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Episode 191: Magic Metaphysics
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Hello Podwalkers welcome back to the show !! This week Taya, Alex and returning guest Reinhardt are covering a melthos topic again, this time talking about how some of the real world game mechanics of Magic exist in the fictional universe, and how the citizens of that universe may or may not understand them or even be aware of them!
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. We have a episode I'm very excited about. This is something that's been bouncing around in my head for a while, but before I get into all of that, I want to first thank the Granny Coffee Company for being a wonderful sponsor for us.
00:00:47
Speaker
minority-owned LGBTQ ran a coffee company that likes to support gamers. They've been supporting us for a long time. They also provide Hobbs all of his coffee, which is great. Tay and I are not big coffee drinkers, but we love their support, love what they do in the community, and also supporting Hobbs's caffeine addiction is a great thing too.
Five-Year Anniversary Plans
00:01:09
Speaker
Also, just want to mention to everybody, the Goblin Lore has five-year, we're working on our five-year episode. We actually, probably by the time this goes up, we'll hit roughly the five-year anniversary, but we're working on some things. So the episode itself will probably come out. We'll come out in a few weeks probably. When we have a better idea of the exact time, we'll let everybody know. But for that, we are asking for help. We'd like the community to send us
00:01:37
Speaker
short recordings about what the show means to you. The three hosts are going to get together and talk about what the show means for us, but we'd like our community as well to contribute to that conversation. So if that's something you want to do, please record something. We have our email in the show notes.
00:01:54
Speaker
gmail.com, it's in the show notes. If you want to send it there, that would be awesome. Thank you. And then we do some introductions.
Main Topic: Favorite Magic Cards
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm Alex Newman on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler. We're going to do our introductions and answer our question this week. And then I will try to explain this topic because I don't know. I still don't know that I have the right great words for it. But Hobbs is not here. We have a wonderful guest. But why don't I finish my introduction?
00:02:23
Speaker
all down for melon underscore chronicler and
00:02:26
Speaker
My pronouns are he, him, and our burning inquiry this week, we wanted to start, it's gonna be a Mel topic, so we wanted to kind of start with, you know, a favorite mechanic, or maybe something that's a really mechanically-centric card or Mel card. So kind of just to define that, you know, Vorthos are people who love the story and the flavor. For Mel's, it's about the mechanics, but really liking how the mechanics work together. And I think for me, one of the best cards that I've ever found to explain that
00:02:56
Speaker
is a card called Marshaling Cry from Future Sight. Sorcery gives your creatures plus and plus one until end of turn, and Vigilance, because it's a white sorcery, but it has both cycling and flashback. So you can cast it like normal and flash it back if you want, but you can also cycle it, discarding the card, and then flash it back. So cycling and flashback are playing this interesting tandem there. These two mechanics sort of working together to let this card do some
00:03:26
Speaker
Kind of a lot of different things depending on how you want to use it. And that's for me, a card I think of all the time. I don't know why I love this card, but it's, it's kind of what made me realize that understand that whole male aspect for myself. So I'm going to hand this off to Taya. Want to introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Taya. Pronouns are she, her, or they, them. And Taya transcends on Twitter.
00:03:51
Speaker
And I'm going to go with my favorite Malthus card of all time, which is Felden of the Third Path. The whole card is built around a story and flavorfully and mechanically, it works perfectly with the story of Felden trying to bring back his deceased wife and trying to make a Simulcrum of her. He brings things back from the graveyard to lend a turn.
00:04:18
Speaker
artifact things but he never quite gets it right and they don't last. If you've never read the story I highly recommend reading it and he walks through all the colors of mana and tries to you know through each of their colors the lens of each color look at bringing back something from the dead and how all of them or none of them can do it perfectly and they all have a drawback.
00:04:42
Speaker
And it's learning about how each of the colors of magic functions at a time when in the history of Dominaria, the color theory was relatively new. So it's a very Malthus card. And it's one of my favorite cards of all time with some of the best flavor text. She will come back to me. It's just all around a great card.
00:05:12
Speaker
you know, brings a tear to my eye when they released it and re-released the story from anthologies with it.
00:05:20
Speaker
That's a really good pick. And yeah, and I love the metal fellas. And that story kind of fits well with what we're going to be talking about. But before that, Reinhardt, we have Reinhardt back. You want to introduce yourself? Sure. Thanks. I am once again honored to be on this wonderful podcast with Alex and Taya. And we're going to be talking about, yeah, like Alex said, a combination of
00:05:49
Speaker
magic card mechanics and story and everything that ties them together. And so I was thinking about what card, I was thinking really hard about what card I would select. And I think I landed on Jaya's Immolating Inferno for kind of a real backwards reason and a very personal reason. So for anyone who doesn't know, Jaya's Immolating Inferno is
00:06:18
Speaker
think it's a red red X or XX red, one of those combination costs. I think it's a legendary sorcery from Dominaria 2018. And it's kind of like a giant, giant fireball.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it originally was created to commemorate the sparking of Jaya Ballard at the hands of Joda when he broke a magic mirror over her face.
