>Unlike the other praetors who force new recruits into their designs, Urabrask prefers they retain the strongest parts of their original form and contribute these assets to Phyrexia. Secretly, he prefers when beings willingly choose to join New Phyrexia, but he is not above destroying those who oppose it.
Well, there's the final word on Urabrask's mentality, I suppose. I guess "New Phyrexia, but ruled by Urabrask and just being left alone" is still on the table.
Urabrask learned a few things from his time on New Capenna.
"Hey, I don't know man, if you don't join New Phyrexia, well, I can't guarantee that your store won't end up burned in the Great Furnace. Why don't you give it some thought?"
>Reversing phyresis is difficult. After infection passes a certain stage, rehabilitation becomes impossible. Recovery varies per individual and becomes more difficult with increased compleation. Healing the mind may require different processes than healing body. However, several substances, like Halo, can stave off the transformative effects of glistening oil, and some individuals, like Melira, are entirely immune.
Seems like they're definitely seeding the possibility of 'curing' the Compleated Walkers
When in doubt, use everything.
Melira, take a mouthful of Halo and without swallowing, bite the Compleated Planeswalker. We made you some grillz outta the mycosynth.
Wouldn't surprise me if Etherium could be used in some ability to override the corruptive influence of phyrexis.
Of course, for that to work, Etherium needs to have its Blind-Eternities-made-corporeal wish-granting powers it had in Tezzeret's Planswalker novel *Test of Metal*. And outside of the one-off mention of Baltrice we got during this set's story, that book is only faintly canon at the best of times.
Seeding possible mental fixes is good.
Undoing the brainwashing and leaving the body changes for now is the most interesting option imo.
Not great news for Ajani and Tamiyo though. Nahiri and Jace seem like the most viable candidates for immediate full restoration.
Lukka reverse brainwashing the Phyrexian he is bounded too into a large puppy by undoing his own brainwashing sounds like the funniest outcome here.
Just a guy and his very ugly dog.
Jace is *straight-up dead.* His body has been reanimated, but the story was very explicit that it was his corpse, not him, that rose to join Norn.
Jace is not coming back.
E: Just gonna edit this in because I'm tired of receiving the same response from the people who didn't bother reading the story. Lines directly from Chapter 5 of the ONE webfiction:
>In a single convulsive motion, [Elspeth] drove her blade through Jace and shoved him aside, letting his body take the sword with him as he fell and grabbing the sylex in her own hands.
...
>[Elesh Norn] turned her smile to Jace's corpse, which shuddered and stood, Elspeth's sword slipping from his body as he moved to join his new master.
It's not exactly subtle.
He's a robo-zombie but should still have his soul attached to preserve his spark. If they want to resurrect him they have that out.
I'll believe he's dead for real when they put his funeral on a card.
I mean, not really. Especially lately, and especially for main characters.
Older characters? Sure, "considered dead" but might come back. But Gideon? Jaya? They gone gone, and we have that confirmation.
I believe they are setting him up to become a force ghost. He put his soul in the Sylax and thats how they get rid of Jace while still keeping him around.
So long as Jace still has his spark he still has his soul. So long as he still has his soul and his body is still biologically functional he can very easily be brought back to normal.
I don't know if he has his spark still. We've seen nothing that would say that he has it after he got killed by Elspeth
He has his Planeswalker card, but I don't know for sure whether that means he actually still is or not
>He has his Planeswalker card, but I don't know for sure whether that means he actually still is or not
MaRo has confirmed that, with the exception of UB and D&D products, a character being represented by a Planeswalker card definitionally means that character has a spark.
From established lore, dying also makes planeswalkers lose their spark in the process.
Both Jace and Nahiri are showcased as planeswalker in ONE so I doubt they are dead *because of* compleation.
That doesn’t mean they can’t actually die further into MOM story for other reasons of course
EDIT
Gideon was a flagship PW card in WOTS and got offed in the story.
Card mechanics and related lore have always been malleable, so drawing conclusions like this seems premature.
And Melira can completely cure phyresis in the ONE story but her new card doesn't make the player immune to Poison.
WOTC has been extremely upfront that, while they always seek for harmony between game mechanics and story, the former trumps the latter. There's hundreds of examples of cards of characters that don't reflect the lore. Jace showing up as a PW card after he *gets stabbed through the chest and explicitly dies in the story* is not negated because R&D designed him to be a PW card to fit with the design of the set. This is not new or complex and it's *wild* how controversial it is.
I only disagree in this instance because the rules around compleating planeswalkers has been a little fast and loose even within just the story chapters, so it’s hard to say to what degree the cards are sticking to the story when the rules of the story are a little messy
Yeah that’s why I’m not ruling out these guys being not-dead, since we have no idea if
1) They’re using Oil 2.0
2) Planeswalkers got surgerized off-screen
3) WotC just forgot
I think the intention of my post was pretty clear but I edited it for clarity.
I did not say that Nahiri or Jace *can’t be killed* for whatever reason, I said that under the established lore, the process of dying inherently remove the Spark from a planeswalker SO the most likely explanation is that the “death” referred inside the story was a *symbolic* death that precedes being reborn anew as a Phyrexian
I know we're fully postmodern on this sub, but I have a hard time reconciling these lines *directly from the final chapter of the ONE story* with the idea that Jace is just pretending to be dead.
