A few had mentioned that in the old UR thread but i don't think it will be Ob Nixilis. He was a planeswalker and the the Chain Veil cursed him hence why he became a demon, and when he arrived to Zendikar the power of the plane stole his spark. I feel like he wouldn't have "demon-like" powers, because demons are pure manifestations of black mana so I guess he isn't really a "pure demon", but idk I could be wrong!
There were a lot of potential legends shown in this. Kothrophed, Josu, the Raven Man, Nicol Bolas (Not likely), and Lady Ana shown in that one art attacking Josu (Will not be this).
This was not a good story. It simply tried to do too much in too short a time:
1. Liliana as a healer needed development. Maybe show her healing someone or something. Her endless years of studying under Ana, likewise, is undeveloped. These are things just told to us and not actually shown. Show, Don't Tell.
2. The whole Josu plot thread fails. If I as the reader can't care about him, then i can't care about Liliana's plight to save him. What this story needed were scenes of him and her doing brother-sister things to make us see why she values him so much, and show us the contrast between his behavior as a demon and as a human.
3. Liliana is unrelatable as a character. She comes off as whiny and in over her head, instead of calculating and competent. Ob Nixilis, unlike her, feels like he knows what he's doing and he knows what he wants and how to get it. He'a a completely superior monoBlack character, and Creative understands we're not supposed to sympathize with him, whereas they keep writing Liliana like an unlikable villain but wants us to empathize with her.
4. The Raven Man. Just this entire character was handled terribly. He shows up and very easily convinces Liliana to become a full on necromancer, and then he's taken out by her offscreen. The man that is her supposed start of darkness and the reason she's where she is right now... Gets beaten offscreen. I mean what.
5. Liliana's descent to the dark side is pathetic. All it took was a stranger saying "ey yo you da bess! Work dat black magic sistuh!" and then she dives headfirst into murder and black magic, what? This would be more believable if she was presented as emotionally distressed (which she clearly wasn't since she was making mental quips), if we knew why Josu mattered to her so much and if The Raven Man's main argument was "Only way to save Josu", but it was more like a footnote to "You're awesome, Lili." When Darth Sidious convinced Anakin to turn, he first tried playing to Anakin's ego and that failed. It was only by picking at Anakin's fear for Padme's death that he finally got an apprentice, and that only worked for viewed because we SAW Padme and Anakin's relationship develop (terribly) over three movies. Some scenes with Josu would've gone a long way.
6. Minor one, but her being from Dominaria was inconsequential to the story, and her first walk being Innistrad was also inconsequential. Seems pretty weird to hype up these planes returning and then have them be footnotes.
Now for the good:
1. Bolas was great, being the arrogant theater villain he really is.
2. Josu looks cool as hell in demonic possession form.
To add to all of that: Agents of Artifice and Test of Metal made it clear Liliana knew Bolas and had some sort of relationship with him, so this article expanded on that. Also, this story not having Malfegor at all irks me. He's a demon dragon and was subservient to Bolas. One would think Bolas would've made her make a deal with Malf so that she's bound to Bolas in some way.
To add to all of that: Agents of Artifice and Test of Metal made it clear Liliana knew Bolas and had some sort of relationship with him, so this article expanded on that. Also, this story not having Malfegor at all irks me. He's a demon dragon and was subservient to Bolas. One would think Bolas would've made her make a deal with Malf so that she's bound to Bolas in some way.
Is Malfegor still alive? I sort of forgot what happened to him. Actually, being a Dragon probably meant Bolas didn't regard him very highly - "Higher-ranking" dragons tend to have a disdain for their own kind (especially the "lesser ones") and Bolas does strike me as that kind of Dragon as well. Besides, he had to know all the 4 demons in order to bring Liliana to them, so there's no guarantee he doesn't have some sort of control over at least one of the four demons.