00:06:52
Speaker
And the reason why I feel that it fits well into this conversation is, well, it's cheating. It's because I use that example, that card of what, you know, I sat down when I was writing the Brothers War stories, the present day stories. And I said, I really wanted to do something big and I have Joda and I get to use him. So,
00:07:21
Speaker
what if we call back to Jai's emulating inferno, but let's really get into how the card really works. And so if you recall in During the Brothers War, there's a scene in which Joda and Elspeth ride out to meet this Phyrexian behemoth, and they don't really have a plan. And Joda takes out
00:07:50
Speaker
this kind of amulet. And he says, this is a spell from Jaya. You need to help me cast it. And that is a legendary spell. And a legendary spell requires you to have some kind of legendary thing on the battlefield in order to be able to cast it. So in this case, Joda had Elspeth and was able to help
00:08:12
Speaker
Coordinate and cast the spell and I really thought that was fun. That was fun to be able to try to capture the function of the card within the story and I I can't help myself. I really like doing that So that that's my pick
00:08:30
Speaker
That's a good pick. I recognize that in your writing and you did it too. And it was really cool that you got to bring in that legendary spell aspect to it. And I'd love to see more legendary spells in it. Wow.
00:08:55
Speaker
That's really cool. And again, fits really well with the topic.
Game Mechanics and Story Integration
00:09:00
Speaker
So I've talked to both of you to some degree about what we want to talk about tonight. I've actually mentioned it in a previous recording, and I'm still trying to figure out a good, concise way to describe it. But basically, the topic is something I've kind of had in my head for a while. And it's this idea that magic is a game. And so as part of a game, we have a lot of different game mechanics, and some of them
00:09:25
Speaker
have flavorful representations in the world, manna, and the colors of manna is one. These exist in the world. But we know of them as game mechanics, so we know how they work as game mechanics. But the people in the world, I wanted to kind of talk about the idea of how would the people in the world understand these things? And how would that sort of translate? And I think
00:09:50
Speaker
at least for folks who were playing around when I was, you know, kind of came back to magic. I think one of the big examples I have that we can kind of start here and go into some of the directions. I know we've got a bunch of stuff, but I want to talk about on the Theros. When we first went to Theros, we see gods. I think that's the first time we really had gods printed as a card type.
00:10:14
Speaker
And because of the way magic works, of course, we have five gods in the first set, one for each of the colors. And then we go through the next two sets and we get five more gods in each of the two color pairs. And then in the story, there was this missing god. There was this whole idea that
00:10:37
Speaker
There was no green, uh, red God, but in the story, Oh, why am I blanking on the Seder? I'm sorry. When are you telling those? Thank you. Xenogos. It was a planeswalker decided to come back and become a God because there was a whole bunch of parts for his story, but he decided this is what he wanted to do. And so he became a God and it threw all sorts of chaos and it caused a lot of story.
00:11:03
Speaker
things as the story happens, you know, there's going to be people doing things with different motivations. But that idea for me, I don't know, it was one of those weird little frustrating moments where you get mad because people are wrong on the internet, sort of things where people were like, well, of course, I would know in the world that there is this God that's missing, of course, and a ghost is going to become the God. But it's like the people who live here have 14 gods that they've dealt with that
00:11:33
Speaker
For how I was looking at it, they're not necessarily going to understand that there's exactly five colors and that everything has to be balanced in these five colors. Because again, from a gameplay perspective, Wizards has tried that with Torment and Judgment, where one set was weighted into black and the other sets were weighted into white and green. It threw things off in balance and it wasn't great from a gameplay standpoint. So whenever we end,
00:11:55
Speaker
especially in today's environment with a lot of commander and more casual play, people play all sorts of colors. They enjoy all sorts of things. So when they're going to make something big, like a God, a cycle of gods, they're going to make one in each color because they want to represent all five colors. They want to give people those tools, those things to play with just as game pieces, as a game.
00:12:17
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that in world that this stuff has to exist that way. I mean, it generally will, because that's the way the game is. But so, does this make sense, you two? Do you have any ideas kind of from that point? Yeah, you know, it makes a lot of sense. And we see the representation of this world through the lens of game that.
