The Philosopher&#x27;s Soul

THIS BEAUTIFUL SON OF A EWE WON’T STAY DOWN

Remember folks: knocking a zombie down does not mean they’re re-dead.

cue the Chumbawamba, etc

seras-sanctum-deactivated202005

This is why you always double-tap the zombie, Samut!

#mtg

Emma Handy and two other friends I don’t know sprinting into the feature match area to hug Autumn and everybody openly crying in joy is the best moment in Magic history forget literally everything that came before it

seras-sanctum-deactivated202005

What a fucking moment.

(Image source)

#mtg #Pteramandersaystransrights #important

Take a fucking bow.

babyanimalgifs

Dog snaps

Floofs!

#fuzzy

markrosewater

I looked up to you for years, I looked up to you for so long that I thought I wanted to work at a job like yours. But now, I see all I really wanted was to be happy like you. Thank you for being a beacon when I felt at my lowest.

A lot of people get to a bad place because they don’t prioritize making choices that will allow them to be happy.

@genevieve-sharp Profound.

#mtg #life advice

neil-gaiman

I just read Good Omens and its now my favorite book. It turns out many of my friends have also read it and never told me about it. I feel betrayed, it’s literally everything I have ever wanted in a book.

There is a moral to this: Friends don’t let friends not read Good Omens.

@genevieve-sharp- Truth?

#Gaiman

loreleywrites

I have no real opinion on the matter but I would like to know your thoughts on what you meant by MtG isn't addressing diversity well

It’s been three years and the Gatewatch only just got it’s first nonwhite member.

It’s been three years and there are no explicitly LGBT+ recurring characters.

It’s been three years and there are no recurring characters with nonidealized body types.

There is no representation, there is representation that is largely relegated to the fringes of an IP, and there is representation that is visible and present in the ongoing state of an IP. Magic has talked a big game, but they’re still stuck in the second stage. There’s a lot of good work being done in card art and a lot of good work setting a foundation for improvement, but Magic as a franchise still has a long way to go.

krishnath

Ehr, Both Chandra and Gideon are non white. Gideon is what we in real life call “Middle-eastern”, and Chandra is at least half-Indian (on her mothers side). Sarkhan and Narset are both Central Asian (Sarkhan being Mongol and Narset Tibetan), and Tamiyo despite being non-human is clearly east asian. Samut is Egyptian, Huatli is Mayan, And of course, Teferi is Central African. And we just got another ethnically African planeswalker about a month ago in the form of Aminatou (A.k.a the best planeswalker ever). Kiora, although a merfolk, is clearly Polynesian.

Both Lily and Chandra are at the least Bisexual (Both have shown attraction to both males and females in story). Karn is Asexual and doesn’t really have a gender identity, and neither does Ashiok. And since prior to the Tarkir storyline we have had multiple characters in story (and on cards) who have been gay, lesbian, and trans.

Sure WotC still has a way to go, but saying that they don’t have representation when they clearly do, including several main characters, is not just wrong but disingenuous.

Without getting into the issues around most of these, the statement was Gatewatch. The ‘Pocahontas’ representation, as it’s been called, doesn’t count for much until they’re actually recurring members of the story. Adding background characters of color isn’t quite the same thing as having them represented in the story. And the two you mention are problematic. I think they’ve been making comparably great strides, but there’s a long way to go and retconning your characters to be POC isn’t the way to do it.

Gideon is Mediterranean, which isn’t the same thing as Middle Eastern. He’s a Greek analogue, and it’s taken almost a decade for his artwork to ‘realize’ that. That hardly counts for much, either.

Chandra is gaelic-looking woman from a time when Wizards of the Coast used Indian names on white people or fantasy creatures to make them sound exotic. This was back when WotC talked about Liliana being Middle Eastern until they realized that they gave the Middle Eastern woman a Veil…

Adding in an obviously Indian mother a decade later doesn’t change the fact that they dropped the ball from the start, and there was zero indication Chandra was anything but snow white until Kaladesh. I wished they had just owned it, honestly, because Kaladesh is diverse and her parents could have been white Kaladeshi while simultaneously introducing the first actual South Asian representation in Saheeli.

