#ashnod

[xantchaslegacy]

[dissonant-aria]

Something that rustles my jimmies is that in the Novel Planeswalker, we get a history of rhe early life of Xantcha, the Phyrexian Sleeper Agent turned traitor and companion to a very insane Urza.

And a scene early in her life is meeting another Sleeper Agent Identical to her. Now all the Sleeper Agents were based of a set amount of people and didnt really age (hence how mortals would eventually catch on). In order to tell each other apart, Xantcha changes her hair while the other Agent dyes hers Red. This act of rebellion sees both of them punished, but eventually the gate to Dominaria in Koilos reopens and a bunch of Sleeper Agents are sent out, including the red headed one. Years later as Xantcha is about to be sent out, the gate closes and the Dominarian Sleeper Agent program is abandoned. Gix, head of this plan and Praetor ruling over Xantcha is punished.

But in The Brother's War there is a red haired girl, with no morals that comes out of nowhere and is skilled in artifice. A girl who does not age no matter how long the war goes on.

Ashnod. Who was not printed as a Phyrexian on either card. Is this a retcon, red herring, coincidence or oversight?

[magic-the-girlbossing]

The Multiversal Girlboss battle is over!

Let's take a moment to look at the top 8 of our fine competition.

#1 - Vraska, Queen of the Golgari

With a resume sporting feats of assassination, piracy, and a successful hostile overtaking of a swarm-like guild, it's unsurprising she'd find herself at the top.

#2 - Alesha, Khan of the Mardu

This Khan who smiles at death viciously fought her way to the top, on the back of not only her incredible list of feats but also the fact that she is, indeed, transgender.

Tied for #3 - Liliana Vess

Though I doubt she'd settle for tying, she'll have to accept it. This intrepid necromancer has seen the most limelight of any of the girlbosses in this tourney. I would go so far as to say that in her early years she defined what it meant to be a Magic girlboss. Unfortunately for her, her recently compromised girlboss status due to a pesky thing called "character growth" doomed her to third place.

Tied for #3 - Teysa Karlov

Opportunistic and cutthroat, Teysa's slow climb of the Orzhov ladder, leaving her effectively at the top of a corporate AND religious hierarchy, gave her a strong case for her ascension to the title of ultimate girlboss. Unfortunately, she lost out to someone who was actually able to take over a guild.

Tied for #5 - Queen Marchesa D'Amati

Long may reign the queen of Fiora, but let it be known that this is the highest title that she will achieve.

Tied for #5 - Nahiri, the Lithomancer

While Nahiri has surely taken some girlboss actions (read: committed some war crimes), her status as a repeated failgirl blocked her from ascending any further in this competition.

Tied for #5 - Ashnod the Uncaring

Speaking of war crimes, it's Ashnod! In spite both of her numerous felonies and her sporting that bob (one of the most girlboss hairstyles) she fell just short of greatness in this one.

Tied for #5 - Emrakul, The Promised End

Rounding out our list we have Emrakul. We hope she's having fun up there in the moon, and we hope she knows we're ready for her to join us whenever she wants.

Link to final round masterpost.

[ashnodtw]

drawin

[bunnyelfprincess]

mtg book report, entry 3: a history of antiquities by kathy ice

ice, kathy. “a history of antiquities.” the duelist supplement, 1994, pp. 12-15

(hey ashnod, are you free later? i'd like to not be if you catch my drift)

magic the gathering’s first expansion set came four months after the release of alpha, and were it not for quite a bit of metatextual gymnastics to retroactively integrate it into the game’s core ip[1] you could easily argue that the game’s very first expansion was also basically its first universes beyond set.

we’ll eventually come back to arabian nights because there are some comics and whatnot, but i do want to take a moment here and note that while arabian nights’ impact on magic story was minimal, we did learn a lot about magic as a card game. magic the gathering’s first expansion was, in retrospect, a very crucial fork in the road. a different road would’ve had “the gathering” as not just a subtitle of the game as a whole, but as a title for specifically the cards printed into limited & unlimited editions, while magic’s first expansion would’ve been a standalone affair known as “magic: arabian nights” with a completely different (and honestly kinda kickass) pink card back. the last-minute decision to keep the card backs the same and allow sets to be mixed together is, without exaggeration, one of the reasons we have the game in its current form.

three months later, magic would release its second expansion set, antiquities. while arabian nights attempted to reproduce an already-existing public domain story, antiquities was the first set to have a real story through several flavor text mentions of a war between two brothers, urza & mishra.[2] the war is referred to in fairly vague terms, mostly about how destructive it was, with references to some of its specifics being argued over or lost to history.

this is exactly the kind of approach our next piece of official magic story will take. “a history of antiquities” is our first story source that was originally printed somewhere other than an instruction booklet, this time a supplemental issue[3] of the duelist magazine. it followed “worzel’s story” being reprinted in issue #0 of the same publication.

“a history of antiquities” tells the story of the brothers’ war through the lens of two professors of history, ildria caldos & farsa tashiir, arguing over their pet theories through the editing process of an in-universe academic document. it’s interesting that this is really the first telling we get of one of magic’s most well-known stories, because it really does feel like it could’ve been written much more recently looking back on it.

obviously a lot of the specifics here would later be contradicted, but that actually doesn’t end up invalidating this bit of fiction at all because the entire conceit of it is that so much time has passed since the war and so little evidence remains because of the widespread destruction the war caused, that all anyone can really agree on is the broad strokes of what happened.

i like this kind of storytelling because it’s excellent at making the world feel much larger. and i know it’s hard to imagine with how oversaturated we are with information about urza & mishra’s war at this point, but it’s honestly pretty refreshing to be reminded how vague our understanding of these bits of lore used to be, and how excited we were for every hint & scrap we got.

notes

1. but like, shoved in a corner where we kind of just don’t talk about it.

2. there’s also one reference to a place called “phyrexia” and one card is the priest of some guy named “yawgmoth.” that’s probably not a big deal, right?

3. i believe this issue came out between issues #1 and #2 of the magazine. a publisher’s note indicates that this supplement was released because they were expanding the magazine proper to incorporate more features that players had widely requested, but that since those changes would take a while to implement they released a supplement to give readers information about forthcoming sets in the old format. idk why they couldn’t have just called that issue #2 and said the changes were coming for issue #3 to avoid confusing the heck out of everyone, but ildria thought urza & mishra were fighting to date ashnod, so here we are.

***

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[onion-souls]

I wonder what design decisions went into making Ashnod's Altar not work with Ashnod the Uncaring.

Too good? I don't know, kind of fucked that Ashnod doesn't work with the one good Ashnod thing. At least she works with the shitty counter generator and the Unglued gag, but, whatever.

Ashnod also kind of works with Kelly Sue DeConnick Ashnod, but not so much with 90s Image Comics Ashnod.

[idle-minded-sucks]

Paintreeon request: Ashnod. She's using her alter to perfect compleation, but in this timeline it means something incredibly different! A different kind of perfection...

[fungustober]

I love Ashnod x Tawnos because it's like "Here we have Warcrimes McGee and we're going to pair her with this random guy we pulled off the street."