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Episode 127: Legendary Legends, a Visual History
128 Plays4 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! And we are back with a look at our friend Jay Annelli's book on the Legends of the Multiverse. This fantastic book is a visual history with plenty of amazing artwork. Perfect for an audio podcast to talk about right??
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and Goblin Enthusiasts
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today we're doing something a little different. We're talking about a book.
00:00:43
Speaker
I don't know. I couldn't come up with a good way to... Yeah, we're talking about a book. Yeah, as opposed to eating them, I guess. I don't know. Oh, that's Orcish Librarian. I know, but orcs are our friends, which we'll get into later. They cast and sometimes they have good ideas. That is true. That is true. In this case, though, we have another friend, friend of the show, Jay and Ellie.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yes. And I think officially designated friend of goblins as well as we'll talk about. I think so. I think Jay has always been very pro goblin and this book makes it known to the world. Yes. So why don't we introduce ourselves and then we'll talk about the book and
00:01:27
Speaker
Go from there.
Magic Legends and Deck Building
00:01:28
Speaker
So I'm Alex Newman, found on Twitter, at Mel underscore chronicler. My pronouns are he, him. And for today's episode, or for today's question, we'll just do kind of a quick one that fits the theme of the book we're talking about. What's one legend that you'd like more story about in Wizard Story? So I'm going to go way back to a legend from legends.
00:01:53
Speaker
the first set, in fact, to have legendary creatures. And I'm going to say I want some more story about Zyra
00:02:01
Speaker
Irene? Irene? I've never known. She is an insect wizard, which is fantastic. A card from Legends. A 1, 2 flying insect for black, red, green that has black, red, green tap draw card. It's a target player draws a card.
00:02:25
Speaker
John, draw cards. Yeah, kind of a weird thing from, you know, before they really got the color pie all figured out. But I love this creature. A, I've always, you know, the draw card has always been, you know, three of the strongest words of magic. But also when years ago, six-ish years ago, I can't remember how long I've had my John's lands deck together now. But when I was looking to build, I wanted to build Gitrog Monster,
00:02:51
Speaker
Plus seismic assault and just a really fun combo of I get to throw lands at you and draw cards for doing it But I needed a gitrog is only green black. So I needed a green black, right? I needed a junk legend
00:03:08
Speaker
And at the time, this was one of my forerunners. There was a few others that I was kind of looking at, but ultimately Zyra ended up playing really well for me. She's a cheap three-cost creature, so I can cast it right away. And with the card draw, it basically is kind of a safety veil for the deck. If I don't get stuff going early, then I'm starting to draw two cards a turn.
Narrative Potential in Magic
00:03:32
Speaker
and having a 1-2 flyer as my commander means I can sometimes use the Trump block something big, and it's a great card for helping me kind of buy time to build into what I'm trying to do with my deck, even though it has nothing to do with the main theme. And since then, we've got Lord Windgrace, who is a planeswalker commander that has land stuff going on. We've got a few other things.
00:03:57
Speaker
through all this time, I still have Zara as my commander. So it'd be kind of cool to have some story. I'll be honest, there might be a little bit from way back in the day, but the stories back then were kind of scattered and I'm not super familiar with them. So I don't think we have a lot about this character.
00:04:14
Speaker
think it's super likely we'll get any but I think it would still be also insect wizard just fantastic creature type it is it's it's it's you know and not in blue cuz I think of like insectile like I was thinking of like a delver
00:04:32
Speaker
Mmm, that's true. That's true, there's a lot of insect wizards on Amstrad and Blue, but not many in Jund on Dominari. Yeah, not in not Blue, basically.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, well, I am Hobbs Q. I can be found on Twitter at Hobbs Q. My pronouns are he, him. It's funny because I actually went straight back to because once again, we did not even have a question necessarily. So there was no time for us to share answers yet. I went back to a character from Legends also.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I went with the fact that like legends, well, it's just funny because we think of how surnames are used and how less than fantastical it was at one point, where we have Angus Mackenzie. We have our really good Scottish man who is completely modeled after Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python.
00:05:27
Speaker
confirmed by Brian Wackowitz as I talked to him at GP Vegas one year and was just like, I've always loved this card because it's an enchant, like you can use it in an enchanter's text and it looks like Tim the enchanter. And he told me, he's like, yeah, I got the assignment right after I had just been finished watching Money Python. So it's totally intentional. Well, you know, I was looking at the story that we have for Angus and like the Wikipedia page or the game of PDF page literally has like a quote.
Mental Health Advocacy
00:05:55
Speaker
about Angus McKenzie being Caracas's greatest defender. His policy of peace through perseverance inspired the people of this realm to unite and drive out the malign elements that were tearing them apart from within. And he's also mentioned in the flavor text of Lady Orca. So I was wondering where that, you know,
00:06:14
Speaker
That lying about the greatest defender of Caracas and there's a link to a Gavin very Instagram post Which he he had found a calendar that matched up with the year that it was that was a magic the gathering from 1997 calendar, you know like one those pages a day calendar like the terror part ones and
00:06:36
Speaker
where you get a new character or thing every single day. And that's exactly where that quote came from. That is on the Magic the Gathering calendar from 1997. And that's basically the entirety of our story for Angus McKenzie. So I would love to have Angus story, I think similar to what Alex was saying, with Zira, very, very unlikely. But yeah, I would love to have more of that.