But no. Instead, we get Chandra O’Nalaar, who, despite biracial children having a wide array of features, looks more like my very, very white niece and nothing like my half-white/half-indian son or any of my friends or relatives, down to the ¼th or 1/8th Indians. Red hair and freckles are certainly possible for her, in as much as they’re possible for anyone, but it would be exceedingly rare in such a way that it’s obvious Chandra was never intended to be South Asian representation.

^ This. Basically all of this. Couple of points I would add: Liliana being an essentially white woman with a veil as her signature weapon seems kind of worse to me than playing into what I recognise is a bad stereotype of “Middle Eastern woman with a veil.” It’s a smaller case of the same thing as Chandra where it might have been better to just own it. Also, if you’re going to tell a story that has a (reasonably) fixed set of main characters, as Magic has done since Origins, what matters isn’t that the representation exists in the Magic universe somewhere but whether it is “on-camera”, so to speak. For the difference between the two and why it matters, see everything about the Nissa/Chandra queerbaiting. One cannot expect people to be happy knowing these characters exist if we never see them or stories are never told about them, perhaps because (like in Alesha’s case), they’re dead.

#magic story #important

markrosewater

"You can only play the cards when you can legally play them. For example, you can only cast a sorcery during your main phase." You are aware, I assume, that the UN-FAQ and X's text seem to contradict this ruling? Could you clarify which takes precedence for us, and update the FAQ if your ruling overrides the previous?

I messed up. I should have checked the FAQ. The FAQ is correct and my last answer on the topic is incorrect.

Bookmarking for future questions about X.

#magic #uncommander

maliciousindungeon

Boris Groh is one of my favorite artists, mostly because of his works that feature LARGE skeletons just doing their thing

maliciousindungeon

This is by far my most successful post on tumblr and I am really fucking glad because my main man Boris deserves to be recognized for his work. Even if its mostly getting passed around in the form of memes about cheese.

So cool!

#cool

markrosewater

Why did the C18 Jund commander deck two non-windgrace commanders had nothing to do with land-matters? (I don't think the ability to pay a lot of mana with Gyrus is land-matters)

The deck was about more than just “lands matter”.

Nothing against the asker, but this particular complaint has been really overblown. Ever since the very first Commander product, there have been decks where the two alternate Commanders have little to nothing to do with the stated theme.

The politics deck in C11 had Chaos and Land Destruction alternates.

The C13 grixis spellslinger deck had group slug and sacrifice matters alternates.

C14 elves had lands matter

C15 enchantment deck had Lifegain.

Many of C16′s partners had little to do with the main 4-color legend’s theme.

The C17 dragon tribal deck had a rattlesnake commander and a big mana/storm enabler in Ramos.

I’m not sure why C18 in particular has caused people to latch onto the notion that a deck’s alternate commanders have to play into the advertised theme, when historically this hasn’t really been the precedent.

I can only speak for myself, but: When the decision was made to design the decks around themes rather than colours (tribes, last year), I expected that all of the potential commanders of the decks would be at least related to the theme of the deck in question. This could be as simple as “being of the correct tribe” last year, or “being an artefact” or “caring about enchantments” in some way this year (see below). That is what changed. If, say, Nazahn had been a Kor instead of a Cat whilst the rest of the decks got 3 on-tribe Commanders, there would have been an uproar. The same principle applies here- Windgrace is awesome, but the spider commander has zero relevance to the theme whatsoever and Gyrus cares far more about your graveyard than your land count.* I don’t expect you to share my disappointment- I’m merely offering an answer to the question of “what’s different this time.” If you’re going to design the decks around themes, I expect themed Commanders (plural). C17 met this expectation, C18- in this case- did not. *to pre-empt the reply: No, having X in the cost does not make Gyrus a lands-matter commander. He is just as effective if you ramp him out early using Sol Ring and Mana Vault as he is with a bunch of lands-in play. A commander has to reference or involve lands, specifically, in some way to count as a “lands-matter” legend for me, just as Brudiclad counts as an “artefacts-matter” legend because he makes them. Life from the Loam or Creeping Renaissance are lands-matter spells- Lavalanche is not.

