The Color of Hope: Ambition, Necromancy, and Black Mana
Black is one of the most misunderstood colors in Magic: the Gathering, not least because it appears on the surface to be so straightforward. Look at the most iconic black cards of Magic and you'll see deals with demons, necromancy, mass destruction and cruelty and suffering–the trappings of classic fantasy evil. Even the color's symbol itself is a skull, a universal signifier of death and danger.
And in early Magic that seemed to be all it was. White was the color of Fantasy Good, black was the color of Fantasy Evil, and the rest of the colors were... fire magic? Elves? Whatever odd but intriguing skeleton affairs are implied by Time Walk?
Gradually, though, Magic deepened as both a game and a storytelling medium. The color pie grew into itself as a system of complementary philosophies, archetypes whose associated aesthetics were only part of the full picture. Their arrangement around the wheel, below, is highly deliberate; neighboring colors are said to be allies with a high degree of philosophical and mechanical overlap, while colors on opposite sides of the pie are known as enemies, more likely to disagree on fundamental levels.
Black stopped merely representing capital E Evil and became the color of striving for power; unlike its peers, black felt that nothing, least of all morality, could prevent it from seizing what it wanted. Mark Rosewater's 2015 article about black emphasized the color's focus on the self:
"Black's philosophy is very simple: There's no one better suited to look after your own interests than you... Many costs require the sacrifice of others for your own advancement. Because it puts itself first, black is always willing to make this trade. The weak must fall for the strong to thrive."
-Mark Rosewater
At its worst, black is an exploitative, amoral color that prioritizes itself at the expense of all others, allowing the "weak" to fall and scorning the very idea of compassion. Rosewater writes that black is "always willing" to trade others for itself. And these can certainly be parts of black's philosophy, when taken to its worst possible extremes, but they're far from the entire story.
Over time, Magic's outlook on black gained nuance. Magic story introduced protagonists like the necromancer Liliana Vess, whose craving for immortality, seemingly exploitative nature, and demonic deals called back to the oldest portrayals of black–and yet she was not one-dimensionally evil. She underwent character development over the years, learning the value of reclaiming herself and standing beside others, and at no point did she become any less mono-black for it. Remember her; we will come back to Liliana and her story later.
In addition to the usual death and decay, black cards began to feature a theme of relentless devotion. On the plane of Eldraine where each color represents a virtue, black's is persistence, explicitly as important as any other color. On the plane of Ikoria, the love between bonder and beast pulls Winota back from the brink of death. Wherever this Oathsworn Vampire printing is set, its flavor text is quintessentially black. It's the same self-driven attitude as before, but cast in a different light: black is nothing if not persistent when it's got its heart set on something (or someone) it cares about. Nothing, least of all the grave, will keep it down. After all, black will always come back for its own.
These newer cards uncovered the true face of black as a color capable of both great love and harm (sometimes even the latter for the sake of the former), and suggested a tantalizing new thread: perhaps putting yourself and yours first isn't all that bad, necessarily. Black is a deeply protective color; it says you don't just have to accept what you're handed, it's okay even to be furious about it (hello, ally color red), but let that galvanize you to do something about it.
Vraska, a gorgon who faces extreme discrimination on her home plane of Ravnica, triumphs by reclaiming herself, gorgon powers and all–and even more radically, loving herself. She displays traits often considered the purview of white and green, such as a love of home and a drive to elevate the oppressed, but they are all filtered through the lens of her black alignment. Vraska staunchly refuses to deny herself or her people, the Golgari Swarm, of their value. Nor does she allow law or propriety to prevent her from championing them by any means necessary–even if that means cold-blooded murder, or aligning herself with a villain like the Planeswalker Nicol Bolas.
"[Vraska] thought of Mazirek, of the kraul, of the rest of the Ochran assassins and the malignant Jarad who reigned with casual ruin over the most downtrodden of the downtrodden. She remembered her years of isolation, and the heinous cruelty of the Azorius, and how no group deserved to suffer as much as those who would subjugate her own.