00:07:05
Speaker
Before we jump into kind of the main things that we are going to talk about today, especially when it comes to the topic of legends, because as you can tell, we're probably leaning to that theme. We just want to do a couple of housekeeping things and make sure that we give a shout out to the Grinding Coffee Company.
00:07:21
Speaker
So our partners that have partnered with us to be able to offer just great coffee and a discount for y'all. They are a black owned LGBT ran coffee company who just have partnered with gamers.
00:07:38
Speaker
We also are coming out of this is our first episode outside of suicide awareness month. So September was suicide awareness month. Uh, we, we did kind of a, just at least we're highlighting that topic and we continually will, as we always do talk about mental health, bring forward that, but I just wanted to kind of give that acknowledgement to September is where we're living it. Um, realizing, you know, suicide awareness is not something that ends. It's just that September is the month that's kind of devoted to it. So.
Gameplay Strategies and Events
00:08:08
Speaker
Now, my time travel chops are not always the best, but I believe this will be our first cast coming out after your stream event.
00:08:19
Speaker
So no, the stream event. The first one we recorded after the stream event. It's not great. No. So yeah, so thank you for reminding me of that because of the timeline, the many timelines, much like Tarkier. We mentioned last time that when we were recording the last episode that Chase and I would be doing
00:08:39
Speaker
a we were doing a game together and that went amazingly I think it ended up raising close to 40 a little over 4000 I believe was a total raised for nami so the national alliance for mental illness I played six hours worth of games on that day including
00:09:04
Speaker
Clark, Sakashima, that was not quite CEDH, but very few of those games went past turn three. So they were not tuned in the sense of like full on, but they were, we got in, in a two hour span, we played five games.
00:09:21
Speaker
Which was just, yeah. And I got to win by getting off Jessica's will, copying it, making a ton of mana, exiling cards, basically untapping lands using frantic search with Karkout to stitch in time and win enough flips to get enough turns banked that I would be getting it back into my hand every time.
00:09:45
Speaker
I had to kirk some out so the likelihood is that I would get to keep returning it to my hand and get at least one extra turn per time as well as everything else. So I get to flip a lot of coins. Holy moly. If you get to flip coins, you're doing well.
00:10:04
Speaker
That's fun. That sounds like fun. And so, like, I just have to throw this out there in case people don't know this. I did not realize the power of the if you control your commander cards. So the red one and the blue one. So the blue one counters it on creature and the red lets you switch the target of a spell. It's an automatic guarantee that you will get to use that spell because even if you lose the coin flipped, it comes back to your hand and you get to cast it for free.
00:10:30
Speaker
Cause they cast for free if you have your commander out. So lose a coin flip, it doesn't matter. You basically just get to keep recasting it until you win. Sounds like just good old non spike commander going on. It was very chaotic. You know, you're at the mercy of the coins and people's decks definitely were not, not, and definitely not made to take advantage of that.
00:10:58
Speaker
But yeah, so that did happen. So we're out of Suicide Awareness
Book Discussion: 'Legends, a Visual History'
00:11:01
Speaker
Month. But yeah, we raised money for NAMI again, and we'll continue to kind of keep doing these things as we have the opportunities. Excellent.
00:11:11
Speaker
All right, then do we want to stop teasing the topic? Like actually say the topic? Hey, let's talk about books. Yeah. So we're going to talk about books. One, one book in particular, we want to talk about legends, a visual history by JNLE. Yes. Visual history is very perfect for an audio format. Yes. I very specifically have right in my show notes here, uh,
00:11:39
Speaker
Despite the book literally having a visual history in the subtitle, which would suggest it being poor for an audio-only format, I think there's actually a lot for us to talk about here. Yeah, and I will say this too. If you've not seen these books, so there's two of them out there by Jay. So the first one was Legends of Visual History, and then there's Planes of the Multiverse of Visual History. And while they are visual, there are also blurbs, which is kind of what we're going to get into today. And more importantly,
00:12:10
Speaker
the cover art for the the dust jacket for legends of visual history has a gobbo we got a goblin front and center we got crinko yep right on the throat you know it's a good book
00:12:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And the book is nice and smaller than I was expecting. It's not super tiny, but I was expecting a big coffee table book. We should say when we say smaller, we don't necessarily mean shorter. No, we literally mean this is kind of a smaller dimension of a book. Yes. Very interesting. These books are done in a smaller dimension that I think then like you said, you were expecting the first time.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit bigger than like a normal mass market paperback, a little taller than that, but closer than I was expecting. I was expecting this to be a bigger, I know like by and large, I don't know, coffee table book is actually a common term people understand.
00:13:08
Speaker
Those are usually foot, I don't know, I've heard it. Well, if you've ever seen the art books, like The Art of Zendikar, The Art of Innistrad, it's not no size large. No. And I was expecting around that size. Because those, at least from what I gather, the idea is that you kind of leave them out for people to flip through. I mean, and this book fits for that really well. It's just much smaller, which is nice. It's much more handheld, which I appreciated.
