Saturday, 23 April 2022

Future Sight Online


Wrapping up the online coverage of the Time Spiral block, some articles on Future Sight. I'll be honest, there is a not a tremendous amount of interest here, though there is a very strange first appearance of a character who would go on to be very important, which is fun to look at.

As with the last two sets, we no longer have the minisite, though the Arcana articles advertising it only talk about "hints" and "insights" in the storyline, no actual stories, so I don't think we're missing much. Let's quickly move on to the Feature Articles.


FEATURE ARTICLES

Back to the Future Sight is Rei's customary introduction to the set, and it continues one of Rei's traditions: telling a completely different story than the novels when it comes to Otaria! He mentions how Tolaria is the big final rift that needs to be closed, as if it hadn't been already done by Karn in the Planar Chaos novel, and completely omits Otaria, the rift that was described as so big that it might be impossible to close it in the Future Sight novel. Ah well. After this we won't have to think about Otaria for a very long time Rei!

What I find more interesting is this quick blurb about the future-shifted cards:
"What is it like in a subterranean world, where the only light comes from luminous moss, and nature must survive in a vast network of darkness? What sort of people live in a world where the most powerful influence is secrecy, and citizens must remain mysteries even to those closest to them? How would you survive in a plane where a single leaf is as broad as an entire city block, and even the most mundane creature towers as a goliath above you?"
I recognize the references to Phosphorescent Feast (So... are there loads of tunnels underneath Shadowmoor?) and Edge of Autumn, but I'm not sure what that world of secrecy is supposed to be about.

Finally he justifies Venser, Shaper Savant's creature type by saying he's outgrown artifacts, just like his flavor text does. I guess that matches with him going into the Multiverse without his ambulator at the end of Future Sight, though we'll see him having returned to his tinkering when he shows up next. Other than that Rei mostly just discusses the gameplay implications of his card.


Magic, Now With G5-27 Attachment! is a Matt Cavotta article, but it mostly tells stories about how cards were created, as Future Sight was his first time being part of the design team for a set. There is a quick mention of the Grandeur creatures where he calls Orim and Cho-Manno the mom and dad of Oriss, though he also refers to the ancestors of the other cards in the cycle as "Mamas and Papas", so I wouldn't take it too literally. We'll return to the topic of Oriss's parentage next week though.

The Italicized World of Future Sight, by Garret Baumgartner, gives us an actual story based on Lumithread Field, of all things! I didn't even remember that existed! It's sneakily hidden behind another link, but can be found here.

The story is pretty mysterious. The Ota, whatever they are, fight a dragon who is... guarding? hoarding? suns that have been hidden, supposedly by the gods. In the end, as the flavor text tells us, the Ota win. It's not entirely clear which side, if any, are the good guys in the conflict. It's as vague a glimpse into an unknown plane as the future-shifted cards themselves are, but it's still pretty cool to have. I'm sticking it on the timeline alongside Future Sight, invoking the old "if there's nothing telling us when to place it, it goes on alongside whatever set it's tied to". This feels a bit odd for Future Sight, but it's the best I can do.

Other than that it's your standard "this is how flavor text is written" article. Oh, except it spoils one aspect of the Dominaria set 11 years early, when it deals with Adom Capashan & Merrik Aidar's battle against the slivers: 
"Will their sacrifices be in vain? See the next block set on Dominaria for the answer! (Quick answer—no.)"

This article did get me thinking that it would be cool if more Future Sight planes got cameos in the stories now and then. I guess the initial idea was to avoid them until they got to be the main feature, since filling them in could lead to problems making things fit later on, like when Karador was described as a Nessian chieftain, which led to troubles when there didn't end up being any elves on Theros, despite his art clearly showing one, and his whole shtick not matching the underworld of Theros, leading to the article on the 2011 Commanders being quietly changed. Changing the inserts that came with his deck proved trickier.

So you'd have to be a bit careful, but still... We've already seen stuff like Bloodshot Trainee and Phosphorescent Feast getting reflavorings to fit in later sets, and the problems with Arkhos and Mongseng (which were originally intended to be the settings for what ended up as Theros and Tarkir) show that you might be waiting for one of these places to take center stage only to discover they're never going to do so. I'd save a few places that really spoke to people's imagination, like Muraganda, to prevent another Karador situation, but... do the Ori and the Lumithreads, or the really big world in Edge of Autum (wait, is that Gargantikari?) look like they'll ever work as a standard set? So why not have the Gatewatch meet the Ibblian Mushroom Queen in an opening action scene, or a fun side story?