I'm hoping one of the demons was the All-Consuming Oni of Chaos. I would not find it surprising if Bolas got to know him when he was hunting down Night's Reach, considering both of them could be considered having a grudge with Night's Reach (although Hidetsugu didn't place the oath very highly in the first place, having outwitted the entire system from the start.) Regardless, he was very good at making oaths and deals to his advantage before he ascended, so I'm pretty sure he'll be good at pacts as well.
By the way, for those saying Kothophed being the most powerful of the four - we only have his word for it. Wouldn't every demon claim to be the most powerful (and Griselbrand was indeed the most powerful one on Innistrad)? Besides, both of them was more or less destroyed with hardly any effort from the Chain Veil.
I think we only got Kothophed not because he was special - it's because he's dead and therefore this is the "best chance" to feature him - the other two demons still can be featured in their respective blocks and Griselbrand already had his turn.
If there's indeed an order to Liliana's taking down of demons, I'm sure she's doing it in reverse order (probably "just to make sure she still retains her power by removing them in reverse order"). But we don't know if Griselbrand was the 3rd Demon she made the pact with (since he's the 2nd one destroyed).
I kind of think these stories would be better served if they made them two-parters for each walker. One focusing on their homeplane up to the point where they ignite their spark, and the second part about how they settle into the world they planeswalked into and how their perspective changes by the unfamiliar surroundings.
This would have given us the chance to see Liliana become more and more desperate about her brother's condition and then in the next part, how she slowly rises from a guilt-ridden wreck to a powerful necromancer on Innistrad. As it is however the story has next to no character development and the two sections (healing brother and making pacts) have literally nothing to do with each other.
To add to all of that: Agents of Artifice and Test of Metal made it clear Liliana knew Bolas and had some sort of relationship with him, so this article expanded on that. Also, this story not having Malfegor at all irks me. He's a demon dragon and was subservient to Bolas. One would think Bolas would've made her make a deal with Malf so that she's bound to Bolas in some way.
Is Malfegor still alive? I sort of forgot what happened to him. Actually, being a Dragon probably meant Bolas didn't regard him very highly - "Higher-ranking" dragons tend to have a disdain for their own kind (especially the "lesser ones") and Bolas does strike me as that kind of Dragon as well. Besides, he had to know all the 4 demons in order to bring Liliana to them, so there's no guarantee he doesn't have some sort of control over at least one of the four demons.
He's dead as dodo, slain in a very anticlimactic way by Rafiq during the Alara conflux.
That said, he has always stricken me as hardly anything more than a (Rakdos-type) brute, certainly not the scheming, insidious type like Kothophed or supposedly Griselbrand. Probably the fact that he is RB, a combination prone to chaotic behavior, rather than the pure B.
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Do we really need some cliche scene with Josu pushing little Lili on a swing or some crap to believe that she values Josu? He's her brother. People generally value their family VERY highly. As I've said about the perspective second black legendary card: Josu is just a tool. They could have put any number of things in his place and gotten to the same result. So no they didn't need to show sibling bonding scenes or anything of that sort as it wasn't important. It was enough that she was trying so hard to find the cure for him. The point of the early part of the story was to give her a reason to do anything to dodge death even to the point of selling her soul to demons (and doing god knows what for Bolas to get him to help her). Not everything needs to be shown. Most writers I've encountered, including MaRo and Doug via their blogs, say that if something isn't absolutely necessary for the sake of the story it should be cut. Showing her healing, sibling scenes, her later duel with the Raven Man (in which he was not taken out, just defeated) none of these things were necessary for the story they were trying to tell here.
The only reason I found this story to be meh was because I just don't care for Liliana. Not that she's a bad character or anything or that I actively dislike her, I just don't care.