00:12:45
Speaker
you know, we don't see what it would look like, you know, in a necessarily functioning society. And maybe we'll get a chance to see what will happen post, you know, marching machine when we eventually go back to Ravnica after a couple of the guilds were devastated. And we'll see what that imbalance does to the guild structure at a point where that balance was critical to how the plane functioned.
00:13:14
Speaker
And it was very, very well known, you know, that this balance was present and part of daily life on that plane. So, you know, at some point, maybe we'll see how that plays out in the story. But I think by necessity of how the story works within the rules of the game, we do see this as a balanced presentation, you know, pretty much everywhere we go.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting, that's an interesting idea that we could see how we're having because that was one of the other examples I had from around that time. A little, a few years earlier than that, but more than a few years. Sorry, that was before the gap when I stopped playing.
00:13:57
Speaker
the original Ravnica did not, I don't want to talk too much on that one necessarily unless y'all have more to add. But originally on Ravnica, there was only nine guilds that everybody knew about because the Tamir was the hidden guild. They're the, you know, the spy guild and that. So that was their thing that in part of that story, they became public and that threw a bunch of things off, but would have had a similar thing where it's like for folks on that world, there's nine guilds. And that's not something you would question just living in your world. There's
00:14:24
Speaker
I mean, maybe you might question if the guilds are doing the right stuff or, you know, say, for example, if you're in a place that has two political parties, you might be like, is this enough? Is this really going to represent everybody? And there's debates about that. But you wouldn't say, well, there should have been five because that would hit all of the colors or something like that. But I think the that sense it
00:14:45
Speaker
There's an interesting metaphor that can be made, right? When you're watching a movie or even reading a book and you're seeing how the plot unfolds. A lot of people who are viewing or reading can say, oh, you know, I know this is how this is going to end. I can see the story structure in place. And if they obey the story structure, this and this and this will happen and fall into place.
00:15:12
Speaker
And a lot of times it does happen, sometimes it doesn't. And, you know, the reader in this case is the player and the player sees that and the player knows because they read the articles or they've just spent a lot of time with different sets that the game designers do strive to have a balance because of a balanced
00:15:36
Speaker
kind of set often is more fun. It plays well. In Limited, you have a lot more options. And so, like, there's a kind of assumption that, oh, of course it's going to be like that. When the assumption is just kind of what has happened before and what tends to happen, not something that has to happen. So, you know, the red-green God, missing red-green God, I mean,
00:16:05
Speaker
people, yes, could have said, oh, eventually, or of course that character is going to be that, or eventually there will be. But that comes from a point at which you have kind of outside knowledge to the world of the story or the world of the game, if that makes any sense.
00:16:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, and it's been a while and I honestly, I was playing the game and I paid some attention to the story, but I wasn't as deep into it then as I was later. So I can't say for sure, but I don't believe the whole idea that Xenogos was going to become a god, I don't think was played as a surprise. I think it was, he was going to pursue it. Elspeth and others were trying to stop him.
00:16:51
Speaker
But I don't know that it was supposed to be some big reveal to the players. And I think, and maybe if that had been the case, it could have been like, well, this isn't a surprise to the players because we can see the gap. But I think what frustrates me is less people said, well, it's not a surprise to us because we could see that gap, but maybe more of saying, talking about it like it was some plot hole or something. Right. And that's just, it's like, well, that's the point of the story. It's not a plot hole that the story has a plot, that it's going in a direction and it gets there.
00:17:24
Speaker
So yeah, and I mean, I don't know if another example that might be easy, and this is just another game entirely, but when I used to play, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons growing up, and that was another thing just trying to explain, particularly when I was a teenager, explaining to my teenage friends who'd never played the game, ideas that things like levels don't exist in the game. That is entirely a construct of the game mechanics. You have characters who are more experienced than others, but
00:17:52
Speaker
that isn't an actual in-game mechanic. And even things like a character class isn't necessarily a straight analog in there. You have like a fighter class could be a guardsman, a soldier. There's a hundred different ways that a person could have those sort of, from a mechanical standpoint, those pieces, use it and use that differently in the fiction. And so I think that's a big part of where this has been bouncing out of my head forever.
00:18:22
Speaker
With that set, I think that's a good set.
Bloodline Project and Mana Connection
00:18:25
Speaker
I know Reinhard, you brought a bunch of good stuff to talk about some of these mechanics. Sorry, not the mechanics, but to go into the story a little bit, to just say how much does this
00:18:39
Speaker
do the citizens of this world know? And I think it depends on which plane you're talking about. Certainly Dominaria has had the bulk of sets set upon it, I suppose. So there's been more opportunity for characters to talk about
00:19:00
Speaker
the nature of magic there than there has been on any other set. So you compare it to like Kaladesh, right? You had two sets. Dominaria has had, what, something like 23, 22 sets. And, you know, so I did a little bit of homework because I'm a big nerd and I have these books. And
00:19:24
Speaker
from Bloodlines. Bloodlines has a really interesting exchange between Baron and one of his students named Timon. And this is during the time when Baron is kind of overseeing parts of the Bloodline project, even though he finds it very distasteful. You know, it's the point in time when, you know, Ursa's like, we got to do this because otherwise we're screwed. And who is to argue with him?