00:13:32
Speaker
Um, it was easier to sit and actually read through it. Cause as you say, there's a lot of pictures, which is great. There's a lot of really good art, but there's also, you know, paragraph, two paragraphs for a lot of these characters that are in here. And some of them get a little bit more than that, but I'm just picturing now. It's like, this is a coffee table book for your studio apartment, not for a house. Yes. For, you know, we, you don't have a lot of rooms. You have a smaller table, small coffee table, and you need a small book for people to look through. Yes, exactly.
00:14:03
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's probably enough for that, because actually it doesn't work super well to keep talking about the visuals of this. Do you want to start before we get into the actual content? So it's broken up really nicely by a number of different planes in Magic, and then talking about a number of characters in each of those planes. And one thing we'll get into a little bit is the selection of that can be interesting.
00:14:30
Speaker
I do want to talk about the foreword before we talk about that though. So it was a great little thing, a little blur by Jay just talking about his experiences with magic. But right in the first paragraph,
00:14:44
Speaker
He drops Squeak Goblin Nabob. Yeah, talking about like one of the rare in the first pack that he kind of, you know, begging his parents to buy him a pack of brand new Mercadian masks and kind of opening it. There was the creatures and the spells and then kind of the rare in the back being Squeak Goblin Nabob.
00:15:04
Speaker
with art depicting a goofy-looking goblin in full leadership regalia. If you have never seen the original art for Squeak, Goblin, and the Bob, I highly recommend going and checking it out. It's probably not the Squeak that you're thinking of seeing.
Legendary Rule and Storytelling
00:15:20
Speaker
But this was it. It was a goblin legend. And Jay said, is that person so interested in story at that age?
00:15:33
Speaker
what it was a legend, right? Like, just like, you don't know. But if it's right there on the type line, you have a goblin that has somehow become legendary. Yes. And he talks a little bit about, you know, what does, you know, what does that mean? What's it called? Who was this creature who was cool enough to be called a legend as a line right from the forward like, and we talked about this a long time ago, I realized,
00:15:58
Speaker
we we did a what does it mean to be an elder i think we talked about legends a little bit but yeah i think like episodes like episode five i think joe and i did the legend episode yeah and all the bit we well we did all the iterations of legendary yeah and and so i that may be something we want to come back to but this seems you know it's a relevant thing that
00:16:22
Speaker
From a story standpoint, there's this wait, and especially early on in the set, the Legends, like the Legend Rule worked very different, where I can go through the whole iteration of it, but just as an idea for people who didn't play back then, that was a long time ago, that was 94. Back then, you could only have one of each Legend in your deck, and when one was in play, I believe the first iteration was, you couldn't play a second. Nobody could play a second.
00:16:50
Speaker
No, if the first one's out you could not play a second one and then the the next iteration I believe was if you played it if you weren't the first one to play it and you played yours it would just disappear and then we got
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, we got blue each other up. Yep. And it changed, you know, when at some point you could play more than one. But it was this whole idea that being a legend had weight, it had significance, it meant something. I mean, and even today, it does a little bit from a mechanical standpoint, legends get more stats, if it makes sense. They have a higher card budget because from design standpoint, because you can only have one in play.
00:17:37
Speaker
They also obviously commander is a very big significance to it. If a creature is legendary, now it can become your commander and that creates different motivations for them to make different things legendary so that there can be different interesting commanders, not just from story, but then also from deck building techniques. But early on, it was all about story.
00:18:01
Speaker
These are story or lack of story, but the idea that it was about evoking story. Yes. As we said, you know, the first set legends had like 50 or 60 legends or something like there isn't magic story for all of these characters. I think there may be blurbs, but there isn't actually stories that feature them because there's just so many and I believe a lot of them were based off of like Z&D characters from the people who designed the set, which is kind of fun.
00:18:29
Speaker
But so that's that's a whole other topic. So we've talked about that maybe we come back to that some other time, but I think
00:18:37
Speaker
Oh, that's right. One other sort of general thing about this, and we'll see how much we get into this before we get to particular characters. It is interesting to think about when you look at something like this, when you look at the planes of the multiverse book, you look at commander legends and commander sets where they bring back legends from 10, 20 different worlds.
00:18:59
Speaker
It's very interesting to look at and think about what exactly we're seeing, because there are so many worlds and so many characters that Wizards have to be very particular when they pick out who are going to appear. Obviously, in this case, we're having Jay, who is the writer who probably had some input. We're going to have creative has some input. There's going to be things that are going to be more recency bias, like the most recent sets are going to be in here, like Eldraine.
00:19:29
Speaker
and Ikoria were both in here, which would have been two of the most recent sets after this book came out. And so there's going to be some of that. There's going to be the Dominaris and the Ravnicos that are just well known. But then there's going to be a few that are stuck in there because Wizards wants us to keep them in mind because stuff is going to happen. And it's always interesting when we go through some of this stuff to kind of think about
00:19:55
Speaker
We know that things have been seeded in the past. We know that things have been mentioned, but a lot of things get mentioned. Yes. There's always some red herring, so just because it's mentioned doesn't mean anything's coming out about it. Or it might mean they're building toward it. Because we've had characters from Kanagawa for several years in Commander sets popping up here and there.