Eliminating that hell was all she ever wanted."
-The Talented Captain Vraska, Alison Luhrs
Like Vraska, black loves fierce and hard, willing to break any taboo for the sake of those it cares about. And it whispers, the entire way through, you are enough. You deserve better. No matter what others may say or do, you are enough.
"If I am to be met with disrespect, then I must first love myself with a fierceness no fool can take away."
-Vraska in Pride of the Kraul, Alison Luhrs
Even black's "ruthlessness" isn't as fundamentally cruel as it appears, centering a passion for problem-solving (shared by its other ally blue) instead of a blunt disregard for others.
"People don’t understand the word ruthless. They think it means 'mean.' It’s not about being mean. It’s about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It’s about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it."
-K. A. Applegate
All of this comes together to make a black a color not of evil but of strength, integrity, and persistence. And that's all well and good, but I'm going to take it even further and put forward a new proposition: that black is the color of hope.
Of the nine mono-black Magic cards with "hope" in their names, all but Liliana portray black as an instrument of hope's destruction. This is, once again, black's flaw taken to its extreme–crushing others to achieve its own ends–but neglects black's own relationship with hope.
Black, more than any other color, requires hope to stay alive.
For black to persist, it must believe in a light at the end of the tunnel, a future in which its goals are realized. As long as it does, it will endure any hardship, walk through fire, and turn reality itself upside down on its way there. Primal, desperate ambition is the engine of hope that burns at the heart of black, keeping it always one step ahead of stagnation. Bitter and stubborn, black believes tomorrow will come because there is no other choice. After all, for black to relinquish hope is to let itself wither, regress, and die–an unacceptable outcome.
Thus, it is monumentally difficult to strip black of hope. That only makes it all the more crushing when it happens, when black contends with the idea that there is nothing it can do.
Black's deepest, darkest fear is helplessness.
Like any mono-black character, Liliana Vess is driven at her core by a seething, desperate hope. When Liliana first unlocks her necromantic power, it is out of a sheer refusal to allow her ill brother Josu to die, even when the esis root that would cure him is destroyed by enemy witches in an undead-raising ritual. She defies her previous training as a healer, which taught her only to take the safe path, in favor of a higher-risk and higher-reward approach: stealing life from the witches themselves to restore power to the esis root she needs. It is her knowledge that her brother needs her, and her sheer stubborn will to succeed, which allows her to defeat the witches against steep odds.
"Six foes, and Liliana stood alone. But Josu's life depended on her, and the power blossoming within her was more than enough."
-Liliana's Origin: The Fourth Pact, James Wyatt
Tragically, however, Liliana's attempted cure goes horrifically wrong, transforming Josu into an undead being plagued by eternal suffering. In his pain, Josu attacks Liliana. For a while Liliana holds out hope, finding the power to fight back while she determinedly searches for a spell to reverse the harm she's done. It is when she realizes this isn't possible that her strength falters.
"All this time, she had believed… that she could turn the power of death to the service of life and health. That a healer should use every tool at her disposal. But Josu was the result, a horrible fusion of life and death, and all her spells meant to manipulate the life force of the living could do nothing to harm the dead."
-The Fourth Pact
Liliana learns that even her own dark magic, fueled by determination, cannot solve the problem she's created. She discovers the hard limit of her willpower, and the despair of this discovery is what causes her Planeswalker spark to ignite.
At this time Planeswalkers are as gods, immortal and near-omnipotent. Liliana spends decades enjoying this affirmation of her capability before the Mending strips her and all her peers of their power, reducing them once again to mortal mages.
"Then the Multiverse reshaped itself, robbing her—and every other Planeswalker—of the godlike power they once had wielded. Some called it the Mending, as if something broken had been repaired, but to Liliana, it seemed the opposite. It broke her beyond any hope of repair."