> In a single convulsive motion, [Elspeth] drove her blade through Jace and shoved him aside, letting his body take the sword with him as he fell and grabbing the sylex in her own hands.
...
>[Elesh Norn] turned her smile to Jace's corpse, which shuddered and stood, Elspeth's sword slipping from his body as he moved to join his new master.
You might be able to make the argument that Nahiri died off-screen and the one line about her "clearly not surviving the fall" was a character's thought and subject to an unreliable narrator, but Jace is pretty unequivocally a zombie, regardless of his card type in ONE Boosters.
You're right that the word "corpse" pretty unambiguously means "dead" but idk why you're so dead-set on "a single easily-ignored line in a story written by a hired-gun author in a process *known* to conflict with canon and what's depicted on the cards is what will dictate what Wizards does with the character moving forward."
>Jace is not coming back.
Call me a cynical bastard, but quite frankly, it's going to take Jace being reduced to ashes and scattered across at least four different planes before I start to believe that his chances of being brought back will go down from "Certain" to "Nearly Certain".
Never underestimate the power of shareholder-appeasement-powered Plot Armour / Deus Ex Machinas. Don't get me wrong, I have no investment in his ultra-generic self, and I want there to be some actual stakes and impact in the story, but I've seen this song and dance too many times to feel any sort of tension when one of the faces of a brand "seems to" have died, especially given that he's swanning around in Smite now.
!RemindMe 80 Days
No matter how much they push it, one person in a writer's room getting one memo from some higher-up can decide his fate. Given how mercurial stuff can be, I'm gonna sit comfortably in limbo until the end of the storyline, and clap for whichever side of the fence gets to pull out the "WE TOLD YOU SO!" flags
Re: your edit, I also read that, but I am completely sure that there's going to be a number of things happening that defy the laws of MTG Universe as we understand them in the MoM story, and I would bet Jace (and Nahiri) coming back to life is one of them.
>Not great news for Ajani and Tamiyo though
What are you talking about? Ajani has two eyes now! Two! That's twice as many as he had before!!!
Joking aside, I feel like Tamiyo might be okay? It depends on just how much of her body has been changed. At the very least, at least she's the native of a plane where cybertech is common - - She won't be easily ostracized by at least some of the population.
Maybe over time she'll even be able to replace parts of her body with Kamigawan tech.
The most recent Tezz story talks about her being vivisected and rebuilt from the inside out. If she makes it, she's definitely staying a robot for now. Definitely a candidate for mental fixes only.
Personally, I love her re-design (100% my favorite of the compleated) and it does fit fairly well into the Neo-Kamigawan aesthetic. Would hate to see it just be a one-off.
for jace and nahiri you forgot 2 things
1. nahiri pretty much used the very last bit of her non phyrexian life to destory the phyrexian arena and open the door for th fair basilica sphere
2. elspeth literally impaled jace with the luxior and was reanimated
I meant that they seem the least compleat - the whole "death" bit does complicate matters.
Though are they really dead if their sparks (and souls) are still bound to their robo-zombie bodies?
Nahiri is strongly implied to have actually killed herself and then been reanimated.
It's less clear what happened with Jace; certainly a normal human would be "actually dead", but we don't know much about his particular phyrexian biology (?) at that point.
I'd be fine with them being cured as long as there's significant lasting damage both physically and mentally that basically puts them out of commission for a very long time.
I think there's very interesting stories to be told there and it would still have very significant lasting impacts on those characters and the Magic story in general.
I think it's less "seeding" and more "slapping us in the face repeatedly with it".
That said, even if they didn't do it this...Jace got Compleated, so they've already given all the possibility-seeding necessary - They didn't need to add more foreshadowing it's going to be fixed before the year's out.
> I think it's less "seeding" and more "slapping us in the face repeatedly with it".
I think that is part of the nature of how they give out narrative information. They don't know who is going to just read the cards or who is going to read the stories or who is going to watch the worldbuilding video or who is going to read the planeswalker's guide. For those who track everything, it feels repetitive.
But like I thought Elspeth's return was one of the most clearly hinted-at things all the way back to when she first died in Journey Into Nyx. But I still see people say that this came out of nowhere and it's a ridiculous ass-pull.
Yeah, I 100% get that, they feel it needs to be made at least somewhat followable for people who only follow the cards. While I believe that it would be better to have the story of the cards inspire people to ask "Wait, why is this going on? I should look into this with the stories", I can see why they're taking their current option.
One of the more annoying things to me that I see on this board are people who get really mad about not understanding the overall narrative but don't read the stories.
Like either you care about the story and you read the fiction to understand it, or you don't care about it and you don't read the fiction. How do you care enough to be mad at WotC but not enough to try to understand more?
Though now that I type it out, I guess "having a bit of information and being mad about it while refusing to get more information" is par for the course for a lot of people.
A lot of people were yelling "but the stakes!"
In my opinion, letting them live with a metric fuckton of trauma is much more interesting. Same reason I groan at "bad guy does one good thing and then dies".
Tamiyo constantly hearing the screams in her mind as she took notes on their suffering, Ajani coming to terms with him killing Jaya, Jace having PTSD episodes that accidentally manifest as illusions, Vraska probably having to learn to walk again because I imaging going from a big snek-tail back to organic legs will probably leave them atrophied.