00:20:17
Speaker
And now, you know, in the last month, we find out this Kamigawa set coming in 2022. So there's things like that. Some of it is going to be them seeding future stuff. Some of it is going to be them putting down things that they can come back to. Talk about that a little bit in narrative set. Sometimes when you're telling a story, you don't know how it's going to end, but you can put down four or five different things now.
00:20:43
Speaker
three books from now, two years from now, whatever, when you're looking to figure out what you can plug into and you're looking to build this next step, you can go back, look through the seeds you laid down and figure out what works best. But in any event, I think we've done enough vamping. Let's... Well, since this is arranged kind of by planes, I'll just say, just let out, one of them, Fioria is mentioned, is the plane that we talked about a little bit with Grenzo.
00:21:13
Speaker
It's the high city. It's the city of Paliano on Fiora is the high city. And that is a plane that has been used in conspiracy. Now, we've had two conspiracy sets. We talked about this a little bit when it came to Grenzo. Could we be setting up that we are returning to this? It's been a fan favorite in terms of multiplayer drafting. So either way, also, we just didn't have a lot of data on it or a lot of info on it. So this is a nice way to kind of maybe package that.
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, and to see a little more. So I think I don't know that we're going to hit every plane. I've got a list of characters I want to talk about. Also, one thing I mentioned the house before, and we'll see what happens. He and I tend to get on long tangents.
00:21:54
Speaker
Sometimes we end up in places that our notes did not cover, but my initial thought is I think we're going to talk about Planes of the Multiverse book.
Ravnica and Key Characters
00:22:07
Speaker
We said I think there's a lot to talk about on this one, so we're going to try to focus on the characters, talk a little bit less about the planes that we may mention some stuff.
00:22:15
Speaker
But then the goal is then when we talk about the next book, then we can extrapolate more and talk about more about the planes themselves in that episode at some point down the line. But so I think we want to start with Ravnica.
00:22:30
Speaker
Why not? We love Ravnica. That's the first section in the book. I think Ravnica is outside of Dominaria. It's the place Magic has spent the most time at this point. And it's spent a lot more time there recently than it did at Dominaria in recent memories. So for newer players, Ravnica is very much kind of the
00:22:51
Speaker
the most common setting for a lot of what people have known. I mean, I would say that, yes, Ravnica is a great, I mean, there's a reason that we've used it as a framework for a lot of episodes. The guilds, you know, the idea of the city world, I mean, there's a lot that really does set up, it lends itself nicely to storytelling and to episodes we've done.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yes, yes, it does. Even as much as Dominaria feels like home to me because I started playing Magic so early, Dominaria has put together a little more slapdash because I think, well, not even I think, it was just they were building the world as they went and so a lot more. And so you have a lot of different parts of it where this block sets here and then they need to do a new block. So they're like, well, somewhere else in the ocean, there's this other continent. And now we're doing this story there. And Ravnica is a lot more cohesive.
00:23:41
Speaker
because they built it that way from the beginning. But then to get into some characters, we got to start with Cranko, right? We got to start with Cranko. Cranko not only gets a blurb in the book, Cranko also gets a shout out in the acknowledgement second at the end. I just want to highlight those before just knowing Jay and his love of goblins. It is funny because his blurb for Cranko says the alleged
00:24:07
Speaker
leader of a goblin criminal cartel yes and then his and i'm sorry listeners you may hear us paging through the book as we go i think i just dropped but um anyway and then the the acknowledgement literally the last paragraph of the entire book is finally a special thanks to cranko
00:24:26
Speaker
The legitimate business goblin who, despite the slander against his name printed in these pages, was gracious enough to still pose for the cover of... Yeah, it's just great. I mean, yeah. But it is true. It's like, it's got the... You know, this has Cranko Bob Boss as the art that they do, so it's focusing on that bit. It's kind of more pre-War of the Spark focus, because it really kind of talks about him being kind of like, he's on the lam right now, is what we know about him. So, newfound cash in his pocket. He's just...
00:24:55
Speaker
rebuilding his criminal empire, whereas in that last we saw him was like looting businesses.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yep, yep. And so we get to start there. It's nice to see Cranko get some representation there. Unfortunately, a few other goblins who at least one who we've talked about recently did not get a page in this book, but that's okay. When this book came out, I made a joke with Jay about like, well, how many goblins were you able to actually get in there? And he joked about like the ones that he had to cut.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I'll say because you go to the contents page and then the there's just a well, probably would have been a blank page. There's nothing specific supposed to be there on the on the left. So it's just it's a picture of Squee, which I appreciate who will get to later. He has a section later in the book, but then he also gets an extra picture just right there and the contents as he deserves. Yeah. After how many years in the story? Like, come on, Squee deserves it. But
00:25:52
Speaker
We get to see Fiblefip in here, which is really cool. I forgot that they did a Totally Lost where he's on top of Bolas' statue for no apparent reason because poor Fiblefip can't catch a break.
