Saturday, 26 March 2022

Time Spiral Online



So, Time Spiral online... unfortunately we're now in a period when even the Wayback Machine can't make every page visible (or legible), so it's possible I'm missing some stuff here. Most notably I couldn't access the Time Spiral mini-site. Luckily I don't think there were any unique stories on there, just some general introductions to the world and the old characters that finally got cards in this set.

Oh, and, eh... the Antiquities War & Urza-Mishra War comics, from 1996. What an utterly bizarre thing to include! I guess the Ice Age comics that were put online for Coldsnap were very well received and thus they wanted to include something similar. And yeah, off all the Armada comics these are the closest related to the Time Spiral story since the Sylex Blast created one of the rifts, but... a) these comics have long been chucked out of continuity by The Brothers War, and b) the comics are unfinished as the Armada line was cancelled before the final miniseries in the trilogy could be released! Which means that the Sylex Blast isn't in these issues. I can only imagine how bizarre this must've read to people unfamiliar with the history of the comics...

The actual last panel of the comic.

Well, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the pages we can still access.

FEATURE ARTICLES
Starting, as always, with the Rei Nakazwa intro to the new set. Time (Spiral) Is On My Side is basically a list of the great disasters that made the rifts, which sets up Time Spiral pretty well. He also succeeds in making the setting look appropriately bleak.
"Urborg still holds the ruins of Volrath's Stronghold and the City of Traitors. There, the il-Kor, the il-Vec, and the il-Dal still wander the shattered streets, although many have found some measure of redemption over the long centuries. But how have they changed since the last time we saw them during the Tempest block? Meanwhile, the last remnants of the Capashen family toil to uphold the ideals of the fallen Benalia. In the mountains, though the Keldon people have mostly been wiped out, their blood still lives on in Radha, a half-elf warrior who may carry Dominaria's last hope."
Some individual points:
  • Rei says Karona was created by "a cataclysmic burst of energy from the mysterious artifact known as the Mirari", and that Kamahl defeated her. This is in line with what he said in the online coverage of Scourge, but not actually what happens in the novels. Keep ignoring the numena and the unmen Rei! I wish I could!
  • As usual this article sticks to what the average player will be familiar with, and thus says the damage started with the Brother's War, making no mention of the Madaran rift.
  • We're also told other planes are affected by the rifts, but we get no examples of what that entails.
  • The article's preview card is Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, but Rei doesn't comment on him not being a planeswalker. He just says "Long-held creative paradigms familiar to most Magic players may have to change forever."

Also returning is Doug Beyer's discussion of the set's flavor text, in The Italisized World of Time Spiral. It covers the usual stuff we've come to expect from these articles, but I did perk up when he talks about Mishra, Artificer Prodigy.
"The flavor text almost implies that his moral downfall is due to this time-trip, but being time-rifted doesn't actually change history. It's more like we're seeing a temporal mirage of Mishra, doing things here in the post-apocalypse world for a few weeks, then disappearing – and meanwhile the original Mishra goes on about his business just like history says. However, maybe there's a chance, just a glimmer of possibility, that past-Mishra tuned in to some wavelength of future-Mishra and saw the ruination he saw, and the bleakness inspired a decision or two…."
That's a bit having your continuity and eating it too, but it's nice to have an explanation for why the set can have legendary creatures from times past without completely screwing up the established timeline! It also good to keep in the back of your mind for a few upcoming stories involving time displaced people.

Speaking of those legendary creatures, The Legends of Time Spiral, by Brady Dommermuth, gives us an overview of them. Apparently one of the rules when selecting what characters to include was "No careless resurrections", which in this case means not having characters with "important deaths" showing up. Seems a bit odd for mere temporal mirages, but considering how many people invoke the Planar Chaos colorshifted cards to claim something is not a color pie break, perhaps it was a good idea to be careful. Most people don't look beyond the cards, and it would be a shame if hordes of people thought someone like Urza or Gerrard had been resurrected. (Although I might quibble about Mishra's and Saffi's death not being important!)