I just want to know where Kar-Sengir is...

Webcomic Sneak Peak send me on a nostalgia trip. It shows us some webcomics that might be appearing on Magicthegathering.com in a hypothetical future. Suddenly I've got flashbacks to reading Sluggy Freelance! And it's not just webcomics, it's webcomics written by Yawgatog! Yawgatog! Remember him? From MiseTings! Remember MiseTings?

These comics are clearly based on Order of the Stick, with an angel, a vedalken, a necromancer, a goblin and an Elvish Piper going on adventures and referring to the game rules. I'm not going to count them as canon, but if you want to, go ahead. But don't forget to extend the same courtesy to Phil and Dixie from the old Duelists, and by extension, Girl Genius.

Finally for the Feature Articles, there is We're Bringin' Crazy Back. No lore here, but it does have a whole bunch of sketches for Tenth Edition, which are pretty cool.


TASTE THE MAGIC
Let's first cover the Taste the Magic articles that give us actual stories:

How Many Eyes? starts out as two stories alternating one another: the first covers the Putrid Cyclops Muggtoth, a zombie who is cursed with premonitions about his impending death. He keeps avoiding those fates, but hates having nothing else to look forward to. The second story covers a Magus of the Future named Vissk who lectures his apprentice Pinaphet on seeing the future. They all end up near a time rift through which steps... Ugin! Who promptly burns all of them to death. Vissk is furious that he didn't see this coming, Muggtoth is happy that his suffering is finally over.

Well, that was bizarre and pointless. He's some people. Now they're dead. It's all the more bizarre in hindsight, as this dragon sounds nothing like the Ugin we would eventually get to know. Killing people in (from his perspective) the past, merely for standing in his presence? This is the guy who didn't want to kill the Eldrazi just in case something bad came from it! Ah well, maybe this one is from the "What if Ugin went evil" future timeline.

The other story is possibly even odder. In Gentlemen's Duel Masrath and Tessebik are two planeswalkers, old friends who meet each other in the arena of the magi, "a rare sect of battlemages whose purpose was to recreate the glory and grandeur of one-on-one combat". The two decide to have, well, a gentlemen's duel, where they will each go to a plane neither has been, collect whatever creatures and spells they can there, and then face each other with what they've found. They both go off to Ravnica.

Uh, yeah, this started off as a pretty interesting look at Dominaria directly after the Mending, with the plane healing, and an in-universe appearance of Magus of the Arena hinting that this might be happening in Estark... and then it turns out it was all just set-up, and Matt Cavotta really just had to find a way to make his flavor article relevant in Sealed Deck theme week. Very odd, but we've got weirder things in continuity, so let's roll with it.

Timelinewise I'm sticking the "Ugin" story alongside Future Sight, but since Gentlemen's Duel explicitly happens while Dominaria is said to be healing I'll put that one directly after it.


Moving on from the stories, Spelling it Out and Enchant Words ask some fundamental questions about Magic's lore: what are spells, and what are enchantments? It tries to make sense of all the various ways magic has been portrayed in Magic (the game, and by extension the storyline). If you think about it, it's actually a bit odd that the game has quite a clear framework for how magic works, but the stories just throw in everything, from hard- to soft magic systems, from Barrin memorizing spells like he's in D&D, to Jodah's mind palace, to Toshi's kanji's, to the Keldon's "beyond mana" link to their warlord, to whatever mystical nonsense happened at the end of Apocalypse to defeat Yawgmoth.

These articles do a good job in trying to make sense of it all, mainly by making a distinction between the spell itself and whatever ritual or incantation is used to create it, though I have no doubt they have since been contradicted multiple times (and probably had been already at the time due to some obscure source), there's just too many exceptions in this canon.

Gerrard Capashen Boots 54-Yard Game-Winner delves into the flavor of Kicker, specifically the coalition symbol found in the cards with colored kicker costs back in Invasion block. It goes with a very literal interpretation of the coalition symbol, saying for example that Stormscape Battlemage accesses white and black mana through his armor. After that it quickly moves on to discussing how certain art was changed when their cards changed during development, and then to showcasing various arts. Not much more to say here.