00:26:07
Speaker
Poor dude. I appreciate that. I know. You gotta feel bad. I mean, I love the fact that we got to see Fibleth go from being kind of just a lost homunculus to being a legendary creature. And I think that speaks to that fanservice in some ways. Yes.
00:26:25
Speaker
you know, the way that they have had from, you know, so if you look at the art from Totally Lost, it's this lost homunculus. And I mean, they're literally a stuffed animal of it. I have it. It's sitting around here somewhere. It's lost right now. But it's literally a fibble-thump doll. And it became so popular and became such almost like a meme. But at the same time, they use that to develop a legendary version of this lost, scared,
00:26:51
Speaker
Homunculus version of Nora and the Wary. Yes. I mean, and it helps to kind of speak to how community focused this game can be. I mean, sometimes it feels like it isn't as much, but at its best, this game really is the community as part of the game.
00:27:08
Speaker
And that's a thing where that was something the community really picked up on, just from that sort of throwaway card, kind of a throwaway character. And there have been a few others like that who sort of then become, get pulled in more. But yeah, Fibblethip.
00:27:24
Speaker
I appreciate Fibleth getting some representation in this book. And then I don't know, I don't have too much else to hit specifically on Ravnica.
Dominaria's Legendary Lore
00:27:33
Speaker
He does a pretty good job of hitting a lot of the guild leadership to talk about story, recent story in particular, but a little bit of the first couple of Ravnica sets. And I say recent story, I mean more running up to War of the Spark story.
00:27:50
Speaker
But if you don't have anything else in Raphne, I'm going to move on to Dominaria. I mean to Dominaria, which is harder to encompass in a chapter. Yes. It is the most characters of all of these. Now it's a little bit more than Innistrad, which we'll get to.
00:28:08
Speaker
later. Innistrad has a good number too. Actually, Innistrad is more than Ravnica as well. Speaking of fan favorite sets, we'll get to that. I do like how Dominaria section starts off with the five Elder Dragons. Yeah. So I think that is one of the things that is very interesting, right? So, you know, we've done a whole episode on what it means to be Elder and Elder
00:28:32
Speaker
creature type, but to start out with what we first know of is the Elder Dragons. Interestingly, meaning that we don't get Ugin.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yes. Because Uginan's never actually been just a legendary dragon. That's true. He hasn't. To date. To date, yeah. No, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you're right. He's not actually in any of this because he's only been a planeswalker, and this is specifically legendary creatures. Yeah, they talk about the fact that we've got some people that have sparked. Like, we get Bolas, but we get Bolas.
00:29:09
Speaker
as an elder dragon. So, you know, one of the, you know, the five elder dragons that were first showed up in legend again. Yeah. And but I think that's also interesting too, how they structure they start with Ravnica, which, like I said, is kind of the more recent home of magic among the multiverse. And then they go to Dominaria next, and then immediately go back to
00:29:35
Speaker
five legends from legends. So all the legendary dragons were in legends or all the elder dragons were in legends to begin with. So they go all the way back to the beginning of the legendary creature type and talk about these five dragons who not only were in that set and even people who played, you know, people who played back then, even if they didn't have stuff going on with them, you know, you saw those dragons you were aware because they were
00:29:59
Speaker
seven sevens, they were massive, had a lot of stats going on. But also all these stats and abilities and had to be able to, you know, you had to pay upkeep costs on them. Yeah. But also, those five were the the in the creation or vital were part of the creation of commander, just become the most popular format of magic.
00:30:24
Speaker
And so it's interesting, I think it's cool that they're all right there, right at the beginning of that section, of that chapter. And we get Dargaz too, who we talk about a little bit in a couple of our previous episodes. Don't have much more to say on him, but again, putting him after the Elder Dragons is kind of fun. And then we get Yawgmoth and Urza.
00:30:52
Speaker
Erza, who I'm obligated to mention, is the worst. I have to say that in the next breath after I say his name. It's interesting that we, you know, obviously we're going to get Erza. Like, he is so... such a large part of the story of Dominaria. But this is... it talks... well, it's two paragraphs. It's a quick hit. And it's a good quick hit.
00:31:21
Speaker
But I do like that it starts with few beings are more infamous in the multiverse than the planeswalker Urza. And then kind of talks about whose brilliance was matched only by his arrogance. Yeah, talks about the brother's war and then his war with Phyrexia and preparing Dominaria to fight Phyrexia.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really interesting because we get to see, you know, how they're doing this, like, there's so much it's like, you know, each chapter they had to, you have to, like you said, who's cut who isn't, you know, there's ways to be able to tell this
00:31:57
Speaker
Because I'm thinking of like in two pages we get Meritlage which I think is almost once again a nod to kind of the cool thing that Or a joke even that everything is Meritlage You know, I mean that we thought that maybe the moon of Innistrad was Meritlage. I mean everything that is an unknown gets called Meritlage and I think this is a really nice call to it because it's of what that is But we don't get Mishra. We get Orsa. We get a mention of Mishra, but we don't get Mishra
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah, and one thing too, and again we talk about, it's an interesting, the choices that are made, but also the templating choices here, because we have Urza and Yawgmoth both get two pages.