  • Brady claims Jeff Grubb misread Dark Sphere and thus made Barl and Lord Ith separate characters. I'd better clear Jeff's name again, since the opening of The Gathering Dark reveals that he actually checked it with Jesper Myfors, one of the creators of The Dark, and the two had always been their own characters! Dark Sphere's flavor text was just oddly parsed!
  • Ith, Dralnu, Kaervek, Stonebrow and Saffi were selected after it was decided to do a cycle of ally-colored legendary creatures. Trying to make things fit could explain why Ith is white/blue, while he always felt at least partially black to me. His Wand has a discard effect, and his main minion in the story was Rag Man. I guess the card shows him as a younger man, before getting locked up in a cage above a bottomless pit.
  • Kaervek was modeled after the character on Kaervek's Purge, but this was a decision made during Time Spiral's design. Originally he, like so many characters from long ago, didn't have a set look. Finding an image of Lim-Dûl proved a similar challenge. They ended up taking inspiration from the back cover of The Eternal Ice, although Lim-Dûl was also illustrated in the Ice Age and Shandalar comics.
  • Stonebrow's axe is Soul Reaper, which means he was taken from the timeline at some point during Legions, between him stealing the axe from Akroma and giving it to Kamahl.
  • Interestingly, Brady gives an actual continuity reason for that lack of legendary lands! That's going deeper than I thought they would go!
"Onto the legendary land cards, which are a little tricky to explain. Here's how it goes, messy as it is: With Mirrodin, the creative team realized that representing particular places is very flavorful and useful in communicating the setting. But in the meantime, the card designers and developers had learned over time that the best number of legendary lands to produce in, say, a year is very, very low. So the creative team rewrote the rules about concepting lands to enable more unique places to be represented on cards. The “new” rules are as follows: A legendary land is one that can sustain only one “mana bond” with a mage – for one reason or another the land can't support multiple mages calling on its mana. Any nonlegendary land, whether it's a particular place or a nonspecific one, can support “mana bonds” with more than one mage."

  • We're told the Ur-Dragon "isn't a creature, but a concept". Which was true back then. Not so much these days.
  • There is one big lore revelation in this article: Tivadar of Thorn fought his crusade against goblins with the help of Rasputin Dreamweaver! Previously we knew next to nothing official about these two, only what's in the cards and the two second cameo of a young Tivadar in The Gathering Dark, but Jeff Lee's site claimed Tivadar was helped by Ith instead! To this day I wonder how this mix-up could happen. Yeah, nowadays Ith and Rasputin are pretty similar, two white/blue Human Wizards, but back in the day, when Ith had no card and Rasputin no lore? Or do we suppose that Brady thought that Ith saying he's going "elsewhere" at the end of The Gathering Dark created a continuity issue with him helping Tivadar later on, and thus quietly swapped him out with lore-less Rasputin? That doesn't sound very logical either, as just assuming Ith came back to Terisiare from wherever he went fixes the issue just as easily. I guess this will remain a mystery forever.
  • Considering all the crap we've given Brady over the years, I should say that this article does very well continuity-wise. Other than the real-world Jeff Grubb/Dark Sphere continuity it all checks out, and he even mentions some obscure bits of lore, like the Lhurgoyf story from The Monsters of Magic.
  • He also acknowledges that Invasion states Tolaria became a featureless melted pane, and the ruins shown on Academy Ruins are thus playing it a bit fast and loose with continuity. Magicers being Magicers obviously started complaining about that. I'm personally fine with saying a few slow-time bubbles sank to the seafloor as the rock around them melted though.

The other flavor related feature articles are Magic: a Gathering of Easter Eggs, which is mostly art stuff (I never noticed the Titan Engines were based on the Thran symbol on Thran War Machine), and The Look of Time Spiral, but that one is broken due to link rot.


TASTE THE MAGIC
Our weekly lore article with Matt Cavotta has no stories this time, nor any secret hidden lore about a random rare like... eh... Chronosavant? Let's just quickly go through a few articles.
  • Jaya Ballard, Task Mage. Not much to say here, but let's commend Matt like I just did Brady: he gets the Eternal Ice/Shattered Alliance summary spot on!
  • Dueling in Dominaria is about how Suspend, Split Second etc. work in universe. It sets rules for these things, but leaves the working of specific cards open, true to his "you decide what's canon" philosophy we talked about in the Dissension coverage.
  • Here we're once again reminded the rifts are also doing stuff elsewhere (though on Dominaria they are "most plentiful and most potent"), but not told what exactly.
  • Um, Welcome Home? gives a justification for why Dominaria is in such a bad shape. Let me just quote the first few paragraphs:
"When it was decided that Time Spiral would be a nostalgic set, everyone's first feeling was one of homecoming, of the warm welcome of home cooking, family, and friends. Even Uncle Istvan would be there. But that warmth ended up being more like a relentless dry heat, and the stuff you smell cooking is your own exposed skin. Friends and family are battered, scattered, and tattered—if they're lucky enough to have survived! What sort of homecoming is this? How am I supposed to feel warm and fuzzy when all the nostalgia is wrapped in protective rags and shielding itself from the salt winds? 
This was a question swirling around the Wizards office from the moment that the style guide was finished and people could see the world in which their old friends would be living. I think the somber tone of the set bummed some folks out. It was not the party that many had hoped for.