Eh, letting them live with trauma might be interesting if the story had any time for that sort of thing, but it really doesn't. We've got huge numbers of planeswalkers and extremely plot heavy storylines being crammed into a few short stories, they're not going to have time to do any sort of justice to a whole bunch traumatised planeswalkers.
Also, characters like Vraska, Nissa and Jace all have plenty of trauma already. Adding another helping of almost comically excessive trauma on doesn't really help them be interesting, and it rather homogenises them by replacing their own issues with a stock ex-phyrexian thing shared between all of them.
> We've got huge numbers of planeswalkers and extremely plot heavy storylines being crammed into a few short stories, they're not going to have time to do any sort of justice to a whole bunch traumatised planeswalkers.
I mean, they don't have time to do very much of anything, it feels like. They just need more story time if they're going to continue doing these huge team up/convergence plots.
Yeah, the story hasn't shown much interest in getting into characters' damage unless it's plot relevant. Teferi can mope about his failures with Zhalfir, but only because he's going to end up there in a few months.
A set on Vryn would give Jace (and potentially Vraska) time to really explore the harshness of what they've done. Heck, the upcoming return to Ixalan could do that.
I agree, and want to add that I think overuse of character death *lowers* the stakes. I'm not going to get attached to your characters if I think you're just going to kill them off for shock value.
She’ll probably have to learn how to use fingers all over again once she loses her sword-hands.
“Kor lithomancer breaks down sobbing after attempting to eat at local noodle shop.”
I don't want nissa or vraska to die- their inclusion so far in this story was shock value only and had nothing to do with their personal stories up to now. It would be a slap on the face, especially on the eve of another ixalan set.
Nissa, though, really doesn't HAVE anything left to do. She's not getting back together with Chandra, that plotline died. She already rebuilt Zendikar. So what storylines are left for her character to do at this point? All her previous story threads have run their course. Unless they want to start something new with her (which they have no deep motivation to do as there are many Planeswalkers they can choose from) there's really no reason why they can't kill her off.
I really dislike that mentality. "Oh, this character did the one thing they could and now is totally useless". You can do anything you want with her moving forward- and I think she'd be more interesting for it. Besides, at the very least if this was the end for her she could have been a main character in events. If she dies, her last appearance as a heroine and therefore as the actual character that people who liked her got invested in, was a side character in a side story where she didn't even actually get defeated on screen? That's trash. I don't want her to die just because there aren't any immediately obvious things to do with her at this exact moment in the story. I'd rather she just retire and leave the story if that's the case.
Nissa’s side story from Brothers War mentioned wanting to work things out with Chandra after going to New Phyrexia, so I don’t think that one’s quite dead unless Nissa is. There were also hints about her having a connection to Emrakul between the ending of Eldritch Moon and into her story in Amonkhet as well.
If Lukka and Nissa both die, who is the poster-child green planeswalker?
I mean, maybe Tyvar? He's pretty much brand-new and an unknown quantity, but people do seem to like the way he punches things.
Yes, but I'm assuming there will always be five planeswalkers, one of each color, who are the poster children for Magic. They might not be the Gatewatch anymore, but the WotC marketing department will always need five memorable faces for their marketing displays.
Garruk can't fit that bill; in lore he's nearly as black as he is green and is murderously insane. Vivien might work. I know nothing about her. (All I know about Tyvar is that he likes punching things.)
Really? To me it seems that this simply lays out what we know from the stories about Halo and Melira. It also explicitly says that rehabilitation becomes impossible after a certain stage. This stage has probably already passed for most, if not all, of the compleated Walkers.
God I hope not. I don't mind having stakes that actually matter. Nahiri is my favorite walker, but if the story chooses to take her off the table, that can make some other walkers shine that have been ignored. I remember Venser dying in the OG NP block. That was sad and it's horrifying to see him in this set. And that's so awesome from a story perspective. I wouldn't even mind if they stop the invasion, but these 5 are still "villians"
I wish they would have mentioned him in one of the stories. Like is he a fully phyrexian thing that just moves his body around or is it like Ertai where he maintains some amount of the original person even though he’s been dead for years?
We have had enough of these planeswalkers both in terms of lore and in terms of card variants. Not to mention, with all the new walkers they’re adding, they can easily fill in the blanks left by the loss of the Compleated walkers.
The Library of Strixhaven's Bureau of Navigation has several remarkably heavy guidebooks about New Phyrexia, all of which recommend that if you simply cannot stay away from the plane, there are severe and taxing precautions that you should seriously consider employing in order to safely travel there and return. It also has a warning to ensure that you are fully cleansed of any fluids before returning to Arcavios.
The Planeswalker's Guide to the Multiverse has this to say about New Phyrexia: *No.*
>The oil eventually replaces all vital liquids in the host body, which prepares it for compleation, a surgical process that swaps the body's organic matter with artificial machinery. The oil can corrupt artifacts as well as organic beings.
In the story, I thought Jace and co. started getting machinery just from being infected, not from any sort of surgery?
Either the art shows a character's state after a while has passed, or Jin put some mycosynth in the Oil for shits and giggles.
Granted, that would be hellishly efficient, so he at least thought of that.
>Studying the vedalkens' blinkmoth serum also allowed the Progress Engine to enhance their vast reserve of glistening oil, making it more virulent and able to proliferate through organic material at record speeds.
Right, I understand that the oil can do the brainwashing. But doesn't Jace end up with wires and a metal arm also? This isn't just the oil replacing vital liquids and preparing the body for surgery.