00:32:40
Speaker
A handful of characters get four, where they have one page of description and three pages of art. Most of them in this book only get one page, where they have just a little bit of art and the paragraph. You go to the next page, you know, Joda and Merritt Lage each only get one page. But Urza and Yawgmoth both get two, because then they have the chapter, a little description, and a full page showing their
00:33:08
Speaker
modern horizons cart. That was the set that these both came out in where we got to see both Yawgmoth.
00:33:14
Speaker
as a human before he became a cloud or something. Yawgmoth got weird. And then it's like weirder than Urza. It's strange. Yawgmoth got weird. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it, I think. Yeah. And then the next page you get the same thing. You get Urza has one page of, you know, the paragraph of description with a little cutout of one of his cards, but then the other page, a full page of his art from the card.
00:33:41
Speaker
I can't remember the full name of it, but his card, oh, it's right here, Ursula or Dr. Fesser. I can't remember his card, because Ursula is the worst. But yeah, I just think that's really cool. And like I said, the art in this book is so good.
00:33:58
Speaker
But then on the next page, you mentioned Merit Leige. I mentioned Joda. I did want to say something about Joda, which I thought was really interesting, because he's still around in the modern story. He was in the books. He was in the stories back then. He finally got a card when we went back to Dominaria. And he, I think, could be an interesting contrast to Erza.
00:34:23
Speaker
And that's something I think we need to explore a little more and probably bring on some other story experts to talk about too. But he is an interesting character who, the more I'm kind of reading about him, the more I like him as a character.
00:34:38
Speaker
the more that he's not ersa. The more that he's not ersa. Yeah. Oh, man. So what's really nice is that we then get, you know, so leaving from this, we basically hit the weather light crew. Yeah, you're right. I just want to say before we get into them, they say I just noticed, so not only like she has this full art treatment for on one page, but it actually bleeds into the other page and cool effect.
00:35:02
Speaker
It is a cool fact. I do recommend this book if you haven't picked it up. Yeah, I think I gotta stop talking about visual stuff on the podcast. I'm sorry, like it's... There's a lot of non-visual things in here, but the visual stuff doesn't translate, obviously. I'm sorry, you were saying something about the way the light crew and then I got distracted.
00:35:21
Speaker
by the art because these books are individual history. So good. But yeah, no, we get the actual like, Weatherlight crew. You know, we hit basically all of them from the original Weatherlight saga. So we've talked about them before. But basically, we get Captain Sisay, we get Gerard, we get Tangrath, Miri, and then Squeak. So we kind of hit a good portion of the crew as it stood back then. Not quite all of them, but most of them that show up in the stories.
00:35:52
Speaker
Um, I love this chapter because it also gives us, we get slime foot and yard goal. Yes. And I can say, Oh God, I was going to talk about the art again. This, this is one of my.
00:36:04
Speaker
Okay, there's a handful of cards that I own specifically, and this is a weird thing for myself, but it's a handful of cards I own specifically for art that I have in just a different binder. And some of these are just ridiculously bad cards. There's like Spawn Binder Mage or something, which was like, I think one of the worst
00:36:24
Speaker
What was the new ally mechanic in Return to Zendikar? The party? No, the previous one. We have to tap them and tap allies. Cohort. Cohort, yeah. It's like one of the worst Cohort cards and Cohort is one of the worst mechanics we've had in recent years. So this card is awful, but it is so gorgeous. I got it in foil.
00:36:46
Speaker
because it has a lot of the cause-like weird effect that just sparkles really well in foil. So I have that in there. And then things like I got the Chroma Angels Wrath from the Angels and Demons deck because just the chippy art on that card is just so good.
00:37:06
Speaker
That's in the book, by the way. I think I put in our show notes. The page with the art from the Angels and Demons Duel Deck is worth the cover price of the book itself. That's my opinion. The Chippy art. I mean, to be fair, Chippy is very, very good art. Yes. And also, that wasn't me being smart. That was the book attributing the art to the artists, which is very, very good.
00:37:32
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, like you said, we get Slimefoot, who is one of the new...
00:37:40
Speaker
whether like people, you know, we get Yargo, which is just Yargo, I guess, was fun. It's harmless, fun, silliness to the point where, you know, there was a secret layer where Yargo is in the artwork of a bunch of cards and people celebrate Yargo Day because this card has a ridiculous power toughness stat.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yes. And it's great. It's fun. And again, it's the game, but it's best when it's the community is when there's more. Yeah. Yeah. There's that interaction. Yeah. And then one more to hit the last card in the Dominaria section, we get Lyra Dawnbringer with a quote.
00:38:29
Speaker
Well, that is on the flavor text of the card that I still get missy eyed years after this set came out. Lyra Donbringer, big fancy angel with the wonderful stained glass armor that's part of the Benelish stuff going on in Dominaria. And her flavor text is, you are not alone, you never were. It's a quote from her and it hits me every time.