00:19:54
Speaker
So Reinhardt, before we even get further into this, for people who haven't been following Magic Story for 25 plus years, we should give a quick thing on what the Bloodline Project even is. Okay. Okay, I can go ahead. The Bloodline Project. Here we go. The Bloodline Project is a project spearheaded by Erza, nominally
00:20:21
Speaker
tinkering with the various family lineages of Dominaria in order to create someone who could control or use or somehow activate what he called the legacy.
00:20:38
Speaker
the legacy being just a bunch of stuff that he put together. It's kind of a weird plan if you really sit down and look at it, but in this case it was, I mean, let's not...
00:20:52
Speaker
Let's not bandy about it. It's a formalized eugenic experiment. magical eugenics as we're off sand this podcast ursa was the worst. Yes, magical eugenics so that someone could use his his leftovers from his yard sale that he couldn't. Right. I mean, let
00:21:12
Speaker
you know and and we can we can then say we can then say i mean because because i mean it worked uh at the end i mean like okay fine that was like his backup plan after several other plans didn't work well i guess we'll go with this one
00:21:31
Speaker
But during the, so in carrying this project out, he roped in a lot of much nicer people into unwittingly helping him or wittingly but reluctantly helping him. And Baron was one of them, Baron was probably the chief of them. And so Baron was there and time in his student comes in and he's saying, he tells him, sir, I think there's something wrong with the bloodline project.
00:22:00
Speaker
Baron's like, I know, no. Ben's like, no, seriously. These subjects that you are developing in these test tubes, basically test tube people, are not forming bonds with the land.
00:22:19
Speaker
And basically he's saying that the Bloodline Project is creating people who do not have mana ties. So they don't have the ability to channel mana basically or do magic, but they'll hear something worse about it. If you don't have mana ties and you don't have bonds to the land, you don't have empathy for anything.
00:22:43
Speaker
And that's what Timon was kind of saying is like, it won't work. You're going to create like people who don't care or aren't able to relate to other people. Like this is probably bad. And Baron's like, oh, okay. Well, Erza said we have to do it, so we're gonna do it.
00:23:10
Speaker
Um, and so that, that kind of talk, um, uh, that, that exchange included terms like, you know, you know, times like, for example, you know, being bound to the wood gives you an affinity for green manna being bound to the mountain. I grew up in the mountains and loving the mountains means you have an affinity for red manna and so on and so forth.
00:23:35
Speaker
So in this is a case where it's very explicit, where they're saying manna is tied to specific parts of land. And we do see this, you know, a number of places during that era of storytelling, Taya's example story is a perfect example of that. It's a distillation of that. But we see these references again and again in different
00:24:03
Speaker
in different pieces of fiction. I would say by and large, it's not called out as overtly today as it was in Bloodlines and other stories of past eras, but it's still there from time to time.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. That's one that I hadn't thought about when we were kind of, I was thinking about this topic and sort of talk about it until you brought it up Reinhardt, but I'd love that, that idea, the mechanic that literally is, is mana tied to lands. Again, we're using lands as a game piece.
00:24:36
Speaker
to produce the energy we need for our spells in a game resource fashion. But I love that idea that I'd forgotten because I'd read some of these books. I hadn't read Bloodlines, but I read all of The Gathering Dark, which is one that you mentioned in the notes too, and that Ice Age cycle years ago. And I remember them having some mentions of drawing mana from the lands that these people had spent time in or grew up in or had experiences in.
00:25:05
Speaker
And so that, that mechanic being tied into the actual story is one that I think is, I love that, but also. Even if you go back to a Malthos point of view, you look at a card from Alpha fast bond, it is like the idea that you're generating a quick bond with the land.
00:25:23
Speaker
That's a good one. That's a really good call. Yeah. And so it's just it's I think that's super cool. But I also can see where I, you know, we're talking about novels that are novel link story, as opposed to the the much shorter space that stories is have these days to there isn't as much room to throw some extra words at some of these concepts and things like this.
00:25:48
Speaker
I mean, to be fair, it, it, it can be really awkward to bring up because again, like in a practical sense, the players do know these things and it's very, it's very tied to gameplay in a way that you could talk about it mechanically, strategy, things like that. You know, I tap for mana. I have this many, many mana in my mana pool at this one time. I think that the story, this is my conjecture.