-The Fourth Pact
Once again, it is Liliana's fear of helplessness and her refusal to accept it that drives her to push beyond the bounds of propriety–this time, to make a pact with Nicol Bolas and four demons to maintain her immortality. It is not enough for her merely to delay death; she requires the security of knowing she is fully beyond its reach, that she will never be helpless before it again as she was with Josu.
"Holding death at arm's length for whatever years are left to me? No, that's not enough. I want to be free of its shadow."
-Liliana in The Fourth Pact
Black isn't like its enemy colors white and green, which are superficially associated far more often with hope. Unlike white, it doesn't believe that conviction, justice, and community will bring about rightness. Unlike green, it doesn't trust in the wisdom of the world or the natural order. Black believes that nothing will change unless you make it change; ultimately, black's self is the only one it can trust to bring about the world it needs. In addition, black lacks its enemies' idealism. Instead, it strives to be a pragmatic realist, making a final assessment of defeat all the more definite and crushing.
While white and green are more amenable to finding hope and holding it aloft as a banner, black claws hope desperately to its chest with shredded, bloody fingernails. Every ounce of hope black has, it tore by itself from the clutches of an uncaring world.
Ironically for such a self-driven color, black's fierce hope is the greatest asset it can provide to others–on its own terms, of course. It was Liliana who turned the tide of battle against the Eldrazi titan Emrakul, defiant in the face of cosmic despair. And when Nicol Bolas made his bid to return to godhood, using Liliana's necromancy to command his undead hordes, Liliana finally turned against him. In reclaiming her power, so too did she use it to free her fellow Planeswalkers from Bolas' assault. Her fear of helplessness no longer shackled her to him; agency and autonomy were hers at last.
The triumph of black, its moment of ultimate victory, is the hard-won fulfillment of its hope.
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
-Dylan Thomas
An aetherborn, railing against the shortness of their natural lifespan, constructs a new body for themself with their own bare hands. An artificer's grief over her lost companion causes her to push invention to its limits. A young girl who loves her brother calls on the darkest of powers to save him. As it turns out, necromancy–that original thematic keystone of black–is only one of black's many, many refusals to let go of love and hope once it has them, even in the face of the ultimate end.
Time and time again, black–in love with life, ablaze with hope–looks the Grim Reaper in the eye and tells it: "Not today."
Blacker than Grixis (Warhammer 40,000 and Magic: the Gathering)
Games Workshop never consulted the Color Pie when it built 40k (Magic: The Gathering did not exist yet), yet the setting it formulated maps with uncanny precision onto Black’s axioms. Warhammer 40,000 is not merely grimdark. It is a setting whose entire cosmology, metaphysics, and survival logic align with Black to the exclusion of all other Colors.
And it is primarily because of the Warp.
Black’s core thesis is that the locus of control is internal: reality is clay to be reshaped by the strongest Will. Nothing external—gods, nature, reason, or communal harmony—has the final say unless you let it.
In 40k, the Warp makes that thesis literal. Collective emotion and belief literally forges gods. The gods and mortal rulers of the Eldar Empire failed to ruthlessly control its subjects' behavior and thus allowed them to birth Slaanesh. The Emperor confided in Malcador that if he had warned all of his Primarchs about Chaos then all 18 of them would have fallen to it.
The Imperial Creed’s enforced ignorance and the Inquisition’s purges of anyone who knows too much about Chaos—these are not merely “necessary evils.” They are the optimal strategy in a universe where letting the masses believe the wrong thing feeds the enemy. The regime that keeps trillions deliberately deluded is the regime that survives. Only Black endorses that as the correct path.
White calls it tyranny. Blue calls it anti-progress. Green calls it unnatural. Red calls it boring. Black simply says: “Yes. And?” And the other Colors have no answer.
