrapped up without any larger impact on the continuity, Tresserhorn and Krov are still there, but are presumably dealt with by New Argive at some point (The Shattered Alliance states Tresserhorn would be finally defeated by them a few decades down the line, and that the place would end up underwater after that). Speaking of New Argive, we do get this little tidbit:

"The New Argivian alliance is solidified as a triumvirate, with Kjeldor, Balduvia and Yavimaya enjoying great influence over a now ice-free Terisiare"

We never heard about Yavimaya being an equal part of this alliance before (friendly, through the Juniper Order, sure, but not more than that), and they never joined New Argive either. Presumably the merger of the Kjeldoran and Balduvian royal houses, plus maybe Yavimaya becoming an island as the sea levels rose, meant that the forest went its own way when the New Argivian alliance turned into New Argive proper.

Theme Deck Inserts

When we're talking about obscure storyline sources, you might think about an old website that can only be accessed through the Wayback Machine, or perhaps a D&D anthology that randomly included a Magic story and was released to no fanfare at all. You probably wouldn't think about the inserts WotC has been including with loads of Magic products for years and years. Many people gets to see those, right?

In practice though, I think a lot of people chuck them out without ever reading them. And since they usually contain either no lore at all, or just the most basic summary of a set's storyline, Vorthosi rarely seek them out. Every once in a while a batch of them is released that does have unique information in them, but without a site where you can browse them all, how would we know which ones those are? (If the fine people of Magic Librarities ever need another project...)

All this to say that I stumbled on some information about Sek'kuar on the Wiki that came from a Coldsnap theme deck insert and then had to ask around for photos on Twitter to see if there was more relevant information in them! Many thanks to @GolgariGlenRoss for the look at 3 of them, and to @Andrey_KsH & Cary from MTGLore.com for links to a YouTube unboxing that had a look at the 4th insert in it!

Luckily there are some people who saw their historical significance!

So, have we uncovered a treasure trove of hidden information here? Eh... I wouldn't go that far. But it's very cool to have a more detailed story on Sek'kuar other than "he's a big scary orc", and there are some other interesting details in them as well.

• The main story blurb that's included in all 4 inserts repeats that it was Arcum Daggson who warned Kjeldor about Heidar's plans, which we learned about in The Horror of Ronom Glacier. It's a neat little detail, oft forgotten, that makes Arcum a more important character than the very minor role he played in Ice Age and Alliances.
• We're told that the Rimewind have been adapting their powers to the cold for the last 400 years. This contradicts a Taste the Magic article we looked at last time which said there were 1000 years in the Ice Age after their discovery. I think this shorter date is the more reliable, as its specificity suggests it was taken from a worldbuilding guide or the like. The Rimewind were very secretive and isolated of course (to explain their absence in the story up to this point), so just how long they were doing their own thing in an unexplored corner of Terisiare has little bearing on the rest of continuity.
• Seeing those two facts back to back makes me realize something: in The Shattered Alliance Arcum Daggson has a collection of weirdos hanging around for his own amusement, including Sorine Relicsbane and a Zuran. It makes perfect sense for him to have a rogue Rimewind wizard in that crew as well, and thus it also makes perfect sense that it was him who learned of Heidar's plans and told King Darien! Now isn't that some serendipitous continuity matching?

• One insert covers the refugees fleeing to Kjeld, including plains giants and Zurans. The wording is a bit vague though, so I'm not sure if Zur himself also showed up:

"The Kjeldorans never expected Zur himself to stoop so low as to ask them for help, but are surprised when his followers begrudgingly do."

• The inclusion of Zur in Coldsnap is interesting though. The Eternal Ice said he mysteriously disappeared. But as Lim-Dûl and Jaya Ballard were left out of the set since they were gone from Dominaria at this point, Zur being in it suggest he was still alive. Which leaves open the possibility that he actually succeeded in his quest for immortality and might still be walking around on Dominaria today! So how about for the next set on Dominaria we get Jodah versus Zur round two? With the tagline: "This time you actually get to see it!"
• The Sek'kuar insert, which started me down this path, tells of him making a deal with an "otherworldly horror" during a shamanic trance, gaining power in return for leading the creature to Krov, where it could feed on all the dead it wished. There is a big picture of a Void Maw next to the story, so I think the wiki might be right in surmising that's what the otherworldly horror was.
• The final insert came with the Auroch-based theme deck. It introduces us to the town of Bjarlang, which got flattened by a bunch of aurochs under the influence of the Rimewind wizards. Which is about as much information as I figured I was going to get from the Auroch theme-deck. The only thing of note I discovered was that while Bjarlang hasn't made it onto what I have been calling "the" wiki, it does have an entry in this Japanese wiki. Who knows what other obscure information has been preserved in non-English locations? (I checked if that wiki had anything on the ending of Mirage: Oasis, but I couldn't find anything...)

And with that we've covered all I know about Coldsnap. If it turns out there was also lore information on... I dunno, a prerelease poster or a Magic Online release promo, let me know!

We've almost reached Time Spiral, which I know a lot of people have been looking forward to, but before we get to that we've got one last little detour: a D&D anthology that randomly included a Magic story that was released to no fanfare at all. That review will be up in two weeks though. I'm still working on the Time Spiral stuff, so I'm going to see if I can get the "spreading out the updates to buy myself some time"-trick to work this time.