Do we really need some cliche scene with Josu pushing little Lili on a swing or some crap to believe that she values Josu? He's her brother. People generally value their family VERY highly. As I've said about the perspective second black legendary card: Josu is just a tool. They could have put any number of things in his place and gotten to the same result. So no they didn't need to show sibling bonding scenes or anything of that sort as it wasn't important. It was enough that she was trying so hard to find the cure for him. The point of the early part of the story was to give her a reason to do anything to dodge death even to the point of selling her soul to demons (and doing god knows what for Bolas to get him to help her). Not everything needs to be shown. Most writers I've encountered, including MaRo and Doug via their blogs, say that if something isn't absolutely necessary for the sake of the story it should be cut. Showing her healing, sibling scenes, her later duel with the Raven Man (in which he was not taken out, just defeated) none of these things were necessary for the story they were trying to tell here.
I think the problem is not the bond between Liliana and Josu, but the fact that her apparent desperation to find a cure comes out of nowhere. We are told she is desperate to try anything, but we never see it. It would have made sense to show how she tries all sorts of things to try to cure Josu, each approach more questionable than the last, until she eventually resorts to dark magic, because she literally tried everything. As it is now, however, it goes like this: "Gotta cure Josu, but how? Oh, I know, evil magic!" It's jarring and emotionally shallow.
Bottom line is: I know Liliana was desperate, but I didn't feel it.
PS: Another thing that really didn't work out well is that we never saw Josu as a human, only as a more or less inanimate object and a zombie. There was no horror in experiencing the transformation of someone close to Liliana to a monster. Josi is less than a plot device, he is basically just a minor antagonist, but sold as a tragic figure. However, nothing about him was tragic, because we never got to see what he was like before.
@Yatsufusa, Bolas looked down on Malfegor, yes. He considered him an abomination for having his dragonhood tainted with foul demonic genes or whatever. I'm not saying Malfegor is powerful or smart, just that it's weird Bolas didn't use him to bind Liliana to him in some fashion.
Honesty I wish they could have just linked us to the web comic then give the rest of the story to devople Liliana before she made her fourth deal, although the thought she'll be cursed with Josu when she dies does give another reason she made the deals to become immortal.
While it didn't really matter that Liliana was from Dominaria or her first walk being Innistrad, I can't blame wizards wanting to use popualr planes in those slots.
@Yatsufusa, Bolas looked down on Malfegor, yes. He considered him an abomination for having his dragonhood tainted with foul demonic genes or whatever. I'm not saying Malfegor is powerful or smart, just that it's weird Bolas didn't use him to bind Liliana to him in some fashion.
Whos to say Malfegor had the power to help Liliana?
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I don't think we're getting past arcs, so much as they're leaving things open ended so when they return to whatever plane the stories are on they'll have something to use. It's okay to do that, but Creative isn't doing it well. Writers tend to leave small, innocuous pieces that later come back as huge deals, but Creative is leaving huge centerpieces to stories unaccounted for (Chandra's mother, Ana, The Raven Man), and all that does is weaken the story they're telling. It would be like if instead of Karn leaving with a bit of the glistening oil on him and going to Mirrodin with it, he instead left with Yawgmoth's corpse. I mean, the then-creative planned to have Phyrexia take over Mirrodin as far back as 2003, when the plane was made, but EVERYONE missed the subtle clues they left behind until after the fact; that is brilliant. Modern Creative is just leaving huge chunks of the story a mystery and telegraphing that they'll use it later on maybe possibly whoknows.
I think the problem is not the bond between Liliana and Josu, but the fact that her apparent desperation to find a cure comes out of nowhere. We are told she is desperate to try anything, but we never see it. It would have made sense to show how she tries all sorts of things to try to cure Josu, each approach more questionable than the last, until she eventually resorts to dark magic, because she literally tried everything. As it is now, however, it goes like this: "Gotta cure Josu, but how? Oh, I know, evil magic!" It's jarring and emotionally shallow.
Bottom line is: I know Liliana was desperate, but I didn't feel it.
PS: Another thing that really didn't work out well is that we never saw Josu as a human, only as a more or less inanimate object and a zombie. There was no horror in experiencing the transformation of someone close to Liliana to a monster. Josi is less than a plot device, he is basically just a minor antagonist, but sold as a tragic figure. However, nothing about him was tragic, because we never got to see what he was like before.
