Current MtG Storyline - Cliff's Notes

[Ace/Homebrew]

I'm positive there are others like me who cannot stand reading the storyline behind the MtG sets but have an interest in knowing what occurred. On the flip side, I'm sure some of you absolutely enjoy reading the current plot week to week.

So could those of you that enjoy reading along summarize the events in an abridged form?
I've looked around (except for reddit) and have not found a source that provides a satisfying summary. I'm hoping this will be a good resource for those like me, or even for people who skipped a few blocks but want to catch up.

Thanks to those that contribute!



Here's what I understand of Amonkhet:

The Gatewatch learned from Tezzeret that Bolas hangs out on Amonkhet. They travel there to confront him and see an Egyptian themed world complete with animal-head gods. The culture of the plane is to work towards becoming a powerful warrior. Those that succeed are sacrificed to become part of God-Pharoah Bolas' undead army.

What have I missed about Amonkhet?
What the hell is going on with Hour of Devastation?

[Claymore]

Liliana also went there to kill Rakazath Demon (3rd of the 4 who have her soul contract). She ate him with a tornado of zombies and then regretted/felt violated afterwards, so she annihilated his corpse. Much to the disgust of the other gatefriends.

The blood of Raka got into the water and made all the rivers run red, which for some reason unveiled a tomb/Crumbling Necropolis and some sarcophagi according to prophecy. Probably with the sun aligning between the Bolas horns if you looked at it at a certain angle too. The sarcophagi opened up and out came the Scorpion God and the Locust God. The Snake god rushed Scorpion, and Scorpion killed him. Locust started unleashing his bugs and opened up the desert/devastation to the city, and apparently just fucked off for the rest of the day.

The white god and blue god fought the Scorpion along with Gideon, but they were both killed. The Scorpion ended up getting killed by being impaled on a obelisk by the red god. The red god and black god were left and led to Nicol Bolas, who made them fight each other. Black god wanted to appease Bolas so he was aggressive and won. He defeated the red god and brought her to Bolas, so Bolas killed the Black god. The red god fucked off for the rest of the story. Samut the human warrior saved the Red god at some point and that ignited her spark. Presumably because she sacrificed herself to save the god. She then fucked off to some other plane.

The super gate friends attacked Bolas. It is revealed that Bolas orchestrated the release of the Eldrazi in order to test the Planeswalkers.

Jace was baited into Bolas's head, but Bolas mind wiped him, so Jace planeswalked away. Liliana had to use the chain veil but was defeated anyway, so she walked away. Nissa tried to use the Leylines against Bolas, but Death here was stronger than the leylines so she got defeated and walked away. Chandra did her fire thing and was almost crushed in hand, so she walked away. Gideon tried to be invincible but Bolas crushed him anyway, so Gideon walked away.

The rest of the god worshiping plane denizens revolt since their god was killed and I imagine they were completely obliterated by Bolas. The plane has to go through regrowth before we can get to Return to Almonket.

So for Hour of Devastation, Bolas decides he's done with building his army and decided to blow up the whole plane. No clue why he had to destroy the plane. No clue why he made the army anyway, but it is speculated that it is immune to Eldrazi corruption (being undead) and the blue coating makes them immune to Phyrexian compleation (being plot armor).

Now we get a few different single-set blocks that focus on one super gate friend going through their rebounds, which conveniently aligns with the Wizards mantra of "sorry you've seen so many super friends, we'll reduce how many". The next set sees a lobotimized Jace thinking he's a pirate fighting dinosaurs, so maybe it's just a catatonic dream set.

[Ace/Homebrew]

Thanks Claymore! Exactly what I was hoping for.

So after Hour of Devastation... the plane is in tatters but enough life remains that we can expect some form of recovery?
Hazoret and the Locust God are the only deities that survived?

Has Bolas and his undead army left the plane or are they still hanging out? (It sounds like they're gone and we'll hear about them later)
I'm intrigued by Bolas' army being immune to Eldrazi and Phyrexian corruption. It allows for them to be anti-heroes of some future battle for the title of biggest and baddest. :laugh:

[Barook]

Liliana also went there to kill Rakazath Demon (3rd of the 4 who have her soul contract). She ate him with a tornado of zombies and then regretted/felt violated afterwards, so she annihilated his corpse. Much to the disgust of the other gatefriends.
Was this written for the same idiots who screamed "Garruk raped Liliana!" because of the artwork of Triumph of Ferocity? Which is, by they way, the reason why Garruk was phased out and replaced with Nissa as the main green walker - well, after they retconned the whole Elf Hitler thing.


So for Hour of Devastation, Bolas decides he's done with building his army and decided to blow up the whole plane. No clue why he had to destroy the plane. No clue why he made the army anyway, but it is speculated that it is immune to Eldrazi corruption (being undead) and the blue coating makes them immune to Phyrexian compleation (being plot armor).
Since the ore to make Smurf Necrons is unique to Amonkhet, it makes sense to blow everything up before anybody else gets the same idea while Bolas goes around the multiverse with his new toy army. He can transport them now since Tezzeret stole the Planar Gate tech from Kaladesh.

Edit: I also hate it how they don't have the balls to 100% kill off a plane anymore. All we get nowadays is "shit sucks now, but it's going to be okay eventually". I get that they want to keep the option open to return to it eventually if the plane is popular, but it sucks from a story perspective.

Remember Urza? Serra's Plane is corrupted and about to collaps? He says "Fuck it!" and makes an energy source out of it to power his future superweapon. That's how you end a plane, not some garbage refugee camps in the desert. I sure can't wait for the return to "Desert Sand 2 - Elektric Boogaloo" in 5 years. :rolleyes:

[Moosedog]

As a longtime player that never followed the story line is it worth going back and reading it? As in, with a background and understanding of the cards is it a good story? Or am I better off reading some solid sci-fi books ?

[Dice_Box]

As a longtime player that never followed the story line is it worth going back and reading it?
No.

[Moosedog]

No.

Ha - Ok, thanks. What percentage of Magic players you think follow the stories? 25% ?

[Ace/Homebrew]

I believe it correlates to which format the individual primarily plays.

I'd be shocked if Vintage players give a damn.
There's probably a handful of Legacy players interested.

I think Standard players and Vorthos types are going to be the primary audience for the storyline.

-------------

Here's my take on the reaction of format-players to The Gatewatch:

Vintage: The Gatewhat?
Legacy: I'm so sick of hearing about them...
Modern: It's neat Magic has it's own super-team!
Standard: OMG! Can you believe Bolas defeated the Gatewatch?!?!?

[Barook]

Modern: It's neat Magic has it's own super-team!
Standard: OMG! Can you believe Bolas defeated the Gatewatch?!?!?
At GP Vegas, the crowd cheered for Bolas and boo'd at the Gatewatch at the little card preview roleplay. People are really sick of the Jacetice League.

[Kap'n Cook]

Random tangent:

Haven't read any of the books or whatever but there was some site that I remember reading the Barrin story. Basically realizing that Urza had been screwing with his life all along, the whole bloodlines plan, and the academy. Not sure if the books are better or not, but this story was pretty cool and way different from what they seem to be doing with the planeswalker bullshit now, with the use of obliterate just a crazy ending too.

Basically I wanted to randomly encourage everyone to read it if they didn't know the story.

edit found it: http://www.phyrexia.com/continuity/Barrin.shtml


http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=23098&type=card

[Lord Seth]

As a longtime player that never followed the story line is it worth going back and reading it? As in, with a background and understanding of the cards is it a good story? Or am I better off reading some solid sci-fi books ?Some of the earlier stuff was decent. The Weatherlight Saga was honestly pretty good, though skip over Prophecy (much like the set, the story was blatant filler because they needed a third set before they could get to Invasion).

I can't speak of the quality of a lot of what came after, but they were mostly not very good. I remember the Odyssey block trilogy was okay, but the Onslaught one wasn't. Mirrodin was bad and I didn't even finish it. I've heard Ravnica was good but I can't comment personally. The Scars of Mirrodin book is sorta worth reading only for how amusingly bad it is.

The first two planeswalker novels (Agents of Artifice and The Purifying Fire) were actually surprisingly good.

[phonics]

Liliana also went there to kill Rakazath Demon (3rd of the 4 who have her soul contract). She ate him with a tornado of zombies and then regretted/felt violated afterwards, so she annihilated his corpse. Much to the disgust of the other gatefriends.

The blood of Raka got into the water and made all the rivers run red, which for some reason unveiled a tomb/Crumbling Necropolis and some sarcophagi according to prophecy. Probably with the sun aligning between the Bolas horns if you looked at it at a certain angle too. The sarcophagi opened up and out came the Scorpion God and the Locust God. The Snake god rushed Scorpion, and Scorpion killed him. Locust started unleashing his bugs and opened up the desert/devastation to the city, and apparently just fucked off for the rest of the day.

The white god and blue god fought the Scorpion along with Gideon, but they were both killed. The Scorpion ended up getting killed by being impaled on a obelisk by the red god. The red god and black god were left and led to Nicol Bolas, who made them fight each other. Black god wanted to appease Bolas so he was aggressive and won. He defeated the red god and brought her to Bolas, so Bolas killed the Black god. The red god fucked off for the rest of the story. Samut the human warrior saved the Red god at some point and that ignited her spark. Presumably because she sacrificed herself to save the god. She then fucked off to some other plane.

The super gate friends attacked Bolas. It is revealed that Bolas orchestrated the release of the Eldrazi in order to test the Planeswalkers.

Jace was baited into Bolas's head, but Bolas mind wiped him, so Jace planeswalked away. Liliana had to use the chain veil but was defeated anyway, so she walked away. Nissa tried to use the Leylines against Bolas, but Death here was stronger than the leylines so she got defeated and walked away. Chandra did her fire thing and was almost crushed in hand, so she walked away. Gideon tried to be invincible but Bolas crushed him anyway, so Gideon walked away.

The rest of the god worshiping plane denizens revolt since their god was killed and I imagine they were completely obliterated by Bolas. The plane has to go through regrowth before we can get to Return to Almonket.

So for Hour of Devastation, Bolas decides he's done with building his army and decided to blow up the whole plane. No clue why he had to destroy the plane. No clue why he made the army anyway, but it is speculated that it is immune to Eldrazi corruption (being undead) and the blue coating makes them immune to Phyrexian compleation (being plot armor).

Now we get a few different single-set blocks that focus on one super gate friend going through their rebounds, which conveniently aligns with the Wizards mantra of "sorry you've seen so many super friends, we'll reduce how many". The next set sees a lobotimized Jace thinking he's a pirate fighting dinosaurs, so maybe it's just a catatonic dream set.

I sincerely hope you are joking and that isn't the real story.

[kombatkiwi]

Was this written for the same idiots who screamed "Garruk raped Liliana!" because of the artwork of Triumph of Ferocity?

To interpret this part of the story in that way (the way that 'Claymore' describes it) requires a massive leap of logic.
You can read that part of the story yourself here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/feast-2017-06-14
Nowhere does Liliana express regret/remorse: She arrives on the plane with the objective of killing the demon and she shreds him into pieces (beyond what is necessary, sure) because she enjoys exercising her power.

I mean it literally spells it out for you:

"Liliana rolled her eyes. She felt no shame for how she took down the demon."

If you want to describe the events of the story in an extremely cynical connect-the-dots way then fine, it's not exactly Shakespeare, but maybe you should at least read it before allowing your biases to invent narrative strawmen.

[Ace/Homebrew]

Bump


Anyone that follows care to fill in the plot of Ixalan up to this point?

[whocansay]

Bump


Anyone that follows care to fill in the plot of Ixalan up to this point?

+1

[Aggro_zombies]

Bump


Anyone that follows care to fill in the plot of Ixalan up to this point?
The Immortal Sun is an artifact the ancient Sphinx planeswalker Azor made using his spark as a power source. It's basically a way to prevent planeswalkers from leaving whatever plane it's on. Bolas, in his role as Nefarious Genius Mastermind (tm), has decided he wants this device and contacts Vraska on Ravnica to go on a fetch quest to get it for him, giving her the Thaumatic Compass, a device which detects and tracks planeswalker sparks, as an aid to finding it.

Meanwhile, Jace bails out of the fight on Amonkhet at the last possible moment and randomly planeswalks to Ixalan, where he wakes up with a severe case of amnesia but a reasonable suite of survival skills. Vraska lands on Ixalan and stumbles across Jace because the compass detected him trying to subconsciously planeswalk off of Ixalan. The two of them form a close friendship (with plenty of sexual tension) as they battle their way to the Golden City of Orazca, the current resting place of the Immortal Sun.

When they get there, they are ambushed by local merfolk tribes, who are sworn to protect Orazca from outsider access. In the ensuing scuffle, Jace falls overboard, bonks his head, and recovers all of his memories. The story of Ixalan ends there, but spoilers from the block's art book indicate that Jace and Vraska battle their way to the Immortal Sun and confront Azor, besting him somehow to win it. Jace realizes who Vraska is working for and wipes himself from her memories in order to keep Bolas from finding him. Vraska then activates a beacon which signals Tezzeret to use the Planar Bridge he picked up from Kaladesh to transport the Immortal Sun to wherever Bolas wants it, and Vraska leaves Ixalan to return to Ravnica and await her reward from Bolas.

Some notes on the other bits of the plot:

- The vampires want the Immortal Sun because they worship it and think it will somehow make them immortal without the need to feed on blood.

- Angrath is a planeswalker who randomly got caught in the no-planeswalking trap of Ixalan and is now hellbent on finding the Immortal Sun so he can go home. He's now leading his particular pirate coalition in an attack on Orazca.

- The merfolk are a tribal society. Kumena is a leader of one of the tribes who wants to use the Immortal Sun to make himself powerful because he's a prick.

- Huatli wants to find the Immortal Sun in order to Make The Human Empire Great Again. Her spark is lit but she doesn't realize she's a planeswalker because the IM has prevented her from ever planeswalking.

[wonderPreaux]

Random tangent:

Haven't read any of the books or whatever but there was some site that I remember reading the Barrin story. Basically realizing that Urza had been screwing with his life all along, the whole bloodlines plan, and the academy. Not sure if the books are better or not, but this story was pretty cool and way different from what they seem to be doing with the planeswalker bullshit now, with the use of obliterate just a crazy ending too.

Basically I wanted to randomly encourage everyone to read it if they didn't know the story.

edit found it: http://www.phyrexia.com/continuity/Barrin.shtml


http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=23098&type=card

To comment on the not-at-all-current storyline: I've read all the Weatherlight saga, and two of the time spiral novels, and they're not terribly bad. If you go in expecting the typical sword/sorcery stuff you'd find for a dollar or two in a used book store (which is how I encountered all the novels), you'll find them to be decent books. The world building for Dominaria and, even places like Rath/Phyrexia was something I enjoyed a lot, Dominaria felt like an actual place with country/continental analogues you could appreciate, and it was only places like Mercadia that felt like the sort of "Plane of X" that you might expect in current sets.

Also, the development of both major and minor characters is impressive. The stories of characters like Barrin, Volrath, Thaddeus/Agnate etc. are intriguing to follow, especially when you compare and contrast to Urza's thousands of years crusading against Phyrexia in the dubiously moral/sane way that he does. There's also a general sense of intrigue/tension as well, since very few characters are really cut-and-dry "good" as the story plays out, and you can actually see characters like Karn/Gerard go through a lot of development that you might not see in the Jace gang.

[whocansay]

The Immortal Sun is an artifact the ancient Sphinx planeswalker Azor made using his spark as a power source. It's basically a way to prevent planeswalkers from leaving whatever plane it's on. Bolas, in his role as Nefarious Genius Mastermind (tm), has decided he wants this device and contacts Vraska on Ravnica to go on a fetch quest to get it for him, giving her the Thaumatic Compass, a device which detects and tracks planeswalker sparks, as an aid to finding it.

Meanwhile, Jace bails out of the fight on Amonkhet at the last possible moment and randomly planeswalks to Ixalan, where he wakes up with a severe case of amnesia but a reasonable suite of survival skills. Vraska lands on Ixalan and stumbles across Jace because the compass detected him trying to subconsciously planeswalk off of Ixalan. The two of them form a close friendship (with plenty of sexual tension) as they battle their way to the Golden City of Orazca, the current resting place of the Immortal Sun.

When they get there, they are ambushed by local merfolk tribes, who are sworn to protect Orazca from outsider access. In the ensuing scuffle, Jace falls overboard, bonks his head, and recovers all of his memories. The story of Ixalan ends there, but spoilers from the block's art book indicate that Jace and Vraska battle their way to the Immortal Sun and confront Azor, besting him somehow to win it. Jace realizes who Vraska is working for and wipes himself from her memories in order to keep Bolas from finding him. Vraska then activates a beacon which signals Tezzeret to use the Planar Bridge he picked up from Kaladesh to transport the Immortal Sun to wherever Bolas wants it, and Vraska leaves Ixalan to return to Ravnica and await her reward from Bolas.

Some notes on the other bits of the plot:

- The vampires want the Immortal Sun because they worship it and think it will somehow make them immortal without the need to feed on blood.

- Angrath is a planeswalker who randomly got caught in the no-planeswalking trap of Ixalan and is now hellbent on finding the Immortal Sun so he can go home. He's now leading his particular pirate coalition in an attack on Orazca.

- The merfolk are a tribal society. Kumena is a leader of one of the tribes who wants to use the Immortal Sun to make himself powerful because he's a prick.

- Huatli wants to find the Immortal Sun in order to Make The Human Empire Great Again. Her spark is lit but she doesn't realize she's a planeswalker because the IM has prevented her from ever planeswalking.

Thank you, appreciate it. That's the exact amount of WOTC storyline silliness I can handle anyway.

[ParkerLewis]

Some guy recently posted a summary of the 25 years of MtG story (about 1-5 lines per set). Only thing is... it's in french. If you're interested in the original version, it's here (http://www.magic-ville.com/fr/gazette/show_article?ref=563). A Google-translated version in English (seems not that bad, actually) would be available here (https://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.magic-ville.com%2Ffr%2Fgazette%2Fshow_article%3Fref%3D563).

[Barook]

I do wonder what Bolas' endgame is, aside from getting his old powers back, now that he has his army of magical Terminator zombies. Hopefully, the pay-off is going to be worth it instead of being something incredible lame like the Eldrazi storylines they've done since BoZ.


The two of them form a close friendship (with plenty of sexual tension)
Immediately had to think about this comic (NSFW) (https://new2.fjcdn.com/pictures/Medusa_2a9798_1641674.jpg).

[Claymore]

As a follow up, Azor is the same Sphinx who founded the Azorious guild on Ravnica thousands? of years ago. He traveled the multiverse spreading his policies and gave up his spark to make the Immortal Sun so he could...lord over the Land Before Time Plus Pirates? Not sure what.

----

It does look like I was mistaken in my prior post about the Amonkhet storyline with Liliana, which had been relayed to me by similarly cynical fans of the story. Bolas appeared to finally open the main Gate to the Afterlife (to the outer Wastes realms of Amonkhet) during the Hour of Devastation (as the sun settled between Bolas horns). The Gate opened and Rakazeth flew through, then cut his own arm open to bleed into the main river of the city. The river turned into blood which killed everything in it, starting the ritual of the Hour of Devastation. Raka then wanted to confront Liliana.

She was mind controlled to confront Rakazeth, immediately losing control of her body to walk across the river. He manipulated her until the Jacewatch was able to break his control. She attacked Rakazeth with a torrent of zombie crocodiles (freshly killed by the river of blood) to rend him apart. Then Liliana decided to have the zombies eat Raka, which also had the effect of not letting him reanimate through Amonkhet's planar curse. Liliana felt empowered, full, and relished her independence and being free of the control of others. Jace puked.

I believe at this point, the Terminator horde also flooded the city through the now open gate, and the rest of the story proceeds largely as described. Except with the citizens being slaughtered by Termiantors in the background.

[Aggro_zombies]

I do wonder what Bolas' endgame is, aside from getting his old powers back, now that he has his army of magical Terminator zombies.
So, here's the thing: no matter the medium, no matter the story, Evil Genius Masterminds (EGMs) are always bad.

There's a few reasons:

It's impossible to write a character smarter than yourself. Authors generally aren't geniuses, so the EGM is usually hamstrung by being smart but not a savant or a true genius.
It's difficult to organically convey intelligence. The storytelling truism "show, don't tell" doesn't really work with EGMs because their threat is predicated on being very, very smart, so in order to establish that threat you have to figure out how to show them being very smart. There's a laundry list of tropes that can be used to indicate general intelligence but most of them (fluency in multiple languages, advanced puzzle solving ability, etc) don't crop up naturally in most people's daily lives. You can therefore either chose to contrive something - i.e., instead of eating breakfast, the EGM solves three Rubik's Cubes simultaneously while reading ancient philosophical texts in their original languages - or just have one of the characters say, "Wow, this guy is super smart!" Neither is particularly compelling.
Authors tend to associate being a mastermind with grand, potentially convoluted plans. This is the Tzeentch Effect: you can make a character seem smarter by making them mysterious and attributing convoluted plans to them, but it's also a storytelling crutch that allows authors to make shit up on the fly and then retroactively have the EGM declare, "That was my clever plan all along!". This is especially enticing in an environment where story needs might change over the long term or where there's pressure to draw out the current plot for an extended period of time.

All this means that Bolas doesn't likely have a defined end game any more concrete than wanting all of his old power back. The details can be filled in as necessary and he can be inserted into plots as a cameo to play up what a mastermind he is by making his schemes seem sprawling and complicated. That means he's kind of a bad character because, more than many other characters, there's basically no restrictions on where you can use him or what he can do and a lot of temptation to have bad things be "It was Bolas all along!" to reinforce how smart and scheming and whatever he is.

[H]

It's impossible to write a character smarter than yourself. Authors generally aren't geniuses, so the EGM is usually hamstrung by being smart but not a savant or a true genius.

I strongly disagree with this. It's not impossible, just more difficult. Keep in mind, that as an author, you have the "blessing" of all the foreknowledge in the world. So, you can imbue characters with everything they need, or more. You don't need to be a genius to write a genius. You just need to know how to craft one. It's a skill, like any other.


All this means that Bolas doesn't likely have a defined end game any more concrete than wanting all of his old power back. The details can be filled in as necessary and he can be inserted into plots as a cameo to play up what a mastermind he is by making his schemes seem sprawling and complicated. That means he's kind of a bad character because, more than many other characters, there's basically no restrictions on where you can use him or what he can do and a lot of temptation to have bad things be "It was Bolas all along!" to reinforce how smart and scheming and whatever he is.

I agree with the rest of your points. I think the fundamental issue besides, of course, sub-par writing, is that the entire plot, and every character in it, is about as moralistically and motivationally shallow as any you could find. Like every poor fantasy series, everyone (besides maybe Liliana from time to time) is afflicted with fantastic moral clarity. No one has any doubt about which side anyone is on and so there isn't really any reason to bother detailing why anyone is doing anything. To that point, there don't seem to be any real motivations besides perhaps some shallow "back-story" that yields a mostly one dimensional pastiche of a character.

It's just tropes interacting with other tropes and the story ends up as interesting as you imagine that would be. So, what is Bolas' plan? To be bad. And everyone else's job is to be good, because they want to stop Bolas being bad. There isn't anything else to the story, I don't think. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't read that shit because it is written terribly and I can't go back to reading that sort of stuff.

[kombatkiwi]

The latest story update suggests that in the near future we're getting Return to Ravnica 2 with Nicol Bolas vs Niv Mizzet :eek:

[Claymore]

Is there a way for Niv Mizzet to get his own spark? Think they confirmed he's not a walker previously but maybe he can use the Immortal Sun to eat someone else's spark.

[Aggro_zombies]

Historically, sparks were difficult to get because they had to be transferred from someone who had one already while that person was still alive. Memnarch essentially had to use the entire core of Mirrodin to power a machine to extract Glissa's spark and transfer it to himself, for example.

I highly doubt the Immortal Sun would allow spark transfers - if it did, Azor could have used it to get his own spark back.