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, the angels of Dominaria always. Yeah. Next in the book,
New Phyrexia and Narrative Evolution
00:39:04
Speaker
I was struck by, and I think that this kind of is a cool part to do with the story. I so much think of it being Mirrodin, right? I'm just so mindset on the idea of Mirrodin because that's kind of when I started Magic.
00:39:20
Speaker
It's funny because it really it is new Phyrexia. That's what it is at this point. We haven't been back. We talked a lot about that on the show like what is it going to look like and I think this one is in here and I thought of that intentionality to the fact that it's named.
00:39:35
Speaker
new phyrexia specifically named new phyrexia like it even though it some of the legends that are in here it talks about like the very first one is memark is memark who is yeah who died at the end of the first mirrored in series he died while it was still mirrored in well and and thrown the last trolls in here yep
00:39:57
Speaker
Right? Like, Thrun, well, Thrun stumbles across malaria, which is happens with infect later on. But I mean, Thrun is unions. But we have these, but they it's named new phyrexia. And it's very clear to remind us of the mathematical perfection plane once known as merited. Yes. And I think this is one of those
00:40:18
Speaker
We need to be going. Yeah. I don't know. This is again, we can't know. I don't know that this means that we're going to get there soon. I mean, we know 2022. We do. From what we know of the sets that are coming out, this doesn't fit. This is really a schedule. But we've seen bleeds. True. We've seen bleeds. So, four o'clock showed up.
00:40:42
Speaker
But there is just, there's also the thing that, like, like I said, some of it is going to be just things that wizards wants us to keep in mind. Well, the line here of the description of the plane, I know we're not getting into plane today, but it is. We get too deep. But yeah, now only a handful of Mirans are left to struggle against the rebirth of Phyrexia that has dominated their world. Yeah. So it's a reminder.
00:41:05
Speaker
Yep, it's trying to keep it. And there's only a handful, a relative handful of legends here. But, you know, they hit Memnarch who is very significant from the old story. Talk about Glissa. Yep. Who bridges this two stories. I think the only one really that to me is the most interesting is the inclusion of a Traxxa because a Traxxa comes from a
00:41:28
Speaker
Commander Commander product. Yeah, we were very clear to know that this was a like an angel that was basically the complete victory of new fire xe over a meridian. Yes, that was a mirror an angel. Yep. And and that was one that it's interesting. So
00:41:48
Speaker
Okay, real quick, before I forget it, there was one previous legend in this book that is from a Commander product, I believe. Mazirik, who was on Ravnica, I thought was a Commander release, which is interesting. But Atraxa is really, really interesting to me, because this was in the four-color Commander decks, and this is a place where story and mechanics can sometimes inform each other.
00:42:16
Speaker
And so Wizards, they made, people have been clamoring for this for a while because we had the Nephilim who are four color gold cards, but were not legendary because at the time there was no commander. And I think they, well, Mark Rosewater said somewhere, like head designer magic said somewhere that they made them not legendary, hoping that people would play four of them to make them more likely to be played. And it's kind of ironic that time has made that
00:42:44
Speaker
work in the reverse. If they had been legendary, people would be using them today as commanders more widespread. But anyway, so people have been asking wizards to do that. So they made this commander product that had the original partner commanders, two colors who would partner to make four color combos. But each deck had one four color legend. Atraxa is the not red.
00:43:06
Speaker
and it fits mechanically. They were looking to build a legend for all four of these colors or all five of these color combinations so that people could build them. But this also fits to help tell the story because when you look at the story of New Phyrexia, now eventually the Elish Norn starts fighting and some of the, you know, they all start fighting and some of these praetors end up being killed. But
00:43:32
Speaker
The Red Prater, early on, was kind of doing his own thing anyway. Urobresk, sorry, I forgot his name, Urobresk, was kind of doing his own thing to begin with. And from what we've heard, he was actually sheltering the Mirans because, and we'll get into this a little bit later when we talk about Hazoret, I think it's an interesting representation of Red.
00:43:57
Speaker
changed some of its early representation of just sort of black light where it's the orcs and the goblins are in red and they're chaos and they tear things down and that's kind of what they do but they're a little bit less malicious about it than black can be but that's kind of the only difference they're still evil quote-unquote
00:44:16
Speaker
in like D&D terms. And we're seeing now, they've been doing this more and more, but we're seeing lots of places where red is being represented as other things than that. Red is emotion, red is passion, red is, you know, freedom. And so for Urabrask, it was these people deserve to be free, you know, do their own thing. So he was given them shelter. And he also then,
00:44:42
Speaker
wasn't part of Atraxxus, so it's interesting that Atraxxus is in this book, and if some piece of that will come back. I think there's a whole other thing. We're going to have to do a whole episode, I think, talking about the implications of Nufarexia.