Though the nitpicker inside me feels the need to point out that Matt mistakenly referred to Lord Windgrace as a "her" in his discussion of this art.
 
Vorthos Visits a Travel Agency gives us a tour past all those tantalizing glimpses into the future provided by Future Sight.
  • I was a bit thrown when Matt said the word "Aven" indicates that Aven Mindcensor comes from Dominaria, but yeah, those were a Dominaria specific race once upon a time!
  • Bloodshot Trainee & Flowstone Embrace are also stated to be Dominarian due to their links to the Bloodshot Cyclops and all the (formerly Rathi) Flowstone cards. Well... one out of three ain't bad.
  • He doesn't name Wildfire when dealing with Shah of Naar Isle. It's a pretty obscure place of course, hailing from the Mirage backstory, but perhaps it could also be that it wasn't officially decided Naar Isle was on Wildfire until Planechase got designed?
  • ...after all, two paragraphs later he says "the Muraganda" are "a civilization of enlightened folk who appreciate magic and the simplicity of nature." Clearly it hadn't been finalized that Muraganda is actually the name of the plane.
  • I'm a bit puzzled why Matt calls the setting of Street Wraith and Patrician's Scorn "high fantasy". From those two cards it feels more Victorian. Also, he calls the place "Wyn"? Is that just shorthand for the Wyndmoor Street from the Wraith's flavor text, or was there some behind the scenes development of this place that never made it to print?
  • Here's an interesting idea from Matt;s discussion of Ramosian Revivalist: "Are we heading back to Mercadia, or have the time rifts scattered Ramos's followers across the multiverse?" With Mercadia being so high on the Rabiah Scale the latter option might increase their chances of ever being seen again, though I don't think there is a whole lot of nostalgia for the Ramosians...
  • For Yixlid Jailer: "The combination of tight vinyl clothing, bindings, leather gags, and dead people does not lead down a road Magic is likely to travel. Well, not for more than one card.". Yeah, that prediction is pretty on the money, as the even the first reprint of this card did away with that look! Then again, isn't Yixlid just the name of a club on Otaria frequented by Soul Collector?
Remember when we got anthologies like Tapestries, that had a bunch of random stories on settings we were never going to see again? I wasn't too hot on those, but perhaps the best place for such books would be here, with each short story based on another random line of Future Sight flavor text. Especially since ever since Shadowmoor we've stopped bothering using the references one to one.


The most interesting article of this bunch is probably Tea and Biscuits with Pete Venters, in which Pete gives us some interesting insights in "his" era of continuity, when he worked on unfinished projects like the Magic roleplaying game and the coffee table artbook, and in the proces knitted together various disparate sources into a cohesive continuity. I'll just quickly list all the tidbits of information here for easy future reference, but everything of importance has already been discussed on previous entries of this blog. 
  • The Encyclopedia Dominia was going to be a "humongous coffee table book", with an introductory comic by Pete Venters, in which old man Taysir would be trapped on Ulgrotha and talking to Daria about history. The book would've covered, among others, Vodalia, Benalia, Hurloon, Llanowar, Phyrexia, Corondor, the Adarkar Wastes, Freyalise and Sandruu. Parts of it would eventually manifest as online content on the website of The Duelist.
  • Pete confirms the Empress Galina from the short story Return of the Empress (also from the Encyclopedia website) is the same as the one in Invasion, which necessitates her being immortal, or at least very old, as Return of the Empress ends in 3307.
Also, apparently she had a color-shift before her card was printed. Or is a merfolk spray-tan blue?
  • The post-Ice Age break-up of Terisiare was done partially to make the map look less like a potato, but also to set up "vast submerged treasure troves lost since the Brothers War" for a then planned but never made RPG. Hey, we eventually did get a Dominaria coffee table book, and D&D source books for Ravnica, Theros and Strixhaven... maybe one day this Dominaria RPG will also manifest?
  • Pete's tying together of early continuity involved triangulating distances mention in the early novels, convincing the book department to shrink Dominaria form 30 times Earth's size to "just' 2.5 times, and even nailing down the number of hours in a day and that the sun rises in the east. Apparently that last part was contradicted at some point. If that contradiction was ever printed it was too subtle for me to notice...
  • This article reveals the Sylex Blast shattered the continental plates to such an extend that there is a deep-sea trench stretching from Argoth to Sarpadia, though which the Homarid/Viscerid migrated northwards.
  • We get an elaboration on the Fifth Edition flavor text of Brassclaw Orcs. Apparently it was the orcs who held out the longest against the thrulls, until the later developed Cave-Stormers "a creature composed of a central mouth ringed with razor sharp teeth surrounded by eight legs that could charge through orc caves, turning anything it met into a meaty red vapor without even decelerating", leading to them inheriting Sarpadia. It took them "probably less than fifty years" to dominate the continent, which would be around 220 AR, as we know the Thrull Rebellion started around 170. Unfortunately for them they lacked the imagination to move across the sea after that. 
  • Pete goes on to imagine a Thrull/Phyrexian conflict during the Invasion, which is probably just his own imagination, as I doubt anyone was thinking about the thrulls during Invasion's development. Still... thanks to this article it was printed by an official WotC source, so...
  • Pete mentions a story about Phyrexians questioning someone, "possibly Endrek Sahr", about the thrulls. This is a misremembering of the story The Interrogation, again from the Encyclopea, in which it's actually Sahr questioning a captured Priest of Yawgmoth. Matt asks the storyline goobers who know which story it is to post it on message boards. Eh... is a blog also okay?