At least to me they made it seem like this was a sudden sickness, perhaps brought on by a wound he received in battle. Seems to me like there hasn't been time to try all sorts of things. Lady Ana sends her to find the esis root because it's what she as an experienced healer knows will help with his fever. I think in the early portions of the story they do a good job of showing her desperation to find it and then her fear and anger when the Raven Man tells her the glade in which it is found is gone.
I don't really think we were meant to experience the horror of that transformation. I think we were supposed to understand that Lili experienced it, which we did, but that wasn't really important to the story they were trying to tell. What was important was his lines about them experiencing eternal pain in the void together. That inspired her to do whatever she had to to dodge death's hand.
Also: I don't think Lili would be so easily bound by Bolas. The walkers who are or were bound to Bolas were in some way weak minded (granted I don't actually know much about the circumstances under which Tezz went to Bolas) Lili is not that. She would not likely be easily tricked into thinking Bolas could directly provide her what she wants but he is knowledgeable enough to know someone who can.
I don't really think we were meant to experience the horror of that transformation. I think we were supposed to understand that Lili experienced it, which we did, but that wasn't really important to the story they were trying to tell. What was important was his lines about them experiencing eternal pain in the void together. That inspired her to do whatever she had to to dodge death's hand.
a) I'm pretty sure they tried to make it an emotional moment of her brother turning.
b) If they didn't, then that's even worse. A story is about triggering emotions in the reader. That's the basic premise of a story. Everything else is an accounting of facts.*
* Note, a detached "clinical" approach is fine in its own right. The Planeswalker's guides are an example of simply providing information while being entertaining. The story could have even been written first person with Liliana recounting the events in an emotionally detached manner, but this is not the format they have chosen.
Why do you need more than "this is someone's brother" to see that he, at least at some point, was human? It's made very clear that she loves her brother and that she feels terrible about what she did to him. I'm not an emotional or compassionate person, hell I'm not even that attached to my family, but even I can understand her pain and fear. There's plenty of instances in which the responsibility is on the reader to make connections that are clear but not explicitly stated. We don't need them to tell us why Liliana loves her brother, we don't need them to show us some instance of humanity in him. We are perfectly capable of understanding these things without them being stated.
I don't think we're getting past arcs, so much as they're leaving things open ended so when they return to whatever plane the stories are on they'll have something to use. It's okay to do that, but Creative isn't doing it well. Writers tend to leave small, innocuous pieces that later come back as huge deals, but Creative is leaving huge centerpieces to stories unaccounted for (Chandra's mother, Ana, The Raven Man), and all that does is weaken the story they're telling. It would be like if instead of Karn leaving with a bit of the glistening oil on him and going to Mirrodin with it, he instead left with Yawgmoth's corpse. I mean, the then-creative planned to have Phyrexia take over Mirrodin as far back as 2003, when the plane was made, but EVERYONE missed the subtle clues they left behind until after the fact; that is brilliant. Modern Creative is just leaving huge chunks of the story a mystery and telegraphing that they'll use it later on maybe possibly whoknows.
We got some 8 weeks or UR to fill before BTZ rolls out. Who says we will not get additional content with exactly what you are talking here?
Also, I do not know where your "EVERYONE missed the subtle clues they left behind" comes from Everyone who did not read Mirrodin block novels, you mean? Hardly brilliant.
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Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
I mostly enjoyed "The Fourth Pact" as I find Liliana's character to be fun and fascinating. However, there was hardly any new information offered here. Most of this story is already covered in the webcomics or on card art and flavor text. The only new revelations that we get are that Bolas was the one who introduced Lili to her demonic masters, which I think is an interesting development. I always enjoy when we get to see Bolas and his machinations.
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whose story is for next week? thanks!