00:26:18
Speaker
the story team really wants to approach it so it doesn't cause this, doesn't cause like a schism within yourself like, wait a second, this is weird. There's nothing wrong with it, it just feels weird to have a story with people and characters that are, you know, we try to make them as three-dimensional as possible, talk about
00:26:42
Speaker
using the same words as we do when we're playing a game. Right. That's part of it. Yeah, we've gotten more lately, language has shifted more to like talking about pulling mana from the ley lines. And that that tends to be more specific towards mages like Nissa who pull their energy from the plane itself.
00:27:08
Speaker
And they don't tend to talk about it. You know where Chandra generates hers from her emotions mostly
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, and you have different characters. Magic is described more individual to them. I'm thinking of like, Tamio, like telling stories that cause magical effects. And it allows them to characterize the characters more specifically. And it's maybe economical in that way, where you get to know a lot more about, you know, a Chandra and a story that she's in based on how she's casting her spells.
00:27:44
Speaker
verse is different than somebody else who's in that same story casting their spells in a different way. I think those are both points that are really interesting and really didn't occur to me. A lot of the older characters who were described as planeswalkers, whether it be Urza or Tefesat or Taser, they were ostensibly wizards.
00:28:14
Speaker
But nowadays, they really have widened the spectrum of what could be a planeswalker. So Luca, I don't believe Luca was ever truly described as hot.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, he was never really described as a wizard, was he? No. He was an animal control officer. Yeah, so he had powers.
00:28:45
Speaker
And perhaps of his powers, you know, were augmented by mana, but he didn't like study a spell book or anything. Yeah, or cast spells, do anything in any way like that. Any of the stuff he was doing was through manipulating animals or direct brute force. So I think that gives a license a little bit to kind of
00:29:10
Speaker
take a little bit more general license on how to embody
00:29:19
Speaker
the meta game mechanic into stories. Yeah, which I think it's that's cool. But I do appreciate how the story why they might have obscene that don't know for sure. And then the story teams have changed over time. It's been different folks sort of working both at Wizards and writing the stories themselves, but can appreciate probably why some of the reasons at least that we can see and there's probably more that you can't but
00:29:49
Speaker
I do. I'm so glad you brought that because that's such a cool thing. I hadn't even thought of it because that there's so many mechanics like that are sort of invisible in a way like we know that's how that works as part of the game. But we don't think about that in universe like the concept of tapping something.
00:30:06
Speaker
You know, I, by and large, we think of that as a physical action. We're turning the thing to show that it's used, but I mean, that's, that's a tone that goes back a long time to like you tap something with, with a well, or you're tapping, you know, you're, you're pulling something out of a thing. So, you know, if you're tapping a land, you're pulling the energy out of the land to do something with it. And now that land is exhausted, that energy is used. That's why you can't use that land until the next turn.
00:30:35
Speaker
Which even goes back to originally when they had mono and poly artifacts, which was the same idea as, you know, mono artifacts, they didn't have the tap symbol on them. You could just only use them once per turn. His idea was that you drain the energy from them for the turn. Yep. That's that. That's another really good call too. Yeah. And then later added the tap symbol to them to make that clear that that's what you had to do with them. But yeah.
00:31:03
Speaker
So I did want to mention too, so talking about the colors of magic, one thing I think I've talked about is the throne, when we go at least as far back as the throne, which was pretty far back in Dominari's history, they did not have a concept of the colors of mana.
Thran Empire's Mana Interaction
00:31:21
Speaker
And I'm curious, and maybe you would know this either of you, but
00:31:28
Speaker
If that was sort of that era, or if that was more a Thrawn thing because they were so dedicated to artifacts, it kind of didn't matter what the colors of mana were. It all powered the artifacts the same. My belief is the latter. Yeah, that is also my belief. Yeah, and that is because ancient Zalfir was a contemporary of the Thrend Empire. And ancient Zalfir did have some measure of magical ability. In fact, they were
00:31:59
Speaker
more advanced than the Thran, but we just didn't have a novel about them. It would be really cool to have one.
00:32:13
Speaker
I'm sure a lot of our listeners aren't even really familiar with the Thrawn as they were a super advanced civilization about 6,000 years prior to the current storyline where Yawgmoth was actually contemporary with the Thrawn and started a civil war and destroyed the civilization. It's kind of the whole birth of Phyrexia timeframe.
