Alara Reborn Online

ALARA REBORN MINI-SITE & FEATURE ARTICLE

Last time I said that the Alara Reborn minisite (see Alara in Chaos, The Shards at War & The Threat to New Alara) had little more to say than "there's gonna be war and chaos!". I guess that wasn't entirely true, as it also mentioned the beginnings of the shards' cultures merging, like nacatl moving to Bant and taking the old name of leonin, Vithian survivors being welcomed as refugees by the humans of other shards, and Esperites discarding the laws of the Ethersworn, but the main point is still all the chaos and how it's feeding the Maelstrom, just like Nicol Bolas planned.

Doug Beyer's feature article, A New Age for Alara, mostly just gives an overview of Alara's Sundering and the Conflux, nothing we haven't heard before except for one little thing. He pays particular attention to the Asha/Malfegor conflict, and mentions that as Jenara, Asura of War becomes the de-facto ruler of Bant during a plane wide war, people are looking to her to claim the throne of Asha. Unfortunately at that point, just as my ears perked up, he reveals that Jenara is his preview card and the article shifts to how she's good in both agro and control decks... He does end with "Whether [Malfefor]'ll be able to enact vengeance on a newly-reborn Asha, face a newly coronated Jenara, or simply run roughshod over the embattled lands of Bant remains to be seen", and then a plug for Alara Unbroken, though as I already covered that book, we know neither Asha nor Jenara appears in it. Malfegor gets to face Rafiq instead, with some help from Elspeth.

SAVOR THE FLAVOR

I feel Savor the Flavor is driting away a bit from in-universe lore. An article about Karthuss is mostly about how funny it is to pair him with Amoeboid Changeling and other in-game stuff, and Reality Check is all about the restrictions of flavor on card design (Stuff like "can Noble Hierarch be an elf for tribal synergies?" Funny to read back now that human synergies are maybe more important than elf ones!). That last one does have one line of Doug hinting at the shattered sword of Asha, but that's really just it. So most of these articles aren't that relevant to discuss on the blog. There is also just not all that much on Alara Reborn actually, quite a big chunk of the articles cover M10 or just generic flavor stuff. I guess Doug was quite done with Alara after writing a whole book on it.

The articles do still answer readers' questions, and those sometimes delve into more in-world material. Odd Job is all about the things Doug runs into on his job, but it ends with a reader wonder how planeswalkers keep meeting if there are supposed to be so very little of them. The answers Doug gives (they seek each other out, we tend to focus on the stories where they just happen to run into each other) do feel a bit unsatisfactory after just reading a book where Ajani pops up next to Sarkhan and Elspeth in quick succession. I'm more a fan on the idea that it's a subconscious version of the way planeswalkers can track each other down that will be shown in more detail in The Purifying Fire.

The Planes of Planechase covers... well, you can guess that one. It's our main source of (very limited) information for some planes, like Arkhos or Iquatana, and also gives a few random tidbits about more well known places. (Did you know "the moat around the Academy [at New Tolaria] is there not to protect the campus, but to symbolize the hollow vessel the mind must become before the torrent of knowledge may fill it."?)

On Agyrem Doug says "You may even notice that the strictures and laws surrounding the tattered Guildpact still have power to prevent conflict in that district.", which is a very interesting tidbit. Unfortunately we learn upon our next return to Ravnica that Agyrem has become untethered from that plane, and we've thus never seen it again since.

This is probably also where the Meditation Realm was really solidified as "The place Nicol Bolas brought his minions", despite the whole point of his defeat in Champion's Trial being that Bolas didn't know about the plane. At the time we could call this article a continuity error and move on, but subsequent stories have shown Bolas in control of the Meditation Realm long before Legends II, which makes an explanation really tricky. There either have to be two different Meditation Realms (as if two Tor Wauki's wasn't enough!), or maybe we could riff on Ugin's claim in the War of the Spark that the plane was always his and suggest that he kept certain bits of the place of out Bolas's reach? Though Ugin is (sorta) dead at the time Tetsuo faces of against Bolas, so even that requires some mental gymnastics... 

(Hmmm, there is a 50 year gap between Toshiro being brought to Madara and Ugin dying... could we come up with a fan-theory were those two make some sort of deal that leads to future Umezawa's having some sort of affinity with the Meditiation Realm...)

Obligatory nit-pick alert: Urza ended up on Equilor before the end of the Ice Age, so he was technically in his third millennium, rather than his fourth. By only a few decades, sure, but still!