Black is the perfect philosophy for living in Warhammer 40,000 precisely because it celebrates the absolute virtue of self-determination, the triumph of Will, and the defiant dream to tell God—if He exists—to go fuck Himself. The Emperor did exactly that: He rejected the Chaos Gods, hid their existence from his own sons, and tried to build a secular empire on the corpses of old faiths. Every Chaos champion who bargains with a patron does the same in reverse—feeding Chaos simply to tell the Corpse-Emperor to go fuck himself. The setting’s metaphysics reward the ruthless exercise of internal locus of control above all else.
Here the inevitable objection arises: how can Black’s philosophy of “telling God to go fuck Himself” possibly be correct when four terrible gods and an entire dimension of daemonic horror stand arrayed against any individual human who dares exercise Will?
The answer is already written into the Color Pie itself. Black has never pretended its path is safe, clean, or free of cost. Every Black card that reaches for godlike power—Liliana’s contracts, Yawgmoth’s experiments, the Phyrexian oil, the endless demonic pacts—demands terrible sacrifices and harrowing deals with the devil. The Chaos Gods are that devil, and they are monsters because only greater monsters would offer their blessings to lesser monsters.
The horror of the Warp is not a bug in Black’s worldview; it is the price Black willingly pays for a universe free from White’s moral restrictions and Green’s natural cycles. In exchange for freedom from White’s ideals of justice and compassion and Green’s ideas of inevitable natural order, Black must also forfeit whatever safety, inherent dignity, or cosmic benevolence those Colors might have provided. There is no benevolent force to surrender to, no perfected rational utopia that cannot regress, no harmonious natural balance that rewards selflessness. There is only Will, sacrifice, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
In a cosmos without guardrails, anyone with sufficient Will can reshape reality. That necessarily includes the people you hate most, who hate you right back, and the hateful gods they birth. When the potential for apotheosis is a cosmic constant, then that path is just as available to your worst enemies as it is you.
And that is what fuels the engine of endless war: Everyone must forever seek to dominate or eliminate any possible rivals for control of Reality Itself. The alternative is to inevitably find one’s self at someone else’s mercy… in a universe where the act of mercy is vanishingly rare, because the very concept of ‘mercy’ is not a cosmological truth, but a suicidal delusion.
In such a world, inevitably someone will have achieved apotheosis before others… but they need not be the last. The Chaos Gods are merely those early winners whom everyone else must appease or supplant. They aren’t simply obstacles to one’s apotheosis, they are the proof that Black’s path of apotheosis is true and superior. At least for those who embrace the truth for how it is achieved.
So naturally, in general and aggregate, the Four Chaos Gods are primarily Black. Khorne (Rakdos) may embrace Red’s impulsive urges for violence and bloodshed, Tzeentch (Dimir) embraces Blue’s pursuit of knowledge and foresight, Slaanesh (Grixis) may embrace both Red and Blue for her dual pursuit of passionately excessive perfectionism, and Nurgle (Golgari) might compromise with Green to inspire despair and surrender through humility and acceptance, but these are merely how each one distinguishes itself from the others… Universally, they all operate on the Black axioms of Parasitism, Vampirism, and Domination.
They exploit the best aspects of humanity, tempting humans into giving into the worst, most excessive extremes that each of the gods feeds upon. They gleefully devour as many souls as possible to enrich themselves, dooming each one to a state of everlasting torment. And the ultimate end of the Great Game is seeing which one of them succeeds in finally devouring the others. Just as Slaanesh devoured the gods of the Eldar.
Nurgle has not devoured Isha, but he nevertheless keeps her imprisoned and enslaved. He exploits her; torturing her with new diseases to test their potency. He feeds on her despair, turning the souls of her brave children into wailing trees to mock her and any hope she could ever have for rescue.