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/uncharted-realms/magic-origins-new-era-2015-06-03
Jace is next. Then Gideon and Nissa.
thanks!
1. Liliana as a healer needed development. Maybe show her healing someone or something. Her endless years of studying under Ana, likewise, is undeveloped. These are things just told to us and not actually shown. Show, Don't Tell.
2. The whole Josu plot thread fails. If I as the reader can't care about him, then i can't care about Liliana's plight to save him. What this story needed were scenes of him and her doing brother-sister things to make us see why she values him so much, and show us the contrast between his behavior as a demon and as a human.
3. Liliana is unrelatable as a character. She comes off as whiny and in over her head, instead of calculating and competent. Ob Nixilis, unlike her, feels like he knows what he's doing and he knows what he wants and how to get it. He'a a completely superior monoBlack character, and Creative understands we're not supposed to sympathize with him, whereas they keep writing Liliana like an unlikable villain but wants us to empathize with her.
4. The Raven Man. Just this entire character was handled terribly. He shows up and very easily convinces Liliana to become a full on necromancer, and then he's taken out by her offscreen. The man that is her supposed start of darkness and the reason she's where she is right now... Gets beaten offscreen. I mean what.
5. Liliana's descent to the dark side is pathetic. All it took was a stranger saying "ey yo you da bess! Work dat black magic sistuh!" and then she dives headfirst into murder and black magic, what? This would be more believable if she was presented as emotionally distressed (which she clearly wasn't since she was making mental quips), if we knew why Josu mattered to her so much and if The Raven Man's main argument was "Only way to save Josu", but it was more like a footnote to "You're awesome, Lili." When Darth Sidious convinced Anakin to turn, he first tried playing to Anakin's ego and that failed. It was only by picking at Anakin's fear for Padme's death that he finally got an apprentice, and that only worked for viewed because we SAW Padme and Anakin's relationship develop (terribly) over three movies. Some scenes with Josu would've gone a long way.
6. Minor one, but her being from Dominaria was inconsequential to the story, and her first walk being Innistrad was also inconsequential. Seems pretty weird to hype up these planes returning and then have them be footnotes.
Now for the good:
1. Bolas was great, being the arrogant theater villain he really is.
2. Josu looks cool as hell in demonic possession form.
3. Kotophed.
Your mods are terrified of me.
Your mods are terrified of me.
Is Malfegor still alive? I sort of forgot what happened to him. Actually, being a Dragon probably meant Bolas didn't regard him very highly - "Higher-ranking" dragons tend to have a disdain for their own kind (especially the "lesser ones") and Bolas does strike me as that kind of Dragon as well. Besides, he had to know all the 4 demons in order to bring Liliana to them, so there's no guarantee he doesn't have some sort of control over at least one of the four demons.
I'm hoping one of the demons was the All-Consuming Oni of Chaos. I would not find it surprising if Bolas got to know him when he was hunting down Night's Reach, considering both of them could be considered having a grudge with Night's Reach (although Hidetsugu didn't place the oath very highly in the first place, having outwitted the entire system from the start.) Regardless, he was very good at making oaths and deals to his advantage before he ascended, so I'm pretty sure he'll be good at pacts as well.
By the way, for those saying Kothophed being the most powerful of the four - we only have his word for it. Wouldn't every demon claim to be the most powerful (and Griselbrand was indeed the most powerful one on Innistrad)? Besides, both of them was more or less destroyed with hardly any effort from the Chain Veil.
I think we only got Kothophed not because he was special - it's because he's dead and therefore this is the "best chance" to feature him - the other two demons still can be featured in their respective blocks and Griselbrand already had his turn.
If there's indeed an order to Liliana's taking down of demons, I'm sure she's doing it in reverse order (probably "just to make sure she still retains her power by removing them in reverse order"). But we don't know if Griselbrand was the 3rd Demon she made the pact with (since he's the 2nd one destroyed).