>Jace didn't look good. He was moving under his own power, but the wires growing through his flesh and bone were starting to break the skin, piercing through it and weaving themselves together in delicate loops, waving like cilia, even as they formed a shell around his arm.
But that's all that happens to Jace. He gets killed(?) at the end of the story - there's no time between the above depiction and the end when he could have gotten Phyrexian surgery. And we've been told that Jace is compleated - it's even on his card!
I think there's also a gap between what the card arts show and what the story says. For the players who only look at the cards, they probably feel there is a benefit to show a certain amount of change that does not match the exact timeline of the narrative.
Jace was small potatoes for wotc writers ignoring their own lore for story drama. Nahiri literally has molten metal pumping through her body, and Vraska’s legs fused together and she grew a scorpion tail. The PWs got insta-compleated for the sake of suspense and a more dramatic finale of half the team being already turned to the Phyrexian side.
>>The oil eventually replaces all vital liquids in the host body, which prepares it for compleation, a surgical process that swaps the body's organic matter with artificial machinery. The oil can corrupt artifacts as well as organic beings.
Wait, so is the answer Theros and their enchantment creatures? It seems like they might be immune to completion.
I like to imagine that this was written by Tamiyo trying to entice other planeswalkers to visit and get compleated willingly. Like she probably wrote it all out and left it by the planeswalker notice board on Ravnica from "Note For A Stranger".
Interesting that the Domini were not created intentionally and arose when large portions of the plane gained sentience, almost like elementals. I think it’s especially odd that they aren’t artifact creatures, even as their description talks about the blurring of life, death, and inanimate objects.
I kinda love apparently how well Vorinclex and Glissa get along. Makes it sound like they worked together closely to establish the Hunter's Maze, and the article even says that Vorinclex lets Glissa run things most of the time while Vorinclex goes on hunts for fun. Plus in the Lukka story, we see them apparently sparring for fun and exercise.
The Vorinclex-Glissa power duo is oddly wholesome, seems like they just get along super well and trust each other completely.
>Yawgmoth, a medical genius from Dominaria, planeswalked to Old Phyrexia and installed himself as the plane's new ruler, the Father of Machines.
do people proofread this?
They just left the part out that it was [Dyfed](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Dyfed) that brought Yawgmoth to Phyrexia. Yawgmoth himself is not, and never has been, a Planeswalker.
>Unlike the other praetors who force new recruits into their designs, Urabrask prefers they retain the strongest parts of their original form and contribute these assets to Phyrexia. Secretly, he prefers when beings willingly choose to join New Phyrexia, but he is not above destroying those who oppose it. Well, there's the final word on Urabrask's mentality, I suppose. I guess "New Phyrexia, but ruled by Urabrask and just being left alone" is still on the table.
I like that the red Phyrexian design became best of the original form augmented with mechanics. That's a cool aesthetic.
Urabrask: *Please* become a Phyrexian or else….
I said yes just because of there “please”. So polite
That’s the Great Furnace Difference!
You can refuse, but you won’t. Because of the implications
"Are you going to hurt Mirrans?" "I'm not going to hurt these Mirrans, why would I ever hurt these Mirrans?!"
They’ll have to, because of the implication
Assimilate or be destroyed
Urabrask learned a few things from his time on New Capenna. "Hey, I don't know man, if you don't join New Phyrexia, well, I can't guarantee that your store won't end up burned in the Great Furnace. Why don't you give it some thought?"
"Nice plane ya got there, shame if something happened to it eh?"
>Reversing phyresis is difficult. After infection passes a certain stage, rehabilitation becomes impossible. Recovery varies per individual and becomes more difficult with increased compleation. Healing the mind may require different processes than healing body. However, several substances, like Halo, can stave off the transformative effects of glistening oil, and some individuals, like Melira, are entirely immune. Seems like they're definitely seeding the possibility of 'curing' the Compleated Walkers
When in doubt, use everything. Melira, take a mouthful of Halo and without swallowing, bite the Compleated Planeswalker. We made you some grillz outta the mycosynth.
Halo definitely has to be a part of the reversal.
This indicates that blinkmoth serum was used to make the glistening oil more virulent. I wonder if that is literal or figurative.
hexgold would be better, like a rapper's grill
Wouldn't surprise me if Etherium could be used in some ability to override the corruptive influence of phyrexis. Of course, for that to work, Etherium needs to have its Blind-Eternities-made-corporeal wish-granting powers it had in Tezzeret's Planswalker novel *Test of Metal*. And outside of the one-off mention of Baltrice we got during this set's story, that book is only faintly canon at the best of times.
Maybe Melira uses the Halo like the Green/Black Mist from Japanese pro-wrestling! Spray it right in someone’s face!
Seeding possible mental fixes is good. Undoing the brainwashing and leaving the body changes for now is the most interesting option imo. Not great news for Ajani and Tamiyo though. Nahiri and Jace seem like the most viable candidates for immediate full restoration.
Lukka freed from corruption but still fused sounds hilarious
Lukka reverse brainwashing the Phyrexian he is bounded too into a large puppy by undoing his own brainwashing sounds like the funniest outcome here. Just a guy and his very ugly dog.