Should the Corpse-Emperor himself ever achieve apotheosis, ten millennia of suffering the constant agony of half-death, of being forced to consume human souls to remain alive, and of listening to the prayers of a vast interstellar empire worshiping him as a god in a betrayal of his grand mission… Pile all of that on top of the ruthlessness he already displayed in life. It is too much to hope he will become a benevolent White god to oppose the Blackness of the Chaos Gods. He would sooner rise as the Dark King; White/Black (Orzhov), at best. Forever holding humanity in mental bondage to keep them safe from themselves, because they will forever be enslaved to him for the debt their transgressions accrued.
Just as Games Workshop presciently predicted Black in its design of Warhammer 40,000, it likewise presciently predicted Blue in how that design rejects it. For the longest time, Games Workshop has advertised this explicitly: “Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”
The pursuit of utopia is futile; the struggle against regression is doomed. The Old Ones failed. The Necrontyr became the Necron. The Eldar Empire destroyed itself and its direct descendants thwart the efforts of those cousins who are trying to save their species. Humans destroyed their own Lost Age of Technology, plunged themselves into the Long Night, ended that Long Night only with a ruthless ‘Great Crusade’ of conquest and subjugation and extermination, and then that empire destroyed itself and left behind a massive rotting corpse. The rising T’au Empire thinks it can do better only because it has no conception of those empires that rose and fell before it, and the terrible realities that inform the policies of the Imperium of Man.
Even the recent “Hope Spots”—Belisarius Cawl’s innovations, Primaris Marines, Guilliman’s reforms, the Lion’s return—do not shift the setting toward Blue. They are Blue methods ruthlessly subordinated to Black ends. Guilliman does not restore the Emperor’s dream of rational enlightenment; he triages a dying empire with colder, sharper efficiency so that the machine can keep grinding corpses into prayers. Cawl hoards forbidden knowledge in secret vaults because actual Blue progress would shatter the ignorance that protects the Imperium from Chaos. Every upgrade serves one purpose: more efficient slaughter to feed the throne and keep the masses believing the Creed. These are not steps toward utopia. They are the strong using every tool available to reforge reality in their image for one more grim millennium.
Even setting aside the industrialized human sacrifice of the Imperium of Man (the imperial tithe, the black tithe, the hive cities, the forge cities, the servitors, the kidnapping and torturous transformation of young boys into aspirants who might become Space Marines), let’s look at the Asuryani Eldar.
Only in a universe as bleak and hopeless as Warhammer could it ever be justified to practice necromancy on the level of the Craftworld Eldar. Their Craftworlds are fueled by Infinity Circuits empowered by the souls of dead Eldar. Mass Asuryani deaths actually supercharge their Craftworlds. The Asuryani consider it horrifying and disgusting and disgraceful to weaponize their dead, and yet not only do they not face any divine censure for employing Ghost Warriors, the setting treats this only as the most sensible pragmatism. In this universe, there is no atrocity too heinous to commit for the sake of victory. Is it any wonder, then, that the Eldar’s greatest hope for victory is the Ynnari Death-Cult that seeks to give birth to a second, more dangerous god than Slaanesh, with the desperate hope that this new god will eat the old god, and then not turn around and eat them more effectively than Slaanesh ever could?
But in Warhammer 40k, every other Color becomes a delusion, a coping mechanism, or fuel for the machine. The Salamanders’ compassion is noble but futile. The Tau’s progress is naive. The Eldar’s grace is irretrievably lost. The Orks’ joy exists only because they demand and supply the eternal war Black demands.
Even the Tyranids may be a bioweapon made by the Old Ones out of ultimate Black callousness; nothing more than a tool to wipe the galaxy clean of all ‘failed’ species and their psychic messes. Let’s not forget that the Old Ones already weaponized entire species before, when they made the Orks and the Eldar to fight the Necrons for them. Or how the Necontyr started the war only because the Old Ones denied the Necrontyr a cure for their horrible form of cancer.
Thus, 40k is not simply “a Black-aligned setting.” It is the definitive Black setting—the one in which Black is not merely viable but the only actually honest Color.