This would have given us the chance to see Liliana become more and more desperate about her brother's condition and then in the next part, how she slowly rises from a guilt-ridden wreck to a powerful necromancer on Innistrad. As it is however the story has next to no character development and the two sections (healing brother and making pacts) have literally nothing to do with each other.
He's dead as dodo, slain in a very anticlimactic way by Rafiq during the Alara conflux.
That said, he has always stricken me as hardly anything more than a (Rakdos-type) brute, certainly not the scheming, insidious type like Kothophed or supposedly Griselbrand. Probably the fact that he is RB, a combination prone to chaotic behavior, rather than the pure B.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
YDNRC She did not kill him there.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
The only reason I found this story to be meh was because I just don't care for Liliana. Not that she's a bad character or anything or that I actively dislike her, I just don't care.
I think the problem is not the bond between Liliana and Josu, but the fact that her apparent desperation to find a cure comes out of nowhere. We are told she is desperate to try anything, but we never see it. It would have made sense to show how she tries all sorts of things to try to cure Josu, each approach more questionable than the last, until she eventually resorts to dark magic, because she literally tried everything. As it is now, however, it goes like this: "Gotta cure Josu, but how? Oh, I know, evil magic!" It's jarring and emotionally shallow.
Bottom line is: I know Liliana was desperate, but I didn't feel it.
PS: Another thing that really didn't work out well is that we never saw Josu as a human, only as a more or less inanimate object and a zombie. There was no horror in experiencing the transformation of someone close to Liliana to a monster. Josi is less than a plot device, he is basically just a minor antagonist, but sold as a tragic figure. However, nothing about him was tragic, because we never got to see what he was like before.
Your mods are terrified of me.
While it didn't really matter that Liliana was from Dominaria or her first walk being Innistrad, I can't blame wizards wanting to use popualr planes in those slots.
Whos to say Malfegor had the power to help Liliana?
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
Your mods are terrified of me.
At least to me they made it seem like this was a sudden sickness, perhaps brought on by a wound he received in battle. Seems to me like there hasn't been time to try all sorts of things. Lady Ana sends her to find the esis root because it's what she as an experienced healer knows will help with his fever. I think in the early portions of the story they do a good job of showing her desperation to find it and then her fear and anger when the Raven Man tells her the glade in which it is found is gone.
I don't really think we were meant to experience the horror of that transformation. I think we were supposed to understand that Lili experienced it, which we did, but that wasn't really important to the story they were trying to tell. What was important was his lines about them experiencing eternal pain in the void together. That inspired her to do whatever she had to to dodge death's hand.
Also: I don't think Lili would be so easily bound by Bolas. The walkers who are or were bound to Bolas were in some way weak minded (granted I don't actually know much about the circumstances under which Tezz went to Bolas) Lili is not that. She would not likely be easily tricked into thinking Bolas could directly provide her what she wants but he is knowledgeable enough to know someone who can.
a) I'm pretty sure they tried to make it an emotional moment of her brother turning.
b) If they didn't, then that's even worse. A story is about triggering emotions in the reader. That's the basic premise of a story. Everything else is an accounting of facts.*
* Note, a detached "clinical" approach is fine in its own right. The Planeswalker's guides are an example of simply providing information while being entertaining. The story could have even been written first person with Liliana recounting the events in an emotionally detached manner, but this is not the format they have chosen.
3BB
Sorcery
Return up to 2 traget creatures from your graveyard to the battlefield. Sacrifice them at the end of turn.
RETIRED - GAME SUCKS
Modern:
UUUMerfolksUUU
RGoblinsR
Ad Nauseam
BR 8 Racks RB
WUB Mill BUW
Legacy:
XOps! All splels! X
What I think of MaRo
We got some 8 weeks or UR to fill before BTZ rolls out. Who says we will not get additional content with exactly what you are talking here?
Also, I do not know where your "EVERYONE missed the subtle clues they left behind" comes from Everyone who did not read Mirrodin block novels, you mean? Hardly brilliant.
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)