00:32:40
Speaker
But they were a heavily industrialized civilization, had a giant floating city called Halasan, or Halcyon. But everything was powered by power stones, which caused magical cancer, which they didn't figure out.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, until pretty late. And then they went and talked to Yagmoth about it, which was a bad idea. And he was still like a person, and not a cloud at the time. Yeah, he was still he was still a dude, which, I mean, is
00:33:21
Speaker
awesome and ridiculous. Like that, the Thran book is such a, it's a fun read. But again, when you slow down and you're like, it's just a dude, how is it getting away with all this? It's really hilarious. But once Teo was right, like the, it's a mechanized civilization in a way that really I think Dominaria hadn't ever seen before, or really since.
00:33:52
Speaker
So they heavily used magic without understanding it. They just knew if they stuffed a bunch of energy into these stones, they could then power technology with these stones. And then they also figured out they could make giant bombs with them as well.
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah, and some of that kind of seeds its way into some other sets, particularly stuff with Urza's history. I know there's a bunch of Thrawn things in the Urza's saga. Urza's Destiny, I think, some of those sets. Yeah, Thran Dynamo, I think, was in there. But they did.
00:34:32
Speaker
Even though they were heavily, heavily artifact-based, they did seem to have some measure of, if not understanding, probably not understanding of the different kinds of mana. They did seem to be able to use it. The Null Moon is probably the biggest kind of indication for that because it's basically a giant floating white mana battery.
00:35:02
Speaker
And, but it looks like a moon, because it's, it's in orbit. Um, it's, it's a, orbit to keep it out of Yawgmoth's hand. Yes. Yes. I think it's funny that you call it Thrawn Dynamo, the much more useful and usable card Reinhardt, because the one in my head was Thrawn Turbine from that same set. And it's just about, it gives you co-list meta during your upkeep and then it,
00:35:32
Speaker
is gone. Like you have to you can't use it for spells. So wait, oh, wait, so it slowly kills you with the old rules, right? Unless you have it unless you can put it into a machine, basically. Yeah, that's perfect.
00:35:49
Speaker
Oh my god, that's, that's great. That's exactly what we're talking about. Yeah. Also great to flow your text from that era. When Urza asked the via Shino what it did, they answered it hums. Yeah. So that
00:36:08
Speaker
But yeah, and then there's just out of curiosity, I punch thread and describe fall. And there's a few cards and it's a thing that shows up in a lot of the Dominaria sets too. They like to just throw a random thing that just says, thread on here just as a kind of a callback to that. Their artifacts are still sort of found and persisting 6,000 years later in game. Just that's how many machines and things they built that some of them are still up and running well into the future.
00:36:37
Speaker
or maybe some of them are around and people, some of them people are getting back running. Yeah, I mean, the mana rig that just, you know, they just exploded at the end of the most, you know, Dominaria United was a Thran artifact. Yes. I mean, going, Alex, going back to, you know, a little in our conversation,
00:37:03
Speaker
I think it's pretty clear that at least on Dominaria, within certain spheres, the knowledge of the colors of mana and the basics of how they work is known. I think a really interesting thing, coming from your examples especially,
00:37:24
Speaker
you know, how much is that known on other planes? You know, lest we forget, Dominario is once the center of the multiverse. It's not anymore, although I don't know where it is now.
Deeper Understanding of Mana on Magic Planes
00:37:39
Speaker
So, you know, which worlds do you think would be more knowledgeable about it? I feel like it's another one of those. I think you kind of alluded to it either before recording or on the recording.
00:37:53
Speaker
There's definitely knowledge. He said Dominari definitely has some but in other places I think it kind of comes down to certain people who are connected in certain ways I would say just because It's big and there's lots of people there Ravnica is a city world. There's gonna be a critical mass of People who are gonna be more knowledgeable about I mean, that's that's a whole point of some of these skills is just experimenting on stuff and so you're you're in a society where
00:38:22
Speaker
You get enough people crammed together. You can start to get to a point where some number can make enough food so that not everybody has to make food all the time.
00:38:32
Speaker
That's just kind of how, that is one of the big benefits of having a city. And so Ravnica is going to be a place where there's lots of people who can pursue things that aren't strictly survival. Lots of planes have that, but I think Ravnica probably has a higher level of that. And then of course you'll have things like, especially with the guilds, that's a place where there probably is larger public understanding of the five colors, simply because you have the balance between all the guilds, as you were talking about earlier, Taya. I think that would probably do it.
00:39:02
Speaker
Random Joe Citizen may not quite understand all of those details, but they probably have more of those pieces than on any other plane. And then you'll have folks like Niv Mizzet, who probably understand most or all of those details for being an old dragon who's been experimenting on stuff and then also whatever. I would expect that on a plane like Ravnica, like a Magic Theory 101 class has an understanding of the five colors of magic.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah. So it's probably a large portion of the educated, a larger portion than you'd have on most other places. Arcavios being another one where I think it's just part of the curriculum. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the few planes that's really aware of other planes and the fact that you have plane talkers as teachers. That might change in the near future. That would be interesting as well. Yeah.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm very interested to see how that goes. If we, you know, whenever we get a return to Strixhaven, but we've got a, you know, I'd assume that we get some kind of understanding there. Yeah, I mean, and Strixhaven has. So how in fiction was that
00:40:30
Speaker
What was it called? Sort of the extra treatment where they had all those spells in districts having packs from all these different things. Oh, the mystical archive. Mystical archives. I mean, it was kind of, you know, I mean, like the fiction was hinted at that these are all spells that are in the Great Library.