Jace is *straight-up dead.* His body has been reanimated, but the story was very explicit that it was his corpse, not him, that rose to join Norn. Jace is not coming back. E: Just gonna edit this in because I'm tired of receiving the same response from the people who didn't bother reading the story. Lines directly from Chapter 5 of the ONE webfiction: >In a single convulsive motion, [Elspeth] drove her blade through Jace and shoved him aside, letting his body take the sword with him as he fell and grabbing the sylex in her own hands. ... >[Elesh Norn] turned her smile to Jace's corpse, which shuddered and stood, Elspeth's sword slipping from his body as he moved to join his new master. It's not exactly subtle.
He's a robo-zombie but should still have his soul attached to preserve his spark. If they want to resurrect him they have that out. I'll believe he's dead for real when they put his funeral on a card.
I'll believe he's dead for real when Wizards puts out the memorial secret lair
F JAYA
> put [a] funeral on a card. WotC is like, notoriously bad about this specific part.
I mean, not really. Especially lately, and especially for main characters. Older characters? Sure, "considered dead" but might come back. But Gideon? Jaya? They gone gone, and we have that confirmation.
Yeah but I assume they've learnt lessons
[[Tyvar's Stand]]
[Tyvar's Stand](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c7b362a5-382a-4016-b4f2-aa7b683354c4.jpg?1674810981) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tyvar%27s%20Stand) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/190/tyvars-stand?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c7b362a5-382a-4016-b4f2-aa7b683354c4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Dack, is that you?
Do a Niv-Mizzet and spoil "Jace's Resurrection" before we know he's dead.
Or in a Secret Lair
I believe they are setting him up to become a force ghost. He put his soul in the Sylax and thats how they get rid of Jace while still keeping him around.
So long as Jace still has his spark he still has his soul. So long as he still has his soul and his body is still biologically functional he can very easily be brought back to normal.
I don't know if he has his spark still. We've seen nothing that would say that he has it after he got killed by Elspeth He has his Planeswalker card, but I don't know for sure whether that means he actually still is or not
>He has his Planeswalker card, but I don't know for sure whether that means he actually still is or not MaRo has confirmed that, with the exception of UB and D&D products, a character being represented by a Planeswalker card definitionally means that character has a spark.
From established lore, dying also makes planeswalkers lose their spark in the process. Both Jace and Nahiri are showcased as planeswalker in ONE so I doubt they are dead *because of* compleation. That doesn’t mean they can’t actually die further into MOM story for other reasons of course EDIT
Gideon was a flagship PW card in WOTS and got offed in the story. Card mechanics and related lore have always been malleable, so drawing conclusions like this seems premature.
True, but Gideon dies in the story. Jace is still a planeswalker post-compleation, so maybe he didn’t really die?
And Melira can completely cure phyresis in the ONE story but her new card doesn't make the player immune to Poison. WOTC has been extremely upfront that, while they always seek for harmony between game mechanics and story, the former trumps the latter. There's hundreds of examples of cards of characters that don't reflect the lore. Jace showing up as a PW card after he *gets stabbed through the chest and explicitly dies in the story* is not negated because R&D designed him to be a PW card to fit with the design of the set. This is not new or complex and it's *wild* how controversial it is.
I only disagree in this instance because the rules around compleating planeswalkers has been a little fast and loose even within just the story chapters, so it’s hard to say to what degree the cards are sticking to the story when the rules of the story are a little messy
Is the oil programmable? I thought they had to physically compleat Tamiyo and Amani, but the rest are getting changed just by normal phyresis
Yeah that’s why I’m not ruling out these guys being not-dead, since we have no idea if 1) They’re using Oil 2.0 2) Planeswalkers got surgerized off-screen 3) WotC just forgot
I think the intention of my post was pretty clear but I edited it for clarity. I did not say that Nahiri or Jace *can’t be killed* for whatever reason, I said that under the established lore, the process of dying inherently remove the Spark from a planeswalker SO the most likely explanation is that the “death” referred inside the story was a *symbolic* death that precedes being reborn anew as a Phyrexian
I know we're fully postmodern on this sub, but I have a hard time reconciling these lines *directly from the final chapter of the ONE story* with the idea that Jace is just pretending to be dead. > In a single convulsive motion, [Elspeth] drove her blade through Jace and shoved him aside, letting his body take the sword with him as he fell and grabbing the sylex in her own hands. ... >[Elesh Norn] turned her smile to Jace's corpse, which shuddered and stood, Elspeth's sword slipping from his body as he moved to join his new master. You might be able to make the argument that Nahiri died off-screen and the one line about her "clearly not surviving the fall" was a character's thought and subject to an unreliable narrator, but Jace is pretty unequivocally a zombie, regardless of his card type in ONE Boosters.
First zombie planeswalker confirmed?
You're right that the word "corpse" pretty unambiguously means "dead" but idk why you're so dead-set on "a single easily-ignored line in a story written by a hired-gun author in a process *known* to conflict with canon and what's depicted on the cards is what will dictate what Wizards does with the character moving forward."
The same was said of Nahiri.
