I don't think anyone can pretend that the storyline didn't get significantly worse during his reign, ("It's impossible to tell stories about godlike characters!" Because Sandman, the Chronicles of Amber, Nobilis, etc. don't actually exist, apparently) but it sure could've been worse with someone else in charge, and the way he got axed is quite worrying.
Brady oversaw some of the best world design magic has ever seen. Ravnica, Kamigawa, Innistrad... all are wonderful planes he helped shape. And the stories as well became better, Kamigawa and Ravnica had wonderful novels.
I am sad to see the Brady leave Wotc, and sad to see the position of head of Creative eliminated. I wish Brady the best of luck in his future.
Because Ravnica is a multicolor set, you don't do a colorless theme in a multicolored block.
Storyline, the ten guilds were needed to set up the guildpact. Magic favors certain numbers, and ten two-colored guilds were needed sustain the guildpact.
Ravnica doesn't have an artifact guild because Ravnica didn't need one. The guilds are not going to give power to an eleventh guild unless they had to.
Brady has said that it is possible that time flows differently in some planes, but he admits that the timeline issues are a plot hole and no such things were considered when they wrote the stories.
Where?
As far as i recall, Brady just said, "Scars happened right after the mending, there are things that contradict it, but that's what we are going with." I don't think Brady would use that cop-out of the different timeflow theory.
1) The guildpact is a magical document written by Azor, the founder of the Azorius senate and signed by all ten guildmasters. The guildpact is a world-wide magical contract. It empowers the guilds, while also restricting them.
2) The guilds were at war. They each had armies and each fought. The guildpact was a way to end this struggle.
3) THe Guildpact was offically dissolved by the Azorius Senate. Though the root of it's destruction originated several years back. When Argus Kos arrested Szadek, thus creating a paradox within the guildpact.*
4) Ravnica doesn't need the guildpact. The guilds are still a socio-political juggernaut. Without the guildpact the guilds are going to be more unstable.
* IN the guildpact, the Dimir's role is to usurp and destroy the guildpact. SO when Argus Kos arrests Szadek for trying to break the guildpact, it created a paradox. Basically the guildpact was poorly written. (Or more likely, Szadek had that contradiction added for this purpose).
After the guildpact was wounded, it still worked. It was the Azorius senate that finally dissolved it.
Chapter 2: While watching the play based on the guildpact he thinks about how Szadek and the Dimir weren't real. And that Szadek was probably a necromancer who led an army of skeletons against the city long ago.
Then near the end of the first novel, Szadek finally gets his revenge for being exiled (presumably for the army of skeletons).
So it is implied that his gamut was the army of skeletons, and when that was disrupted he was exiled instead of persecuted (because arresting him would break the guildpact). And then he created this plan while in exile to destroy the guildpact and destroy the city.
While it is never stated how Szadek's army was defeated, i like to think that Azor outplayed him by including something in the guildpact he didn't realize/take into account. (Though this is all speculation)
Alot of Ravnica is left up to the reader to figure out.
Almost every planeswalker comes through Dominaria at some point, and it's one of the few places where planeswalkers are known to exist. I didn't mean a literal crossroads, but a figurative one. Dominaria, where we started Magic, and Ravnica, where we're currently, is a place where a lot of plameswalkers are, not necessarily where a lot of planeswalkers come from.
There are a lot of planeswalkers in the game because we keep going to places where planeswalkers go. You know, as if we were actual 'walkers ourselves? And also, as an addition to the rule above, it would be kinda boring to go to a planes where nothing happens, right? Planeswalkers, even downgraded as we are, are more likely to cause or be attracted to planar-scale events, like massive war (Valla, the Immersturm; Alara during the Mending), seals breaking (Zendikar and the Eldrazi), planar destabilisation (Alara, Serra's Realm), etc.
Since ALara, every plane we've visited had at least one (or more) planeswalkers ascend within a generation. This isn't a matter of Dominaria or Ravnica being planeswalkers hubs, this is a case of planeswalkers being far more common ponst mending. Because planes themselves create planeswalkers at higher rates then previously*.
The point is, 1 in a trillion is a stupid number, and doesn't make any sense. There is no way to say:
1) The likelyhood of a planeswalker ascending is the same across the multiverse.
2) The chance of a planeswalker ascending is one in one trillion.
Also, wasps can cause the complete removal of a species from an ecosystem. Perhaps they migrate into an area with no wasps of that kind before, or perhaps there is a change in the environment that eliminates the host species' usual defenses or accelerates the breeding of the wasp.
For a more extreme and pertinent example, completely natural fungi is wiping out amphibians right now due to changes in climate. They would still be killing amphibians if that climate change was natural.