00:44:57
Speaker
just colors, just looking at how the Praetors work, because Phyrexia in the early days with Yagmoth was like mono-black, maybe splashing into a few other colors. Yes, like if we look back, I mean, it's more things that were aligned is where the other colors come in. Yeah, but Yagmoth was mono-black himself, every incarnation, sort of. Well, in his cards, like his wills, I mean, Yagmoth's will, everything that belonged to Yagmoth is kind of
00:45:25
Speaker
It's centered black. It's centered black. All of that early stuff. And now they get the Phyrexians kind of without that influence of a specific person at the center of it, it evolved into this force that encompassed all five colors because it was consuming an incredibly manor-rich core of Mirrodin where all the five colors were represented. And then it created sort of this Phyrexian epitome of the five colors, each
00:45:55
Speaker
looking at the world through their own thing. And there's some really interesting stuff there when we get closer to… Even if we want to be just… Since we're talking about legends, the one in here, the only predator that is listed is Elish Norn. Yes. The white phyrexianized…
00:46:13
Speaker
Mirror version of Mirrodin and I think that that says kind of quite a lot based on kind of what the role of Ellish Norn is I mean Ellish Norn was the first card we ever got with Phyrexian text To to really show that showcase that off. Yeah Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that's a really really interesting thing and I glad you called out a Traxitude because it's it'll be oh, yeah and Ellish Norn is one of those characters that gets four pages here with an extra art and an extra quote
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's going to mean it's going to be significant when we do come back to this at some point. I'm just wanting to hit this because I know that I'm realizing where we had for show notes, we've been kind of as we normally do, going more in depth and detail.
00:47:01
Speaker
But I think because of the overall theme, we've talked on this show a lot about that element of white that is too much tied to orthodoxy or too much tied to that. And that is where we see Elish Norn being a flimp in some ways. You mentioned Ur-Abrask. This is also the other way where Wizards was playing against trope or stereotype of what white is.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yep, no, that's a good point, because it's a little bit like the story from Kamigawa, where we had a mono-white villain and a mono-black hero, because this was, again, the villain, it is similar to Ellish Norn sort of thing. I mean, what they were doing was very different, but they had a similar sort of, you know, force. Whatever the cost is, I'm going to maintain order. I'm going to create order.
00:47:52
Speaker
This thing is more important than all the people and things that it hurts.
00:47:58
Speaker
the order itself is what's important. And that is a extreme side of white. And just, you know, and that's the thing is early on, white, we had the white knight versus the black knight, we had the angels versus the demons and in a very sort of simplistic element, you know, in a sort of simplistic. Yeah, the very tropey kind of what we would expect very much to be white versus black, evil versus light, or even light versus darkness, evil versus
00:48:27
Speaker
And this is a good way to sort of...
00:48:31
Speaker
show more than that. I mean, even early days, Magic did a little bit of it, but it was a lot more spotty. The set, The Dark, is kind of every color pushed to their bad part. Well, and as we talked about, I mean, towards the beginning with Shivam, you know, it was almost like the way to make white that was to almost be anti-religious, right? It was supposed to be like an extreme preacher. It was, you know, it was Inquisition type stuff. And that's exactly what they did in those first sets.
Goblin Perspectives and Future Narratives
00:49:01
Speaker
Yeah, it was more just like anti-religion to try to show how white would be versus the idea here that, you know, what I like about this, you know, for me, why we can all agree that Ellish Norn is the worst of the predators is because she wants to strip all flesh away, which means goblin kind is probably not fair and so well under Ellish Norn.
00:49:25
Speaker
I mean, as, as so often happens in this show, I'm so glad we don't like, do a lot of prep for some of these episodes, because then you'll start something and I'll be like, listening right along with it. Yeah, where's he going? Where's he going? It's getting intense. It's a simple truth. I'm a simple person. And
00:49:44
Speaker
If we go back there, we cannot go back to a Mirrodin that gave us Krak and Slobad and just not have the goblins. So, how are the Shorns going to lose? We've got to throw in with Koth, the Mirrons, and maybe Urbresk. Who knows what's going to happen. I am fully of the belief that we can get sheltered on our side.
00:50:14
Speaker
All right. Well, that we don't need for neglects. That's another episode. It's already gone. Yeah, it is very specifically like not about thinking about the opposite of that. Yeah, we were still bothered by this. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm getting so hung up on mirrored in that we're already at 50 minutes. But yeah, but at the same time,
00:50:35
Speaker
This is good because these are the characters that like this is what makes the game for me in some ways because it's their stories, how their stories translate to our decks, how our stories are built. But at the same time, we now we have these seeds and I think that we keep coming back to that. And the seeds for this to me is we have Voronklex now showing up on a different plane but is not a planeswalker.
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that's the thing. I'll be perfectly honest. I think I blocked out cause I'm like, I don't want to deal with that. Cause there's nothing good about this. There's nothing good about a phyrexian. Pray it or not being a hun new phyrexia.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:51:19
Speaker
Yeah. And nothing good that just happened recently. Like we need to, so, you know, yeah. Yeah. All right. Speaking of Alara.
00:51:31
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HotzQ can be found at HotzQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel Underscore. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinlordpod on Twitter, or email us at goblinlordpodcast at email.com.
00:51:50
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the cast can be found at patreon.com slash goblinlordpod. Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on twitter at steveraffle. Goblinlord is proud to be presented by Sisters of the Gods as part of their growing Vorthos content, as well as magic content of all kinds.
00:52:20
Speaker
Check them out on Twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers