Prinsessa wrote:Do you mean MTG? That'd be fun to see.
I do indeed mean
Magic: the Gathering.
Sorry in advance to anyone trying to parse the following who has no earthly idea what
Magic: the Gathering is all about. If you're legitimately curious, I will try to break things down into non-
Magicese if you ask!
Here's some examples of cards that may not be final versions, but I think they give you a decent idea of all of the mechanics at play, and some images of the Expansion symbol and new mana symbols:
The set takes place on the plane of N'Dirhi and focuses on the planeswalker Ibanur. Ibanur is a
pre-mending planeswalker who has been moving about the planes of the multiverse almost as long as Urza has. Eventually he stumbled upon a barren plane that was devoid of all life and was essentially just a rock floating through the
Blind Eternities. So, he settled upon it and used his vast stores of magic to create a plane worth living on. At it's center he crafted a giant sea covered in lotus flowers. It was from this first piece of land that he created through which all of his mana (and subsequent magic of creation) flowed. It is for this reason, that all of the creatures and other magical creations on the entire plane were the same "color" (here I mean the same color of mana). All things on N'Dirhi were "gold" or in the more common parlance, five-colored.
When he had made his plane exactly as he wanted it, he realized that other planeswalkers might stumble across his little haven and disturb it, or worse. As a safe guard, he created a giant arch (a gateway if you will) in the Lotus Sea. He intended to create a spell that would suppress his memory of having created the plane, allow him to reincarnate indefinitely as long as the Gateway remains intact, and lastly seal the plane from any planewsalker entering it, or leaving. There was a catch though, in order to close the Great Gate, he would have to give up his planeswalker's "spark" (the special bit of magic that allows a planeswalker to wander among the planes). When all of his preparations were complete, he removed his Spark and set it into the Gate sealing himself inside, and all other planeswalkers out.
Flash forward hundreds or perhaps thousands of reincarnation cycles later. (And most importantly, after the Mending has taken place.)
Ibanur ends up in some manner of situation or another that puts him in great physical peril. (I haven't figured out what that might be yet.) This situation is so stressful, that it causes the empty hole where his spark once dwelled to re-ignite! Ibanur is once again a planeswalker and finds himself on another plane with all of his memories restored. He immediately planeswalks back, but with his powers severely reduced since he is now a post-Mending planeswalker, he finds himself unable to recreate the magic he had used so many years ago!
With the Great Gate having been opened, and Ibanur once again a planeswalker, many things on N'Dirhi begin to change...
There's more, but I think I can get to most of the details as I layout some of the mechanics and explain the two mana symbols in the pic above.
- The set will focus on a new keyword called Spectrum which makes any card it appears on function as if it were all mana colors at once. Any card that uses all 5 mana colors in its cost, or has Spectrum, will feature that rainbow-esque pattern and purple piping on the card frame.
- A race of creatures called Fragments exist on the plane that can break apart into smaller creatures when they die using the Fracture keyword.
- Imbue is a mechanic that specifies a number of colored mana symbols (usually one, but up to all five) that if you used all of the mana colors in the Imbue cost to cast the spell in question then it is considered "Imbued" and some bonus or another occurs.
- Purple mana (the Lotus symbol on the purple background on the left in the above image) will be used as a cost that can be paid with any type of colored mana. It will exist mainly on cards like Wishbringer that allow any player to play an ability. However, since lots of cards in the set will produce colorless mana in higher than usual quantities, this will also force players to save some colored mana in reserve for various spells
- The yellow mana symbol above is far less solidified and will serve as a symbol representing Desert mana. Basically, the outskirts of the lush and formerly rather tropical plane begin to become more and more desert-like over the course of the gate being closed as an unforeseen side-effect from the plane being cut off as it had been.
Another consequence of Ibanur's re-awakening as a planeswalker and the gate's unlocking, was that the all-colored nature of all of the creatures on N'Dirhi "fractured" as well, causing creatures to, for the first time, become associated with the colors of mana flowing through the habitats in which they lived (lions became white creatures from living on the plains, forest creatures became green, fish associated with blue mana, etc.). However, any creature with Fracture is still, at its core, multi-colored so it will still break into all-colored fragments.
The set will have some distinctly Ancient Egyptian/Arabic flavor to it due to the encroaching deserts and such, but also due to the somewhat "Nile-like" nature of the giant sea in the middle of the plane that makes life in the surrounding deserts possible. You only get a small taste of it through the Jackal card above, but there will be a host of "Vitreous" fragment creatures embodying ibises, asps, etc.
I'm thinking that any pyramids that exist in the set will be of the step variety to break away just a little.
Thoughts, questions? Should I just assume that only like two of you have read this far?