Waps are not malicious, wasps do not set out to destroy all spiders. Wasps could wipe out all spiders, but wasps aren't committing genocide, because wasps are mindless creatures.
Are you kidding? Tibalt isn't even 5 dollars in most places.
That being said, the statistic takes into account the entire multiverse, NOT individual planes.
For every two walkers, that means there are 2 trillion individuals in the multiverse for those two.
And besides, this isn't even new. Bo Levar and Urza even went so far as to ASCEND at the same time less than 100 miles away from each other.
I reject the notion that the spark works differntly on different planes. I don't think there are planes with higher rates of generating planeswalkers than other planes.
I think that statistic 1 in a trillion isn't canon. Itsounded good, so they kept it, but it doesn't reflect the actual percentage of planeswalkers in the multiverse.
Planeswalkers ARE pretty rare. In fact, they're MYTHIC rare.
(sorry, couldn't resist.)
But seriously, consider that Dominaria was the size of several earths, the multiverse is (arguably) infinite (or at least really, really big,) and there are more than just humans on most planes. Not saying that will mean the populations will be higher, just that it throws off your calculations. Generational cycle of shorter-lived species, and number of children of longer-lived ones may vary wildly from the modern-earth norm. The one in a million, in a million statistic has been around for a long, long time. I see no reason it should be discarded, though I do see what you are getting at. In the time of oldwalkers, this made more sense, because they were immortal, so they "piled up," as it were. It made sense there was a lot of them, because they rarely died as the multiverse got older. Now it is a bit more of a stretch that they keep running into each other, but I just kind of think of it like the show "Heroes." They are tied in to each other's lives. Call it fate, destiny, mana-magnetism, part of the nature of the spark's interaction of the multiverse, whatever.
You are missing a few important details:
1) the ratio of planeswalkers is one in one TRILLION!
2) Neowalkers are mortal, and most of the neowalkers we've seen are neowalkers. In fact both Tezzert and Ajani are neowalkers and both are from Alara. SO the idea that they pile up doesn't make sense. (Also by point 1, does Alara have a population of 2 trillion?)
3) The planes are near infinte, which means planeswalkers should be equally spread out.
4) Size doesn't really matter here. Dominaria is 2.5 times larger than earth, even if it has 2.5 times the landmass and 2.5 times the resources you aren't ever going to approach a trillion population.
5) Earth's population has grown to the size it has because of the industiral revolution. Most planes would have high mortality rate, high infant and child mortality, and low food. Most planes cna't support a population the size of earth's.
6) ? I don't see how adding new races changes the equation. If we suddenly had elves, could we feed them? No, all sentient creatures would be lumped together. A few, like merfolk or Flamekin could utilize niches not used by other races, but that's not going to balloon the total popluation to 1T.
Not sure if they still hold up, but the old numbers were one in a million have a spark, one in a million of those actually ascends to become a planeswalker. Sparks are hard to ignite. Hard to find someone who has a latent spark too. All Niv's research could be just going towards finding a way to locate a spark so he can kill one person instead of one million.
That statistic was quoted by Brady when he introduced the neowalkers. So it should still be relevant.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the spark is hard to ignite, just that it doesn't ignite very often.*
Consider that it can't be that hard to ingite because all the planeswalkers survived the ascension.
1 in 1,000,000,000,000 is not a realistic number anyway. Planeswalkers would be ridiculously rare, never run into each other, and would basically be unheard of. Consider that there are only 6,973,738,433 humans on earth. So you would need 143 earths to get an average of one planeswalker. Then you have to take into account that most planes are primative, and so thier populations are going to be far, far,far,far,far lower then modern earth.
Brady oversaw some of the best world design magic has ever seen. Ravnica, Kamigawa, Innistrad... all are wonderful planes he helped shape. And the stories as well became better, Kamigawa and Ravnica had wonderful novels.
I am sad to see the Brady leave Wotc, and sad to see the position of head of Creative eliminated. I wish Brady the best of luck in his future.
Storyline, the ten guilds were needed to set up the guildpact. Magic favors certain numbers, and ten two-colored guilds were needed sustain the guildpact.
Ravnica doesn't have an artifact guild because Ravnica didn't need one. The guilds are not going to give power to an eleventh guild unless they had to.
Where?
As far as i recall, Brady just said, "Scars happened right after the mending, there are things that contradict it, but that's what we are going with." I don't think Brady would use that cop-out of the different timeflow theory.
2) The guilds were at war. They each had armies and each fought. The guildpact was a way to end this struggle.