There was a time when I felt the same way. But now, in hindsight, I think it was absolutely the right move. For Magic Creative to mean anything, it has to stay true to its storylines and maintain its integrity. While Time Spiral is absolutely a homecoming party for card design, Creative had to stick to its guns and deliver the Dominarian story as it actually is – not how our foofy emotions wanted it to be. Brady Dommermuth and Jeremy Cranford each took a lot of heat for depicting post-apocalyptic Dominaria so…er…well."
  • I think this is the article Ethan and Kelly were talking about in their Dominaria Podcasts, saying Matt's "longing for a nicer version of Dominaria was palpable". Personally I much prefer having seen the post-apocalyptic Dominaria in some detail before moving on to the post-post-apocalyptic version. Dominaria is such a fun plane because of all it's history, but that history doesn't just come from having a lot of stories happen on it, but also from the way those stories build upon one another. If between each story you sweep all the consequences under the rug and reset the status quo you don't get a compelling history. So I'm glad the creative team dared to bring Dominaria to it's lowest point before it bounced back.
"One sad item not about Magic is that this sort of art is not really part of the scene anymore. While I do wish it were, I understand why it is not. Though we, as flavor enthusiasts, can tell that this is a mature, sophisticated illustration, other folks might see it as too “cartoony.” This is a problem because Magic is continually trying to set itself apart from the kiddie games that spoil the image of CCGs. In order to ensure the player, the parent, the store owner, the general public that Magic is a game for people who use the word “Autochthon,” and not “Xtreme!”, the look and feel must reinforce that as well. Sad, but it is the way it is. The good news is, Ivory Gargoyle is already out there for us to cherish."
  • Eh, yeah... I can echo the sentiment about it being sad there is less silly art (though the pendulum has been moving back in that direction over the last few years), but describing Ivory Gargoyle as cartoony? I don't see it. It's very distinctive, but not cartoony.
  • Also, here in the Netherlands the word "Autochthon" (well, the Dutch "Autochtoon", obviously) is mostly used by people whinging (and worse) about there being too much migration these days, so I'd actually prefer to have people who use "Xtreme" playing the game rather than them.
  • The Time Spiral Magic Museum says "The Scion of the Ur-Dragon is a living projection of the great spirit of all dragonkind, the Ur-Dragon", which is a bit more vague about whether the Ur-Dragon itself actually exists.
  • Speaking of vague, Legends - Who's Got The Sauce talks about Mishra, saying "There he is, in post-apocalyptic Dominaria, ogling a small chunk of Phyrexian stuff. Is this what sets him on his dark path? In some strange, impossible way did this event happen before the Brothers' War?", playing a bit with the "temporal mirage" stuff Doug Beyer mentions. It tip-toes pretty close to the line of saying the timeline has been altered, but since it keeps it in question form we're still good.

ARCANAS
Finally, here's a list of the Arcana articles that might be interested for flavor fans.

Looks at the style guide:
Sketches:
Other art related stuff:
Token art (I want that Camarid to be real! It's so cute!)
...and some more random stuff, mostly art and flavor Easter eggs.
Witches in Magic says that although "warlock" is generally considered the male version of "witch", in Magic "witch" is gender neutral. Clearly that got changed by the time we got to Eldraine. I'm guessing "witch" was discarded because of the association with modern pagans/wiccans, though it would've been neat to see a traditionally feminine term accepted as the generic one for a change.

Finally there is The History of the Sarpadian Empires, which puts all the Sarpadian Empires flavor text snippets in the correct order. No new information, but having it all in one arcana article is nice. Doubly nice that the latter additions fit in the right volumes!

Not reprinted in Time Spiral remastered, thus robbing me of the chance of finally having those Camarid tokens! Now, granted, most of the times I activate Homarid Spawning Bed in my Esix Commander deck it doesn't produce any Camarids anyway, rather copying Hornet Queens or Master of Waves's, but still... maybe if I had such a cute token I would be more inclined to make actual baby Homarids!
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