[kombatkiwi]

Historically, sparks were difficult to get because they had to be transferred from someone who had one already while that person was still alive. Memnarch essentially had to use the entire core of Mirrodin to power a machine to extract Glissa's spark and transfer it to himself, for example.

I highly doubt the Immortal Sun would allow spark transfers - if it did, Azor could have used it to get his own spark back.

I think Azors spark is essentially gone forever (it got sacrificed to create the immortal sun) but it's implied that it can transfer sparks between other people somehow (similar to the mechanism you describe), because it's stated that he would get a spark back after Azor and Ugin captured Bolas with it.

Why he didn't steal someone elses spark with the immortal sun in the meantime could be any number of reasons
- He's not a PW anymore so he doesn't have the means/ability to do it
- He doesn't know how and he needs Ugin's help
- There hasn't been any other PW on Ixalan for him to steal the spark of (the only PW who seems to be a non-recent arrival is Angrath)
- Even if he could technically steal someone's spark all the PWs are stronger than him and can defeat him (because he isn't a PW anymore), so he can't
- Even if he could steal someone's spark he can't leave Ixalan because the Immortal Sun is still there, so there's no reason for him to try

[Vissah]

The latest story update suggests that in the near future we're getting Return to Ravnica 2 with Nicol Bolas vs Niv Mizzet :eek:

Let`s hope the bring in some more sweet Golgari graveyard style or Dredge cards :D

[Aggro_zombies]

I think Azors spark is essentially gone forever (it got sacrificed to create the immortal sun) but it's implied that it can transfer sparks between other people somehow (similar to the mechanism you describe), because it's stated that he would get a spark back after Azor and Ugin captured Bolas with it.

Why he didn't steal someone elses spark with the immortal sun in the meantime could be any number of reasons
- He's not a PW anymore so he doesn't have the means/ability to do it
- He doesn't know how and he needs Ugin's help
- There hasn't been any other PW on Ixalan for him to steal the spark of (the only PW who seems to be a non-recent arrival is Angrath)
- Even if he could technically steal someone's spark all the PWs are stronger than him and can defeat him (because he isn't a PW anymore), so he can't
- Even if he could steal someone's spark he can't leave Ixalan because the Immortal Sun is still there, so there's no reason for him to try
I think the story was meant to imply that Ugin was using Azor by telling him what he wanted to hear, and therefore that the promise Azor would get his spark back was likely empty. The bit about Ugin trying to make Azor feel like a friend jumped out at me as making Azor seem like a tool.

[kombatkiwi]

I think the story was meant to imply that Ugin was using Azor by telling him what he wanted to hear, and therefore that the promise Azor would get his spark back was likely empty. The bit about Ugin trying to make Azor feel like a friend jumped out at me as making Azor seem like a tool.

Perhaps, but from what I know of the story this would be extremely out of character for Ugin

[Ace/Homebrew]

Bump!

I saw a little bit implying that Liliana's contract with the demon team became a contract with Bolas when she killed the last demon.
Anyone care to fill the rest of us in on the plot in Dominaria?

[bruizar]

The latest story update suggests that in the near future we're getting Return to Ravnica 2 with Nicol Bolas vs Niv Mizzet :eek:

this i would genuinely be excited about

Where do you guys read up on storylines?

[Barook]

this i would genuinely be excited about

Where do you guys read up on storylines?
WotC's homepage (have fun searching that PoS).

Also, wouldn't Bolas completely wreck Niz Mizzet in terms of powerlevels? Unless we get another shitty asspull with Izzet tech, similiar to the Eldrazi Titan BBQ party.

[kombatkiwi]

Bump!

I saw a little bit implying that Liliana's contract with the demon team became a contract with Bolas when she killed the last demon.
Anyone care to fill the rest of us in on the plot in Dominaria?

It's implied in the art / flavour text for In Bolas' Clutches but as of the latest dominaria story update they haven't killed the demon yet

[whocansay]

WotC's homepage (have fun searching that PoS).

Also, wouldn't Bolas completely wreck Niz Mizzet in terms of powerlevels? Unless we get another shitty asspull with Izzet tech, similiar to the Eldrazi Titan BBQ party.


Bro nobody can stand up to wacky teeny bopper electricity goblins and steampunk goggles.