ACTUAL STORIES

Just as the Savor the Flavor articles focus less and less on in-universe lore, so do the Savor the Flavor stories care less and less about the fourth wall... You'll see what I mean below.

The Face of War, by Jenna Helland

This one isn't so bad. After an ominous introduction ("He is coming. A dark knight from the hellish gates of Grixis. A dead warrior incapable of pity or remorse. A killer without equal") we do get some talk about playing Thraximundar in a reanimator deck, but then we launch right back into the story. Which is just a few scenes of a boy from Grixis telling people to fear Thraximundar. In the last paragraph it's revealed that the boy is actually an illusionary form of Nicol Bolas.

It's a fun enough short story of Bolas doing some hands-on sowing of paranoia for a change. It also ties a little into Elspeth's story. Despite her not being all that important in Alara Unbroken, here we hear there are lots of rumors about her coming to save people, which Bolas quells by saying she "saved the Tower Stele, but committed a heinous crime in the process. Death was the only honorable course of action." It's a bit odd, you'd think that whipping up the people to try and fight Thraximundar would lead to more spells being cast to feed the Maelstrom... but it's said that Bolas feels the Maelstrom grown "with every life taken", so maybe he created Thraximundar (he calls him "a beautiful creation") with some special Maelstrom-feeding power.

One of the rumors is that Elspeth is "as powerful as the angels". Let's call that long range foreshadowing.

The Day a Vedalken Exploded, by Doug Beyer

This one's a bit pants, to be honest. Naya's forces are attacking the vedalken capitol of Palandius. Some mages manage to create a magic bomb, but are forced to flee and end up at the Maelstrom, where the older mage is killed by a Fusion Elemental. The younger mage taps into the mana of the Maelstrom itself and summons an Enigma Sphinx... and an Enlisted Wurm, a Deny Reality, a Bloodbraid Elf, and an Ardent Plea. Because he's casading, get it? And then he uses the bomb to blow himself and everything else up.

Already a pretty silly story, it's not helped by being interspersed several times by a regular article about the Maelstrom and the cascade mechanic... Really the only interesting bit is learning that Esperites use their etherium chest cavities to store stuff.

Gold Records, by Doug Beyer

Another story according to the wiki, but that's really stretching the definition. This is a selection of police files on "Alara's most wanted". I'm willing to say all these characters are in-continuity, purely because it's fun to have some actual lore behind some cards, but this isn't a story, or even an in-universe text. Whatever Alaran police department created these files can go along with the interplanar tourist board that wrote the Planeswalker's Guide into the Un-Multiverse.

A Different Kind of Origin Story, by Doug Beyer

This actually is a story, but one about Doug Beyer running around Alara, leaving him inspired to name the playtest card "Homelost Elf" as "Bloodbraid Elf". It's pretty silly. Probably the most interesting bit is the final paragraph plugging both the upcoming Zendikar set and Duels of the Planeswalkers game. It introduces us to Nissa, who "seeks to prove that her people, the elves, are the true heirs and best stewards of the planes of the Multiverse". More on that in a future review.

Flavor of the Constellari, by Doug Beyer

Again, more article than story, but there is some sort of new lore in here, I guess? Inspired by the Magic 2010 flavor text of Holy & Unholy Strength, Doug imagines what the Constellari could be ("a race of prophets, a nonhuman species cloaked in mystery, honored and exalted by all who dwell in the plane around them for their stunning accuracy at predicting the events of the future."), and then gives us snippets of a story of a father and son grappling with the prophecy about the Second Child turning to darkness after the father refuses to let an infant, supposedly the Second Child, die. It's very slight, but just as those two bits of flavor text grabbed Doug, his snippets of story grabbed me. I'd love to hear more about this world!

The Face of War and The Day the Vedalken Exploded I'll put on the timeline, the other two Alara "stories" are non-canon as far as I'm concerned. Face and Day directly tie into the Alara story and thus need to go in 4556 AR.

Flavor of the Constellari... Doug makes clear it's just him riffing ideas rather than set canon, but I like it, it's unlikely to ever get contradicted in anyway, and if stuff like "Gentlemen's Duel" can go on the timeline, why not this? There is absolutely no indication when it could possibly happen though... For now I'll just cheat a little and put all the "Alara Reborn Savor the Flavor Stories" as one entry on the timeline. If I ever get around to updating the timeline in a more visual format I'll put it somewhere to the side in a "these stories can really happen just about any time" insert.