00:40:47
Speaker
Right. Right. Okay. The Biblioplex. Biblioplex. Yeah. The repository of any spell that had been cast in the entire multiverse. Okay. Makes it a very dangerous place, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of some of those legendary spells from Dominaria that are
00:41:08
Speaker
be a little dangerous to just have sitting in a library. I mean, you know, you can you can do a lot, you know, spells that must be in there if it's every spell is the elder spell. Yeah. Yeah. And like, what was Freilice's spell that broke the Ice Age? The world spell. Yeah. That's that's an interesting idea.
00:41:34
Speaker
Whichever board wipe-out Nixleis used to wipe out his homeworld. Oh, yeah. I think he did it the old-fashioned way, one by one. It was a planeswalker at the time. Yeah, I don't know what that supports, but it just gives a lot more capacity to do whatever nonsense he wanted to be doing. I think another twist on
00:42:03
Speaker
on like the different mana is how creatures, you know, like we have the card cost, the mana cost for creatures. And what might that say about them? Should we read everything into that? Is that just
00:42:23
Speaker
Kind of a rendering of who they are in as a game piece like it's really interesting to I've thought about just about different characters when I when I they've been handed to me Yeah, that's that's an interesting idea is it is it Obviously from a from a gameplay standpoint There's a lot of game balancing if that goes into it and that's where even set to set you'll have the same function has a different cost but
00:42:52
Speaker
that's interesting and interesting especially from a creature standpoint is it like a more mana because it requires more to pull it to you not necessarily because it's more powerful yeah that's I think you can look at the cards from the Lord of the Rings set and really
00:43:10
Speaker
really ask them those questions because you have the same character represented multiple times with vastly different costs or color identities. That is an interesting idea. That's something that I think they've done more and more with is try to give cards, creature cards to the same character multiple times in a single set to kind of show passage through time, growth through time, something like that.
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, in sets where that makes sense, I think it's pretty, it's an interesting technique where it's like in Brothers War made a lot of sense too, because it's a set that was covering, you know, a
00:43:54
Speaker
long period in ancient history, plus a period of modern history all in one set. So having multiple versions of the same legends in the sets made a lot of sense. Yeah, and that's, that is a topic we've, we've talked to with somebody, there's probably more there to dig into, because it is interesting, both the over the time thing, how people shift
00:44:15
Speaker
but also there's just the the concept that any given person is a multitude and that's just people and and the car a given card is kind of representing a person in that snapshot not just that snapshot of time but perhaps that like what they're doing and even within that time maybe their color bands would be a little different if they were at home or at work or you know on the battlefield literally like in not just a game mechanic thing but
00:44:46
Speaker
That's an interesting concept, especially the Lord of the Rings set. I hadn't thought about looking at the different printings of those legends in that way within that set, which I've now pulled up an attempt to do after we're done recording at some point. Yeah. For the people, they're probably not listening to this podcast anyways, but if you're mad about Black Aragon, too bad.
00:45:14
Speaker
Well, I think that The Rings is not a magic story. I think that's actually a very unique and good kind of benchmark, right? Like you can see, you could pick apart
00:45:31
Speaker
the concepts of the colors because it's an outside force. You could pick apart the concept of how does green apply to these characters? How does white apply to these characters? Red and so on.
00:45:48
Speaker
You could ask, oh, is it consistent to how they're depicted? Is it because they have the same abilities, that they're both red-white? And I think that's a fun exercise. It's cool to see that. But it actually can elicit, oh, some insight. Because they're not magic characters and so
00:46:12
Speaker
Because the cards kind of shape who the character is in a really interesting way. You know, it shapes how we perceive the characters both in the game and the story, but it also shapes how the writers perceive them. Oh, you know, Chandra.
00:46:31
Speaker
Chandra is always red. So there's a certain way you picture her and a certain way she's rendered in art and a certain way you believe that she might act in a certain time or, you know, given a certain stimulus. So like, I think what's cool is the Lord of the Rings actually can show us a little bit more, can shed a little bit more insight on how the colors might be coordinated.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a good point too, thinking about how the story and the cards in a normal magic set are built separately. In recent years, it's a closer, they have better ideas. They've been making the game for a long time, so they're better at what they're doing, but way, way, way back in the day, you'd get so many significant characters that never show up in cards because the story was written so far after.