Even more than MTG’s own Grixis. Grixis is not a whole universe to itself, but merely one plane of MTG’s multiverse which must remain neutral as to which Color is correct. Black mana may predominate in Grixis, but Grixis’ cosmology must still abide by the same rules as the planes of Bant and Naya. Warhammer’s universe is completely separate from that multiverse and from the universe of Star Wars or Star Trek, and so it can operate entirely on Black’s rules alone.
The lifeloss here feels less like "deal with the devil" and more representative of the mental/physical strain you experience expanding your mind in such a way.
Hand painted nerd emblems. Phoenix Squadron from Star Wars and Black Mana from Magic the Gathering.
I will source a shirt (or tank) in your size and preferred color and hand paint in the shape of the logo of your choice. I can also do sports logos. Shirts are one of a kind as the are hand painted. 30$
Emblem ref to work from is needed as well as shirt size and color preference.
I will check what the emblem means and if you try to trick me into a hate symbol I will not make the shirt and will keep your money so don't.
Kinda funny how the leading examples of black combined with their ally colors are destruction, either of the body with rakdos, or of the mind with dimir. However, when combined with enemy colors, black actually shows its capacity to preserve. The golgari preserve life, even in the dead and discarded. The Orzhov preserve the spirits of the dead, in this case to exploit them. Notably, on ravnica, the Orzhov and golgari uniquely have resurrection magic, while the dimir and rakdos commit crimes(thank you thunder junction)
This makes me think of the land that generates black mana: the swamp. Swamps are places where people are lost forever. They are places with some of the most hidden dangers of the world, and the most desperate to survive. They are places with creatures most reviled, but just as important to their ecosystem as any other. They are places that naturally mummify and preserve the dead they keep. The swamps remember every thing that happens to them. Every slight, every hope and dream.
A swamp is a place where things go to die, and in death, become eternal.
It's time once again to ramble incoherently about magic cards. Lets try and divine where each of the cards of Outlaws of Thunder Junction are from, why don't we!
You can find the first two parts here and here! And today we're covering...
BLACK
Starting us off with a native to Thunder Junction. God this critter is spooky looking. Love it though!
Aaah, the Hellspurs. I'll get more into them once we meet our first creature Hellspur, but for now just accept that this magmatic thread of doom is native to Thunder Junction.
Another native creature of Thunder Junction! Vultures are important and regal birds and shouldn't be so villainized, I think... but I can't deny they do sometimes look this nasty.
While we've seen a number of vampires in magic practice ye ol' Sanguimancy, the plane most often shown to do this (and the plane most likely to pop their collars THIS ridiculously) is Innistrad.
As mentioned with ghosts in the Blue cards, dead and revived means you're bound to the plane- zombies are native to Thunder Junction, regardless of where they're from previously.
Sweet lord kill it with fire! This abomination is from Thunder Junction and if it's not I never wanna see where it's from. Snorses are wonderful an idea but god they look comfortable.
Gonna say something controversial about this one- the way the lady is posing, her culty robe, and the predominance of ash in her fire, makes me think this is a deep-cut to Azgol, last seen in MOM. It's got similar vibes to various Hellspur aesthetic stuff, but the woman is clearly just too alive to be one of them- more on that later.
Okay this is probably the best place to bring this up. Hellspurs! One of the criminal factions of Thunder Junction. Lawbreakers, murderers, and thieves to a man. Each follows the brutal scorpion-dragon outlaw Akul, and almost every single one of them is mutated beyond all belief by the Chaotic Thunder of the plane.
As a result, much like with zombies and ghosts, these guys have fully stripped away all of their previous life in exchange for lava hands and shit. So, there's gonna be a lot of folk who are native to Thunder Junction purely by this metric, and it'll skew things a little. This is why I'm counting the numbers by colour, since the Hellspurs are predominantly red and black.
A natural (and very spooky!) magical mirage of death. I love this art.