>Jace is not coming back. Call me a cynical bastard, but quite frankly, it's going to take Jace being reduced to ashes and scattered across at least four different planes before I start to believe that his chances of being brought back will go down from "Certain" to "Nearly Certain". Never underestimate the power of shareholder-appeasement-powered Plot Armour / Deus Ex Machinas. Don't get me wrong, I have no investment in his ultra-generic self, and I want there to be some actual stakes and impact in the story, but I've seen this song and dance too many times to feel any sort of tension when one of the faces of a brand "seems to" have died, especially given that he's swanning around in Smite now. !RemindMe 80 Days
> Jace is not coming back. !RemindMe 80 Days
No matter how much they push it, one person in a writer's room getting one memo from some higher-up can decide his fate. Given how mercurial stuff can be, I'm gonna sit comfortably in limbo until the end of the storyline, and clap for whichever side of the fence gets to pull out the "WE TOLD YOU SO!" flags
Where in the story did it say that? I remember seeing that about Venser, but jace is still alive I thought?
Re: your edit, I also read that, but I am completely sure that there's going to be a number of things happening that defy the laws of MTG Universe as we understand them in the MoM story, and I would bet Jace (and Nahiri) coming back to life is one of them.
Wasn't the person putting the sword in him literally in the underworld? Just sayin....
Jace can be dead while keeping a back up of his mind, no way Jace isn't coming back.
>Not great news for Ajani and Tamiyo though What are you talking about? Ajani has two eyes now! Two! That's twice as many as he had before!!! Joking aside, I feel like Tamiyo might be okay? It depends on just how much of her body has been changed. At the very least, at least she's the native of a plane where cybertech is common - - She won't be easily ostracized by at least some of the population. Maybe over time she'll even be able to replace parts of her body with Kamigawan tech.
The most recent Tezz story talks about her being vivisected and rebuilt from the inside out. If she makes it, she's definitely staying a robot for now. Definitely a candidate for mental fixes only. Personally, I love her re-design (100% my favorite of the compleated) and it does fit fairly well into the Neo-Kamigawan aesthetic. Would hate to see it just be a one-off.
for jace and nahiri you forgot 2 things 1. nahiri pretty much used the very last bit of her non phyrexian life to destory the phyrexian arena and open the door for th fair basilica sphere 2. elspeth literally impaled jace with the luxior and was reanimated
Jace the blue dies One week later Hello fellow adventures I am Jace the Teel
Give him a clearly-fake bushy moustache and you got a deal.
I'll do you one better I'll give him a top hat and monicol and tie compleated vraska to some train tracks
I meant that they seem the least compleat - the whole "death" bit does complicate matters. Though are they really dead if their sparks (and souls) are still bound to their robo-zombie bodies?
Nahiri is strongly implied to have actually killed herself and then been reanimated. It's less clear what happened with Jace; certainly a normal human would be "actually dead", but we don't know much about his particular phyrexian biology (?) at that point.
I'd be fine with them being cured as long as there's significant lasting damage both physically and mentally that basically puts them out of commission for a very long time. I think there's very interesting stories to be told there and it would still have very significant lasting impacts on those characters and the Magic story in general.
I think it's less "seeding" and more "slapping us in the face repeatedly with it". That said, even if they didn't do it this...Jace got Compleated, so they've already given all the possibility-seeding necessary - They didn't need to add more foreshadowing it's going to be fixed before the year's out.
> I think it's less "seeding" and more "slapping us in the face repeatedly with it". I think that is part of the nature of how they give out narrative information. They don't know who is going to just read the cards or who is going to read the stories or who is going to watch the worldbuilding video or who is going to read the planeswalker's guide. For those who track everything, it feels repetitive. But like I thought Elspeth's return was one of the most clearly hinted-at things all the way back to when she first died in Journey Into Nyx. But I still see people say that this came out of nowhere and it's a ridiculous ass-pull.
Yeah, I 100% get that, they feel it needs to be made at least somewhat followable for people who only follow the cards. While I believe that it would be better to have the story of the cards inspire people to ask "Wait, why is this going on? I should look into this with the stories", I can see why they're taking their current option.
I think the issue is a lot of people would default to "wow what's going on, this is stupid" over doing their own research
One of the more annoying things to me that I see on this board are people who get really mad about not understanding the overall narrative but don't read the stories. Like either you care about the story and you read the fiction to understand it, or you don't care about it and you don't read the fiction. How do you care enough to be mad at WotC but not enough to try to understand more? Though now that I type it out, I guess "having a bit of information and being mad about it while refusing to get more information" is par for the course for a lot of people.
Everything is possible... After all, somehow Palpatine returned...
Did you think they were just going to kill them off?
A lot of people were yelling "but the stakes!" In my opinion, letting them live with a metric fuckton of trauma is much more interesting. Same reason I groan at "bad guy does one good thing and then dies". Tamiyo constantly hearing the screams in her mind as she took notes on their suffering, Ajani coming to terms with him killing Jaya, Jace having PTSD episodes that accidentally manifest as illusions, Vraska probably having to learn to walk again because I imaging going from a big snek-tail back to organic legs will probably leave them atrophied.
Eh, letting them live with trauma might be interesting if the story had any time for that sort of thing, but it really doesn't. We've got huge numbers of planeswalkers and extremely plot heavy storylines being crammed into a few short stories, they're not going to have time to do any sort of justice to a whole bunch traumatised planeswalkers. Also, characters like Vraska, Nissa and Jace all have plenty of trauma already. Adding another helping of almost comically excessive trauma on doesn't really help them be interesting, and it rather homogenises them by replacing their own issues with a stock ex-phyrexian thing shared between all of them.