And finally we already say goodbye to Matt Cavotta! The articles Wizardcycling 3 and The Last Quack form the handover to Doug Beyer, who will host Taste the Magic (soon to be renamed Savor the Flavor) for the rest of its run. We've actually moved a bit beyond Future Sight at this point, as the last article talks about the creation of the planeswalker cards. We'll talk more about that in an extra article on the Mending.

MAGIC ARCANA
In the last few of these looks at the online coverage I've just been listing a bunch of arcana's without much discussion. Mostly they were just art showcases and other neat-but-not-groundbreaking stuff. Here however, we suddenly get Sursi Lore. Sursi was previously only known from the flavor text of Mesa Pegasus and it's cameo appearance at the end of the Homelands comic, where we learned Serra died there, after which the Cathedral of Serra was build in her honor. Here we suddenly learn the name refers both to a "plains area" and a village inside it, and that the only Dominarian portal to Ulgrotha was located there! We're told it's likely gone now due to all the apocalypses on Dominaria. It seemed in the Homelands story that the portal underneath Castle Sengir was the only portal to Ulgrotha anyway, so the Sursi one probably closed a long time ago. And if it didn't, it's now gone thanks to the Mending. But back when it existed, this is how you opened it:
"In the cold waters of a deep lake near Sursi lie three menhir stones stacked to form a doorway. If one were to pass through that doorway when the Mist Moon were full and there were snow on the ground, then one would find oneself shortly thereafter in the Koskun Mountains."
Like this, but wetter.

Continuing the game of hiding lore in obscure places, Tolaria West reveals the new academy is in the Spice Islands, a place that comes from the early Harper Prism novels but had never been seen in the cards, and while Shimia is mostly just about how Shimia is obscure and "presumed to be part of Dominaria", it also refers to "certain old, internal Wizards documents" that talk about the Shimian Night Stalker's ability to create undead minions. Back in the Tea and Biscuits article Matt Cavotta talked about running into Pete Venter's old work when doing research on Coldsnap, and not coincidentally Brady Dommermuth gave us a few looks at a "Forgotten Archive" around the days of Coldsnap & Time Spiral block. Clearly people where intrigued by these old files and I love that parts of them leaked out through arcana articles, which are by now very obscure sources themselves. For years I've said that the Dominarian Globe was the holy grail of the Magic storyline that I wanted to see more than anything, although I never imagined it would actually happen. But then the Dominaria set came out and we got just that! So I'm going to start saying that these old internal documents are the new holy grail. I look forward to see them published in hardcover edition in 2037!

In more current news, Linessa's Staff says Linessa is a descendant of Alexi, Zephyr Mage in a "possible future", which doesn't tell us much, but at the very least confirms a family connection, rather than a teacher-student relationship (or a use-the-same-weapon relationship, like between Dakkon and Korlash).


To wrap up... the customary listing of neat-but-not-groundbreaking arcana's.
There's a bunch of sketches showcased...
...some other art stuff...
We end with the Lorwyn Preview Video, which is obviously broken at this point, but can be found on YouTube. It's just someone having fun with some card arts and a zoom tool. We're a long way off from the cinematics we get these days!
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