00:47:29
Speaker
But even to today, you're still going to have things where there's like green, you know, they're going to have a card designed and maybe the mechanics aren't set on it, but they're going to know this is a green, legendary creature. If that fits someone that's in the story, cool. If not, we have to make up a new character.
00:47:48
Speaker
so you're going to have characters sort of get color identities by the mechanics to some degree as well. Or they're going to know we don't have room for this many blue planeswalkers or whatever because we know Chase is here, we know this character is here, we know that character is here. This other planeswalker can't be blue just from a game balance sample.
00:48:12
Speaker
Right. And I do think that probably determines who shows up in stories a lot of the times is just mechanically who's going to who fits in the set. And that'll determine who's actually going to show up in the story. Yeah, I think the designers, I think.
00:48:30
Speaker
I remember reading some of Mark Rosewater's articles. He indicated that, you know, that can play a role in, you know, that they'll say, oh, you know, XYZ person can't appear in here because we're way too overloaded on green plants, walkers or green legendaries. But could someone else appear here, you know, and then story and design can work that way? At least that's what I've read.
00:48:59
Speaker
which makes a lot of sense. It's really, I mean, why not? More voices make it a better story and a better experience. I think insights can be gleaned from all sorts of sources. All right. I think we're kind of getting to the end of this. Do either of you have anything more you kind of want to add to this topic?
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:49:25
Speaker
No, Reinhardt noted a lot of other color
00:49:30
Speaker
references in our notes and I think we could go on those for another while. We could go a long time. We could go a long time on this and you had some really good notes and I did just want to say thank you for doing some prep on this and I appreciate that we've gotten to talk about this. I always love having this level of detail and
00:49:57
Speaker
love having you on the podcast and talking about this because you always bring this, you know, this deep knowledge that is great to have on the show. Oh, it's my my pleasure. And it's just great fun for me to, to talk about this stuff. And I love doing research. So it was, it was just a lot of fun to like go through some of these books and be like, Oh, there, there's another example. All right, you know, and, and, you know, I invite
00:50:25
Speaker
All the listeners, you know, grab if you happen to have some magic novels or want to read through some magic fiction, you'll find that, you know, you'll find references in the weirdest places. Like, you know, I found some from, from Fifth Dawn, where Glyssa is talking about, you know, having affinity for
00:50:48
Speaker
green manna because she's from the tangle and that the moon is made of pure green manna in that case.
00:50:57
Speaker
And that's I'm like, wow, you know, even even on Mirrodin, they were they were talking about that stuff or there's the I mean, you could even go to War of the Spark itself, the War of the Spark novel. And there are there are very few, but there are some instances where specific colored mana is is
00:51:19
Speaker
is remarked about. So the traces of that stuff is still there. And I think as the fiction will go on, I'm sure there will be more. I mean, it's one of the most unique aspects of the magic multiverse is the magic system. And the magic system is really, really, really cool. And anyone who can.
00:51:48
Speaker
try and pick up the Ice Age novels, so The Gathering Dark, Eternal Ice, Shattered Alliance, and read those through. And that's like a course. That gives everything you need to know about the depths of, at least the depths of the in-world understanding of the color pie. And they're great fun. Jeff Grubb is a wonderful, wonderful author.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah, and also go read the Feldman story. That one's free online. Also, Jeff Grum. I will see if we can find that and get that in the show notes with Dr. Hobbs and see if we can get that in there. All right. Well, I think that does it for this week. Thank you, Taya. Thank you, Reinhard, for coming.
00:52:38
Speaker
all that research and thanks everyone for listening. Yeah, remember to send in your sound bites. We want to feature you on our fifth anniversary episode. Absolutely. And that'll be coming in the coming weeks. We'll probably throw something on Twitter and our Discord. If you are interested in joining our Discord is free. There's a channel or two that's for patrons, but most of it is available to everybody. There's lots of good conversations there and we'll be sharing more details about that stuff there. Everybody have a good night.
00:53:08
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find all of the hosts on Twitter for now. Hobbs can be found at HobbsQ, Tay can be found at Taya Transcendence, and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to the Goblin War Pod on Twitter, or email us at goblinwarpodcast at gmail.com.
00:53:30
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood Gob's Hugs, our link trade can be found on our Twitter account and in the description of today's show. This has everything from various discount codes to the link for our Patreon. The music for today's show was by Wintergotten, who can be found at vintergotten at bandcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at stevereffel on Twitter. Gob and Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing forthos content.
00:53:58
Speaker
Check them out on Twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.