3) THe Guildpact was offically dissolved by the Azorius Senate. Though the root of it's destruction originated several years back. When Argus Kos arrested Szadek, thus creating a paradox within the guildpact.*
4) Ravnica doesn't need the guildpact. The guilds are still a socio-political juggernaut. Without the guildpact the guilds are going to be more unstable.
* IN the guildpact, the Dimir's role is to usurp and destroy the guildpact. SO when Argus Kos arrests Szadek for trying to break the guildpact, it created a paradox. Basically the guildpact was poorly written. (Or more likely, Szadek had that contradiction added for this purpose).
After the guildpact was wounded, it still worked. It was the Azorius senate that finally dissolved it.
Chapter 2: While watching the play based on the guildpact he thinks about how Szadek and the Dimir weren't real. And that Szadek was probably a necromancer who led an army of skeletons against the city long ago.
Then near the end of the first novel, Szadek finally gets his revenge for being exiled (presumably for the army of skeletons).
So it is implied that his gamut was the army of skeletons, and when that was disrupted he was exiled instead of persecuted (because arresting him would break the guildpact). And then he created this plan while in exile to destroy the guildpact and destroy the city.
While it is never stated how Szadek's army was defeated, i like to think that Azor outplayed him by including something in the guildpact he didn't realize/take into account. (Though this is all speculation)
Alot of Ravnica is left up to the reader to figure out.
The Dimir were known to lobotomize people who knew too much. And they weren't above killing people.
The guildpact has a clause that revealing the existence of the tenth signatory (Szadek) is punishable by death.
To be clear, Szadek's gamit wasn't 10,000 years long. He early on led an army of skeletons against the city and lost (that's why he was in exile).
Since ALara, every plane we've visited had at least one (or more) planeswalkers ascend within a generation. This isn't a matter of Dominaria or Ravnica being planeswalkers hubs, this is a case of planeswalkers being far more common ponst mending. Because planes themselves create planeswalkers at higher rates then previously*.
The point is, 1 in a trillion is a stupid number, and doesn't make any sense. There is no way to say:
1) The likelyhood of a planeswalker ascending is the same across the multiverse.
2) The chance of a planeswalker ascending is one in one trillion.
Alara pretty much blew that out of the water.
Waps are not malicious, wasps do not set out to destroy all spiders. Wasps could wipe out all spiders, but wasps aren't committing genocide, because wasps are mindless creatures.
But green does make a good beastly, or nature-centric villain. Someone trying to restore the natural order would be a villain.
I reject the notion that the spark works differntly on different planes. I don't think there are planes with higher rates of generating planeswalkers than other planes.
I think that statistic 1 in a trillion isn't canon. Itsounded good, so they kept it, but it doesn't reflect the actual percentage of planeswalkers in the multiverse.
You are missing a few important details:
1) the ratio of planeswalkers is one in one TRILLION!
2) Neowalkers are mortal, and most of the neowalkers we've seen are neowalkers. In fact both Tezzert and Ajani are neowalkers and both are from Alara. SO the idea that they pile up doesn't make sense. (Also by point 1, does Alara have a population of 2 trillion?)
3) The planes are near infinte, which means planeswalkers should be equally spread out.
4) Size doesn't really matter here. Dominaria is 2.5 times larger than earth, even if it has 2.5 times the landmass and 2.5 times the resources you aren't ever going to approach a trillion population.
5) Earth's population has grown to the size it has because of the industiral revolution. Most planes would have high mortality rate, high infant and child mortality, and low food. Most planes cna't support a population the size of earth's.
6) ? I don't see how adding new races changes the equation. If we suddenly had elves, could we feed them? No, all sentient creatures would be lumped together. A few, like merfolk or Flamekin could utilize niches not used by other races, but that's not going to balloon the total popluation to 1T.
It is that "thumb up" button under the avatar picture.
That statistic was quoted by Brady when he introduced the neowalkers. So it should still be relevant.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the spark is hard to ignite, just that it doesn't ignite very often.*
Consider that it can't be that hard to ingite because all the planeswalkers survived the ascension.
1 in 1,000,000,000,000 is not a realistic number anyway. Planeswalkers would be ridiculously rare, never run into each other, and would basically be unheard of. Consider that there are only 6,973,738,433 humans on earth. So you would need 143 earths to get an average of one planeswalker. Then you have to take into account that most planes are primative, and so thier populations are going to be far, far,far,far,far lower then modern earth.
2) Karon was ridiculously overpowered, she's probably the most powerful being we've ever seen (maybe the Eldrazi are more powerful).
We don't really know how powerful Bolas was at his peak.