See? This is what happens when you don't "lower" yourself to feeding on animals. You end up shoving your stupid ass face into a cactus. This is a Ravnican vampire, since we've seen before they're often stupid enough to pull this exact trick.
*Dry bones falling apart noises* Tinybones' funny trick and/or prank! This is from Dominaria since that wonderful friend is from Dominaria too.
Raised on the plane, native to the plane. This skeleton owns by the way, this is a good ass skeleton.
Gisa Cecani is, much like her brother, one of my favorite characters in Magic. She's Innistradi born and raised, and seems to fit in like a glove on this plane.
Really unsettling art on this one! Ghost, so native to Thunder Junction... though we can actually, likely, identify the body here; four arms suggests a Mirran Vedalkan. Neat!
Our first actual look at the main antagonist of the set (for as much as that means in a villain focused set). Akul, the Scorpion Dragon of Gastal- a fact revealed right before I started doing this!
Kaervek! The Merciless! The Conqueror! The "too big a deal to be dealing with this shit", imo. Everyone's upset at Marchesa being here but Kaervek is the one that bugs me the most- this man is a country-conqueror, not a petty crook!... but, it's fine, because it's clear in the story Kaervek is insulted Oko's recruited him for such trivialities.
Anyway, he's from Zhalfir. I hope he gets to kill Oko.
Swing your partner round and round, rip their corpus from the ground! Gisa doing a barn-raising in the most literal sense, a uniquely Innistradi way of waking up the dead, with a Thunder Junction flavor.
A hellspur bursting his way out of a shallow grave- oak box included. Funny, and native to the plane.
No real way of figuring out where this guy is from or his gaseous death-cloud... so I'll say Eldraine, based purely on the fact that it's the plane most likely to have such a simple burst of "sleeping" poison.
An easy one! He may be a rat man but he's called out as a Nezumi and that's a Kamigawan thing.
There are a couple places this delightful fellow could be from... but given the pickpocketting and the general demeanor, he's from New Capenna.
Azul, laying a horrific waste to his "friends" to benefit. The scorpion claws being a vent for his breath weapon is exceptional a design, incidentally.
A ridiculous piece of art for many reasons, this one is native to Thunder Junction purely by the fact that this is where the gang was born.
The reason why this is ridiculous is because every single height here is wrong. Vraska is taller than basically everyone to the left of her. Oko is using magic to make himself look taller that's literally canon so that's fine, but Kellan? Annie? One's a baby (described as small for his age) and one's a grandma. Tinybones is also probably far too big. The only person here who is the right height is Rakdos, whose height is "whatever height he wishes to be he can change shape depending on how excited he is". Wild shit.
The only plane with actual snakes-for-hair gorgons is Theros, and even then only half of the time. So this lady is from there. Fitting too, apothecaries making booze and poison is within Pharika's perview absolutely.
As fun as it would be to say this is a raven from Dominaria, implying the presence of Omenpaths are allowing the (currently suppressed and trying to fight his way out of Lili) Raven Man is doing some work, naw. This is just a normal raven.
An all-natural undead member of the Hellspurs, double erasing his identity. God dangit.
This being an ASSASSIN vampire suggests New Capenna. It's kind of their jam, you know?
Gisa showing she is more impulsive than a monkey-goblin obsessed with explosives is why this story spotlight (that isn't given a story spotlight tag) is happening. Innistradi magic running wild and giving us a real Train to Busan energy.
A later card explains that the demons that are natural to the plane grant gifts like this, so this scorpions and their soon to be scorpionman friend are native to the plane.
Fun fact; scorpions do just glow like this. Bio Luminescence is fun!
Jana has the exact same vibe (and the same demon-snake familiar) as Elnor from Yuma's story, so I'm calling it for New Capenna here. Also, funny flavor text AND reminder text. Fantastic work.
And that's it for part 1. Tune in momentarily for part 2 of Black!