> We've got huge numbers of planeswalkers and extremely plot heavy storylines being crammed into a few short stories, they're not going to have time to do any sort of justice to a whole bunch traumatised planeswalkers. I mean, they don't have time to do very much of anything, it feels like. They just need more story time if they're going to continue doing these huge team up/convergence plots.
Yeah, the story hasn't shown much interest in getting into characters' damage unless it's plot relevant. Teferi can mope about his failures with Zhalfir, but only because he's going to end up there in a few months.
A set on Vryn would give Jace (and potentially Vraska) time to really explore the harshness of what they've done. Heck, the upcoming return to Ixalan could do that.
I agree, and want to add that I think overuse of character death *lowers* the stakes. I'm not going to get attached to your characters if I think you're just going to kill them off for shock value.
*George Martin has entered the chat
And meanwhile, Nahiri is completely unfazed as always. What's one more almost-genocide on her conscience?
She’ll probably have to learn how to use fingers all over again once she loses her sword-hands. “Kor lithomancer breaks down sobbing after attempting to eat at local noodle shop.”
Several of them will die. My money is on Ajani, Lukka, Nissa, and Vraska.
I don't want nissa or vraska to die- their inclusion so far in this story was shock value only and had nothing to do with their personal stories up to now. It would be a slap on the face, especially on the eve of another ixalan set.
Nissa, though, really doesn't HAVE anything left to do. She's not getting back together with Chandra, that plotline died. She already rebuilt Zendikar. So what storylines are left for her character to do at this point? All her previous story threads have run their course. Unless they want to start something new with her (which they have no deep motivation to do as there are many Planeswalkers they can choose from) there's really no reason why they can't kill her off.
I really dislike that mentality. "Oh, this character did the one thing they could and now is totally useless". You can do anything you want with her moving forward- and I think she'd be more interesting for it. Besides, at the very least if this was the end for her she could have been a main character in events. If she dies, her last appearance as a heroine and therefore as the actual character that people who liked her got invested in, was a side character in a side story where she didn't even actually get defeated on screen? That's trash. I don't want her to die just because there aren't any immediately obvious things to do with her at this exact moment in the story. I'd rather she just retire and leave the story if that's the case.
[удалено]
I'm not following how that is related to what I said about Nissa.
Sorry responded to the wrong person.
No worries.
Nissa’s side story from Brothers War mentioned wanting to work things out with Chandra after going to New Phyrexia, so I don’t think that one’s quite dead unless Nissa is. There were also hints about her having a connection to Emrakul between the ending of Eldritch Moon and into her story in Amonkhet as well.
Trust me, I don't want them to die either. It's just a hunch.
If Lukka and Nissa both die, who is the poster-child green planeswalker? I mean, maybe Tyvar? He's pretty much brand-new and an unknown quantity, but people do seem to like the way he punches things.
Lukka is mainly Red. We still have Garruk, Vivien, and Tyvar that fit mono-Green.
Yes, but I'm assuming there will always be five planeswalkers, one of each color, who are the poster children for Magic. They might not be the Gatewatch anymore, but the WotC marketing department will always need five memorable faces for their marketing displays. Garruk can't fit that bill; in lore he's nearly as black as he is green and is murderously insane. Vivien might work. I know nothing about her. (All I know about Tyvar is that he likes punching things.)
Garruk was cured by the Cauldron of Eternity, and swore to protect the Royal Scions
> (All I know about Tyvar is that he likes punching things.) cut and wrapped, that's it
Really? To me it seems that this simply lays out what we know from the stories about Halo and Melira. It also explicitly says that rehabilitation becomes impossible after a certain stage. This stage has probably already passed for most, if not all, of the compleated Walkers.
God I hope not. I don't mind having stakes that actually matter. Nahiri is my favorite walker, but if the story chooses to take her off the table, that can make some other walkers shine that have been ignored. I remember Venser dying in the OG NP block. That was sad and it's horrifying to see him in this set. And that's so awesome from a story perspective. I wouldn't even mind if they stop the invasion, but these 5 are still "villians"
I wish they would have mentioned him in one of the stories. Like is he a fully phyrexian thing that just moves his body around or is it like Ertai where he maintains some amount of the original person even though he’s been dead for years?
I’m fine with their minds being restored but I hope they don’t lose the physical stuff, battle scars
We have had enough of these planeswalkers both in terms of lore and in terms of card variants. Not to mention, with all the new walkers they’re adding, they can easily fill in the blanks left by the loss of the Compleated walkers.
Nothing on Skrelv yet
Skrelv: Is a little guy. A little fella designed by Elesh Norn, he’s busy doing little guy stuff.
good chance we'll still get a legendary creature article. very interested in what's going on with Graaz XD
I was also hoping for some background on what Myrs are since they show up on quite a lot of cards.
Myr were designed by Memnarch. They were each designed to do a particular task, and he could see through their eyes.
especially with memnarch's remains coming into play now
Planeswalker's Guide: DON'T GO THERE seems like a more succinct piece of advice
The Library of Strixhaven's Bureau of Navigation has several remarkably heavy guidebooks about New Phyrexia, all of which recommend that if you simply cannot stay away from the plane, there are severe and taxing precautions that you should seriously consider employing in order to safely travel there and return. It also has a warning to ensure that you are fully cleansed of any fluids before returning to Arcavios. The Planeswalker's Guide to the Multiverse has this to say about New Phyrexia: *No.*
Hahaha that's funny. But surely you MEANT to say... Planeswalker's Guide: Come on in, we can't wait for you to join us!