#magic #c18

@astralarchivist that was an edited passage created to troll people. Aminatou has never appeared prior to this release

I will hold my hand up and also admit to being trolled by this. Well played, whoever you are!

Aminatou and Estrid are completely new, or have been mentioned somewhere before? At least Aminatou seems to be an oldwalker due to her powers.

They’re new. They did not exist prior to this product (and believe me, we’ve scoured the lore for planeswalkers).

@vorthosjay: I saw a reference to Aminatou somewhere in one of the Time Spiral novels- Teferi and Freyalise are talking about Karona? Sorry I can’t be more specific.

EDIT: Time Spiral, Chapter 5: “I was travelling with Aminatou at the time”?

#magic story

Is the multiverse infinite or just immense? If it is infinite, that would mean there are also infinite planeswalkers.

The Multiverse is not infinite, but it is unfashionably large.

I always liked Ugin’s explanation of this: “The Multiverse is boundless, but its contents are finite.” Infinite space, finite number of objects and things.

#magic

neil-gaiman

Mr. Gaiman, do you have any advice to spare for a 21 year old who is absolutely terrified of screwing up her twenties so irreversibly that she won't amount to much of anything? I keep reading that your twenties are "the formative period," and that so much of our lives end up defined by the choices we made in that span, and I feel like I'm already royally fucking it up.

That’s why the twenties are formative. You do things, fuck up, deal with the consequences. That’s what forms you. It’s also how you learn and how you grow and how you change. You aren’t meant to go through your twenties (or indeed through any of your life) with it all figured out. Get out there, do stuff, choose the wrong things, fuck up, fix what you can, don’t hurt people if you can avoid it, be kind, and fuck up better and more interestingly next time.

Yep, I really needed this today.

#neil gaiman

ifdragonscouldtalk

The Good Place is a remarkably moving piece of media, particularly for today, because it takes the inherently nihilistic viewpoint that humans are the ultimate torture for other humans and turns that completely on it’s head, showing growth and character change in every character with brilliant and subtle writing while at the same time completely reversing what it first posits and suggesting that humans are what drive other humans to become better, and our attitudes are a direct result of our situations in life that we can consciously effect and change. It suggests that growth is a decision, not that we happen upon it. This is important, philosophically and optimistically, especially because it does all this while telling No Exit it is inherently flawed in how it sees humans and is entertaining, staying relevant and popular in today’s fast paced and constantly changing media. In this essay I will–

motherforking-bullshirt

genevievegeeks

@swmystery27

Accept no substitutes.

#yabasic

Hi Jay! Has it ever been explained why Liliana was hit with sudden old age after the mending, but Nahiri wasn't? Thanks for all you do for the community.

I’m not sure she was. There was a lot of timeline wonkiness early on, where it seemed like the team had different ideas for how long had passed since the Mending. If she was physically in her 20s when the Mending hit, she could have made the demon deals 10-20 years before the current story and still have aged into an elderly woman.

This is also my interpretation. Going off the post-Scars timeline of it having been “about a generation” since the Mending (vaguely), that’s enough time for Lili to have aged naturally from whatever age she was immediately post-Mending to the age she is in The Fourth Pact.

#magic story #timeline

Your "Elders of the Multiverse" piece reminded me of this from Doug: "We have consistently thought of Ugin’s homeworld as being Tarkir, so he would have had to planeswalk to be involved in a war on Dominaria. That’s a wrinkle, but doesn’t make it impossible to my mind." Can we now safely assume that this is no longer true, given the most recent Magic Story? I hesitate to say "has been retconned" because it was never explicitly called out as being his plane of origin, but you understand me.

Yeah, Ugin is from Dominaria. I’m fine with blog posts or planeswalker’s guides being overwritten, especially as it makes for a good story.