>The oil eventually replaces all vital liquids in the host body, which prepares it for compleation, a surgical process that swaps the body's organic matter with artificial machinery. The oil can corrupt artifacts as well as organic beings. In the story, I thought Jace and co. started getting machinery just from being infected, not from any sort of surgery?
Nanomachines, son.
They harden to fisical trauma.
I too get hard when the fbi comes because I commuted tax fraud
It's 2023, you can submit fraudulent tax documents online nowadays. No need to commute!
Wait I had a typo in my comment on a typo lmao
FOXDIE
It’s a known fact that mycosynth causes flesh-to metal and metal-to-flesh transformations, so I’d assume that the glistening oil can do the same
Either the art shows a character's state after a while has passed, or Jin put some mycosynth in the Oil for shits and giggles. Granted, that would be hellishly efficient, so he at least thought of that.
>Studying the vedalkens' blinkmoth serum also allowed the Progress Engine to enhance their vast reserve of glistening oil, making it more virulent and able to proliferate through organic material at record speeds.
You need the surgery for full compleation, but the oil can do some brainwashing by itself, as seen with karn in [[corrupted conscience]]
Right, I understand that the oil can do the brainwashing. But doesn't Jace end up with wires and a metal arm also? This isn't just the oil replacing vital liquids and preparing the body for surgery. >Jace didn't look good. He was moving under his own power, but the wires growing through his flesh and bone were starting to break the skin, piercing through it and weaving themselves together in delicate loops, waving like cilia, even as they formed a shell around his arm.
I guess it can give some initial artifical qualities? But thats just an early stage, thats not fully compleat
But that's all that happens to Jace. He gets killed(?) at the end of the story - there's no time between the above depiction and the end when he could have gotten Phyrexian surgery. And we've been told that Jace is compleated - it's even on his card!
I think there's also a gap between what the card arts show and what the story says. For the players who only look at the cards, they probably feel there is a benefit to show a certain amount of change that does not match the exact timeline of the narrative.
[corrupted conscience](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/2/7276c584-76ed-4c20-a5ea-627c8f7751e6.jpg?1562612217) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=corrupted%20conscience) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mbs/22/corrupted-conscience?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7276c584-76ed-4c20-a5ea-627c8f7751e6?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Jace was small potatoes for wotc writers ignoring their own lore for story drama. Nahiri literally has molten metal pumping through her body, and Vraska’s legs fused together and she grew a scorpion tail. The PWs got insta-compleated for the sake of suspense and a more dramatic finale of half the team being already turned to the Phyrexian side.
The oil mutates, but ideally surgery follows.
Maybe the glistening oil performs what amounts to nanobot surgery as it infects the host
>>The oil eventually replaces all vital liquids in the host body, which prepares it for compleation, a surgical process that swaps the body's organic matter with artificial machinery. The oil can corrupt artifacts as well as organic beings. Wait, so is the answer Theros and their enchantment creatures? It seems like they might be immune to completion.
I like to imagine that this was written by Tamiyo trying to entice other planeswalkers to visit and get compleated willingly. Like she probably wrote it all out and left it by the planeswalker notice board on Ravnica from "Note For A Stranger".
*"By the way, if you need a pick-me-up, there's a number of Sheolbucks nearby and their Glistening Oil Frapp is a COMPLEAT taste-sensation!"*
That would be cute.
Interesting that the Domini were not created intentionally and arose when large portions of the plane gained sentience, almost like elementals. I think it’s especially odd that they aren’t artifact creatures, even as their description talks about the blurring of life, death, and inanimate objects.
i love these articles, they put so much effort into the worldbuilding
Yeah, it's nice to have them back.
I like how they show Ovika, Enigma Goliath for the unaligned phyrexians, but don't say anything about her. I'm guessing we will never learn.
Well, they *are* an enigma
They usually post a Legends of ___ article shortly after a set releases, so I hope we can learn more about the various legends here in that
I kinda love apparently how well Vorinclex and Glissa get along. Makes it sound like they worked together closely to establish the Hunter's Maze, and the article even says that Vorinclex lets Glissa run things most of the time while Vorinclex goes on hunts for fun. Plus in the Lukka story, we see them apparently sparring for fun and exercise. The Vorinclex-Glissa power duo is oddly wholesome, seems like they just get along super well and trust each other completely.
It's an inverse from Melira and Thrun's. Two women adopted by monstruous father figures, on opposite sides of the war.
It's interesting that Urabrask and Vorinclex are introduced with no title. Are they getting new ones, probably with new cards?
I think that’s just a formatting convention hiccup. Elesh Norn used her new title while Sheoldred and Jin used their old ones.
>Yawgmoth, a medical genius from Dominaria, planeswalked to Old Phyrexia and installed himself as the plane's new ruler, the Father of Machines. do people proofread this?
It's not completely wrong, he just needed a planeswalker to take him there. Before the Mending that was easy.
They just left the part out that it was [Dyfed](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Dyfed) that brought Yawgmoth to Phyrexia. Yawgmoth himself is not, and never has been, a Planeswalker.
Did Yawgmoth write this article?
Curious if we'll ever see the planeswalker that created Old Phyrexia...
All we know is that he liked to take the form of a dragon and died about a month before Yawgmoth was introduced to the plane.
Dead so probably not
So, nothing new?
So, nothing new?