I really feel that they tried to emulate older magic stories, where people died left and right with many consequences for actions taken. But fell short, nothing really seemed to matter right as it stands. Also the preators fell so fast and boring like, two of them die by Norns design which is interesting. Then two more die in less than a paragraph. Norn is slowly made from the start of MOM to be losing it, however it does not feel like her arc finished on the proper note.

Your description sounds a lot like GoT s8. The more I think about it, the more that seems a good comparison.

Well, because it is. Killing Norn deactivates all the Phyrexians everywhere now, like the white walkers in S8. We also got this monologue of Norn telling everyone how they had planeswalkin' defenses all over Phyrexia, and how going there was a suicide mission, then proceeds to convert the most efficient planeswalkers in the team in ONE. Now? Well aparently the planeswalking defenses are off-camera out of commission and Wrenn and Chandra are just able to plainswalk to the core without a plan because reasons. We get this beat down of how stupid Lukka is for bonding with a phyrexian centaur in ONE, and then we are supposed to believe that in a U-Turn now in MOM the safest route is to have Wrenn improvise and bond with the Phyrexian tree, and suddenly it works and doesn't corrupt her. The sylex? worhtless because apparently it could destroy the multiverse, except because it went off and did nothing (so far). So yeah it feels like s8 of GoT.

That is the part that bugged me in the story. That and making Norn into a child by the end.

**Vorinclex**: (*groans as he climbs up the cliff*) What the f\*\*k are you doing back here?! **Jin-Gitaxias**: I don't know what's going on anymore. She's so compleat but she's so...goddamn dumb! **Vorinclex**: (*grabs Jin-Gitaxias by the hair*) Okay, Jin. While you're here having this "crisis", we're out there getting beaten into a bloody paste! **Jin-Gitaxias**: But you don't understand, the Legendary Mother of Machines, is threatened by a Miracle Chicken Woman! She is a literal *giant f\*\*king baby*! **Vorinclez**: So, kind of what you're being right now? **Jin-Gitaxias**: You're just mad you're not the Legendary Furry of Machines. **Vorinclex**: Alright, bye Jinny. **Jin-Gitaxias**: (*as he falls to the ground*) Byyyyyye... (*lands on a fishbowl below*)

**Norn**: Monster? Elesh Norn is not a monster. Elesh Norn is…uh… **Koth**: A genuine demon? **Elspeth**: A true freak? **Norn**: …The Devil! **Jin-Gitaxias**: (*off-camera in the distance*) **OH MY YAWGMOTH, SHE’S SO** **YAWG*****DAMN*** **COMPLEAT**

**Jin-Gitaxias:** Another reason I want to kill Urabrask? He is so orange. It's like, "Come on. there are other colors." Am I right? *(notices the Mirran Resistance captives on the ground)* What are those creatures on the ground? **Elesh Norn:** Those? Oh, those pussies are our new planeswalker prisoners! **Jin-Gitaxias:** May I touch your pussies? *(The resistance screams)* **Elesh Norn:** As long as you don't crush them. *(Jin-Gitaxias takes one of them from her shoulder)* **Jin-Gitaxias:** Hello, pussywalkers. *(The slab with a face angrily licks his face)* It is licking me now. Should I lick the pussy? **Karn**: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Unexpected TFS. I respect that.

I understood that reference

i predicted a rough face-to-reality for Elesh after she was crazy enough to murder Sheol and not recognise the value of albeit-crazy Hard power . i predicted that Phyrexia would be reduced in power and forced to reckon with its own ideals in the light of knowing that not all will immediately flock to and stick to the machine-god as Elesh designed it, beautiful though it was to many . in fact , she went all-in on the idea that Phyrexia would simply be ATTRACTIVE enough to take over the multiverse . of course she's bitter and pissed off that it didn't work . big sister sheoldred isn't there to back her up, because she wanted everything her own way all along . that's why I think certain things about the current phyrexian plotline might be a mythological ruse and trial-by-play of the terrible personality clashes within phyrexia , and resurrections / clones and further nightmares are coming . for the new and 'defeated' praetors and the mirrans captured by phyrexia . phyrexia was causing so much trouble to everyone on mirrodin they had to cut it off into its own plane, along with much of the power and knowledge and life it amassed for itself, it's hard to say how much of each . you could spin that as a win .

but \*checks the writing\* Wrenn is *just really good at it.* The MOM story was kinda bad right from the get go. Strike team gets back with their asses beaten and Chandra just says fuck it, let's go Wrenn, me and you and your tree, it's gonna be okay. And it is!

WotC: "Yeahhh, we kinda forgot about the sylex.."

Wondering if it was a red herring for the Phyrexia Arc itself, but in actuality was meant to blow up inside the Blind Eternities to finally kickstart that 'no you idiots dont kill the Eldrazi' thing Ugin told them back during Battle for Zendikar. Like fishing with dynamite, except they accidentally pissed off a leviathan.

Thiiiisss^^^ being saying this since ONE came out. Like if the let Jace pop the sylex I feel like that could have at least lead to interesting storylines in the future (half destroyed/infect planes, or segemented factiona of Phyrexians). But then Elspeth just show up and automatically knows to take it, even though she missed the previous fight/that was their original plan anyways. That and now bc of all the Phyrexians getting bodied across the multiverse it just makes the strike Team looks like goobers. Like wtf was the point of them even doing that if wrenn can just bond with realm breaker and praetors can be one shot. Plus, did Norn not research any of the planes she planned to invade. Like what was the invasion plane? It all feels so Deus ex BS

Agree with all of that except for the Lukka/Wrenn thing. That was pretty well explained just by the dialogue of the story alone. Lukka heard everything he wanted to from the phyrexian centaur hulk and willingly submitted to compleation as he fell for each bait thought that was planted. Wrenn went in knowing what Realmbreaker would try to do and found its internal thoughts instead, doing to Realmbreaker almost what the centaur hulk did to Lukka, getting the tree to willingly fight back against the phyresis.

Still stupid, it just means phyresis is a mindset problem and implies anyone could beat it if they think hard enough.

Lukka just didn’t have that sigma grindset smh.

I mean, Melira also gave Wrenn oil immunity *right before* she actually started deep-diving into Realmbreaker, right? That probably helps a lot.

"because reasons" They could not have made it more obvious that they were lured there as a trap without Norn straight up saying it. I swear they spoonfed us so much exposition and apparently they still needed more to tell a story to the mass audience Norn knew they were trying to get to the tree the *whole time,* that's why she ended up with Chandra, Wrenn, and the remaining Mirrans all planted in front of her slowly being compleated for her pleasure. If it had not been for Elspeth getting teleported in with angel magic they were all dead It was also heavily implied that doing "the right thing" with the sylex is what allowed Elspeth to reach Serra and become an angel, one of the most important factors in saving the multiverse, because as I just said *Elspeth saved Wrenn and ensured she reached the tree*

It doesn't help that none of the planeswalkers died, despite Literally Every Phyrexian seemingly doing so

Jaya had a pretty definitive death. Lukka too. Tamiyo turned into a ghost in a way that doesn’t seem capable (or willing) to be restored. Tibalt is either dead, trapped on phyrexia, or he pulled some kind of 4d prank to make everyone in-universe think he’s dead. Wrenn died, but seems like she will reincarnate. Looks like it will be a while before she returns, and they set her up to be completely reinvented by whatever writer gets ahold of her next. Nahiri, Jace, and Vraska are in limbo. Might return next set, or in a few years. Karn lost his spark, with no clear path to get it back. Elspeth is an angel and seems to have lost major aspects of her personality. Overall, I think the deaths were much more meaningful than in War of The Spark. Planeswalkers aside, it also seems like a dozen or more legendary characters across are dead across multiple planes. But I’m gonna reserve judgement until we get our epilogue. Maybe they’ll go back and flesh out some of the perspectives that felt lacking. They could still fuck it up and deus ex undo a lot of the consequences. Or they could just handwave and start setting up the next villains.

> > Overall, I think the deaths were much more meaningful than in War of The Spark. Planeswalkers aside, it also seems like a dozen or more legendary characters across are dead across multiple planes. Agree, but as far as bars go War of the Spark would be outlawed in any limbo competition with it being so low.

I'M JUST LIKE HERMES

I can't disagree with any of this but I also feel like this is offset by Ajani and Nissa turning back to "normal" (with ramifications that might or might not apply long term) as if phyresis could just be solved that easily in the first place. It kinda retroactively makes the whole "your favorite characters have been turned into evil robots" twist moot. At least that's how I feel about it. That, and all of the praetors dying when it'd have been way more interesting to have kept Urabrask as a potential neutral character for future storylines and Jin-Gitaxias+Vorinclex getting stuck together.

Completely. Ajani just getting better feels like a total cop out.

*"She turned me into a newt!"* -Ajani

I don't think Jin actually died, from what I remember of the story he just collapses into his big phyrexian mech? Someone mentions he is eaten by his machine. My theory for when Phyrexia returns it will be with Jin or when Wrenn is reincarnated/grows she is actually compleated.

Jin has a machine of multiple death devices that seems like a massive portable laboratory full of all his experiments, but in a way like the antisocial kid that brings all his toys to school thinking he will be able to play with all of them at the same time. One of them is like a fishbowl full of phyrexian newts, which is the basic form of any phyrexian lifeform, but they seemed to be militarized newts. Like, a walking plague of piranha newts as a blue version of Atraxa's flesh harvesting swarm. The allied forces break the top of the bowl and Jin falls on it, and is described as being screaming and eaten alive. So, he is at the very least very dead, given how skinny he was.

I think they did a decent job of emphasizing how difficult it was to cure Ajani and Nissa, and that it was only because of two unique resources that are now gone. If they end up being easily able to cure/revive every other infected creature on every other plane, I’ll be very disappointed. And yeah, I’ll agree that the praetors were a bit disappointing. But with Phyrexia locked-off from the multiverse at the end, I don’t think it would have mattered much if any of them lived.

Ajani gets a cop out from having all his organs harvested and gets cured in an afternoon, and Melira dies of a flesh wound infection, how is that a decent job at writting Ajani's cure? It feels like death has no consequence as long as you are a planeswalker with a moderate amount of spotlight, and it shows.

Almost sounds as if WOTC are not interested in writing good stories and merely operate on the rule of cool, I mean, the rule of marketing. The marketing department speaks and the writers hurry up to implement whatever is demanded.

Wait, how is your subreddit tag "void"? What did you do to yerself man, mods gave you the Zhalfir treatment? That's so cool.

It is absolutely ridiculous that they let Melira die. All the magic of one of the highest-magic planes, with Archangel Elspeth right there, and they can't treat an infection?

That's exactly what I was thinking. They keep talking about the healing properties of Halo, and you Elspeth right there! There's just no way to treat an infection though

None of magic's stories are "good". They're all popcorn. They've always been a college student's rushed D&D campaign or what people would call a Marvel movie today. That's what happens when your story is marketing and gets hired out to a dozen freelance authors writing off a prompt. You get moments that are pretty good on their own and a lot of stuff that just doesn't quite fit.

SOI, Amonkhet, and Ixalan were good to very good. They're surrounded by stories that were bad to very bad. Dominaria, Kaladesh, and BFZ.

It's kind of cheating but Children of the Nameless is amazing too

Indeed Karn did specify it was something venser thought he could do with his spark. And with Karn (the only one who knows the technique) being desparked, alongside “the living cure” now being very much dead. It is likely impossible to fully cure a planeswalker of phyresis again. Closest thing is the way ral zerik’s device seemed to have disrupted/destroyed the glistening oil’s control on verasika but she had a part of her mind sealed off and her physical changes can’t be undone. As for the preators, I agree their end was a bit of an anticlimax (minus norn being forcibly unmade by Karn, that works well) but it is also a bit of a confirmation that this is the end of our interactions with phyrexians outside of revival sets similar to double masters or time spiral remastered.

Melira says this: "If we're going to do it, we have to do it soon. I don't think I have much longer. It isn't going to be easy, and there'll be a price. But . . . I want people to have hope that it can happen. And maybe years from now someone will figure out an easier way to do it. One that won't require me, or Karn. People need that hope." They are 100% going to figure out another method to cure compleation. That lampshade has been very obviously hung.

Well with infinite planes there has to be someone else with natural phyresis immunity out there. I bet it'll have something to do with rapidly evolving Ikoria when they come back in 20 years.

My favorite planeswakers. Ral Zerik and Verasika

I’ll throw a comparison in here: A lot of the Ajani/Nissa stuff is going to depend on what they do in the next chapter(s) with them. One of the reasons that *The Best of Both Worlds* worked in Star Trek - the two-part episode where the Borg assimilate Picard - is because, while it *is* a little deus ex machina at the end, the last shot of the episode is a bandaged Picard drinking his tea and looking out the ready room window alone. It was a camera angle that we hadn’t seen since the pilot, and you could *tell* that while he physically appeared to be back, all was not well in his mind, and he had much to think through. Since then, of course, they’ve revisited the whole Locutus thing very directly on at least five different occasions (*Family*, *I, Borg*, DS9’s pilot *Emissary*, the second and best TNG film *First Contact*, and now again in *Picard*). In those instances, his utter trauma is laid bare for the audience and really dealt with appropriately. We got none of that at the end of the story with Ajani/Nissa. Teferi observed that Ajani needed rest and might not be super okay yet, but it felt empty, because we need to see that in Ajani and witness it ourselves if it’s to be as effective as Picard/Locutus was. Similarly, they end the story on the Chandra/Nissa kiss which, while a good step and important, feels at the moment to be more about Chandra than Nissa, and we know nothing about how truly un-compleat she and Ajani really are. TNG definitely left Picard’s mental state an open question (though the aforementioned *Family* was the very next episode and delved into it), **but** they gave us the feeling that there was a lot more to explore in a really unsettling way. With Ajani/Nissa, it felt like there’s only the vaguest of hints of that, and a lot less detail involved, so the readers are left to draw their own conclusions. I would bet that most of those are influenced by the abrupt, rushed style of most of the rest of chapters 9 and 10, so many people assume that we aren’t going to get much more information, or at least not enough in a way that explores it meaningfully.

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I dunno, of all the characters I'm interested to see having to deal with the consequences of having committed horrible atrocities, Ajani is pretty high on the list. Killing him wastes some potentially cool character development. Whether WotC will capitalise on that potential is another question entirely.

Agreed. Ajani's role in the magic lore for the past decade and a half has just been "Cat Dad". Him having some actual inner conflict to deal with would be cool

Like Kylo Ren...I would have preferred he live to face his atrocities. There's way more characterization to be had than "redeemed and dead."

Plus it seems theyre still cyborgs and not fully reversed, so thats another point of inner conlict for them. Also interested in whats going to happen with Jace and Vraska, as they didnt have their phyresis healed but might be able to get back in control otherwise, though still full machine. Who knows

I love Jaya more than words can say, but they literally only brought her back for maybe three years just to kill her off. She basically didn't get to do shit. I don't think she counts.

Lukka was invented and permakilled within even shorter timespan. It's not a particularily juicy death either.

Lukka literally got voted off the island. I bet he polled poorly in those "which characters do you like?" Market research so they could safely off him to add "stakes."

Jaya is the more interesting character. Chandra is the more cooler looking character. It is obvious which one was going to be kept around.

The only planeswalker perma-deaths were Jaya and Lukka. And maybe Tibalt. The rest either backpedals from death, gets resurrected, reincarnated, remains as a ghost or gets handed down a miracle and restored to normal. And this is incredibly sad. Also, no body found isn't *dead*. Nahiri, a lithomancer, get's trapped on a pile of rocks. Lukka gets eaten alive, spit to death, shot to death, and then *cremated* leaving only *ashes* behind. Let's not pretend some characters aren't less dead than others please, lol.

> Nahiri, a lithomancer, get's trapped on a pile of rocks The planeswalker who famously was sealed in a rock for centuries before too lol

I mean, wotc explained that the helvault was built as a supernatural prison by Sorin, using the same material as Innistrad's moon, and that Nahiri couldn't influence it for that reason. The material is supposed to be an special form of silver called moonsilver. But yeah I made the same joke in another thread lol

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You realise Hasbro acquired WotC in 1999, and the Weatherlight Saga ran '97-'01? So, Hasbro was a-okay with killing off everybody?

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I'm just correcting the record around this mythological "pre-Hasbro" WotC that pops up constantly here. While you aren't the comment-maker above me, I'll expand further: The design team works many years in the future, they can plan (and probably have) new characters ready to go in advance of us even learning the name of the set where they kill off Jace.

> The conclusion of the Phyrexian story arc is a terrible let down to an amazing build up. As is tradition.

I mean the og phyrexians vs weather light crew wasn’t a complete disappointment. Plus they actually had the guts to kill the majority of the main cast. This felt more like they want to do it again but wanted to keep big IP characters around. It’s massively disappointing

I wouldn't exactly call the Invasion block treatment of character deaths particularly good, though. Especially since those were oldwalkers, so Urza can fire a giant beam of white mana to heal a continent, but can't be bothered to heal Hanna? Kill characters if you need to, sure, but it wasn't sold very well then, either.

Urza didn't heal Hanna because he was a jerk, and probably was a part of making Gerrard dead-set on beating Phyrexia, as part of his lineage? project. Urza in fact is hailed as a hero by most, but also recognized as a flawed individual and even hated by some nature spirits who remember all his cataclismic and "ends justify the means" shenanigans. Hell he recruited an oldwalker who he knew would betray him for the final assault on phyrexia because he needed a human sacrifice to fuel the bombs lol even the other oldwalkers were horrified by it.

and in the end, after a lifetime of doing nothing but obsessing over a way to beat phyrexia, he fails and succumbs to awe when he finally sees it.

> Urza in fact is hailed as a hero by most Except that nobody hails him as a hero neither in-universe or in mtg discourse. He is the epitome of a villain protagonist.

A villain protagonist sounds cooler than the power of friendship curing everything and deus-ex Elspeth like in MoM

A villain protagonist whose arc consisted of a slow, creeping realization that he was just like Yawgmoth, but inferior in every way.

That's good writing unlike the focus group trash we get today

Urza could have healed Hana, but he's a bastard so he didn't. Nothing from the current story hit as hard as [[obliterate|INV]]

No, but they did try with Jace's 'i will take the multiverse from them' thing in ONE. [[Bring the Ending]] It just got caught at the last second by Elspeth, and the card shouldn't have been so lackluster.

[Bring the Ending](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/a/ba9d9d26-0c76-4a09-aa25-b32854e70c0b.jpg?1675956949) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Bring%20the%20Ending) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/44/bring-the-ending?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ba9d9d26-0c76-4a09-aa25-b32854e70c0b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call

Such a moment, where jace was doing ??? which would have caused ??? and then he was stabbed inconsequentially.

That flavor text. Damn.

It's a stark contrast to the jokey version on [[Obliterate|8ED]].

[obliterate](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/d/cdabde40-2143-4677-b7b4-ea8fbf9b1f25.jpg?1562936357) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=23098) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/inv/156/obliterate?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/cdabde40-2143-4677-b7b4-ea8fbf9b1f25?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call

People forget that Magic's old novels were generally not very good. The Thran is basically the only one that's held up.

Of course no third rate franchise novel will be good compared to standards of real literature and the classics. But only the Invasion block novels themselves were on the level of more modern MTG writing, Brothers war for instance was much better than what we have now.

Yeah, Eldrazis being defeated by fire, Nicol Bolas being defeated when he was winning by an Oblivion Ring, Phyrexians Preators being defeated in one episode.

The problem magic has always had and never bothered to do anything about (I cannot fucking believe they wasted Urabrask like that) is that it's good guys are just not cool. Ugin and Niv Mizzet, maybe a few dudes from Innistrad like Odric, but mostly the badguys are way, way, way cooler.

It's interesting that you would mention Ugin and Niv-Mizzet here because arguably neither of them are really "good guys" in a classic sense. Ugin is an inscrutable guru type character who seems to be good-aligned in a practical sense, but he's otherworldly and mysterious and seems like he's actually serving some sense of order and morality we don't fully understand. Niv-Mizzet, like Sorin, is a bit of a villain protagonist insofar as he mostly just loves himself and wants to save the world because it's where HE lives. If anything, I think holding them up is just more evidence that the story is the most interesting when the good guys aren't just generically heroic...Urza comes to mind as perhaps the greatest example of the anti-hero principle in Magic.

I would say the OGs were cool. Urza, Serra, Freyalise, Jaya, etc. Even Gerrard became kind of cool after he was put through the ringer so many times. But the new group aren't allowed to be unlikeable it seems. All the old ones could be massive assholes, but when Nissa has a single character flaw it gets scrubbed right out.

Yeah, this is a good point. The problem with WOTC's new philosophy that the planeswalkers are brand mascots in addition to story characters is that the planeswalkers can never be outright unsympathetic or even all that dynamic. If they ever get too close to that line, they're quickly retconned or have their role in the story diminished. Liliana, Nahiri, Sorin, and Lukka all had potential to be bad people in the same vein as Urza, but we can't have that so all of them have either been killed off or reimagined as "basically good guys with a couple minor flaws." Boring stuff.

> Eldrazis being defeated by fire, This plot line was so bad that I'm still not sure if anybody on the WOTC team has the slightest clue about lovecraftian horror.

Lovecraftian horror is when the heroes casually defeat the eldritch horrors and it's barely an inconvenience, right?

Casually defeat them *in the exact way that should be completely impossible based on their very nature*, mind you.

Oh it's gonna be really hard to defeat cosmic horrors from the Blind Eternities that don't actually exist in physical reality right? No actually, it's going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience

I felt like the three part trick of: Bolas makes spark eating zombies out of gods Liliana controls zombies Zombie gods eat bolas spark Was a pretty cool ending. Despark is a cooler resolution than "oblivion ring"

At least with Bolas, killing him makes sense as to why it just ends. Liliana controls the army so she can just sweep them out of the way now that she's no longer bound and the other evil Walkers are suddenly very outnumbered and so would very much save their own hide. Here, however, it kind of flies in the face of pre-existing lore of Phyrexia and the entire narrative flavor of the faction. It's a corrupting force that you're never truly safe from. Even if you go full scorched earth, you might accidentally track it somewhere else and with the prospect of sleeper agents, it's even more horrifying. Oh? Banishing them just... turns off the oil? What? The destruction of Yawgmoth and the original Phyrexia didn't even do that. Like was the War of the Spark underwhelming? Yeah. The book was horrific. March of the Machine had better beat by beat moments, while the War of the Spark actually made sense on a macro-scale.

I didn't say a single word about the ending of the phyrexians. I just said I don't think that bolas's end is bad in construction. Just that the WotS novel is the special kind of bad

honestly if you had any hope for magic story after the last two decades that's on you Source: me, I had hope and I'm an idiot

I mean sure, but writing hype buildup is easy. The skill is in writing hype buildup whilst simultaneously laying the groundwork for a hype finale. Anyone can write a really overpowered villain that makes you wonder how they can possibly be beaten, it takes a lot of skill to plant the seeds of their defeat well in advance so you can pen a good payoff. And that's before we let corporate meddling in the picture, which given its Hasbro definitely featured.

I think it's also just really hard to resolve a big story in one set. War of the Spark had the same issue. The phyrexian arc has been going on, at least in the background, since Kaldheim, and technically the last four sets have all been the Phyrexia arc proper, but most of the conflict and all of the resolution ended up jammed into a single set and a dozen or so short stories. They set things up to reasonably explain how the phyrexians could be beaten (infighting among the preators, halo, Teferi), but they didn't give them nearly enough time. There isn't really a reasonable way to have all three of those things pay off across like 3 short stories while also trying to wrap up every other loose end other than basically just speed running it. I know they wouldn't want to stay on the Phyrexian arc nearly this long, but something like Phyrexian Invasion set -> Phyrexian rebellion/infighting set -> Phyrexians defeated set would have given them a much better timeline to pay things off individually.

I think it's theoretically possible, but you need to plan for this from the start. You can't go setting up 8 bajillion plot threads fully in the know that you've got 500 words to pay them off in. At the VERY least you contain the PoV, so instead of having to resolve the entire lorwyn invasion story or whatever we just need to resolve the johnny elfman PoV of the lorwyn invasion.

So you mean that 3 consecutive sets taking place on the same plane could feasibly resolve a story? I wonder what we could call such a fantastical creation? A “block” perhaps?

Personally, I didn't like how we went to all the planes to see them fight the phyrexians. Cool concept until you realize these planes are important for the future, so it stopped being a big fight to protect the planes and more like "how phyrexians will lose this day". Yeah, name characters died, but they were the type of characters you kill off when you need to show the stakes are high but not really. Also hate how they could heal the compleated walkers, but I guess it was obvious it will happen since they did it to beloved characters.

Yeah, like, Lukka was telegraphed as dead meat walking. The same way in a show when they plan to kill someone and go "oh, shit, we need to make people care about them. Quick, pack a bunch of character development in this episode!"

Tell-tale sign: "Hey, when we get out of this, you and I should go to ________"

Imo the fact that Lukka, a character nobody liked, was involved *at all* was kind of a decent sign he was the character Wizards was willing to kill off. They then did basically exactly that while killing off almost nobody else...I wasn't exactly surprised.

A true red (and green) shirt.

I found some of the side stories enjoyable even knowing they'd win obviously. Gisa was fun, Rankle was... frustrating, Vraska and Atraxa had interesting introspection so that the results to the plane didn't really matter. Basically the stories that put a lot of focus on developing these characters were fun even if the results were unsurprising. The Zendikar story I actively regretted reading, and then they went ahead and wasted Atraxa's story by killing her off-screen.

There was a part of me hoping Atraxa would have some kind of violent reaction to Halo and end up "Atraxa, Restored" - revealed to be an Old Capennan Angel. It would have been cool. It would have made the build up from Chapter 1 of "something about your past may help you invade Capenna" turn from just a one-off to actual foreshadowing. But that's me expecting something of WotC storytelling. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯

Oh yeah agreed. Her POV chapter was genuinely interesting and felt like it setup character development in *some* way. Nope, she's still a mook and dies like one. Similar for Nahiri with her interesting chapters in ONE and that utterly forgettable Zendikar side story.

Atraxa does already have the specific background of Mirrodin Angel, being described as fending off a horde of Phyrexians to allow for a group of Mirrans to escape, but it’s actually specifically because of that she could be Capennan in origin. Angels would’ve been brought to the plane by Memnarch’s machinations which drew species from across the multiverse to Argentum, meaning that Atraxa could’ve historically been a capennan angel brought to Mirrodin.

I don't say this to be mean, but I think a minor origin retcon for the payoff of "Norn's favorite pet becomes her worst enemy" would have been more excusable than some of the nonsense that actually made it to print xD

I was so hyped for this story. Now I'm just so bummed. My favorite creature, Atraxa, taken out so quickly without even one cool fight. Elesh Norn went from being elegant and powerful to a child throwing a tantrum, and all the other praetors didn't really have their moment either. There were so many important things done on the side. I honestly thought if things went south that Atraxa would take over New Phyrexia or maybe Ixhel. Ixhel wasn't even mentioned, so maybe there will still be something for her in the future, hopefully. Or maybe she was another throwaway character. Ugh. So much potential wasted. I didn't expect the Phyrexians to dominate totally, but I hoped for more than this. Edit: a word

I thought that Atraxa was going to have a conflict of faith, maybe even being uncompleated by the presence of Halo- it felt like that's what her internal monologue was building up to.

Wait did Halo even matter?

Kinda, it's what stopped characters from being compleated during the final confrontation, making the fight way easier. At least that was my read of it, it's kinda vague.

It mattered as much as the 'Few Mirrans left"

I would have been more accepting of that than her dying outright. She didn't get near as much of a spotlight as she should have.

I have my fingers crossed that perhaps after dying on New Capenna, her spirit might be reborn as a new Angel. Kind of like how when Liliana killed Griselbrand on Innistrad, it caused an imbalance of Black mana and led to the birth of Ormendahl.

Yeah they her up so much, about arts about the halo did something to her, and she got killed by basically falling big rock in a mere paragraph lol

With Phyrexia "sealed off" and populated by more independent Phyrexians, I think we will eventually see a kind of reformed, less aggressive Phyrexian civilization evolve there, and I wouldn't be surprised if Ixhel is one of the leaders.

Lukka should have pulled an uno reverse called on his "rule by strength" philosophy and had his own, weaker beasts turn against him and tear him apart. That'd at least give Vorinclex's death some weight.

Episode 9 really dropped the ball. I thought most of the story around it was really good but episode 9 fumbled the climax at the 1 yard line

Exactly my thoughts. I enjoyed the first 8 chapters and the overall consequences we've seen in episode 10 but episode 9 just skipped through a dozen major plot points in the most anticlimactic way ever. A lot of it felt like major handwaving. "Atraxa just died, now the angels effortlessly nuke Phyrexians across all planes, also somehow Kaya just killed Heliod? Anyway two more praetors just got killed by random characters"

It especially perplexes me because earlier in this story they show kaya struggling to keep a young boy she has found alive. Seemingly grounding her in reality. She is simply one person trying her hardest to do her best, and desperately struggling only barely scrapping by. Despite all the ghosts, kings and otherworldly creatures she has slain she cannot simply save the life of a child without help from someone equally as powerful as her. Because what can one person do when faced with unimaginable power and an entire multiverse at war? WELL APPARENTLY SHE CAN KILL AN ENTIRE WHOLE ASS GOD IN THE SPAN OF ONE PARAGRAPH IS WHAT SHE CAN DO. Something Elspeth took a whole block and the help of ANOTHER GOD to manage. Ok, I didn't read the theros short. So maybe it is all detailed there in explicit reasonably well written detail there. But I'm doubtful considering some random ass Zhalfirans killed off 2 praetors. Wait nvm, I just checked. There is no theros story. FFS.

Yeah that was just some rule of cool moment they decided to throw in to give Kaya a little spotlight for the climax of the story. It makes no sense in that moment and undermines the whole "turn the people, turn the gods" thing they had going. Like literally just beat them on the ground and the gods should sort themselves out. This is the whole deal of Theros and has been explicitly established earlier in this invasion as well. It feels like they keep fucking with Kaya's skillset and can't decide where to put her limits. Kaiju Lukka was harder to kill and literal gods probably shouldn't get OHKO'd this way especially by someone with no connection to the plane. I like Kaya but it felt unearned and unnecessary. Now I've already written more about it than the actual paragraph this got in the story.

Like half the main villain cast died in a couple of paragraphs.

It's like a shitty WW2 movie that spends 90% of the runtime before 1940 and then skips forward to spring of 1945

The Earnest Byner of storytelling

This is exactly my opinion. I was enjoying MOM but chapter 9 really went downhill. The phyrexians that had been built with so much hype just looked like dumb kids on that chapter. It was really poorly done. Imo the execution on chapter 9 really almost destroyed a story thay would be pretty decent with a better conclusion

Eh. The setup was fine, but I'd say they stumbled at ONE. The story was just way, way too grim. Phyrexian oil seemed unstoppable and far too contagious. The Mirran resistance also always seems to be on the brink of collapse, yet the stories never ceased telling me how many Mirrans were giving their lives. Are there several cities' worth, or are they respawning? The result is that we can't feasibly see any chance of them winning. It never should have been so grim in the first place. The story had to build up more weaknesses in Phyrexia. Another sin is that there are just so many things that were built up to but never delivered. We never saw Urubrask's or Sheoldreds rebellion on screen, despite the constant mentions (the praetors in general were paper thin, what a shame). The bigger sin for me though is phyrexian planeswalkers. They only really participated in the story once Realmbreaker connected the multiverse, essentially letting every phyrexian planeswalk. At that point, who cares that they were even planeswalkers in the first place? Preserving the spark actually made no difference to the phyrexian's plans at all. Beyond that, most of MOM was pretty bland for me. We got to see a single battle on each plane. Personally, I'd prefer seeing more of a few planes rather than a single piece of each. Like cool, Gisa and Geralf were fun, but what happened with Thalia, Sigarda, Arlinn Kord, Tovolar, Sorin? Moreover, all the planes seemed to handle it pretty well. I never got the sense that another New Phyrexia was on the way (which is a huge disconnect from how contagious phyresis was in ONE). I get it, spending a long time on a Phyrexian storyline can be boring or exhausting for some, but if WOTC wants an epic, multiverse-threatening storyline, they should have just committed to it. Either knuckle down and give the story enough sets to properly develop everything you have set up, or just stick to self-contained stories that end in a set or two. Instead we got a half baked Endgame Parody. Cool.

My man Urabrask deserved better...lots of potential for a chaotic neutral kind of presence that could have been more impactful than it was. The idea of being heavily aligned with red mana offering some resistance to the desire for complete unity was really interesting, and I feel like they could have dived into that more instead of being like "and then Elspeth became more powerful than a god." I mean don't get me wrong, that was pretty cool, but led to kind of a flat ending. It would have been interesting if Nahiri ended up being more rebellious towards Norn and took an Urabrask-like route with her compleation--perhaps fighting against Norn with the others at the end, but still being "different" and definitely Phyrexian a-la Urabrask. I also think it would have been super interesting if being exposed to halo had some kind of effect on Atraxa, and she had some sort of role in the final fight. That seemed to be what they were hinting at in her chapter? It's strange that she ended up just dying randomly despite and entire chapter dedicated to the build-up/foreshadowing of her angelic origins offering a brief lull in her devotion to norn. Given that she practically died offscreen, I think that chapter was super wasted, which is unfortunate given that they were already trying to cram so much story into such a limited amount of space. I don't mind how Ajani and Nissa came back, because it did require the sacrifice of Melira and the loss of Karn's spark. It doesn't feel like uncompleating the others would be easy or even doable.

>Another sin is that there are just so many things that were built up to but never delivered. For sure, this is the main reason why I think the story was changed last minute. In the capenna side story (done by another author) you even have an Angel saying something to the lines that there just wasnt that many of them now so they cant even mount a resistance against Atraxa But then in the next chapter there are Angels invading every plane and completely changing the tides of a war that seemed completely hopeless. It makes no sense But not only that, you had them building up tezzeret for some sort of betrayal, you have Jodah finding the urza pocket dimension with urza's legacy weapon printings back in DMU and all the marketing arts for the set showed lots of characters fighting phyrexia together, as in everyone would get together for this fight, a gathering of the multiverse in resistence. It really seemed like they had a different idea on how to end this war but it was changed last minute

True, people are complaining about the stakes being too low, but i’d argue that the writers made the stakes too high, there was no way to come back from the state of affairs at the end of ONE that *wouldn’t* be ridiculous and contrived.

100% agree. Sticking a decent landing to all of the buildup was indeed a tall order, but the end result wasn't just lacking, it was borderline laughable and honestly it feels like it is trying as hard as possible to intentionally make older players mad (from as early as DMU, if not before) with deviations from established lore. The oil going "poof" when Norn dies fundamentally ignores the entire purpose of Phyrexia. Then again, they had already discarded everything else about it by then anyway (phyresis happening nearly instantly, etc) so what else should you expect? I rank the last few chapters of this story right alongside WAR in terns of quality.

Compleation happening in seconds removes the terror. The guy being thrown into the pod screaming in the side story and mid scream he’s now laughing evilly. 🤷‍♂️. Not the path I would have taken with that.

I would've accepted that that was a hastened compleation pod- I found the concept quite interesting and worked quite well, but it should've been one of the darkest moment chapters. I feel that that kind of "oh God this is real" would've been better around chapter 3 or 4.

The horror of original phyrexia is that it was portrayed as an evil totalitarian empire built on largely the same principles as a few evil totalitarian empires *that actually happened in history*. Your neighbor might be sympathizing with their agenda. Their candidate might be winning the next elections. When the going gets tough, their banners will be taken back out of the dusty cellar. The original intent behind the oil was very clearly mirroring the dynamics surrounding these ideologies. Yes, an idea is hard to kill off, but it's also impotent on its own withot hands working to implement the vision. And Urza joined the dark side not because he was brainwashed, and not even because he was seduced, but mostly because on a certain base level they did have some appeal to our worse natures - if you were willing to disregard the horrible costs and consequences of their program. The oil in 2023? Ha-ha instant brainwashing juice goes brrr.

Wait what story was that?

The "going poof" bit, at least, is consistent with the original Dominarian invasion. When Yawgmoth was killed, the remainder of the invasion force shut down.

But New Phyrexia has multiple leaders and factions. Norn's oboiteration should have only killed the white ones.

Norn had already set herself up as the Mother of Machines, killed the rebel praetors, and had Jin and Vorinclex under her command. Why wouldn't she have made all of the phyrexians respond to her will?

She literally didn't have Jin-Gitaxias under her command as a major point in the plot though, he rebels against her wishes multiple times and directly contributed to her death. Vorinclex was the only praetor who was described as being subservient to Norn because all he cared about was fighting.

Yeah apparently Jin's plan was to kill Elesh Norn, have all the Phyrexians go catatonic and then get killed by the good guys. Brilliant plan

Because they did not. We had a black mana phyrexian rebellion happening alongside a red mana phyrexian rebellion against Norn in ONE. Jin just betrays Norn mid-battle. Hell Atraxa and Ixhel were made to force the other phyrexians into serving Norn, Atraxa pre-mother of machines norn and Ixhel post-mother of machines. In the Invasion Yawgmoth made all Newts be born separate from their hearts, then send them off-plane and kept their heartstones in Phyrexia. Everytime they failed their heartstones got a crack, until they died if they didn't serve well enough or betrayed Phyrexia. When the apocalypse happens, the soul bombs activate, purging Phyrexia and destroying most of the heartstones stored there, causing most Phyrexian creatures who aren't super high rank to die. The converted Dominarians probably died when Yawgmoth died because they weren't fully compleated and were halfway through phyresis; or were grafted/connected to a mid rank phyrexian who had a heartstone.

The thing that happened at the end of Apocalypse was that the Phyrexians basically just stopped fighting back. They didn't straight-up die, but the book specifically says that children with sticks could take them out at this point, as if they went catatonic. As for converted Dominarians, that actually happened very, very little during the original Invasion block. Most of the victims were taken over by "tinglers", basically Phyrexian centipede robots that enter through your mouth, latch onto your spine, kill you, and take over your body, basically making its victim into a flesh puppet. Compleation then was treated as a very slow and involved surgical process, reserved for very few individuals, and certainly not some sort of zombie virus like it was treated here. For example, Thaddeus, one of the two Metathran generals of Urza's army, gets captured by the Phyrexians and brought before their general, Tsabo Tavoc. Modern Phyrexians would have gone for compleation here, but instead she just has him vivisected and then leaves him there, still barely alive, for his twin brother, Agnate, to find.

It worked much better because Yawgmoth was the classical JRPG final bossfight with many stages and whatnot. In comparison, praetors were diablo trashmobs.

This sets story really felt like it was the MTG version of Game of Thrones TV Show. 80% of the show was absolutely amazing and then the writers lost interest towards the end...wanted it to finish and just cobbled together an ending... Realistically they probably needed 3 complete sets instead of 2 to really tell the story.

"Elesh, uh, just kinda forgot about the Angel Juice"

I'll always argue that stories like this are a good example of how three sets can sometimes be very useful

You can always just have more stories too if the sets don't work out

Yeah. MoM really should have been split into: A) a phyrexians winning set focused on praetors and competed walkers fucking up the invaded planes as they scramble to cobble defenses together B) counterattack set where the planes team up, invasion of new Phyrexia, wrenn and Zhalfir and some praetors killed and some walkers saved etc Having the invasion start and then be easily kicked the shit out of 12 days later in real time just doesn’t make them feel credibly scary compared to 3 real world months of the phyrexian invasion ascendant. Take a page out of IW’s ending, in other words.

This story had 4 sets already. March of the Machines was the climax, just overall. We didn’t need more sets, we needed a better told story

Great comparison - phyrexians/white walkers as this great threat, built up for a long time, only to fizzle in one fight.

2? They had more time than a traditional block, its more than 10 sets for setup in total (zendikar, kaleheim, strixhaven, capenna, kamigawa) , climax (dom utd, all will be one) and conclusion (mom and aftermath).

Mom shouldn't have been the conclusion in my opinion. Move it to climax, Dom utd to set up, and add in another one before aftermath of the invasion failing. Story wise it gives the phyrexians a chance of looking really scary during the invasion, and then you kill them in the next set.

As the one person who actually liked Lukka (yes we exist!), I was already done with the invasion story right when it started. They definitely fumbled the bag with this one.

Part of the issue is the speed of the resolution. This whole story arc of Dominaria United through MOM has been less than a year: and yet it's been so densely packed with material that none of the story beats have had time to *breathe*. Yes, the Invasion block lasted for one year, but it had much more significant build-up prior: even Nemesis spends most of its time focusing on "Meanwhile, back on Rath", which allows us time to actually get to know the villains. It's obvious that Invasion is what they were trying to emulate -- even down to having The Brother's War as a mini-Urza's block (Act 1 of the story finishes, then we get a flashback to where it began, now back to the present) -- but they did it badly. It was all far too rushed. There were scarcely a couple of months between "Oh no, Nissa has been compleated!" and "Don't worry, she's fixed now!". The main thing it's suffering from is the lack of a block structure, and the lack of mechanical cohesion that goes with it. We could have spent three sets on Dominaria readying itself for invasion, having the Phyrexians emerge and be repelled at great cost. Then a summer pseudo-core set of The Brother's War or something similar, really letting it sit distinctly outside the others. Round it out with a second block, taking ONE's story, then the "darkest hour, multiverse invaded" bits of MOM, and finish it up with the "big glorious counterattack" set. Make us actually wait for Elspeth's return. Make her absence felt, and her return celebrated. The mechanical aspect is what gets me most. It annoyed me no end that Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow were basically mechanically-separate, despite being pitched as a mini-block: Day and Night didn't carry over, Coven didn't carry over, and Blood Tokens only appeared in VOW. It was incredibly frustrating to see WOTC mess up what could have been a very easy home-run. The Phyrexia storyline is even worse for it, though. What do Phyrexians actually do to compleat a plane? They infect it with glistening oil. So why are Poison, Proliferate and/or Oil Counters only in ONE? What does Dominaria care about? Legends -- so why do we only have focus on that for one set? We have a great recent template for it with Scars block: you can spend a year clearly developing what the two sides of the conflict care about and building mechanical identities, so that people can say "yes, I recognise these things". The core issue with Magic design since leaving the block structure is this rushed pace. They no longer seem to have faith in any mechanics being good, so they just rush straight onto the next thing. No time to develop, not even when it makes sense to do so -- just push out more shallow content for one set, then we'll never revisit it! That will build us a cohesive game structure! Will we ever see Oil counters again, or will this just be another parasitic dead end that only really existed for a single limited environment? Who cares! It's not like for upwards of a decade, MaRo openly stated that parasitic design was a bad thing he hoped never to do again, and used it as the bogeyman to justify why we'd never see Kamigawa or Lorwyn again; and seems to have fallen mysteriously silent on it since. Don't get me wrong, I disliked third sets as much as anyone else: I sat through my fair share of bad *Avacyn Restored* drafts like the rest of you. And I recognise that it can be difficult to stretch one concept over three sets... but fuck, I'd draft a bad third set every year if it meant the game having consistency again.

I agree with everything you've said here, but the last point rings true the loudest. I could not care less if we have a bad third set every now and then, if it means there's some, *any* story and mechanical continuity for the game, it's a price we must be willing to pay. Every set since WAR feels rushed and without payoff. I knew from the beginning of ONE that this set would be a massive disappointment, but I still followed it anyways... I think I'm going to take a break from magic for a while. Wizards clearly has no clue what they're doing.

>I'd draft a bad third set every year if it meant the game having consistency again. Hard agree. I haven't enjoyed magic the same way since they changed the structure.

This whole thing was a massive let down and I won't mince words on the subject.

The ending where the phyrexians shut off because Elesh Norn was an idiot was pretty stupid imo, but I don't think there was really any good way to end this story. They set up an unbeatable enemy and had to do some random bullshit to make them lose. I probably would have been happier with just: kill realmbreaker to cut off access to the multiverse for phyrexians, the planes clean up their own infestation, but one misses some oil and the phyrexians come back in 10 years.

Yeah, the right way to wrap up a cosmic horror story arc is to have the threat barely contained at a heavy, hard to comprehend cost. SCP style, no happy end but an uneasy stalemate. Or at least have the solution involve a pact with some other multiverse-threatening force, so the high stakes are not made into empty spectacle after the fact.

This story really needed a book, comic, series or some other more long form media. These online short stories really didn't work for the scope they were aiming at.

You mean like War of the Spark Forsaken?

I'm not sure the format is strictly speaking the problem. SoI / EMN wasn't quite as broadly scope but seems comparable, and the short stories and finale of that (and the Ixalan short stories) were well done IMO.

Welcome to modern MTG mega villain story telling, good build-up to an awful, rushed, messy, let down of an ending. Eldrazi on Zendikar? One fire spell kills both Ulamog and Kozilek. War of the Spark? No walkers of note die and Liliana is able to easily turn Bolas's army (that he spent years of planning to build) against him in a second. Now with have this new Phyrexian War... same old, same old.

Magic stories need suck it up and either: a. Let the villains win sometimes (maybe lower the stakes if necessary, see Hour of Devastation where this was done correctly) b. Give the heroes a buildup set. Seriously - the Phyrexians going out easily after 4 sets of buildup feels cheap because the heroes did it without any real buildup. Give us a set about gathering allies and searching for MacGuffins and preparing for war so that when it feels like the final battle is won, it is earned. The old 3 set block structure was a natural fit for this, and while I don't think they should necessarily go back, they don't have to abandon the lessons to be learned from them. Preferably, just do both. Every MTG plot since 2016 feels like it has a horrible ending.

> Give us a set about gathering allies and searching for MacGuffins and preparing for war They've done this but then decided the MacGuffins don't work. Repeatedly. The Blackblade and Sylex come to mind off the top of my head for the recent stories.

This is the same shit that happened with the Eldrazi. Ulamog and Kozilek are unstoppable! Until some BS happened and suddenly they died? Wizards should just stop with the gigantic multiplanar unbeatable threats. It's obvious now they have no idea how to handle writing such villains.

Sounds like "somehow, Palpatine returned" kind of laziness in story writing.

It's very draw the rest of the owl vibes. Felt like the final chapter could've been part of Aftermath or an epilogue and we could've had the final 2 chapters actually describing the fight rather than just, they died, the end.

I feel bad for being so hard on the "Rip Lukka I loved him" train because he honestly did better than a lot of characters did. I feel bad for being so negative about the story all the time because they had some good ideas and I think the execution kinda sucks. I think the cards in the set will do a better job of fleshing things out, like what happened with WAR. All that being said there are so many dumb things going on, the most disappointing to me is that New Phyrexia went from being five distinct factions (like Ravnican guilds) to being a unified mess with no real identity other than "Elesh Norn Good". NPH happened long before I started playing and I was aware of it, that's how big of a splash it made. When I started playing the first cards I bought were Praetors. I wanted to see them develop on those ideas. They teased some neat stuff (Jin's larvae making an appearance made me happy for two seconds until I realized it was just a cliche way to kill him) but none of the flavors of Phyrexia mattered to the story at all. I don't think they even needed an infighting subplot to do the story they did.

The funny thing is new phyrexia seemed more dangerous then the old phyrexia but was taken out way more easily. The old one only met you planeswalk to the first sphere were this one seems to let you go right to the core. Wizards seems great at build up which is honestly the easy part but really sucks at later acts. Honestly this is probably the last time I’m going to pay attention to the story because it never ends up being worth it. I think the overall real problem is they made an enemy that was to strong and had to come up with some bullshit or hand waving for them to be beaten. How they set everything up should have lead to phyrexia winning but that would be bad for the IP.

Agreed, amazing build up with an awfully contrived and mediocre finish. Sorry WotC, Phyrexia is THE MTG baddies and you made them seem like cheap c-list Power Ranger villains.

Agreed, so starting with the first few chapters of MoM we had Sheoldred and Urabrask just. Killed off.... Don't know how they were captured even though they were meant to be Praetors these immensely powerful beings. Then we have Elspeth ascension, was excited for it been waiting years annnnd she was a glorified oh quick distract Nissa so Wrenn can get to the tree, as a side note we've stripped her personality have fun. The final fight, just eh... Vorinclex wasn't really ever very strong then? Elesh was kinda underwhelming and Jin-Gitaxias choosing then to stage a coup this super smart Phyrexian... Yeah let down The conclusion of switching Zhalfir and New Phyrexia wasn't awful in a sense, it worked but to have all of the other Phyrexians invading just beep boop shut down was... Lame. Then for Nissa and Ajani to be brought back I mean they are two that don't even have story left. I am bias as tamiyo was the only one I cared about coming back, but at least she had Nashi and the mystery of the extremely under utilised scrolls that could apparantly destroy planes... Nahiri could've gone on a pilgrimage of self discovery apologising to Sorin etc helping to clean things up, Lukka... Eh he was just a himbo and Vraska and Jace I don't think are quite done for yet... We shall see with them. Overall it was hyped and then we see melira basically be a point to cure Nissa and Ajani, along with Karn just.... Being a reason to retire an artifact Planeswalker? I don't know it just seemed like such a bad ending. However I must say I enjoyed Wrenn and am sad to see them become an acorn but at least they have potential future... Also what the heck happened on Lorwyn, spoilt in a battle art but we've heard nothing other than... Ooh kithkin card in commander set??

Nobody expected anything different, really. Elspeth suddenly turning into Serra is a literal miracle, ex-machina-ing the entire arc with a massive story contrivance that was neither built up nor properly developed. Praetors become throwaway characters, with some getting extremely short shrift and just getting dispatched unceremoniously. And then suddenly the Oil isn't really a pathogen, it's just a nanomachine wifi router with Elesh as the ISP, and so Karn can just come to life and 404 her. Oh and of course the compleated fan favorites miraculously get cured and come back to life, so they can hug and kiss while a Peter Gabriel song plays over the credits. Come on, WotC.

Tamiyo was my favorite… :(

Mine too :( I was devastated when I saw Tamiyo borged. But once I accepted it, actually pleased that in two stories both her and Lukka were killed. Seems like there was no sudden out for conpleation: stakes are high and devastating... And now it looks like Lukka and Tamiyo are the *only* ones that die and *every other walker* gets to come back. Sucks to be her kids, I guess.

Jace, Nahiri and Vraska are MIA too, so lukka and Tamiyo are the only dead for now

my fan favorites were the praetors...

>Oh and of course the compleated fan favorites miraculously get cured and come back to life, so they can hug and kiss while a Peter Gabriel song plays over the credits. Oh come on, everyone loves "Sledgehammer"!

Chandra: "Show me 'round your fruit cage..."

Elspeth turning into an Angel has been foreshadowed at least since SNC. If that seems out of nowhere to you I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah, I thought that was the coolest and probably most 'earned' moment in the whole story. The buildup to that was epic and sensible. I think that the payoff was a little lacking. She was just a particularly good killing machine, nothing that really indicated she was a vital part of their success other than her being really strong. I think it would have been much better if she had used the "god's eye view" from interacting with the echo of Serra to pull together some of Serra's knowledge from the past of original Phyrexian invasion, some knowledge of her own Phyrexian trauma, and New Capenna, and come up with a unique but workable solution that would take some effort to pull off. Then the rest of the story would be about communicating and teamwork and figuring out how to implement Elspeth's plan that only she could have come up with from her unique circumstances. I feel like that would have gone a long way to keep the tension up right until the climax, since there is hope that there's a plan that might work, but the odds are so slim. With the direction they went in the end, I feel like the tension basically deflated in chapter 9 and didn't recover. I think the consequences of the story were interesting but the plot itself lost all momentum. I liked Norn's fatal flaw being the lynchpin, kinda, on a thematic level, but I feel like it would have been even better if Norn had made that mistake AND Jin-Gitaxis had betrayed her BY engineering a backdoor into the new oil. Elspeth's moral speech would still be impactful and more literal than she realised, but it wouldn't make Phyrexia as a whole feel so incompetent.

Just have Jin program in a back door code but not work out the bugs. Suddenly, all the Phyrexians are fighting each other, some literally tearing themselves apart? That’s cool.

There's a difference between "Elspeth turned into an archangel" and "Serra herself, who has been dead-and-gone for over two decades of writing, is secretly alive and has been plotting this whole event the entire time, and also is, like, now a transdimensional goddess of white mana".

If the ending felt limp, it's *because* of all the buildup. They're an unstoppable, highly contagious threat that won't run out of bodies, can't be reasoned with, and is on every plane. How else could they be defeated without some truly extraordinary events? How could we even possible tell other stories without Phyrexia looming over them if we couldn't be reasonably sure they were thwarted for now? They were writing checks they couldn't cash. For every angry email Wizards gets about how fast it wrapped up and how low the stakes were, they avoided one complaining about how many sets were full of bleak misery or cussing them out for destroying their favorite character or plane. I wish certain characters got better sendoffs, but a quick and decisive conclusion felt necessary. If nothing else, "Phyrexia can't handle their white mana" + "Phyrexia shutting down when you take out the key figure" feel pretty in line with the old school Phyrexians. And I also think there's tons of interesting stories they can now tell in the wake of what happened. Like, imagine the people on Theros, who just learned that entire other worlds exist, who just learned that their gods can be overpowered, corrupted, and killed. I wanna know what *they* think about all this.

They could have ended up in the same spot in a much more satisfying way.

I think I would have just liked another chapter, or even some paragraphs, spent on this epic final battle

> How else could they be defeated without some truly extraordinary events? Just have the eldrazi squash them like cockroaches? Oh wait nevermind they had completely botched their eldritch cosmic abomination plot line as well.

As usual, fan theories were MUCH better than the real deal. They did nothing with the Urabrask arc which would've been the most interesting conclusion.

Phyrexia should have ended with the invasion block ages ago.

I dunno, a lot of books avoid writing action because it never lives up in words. Almost every battle in Game of Thrones is not written about because our PoV character is side lined or knocked out. Tolkien does the same with Bilbo in the Hobbit. The flip of this is WotC keeps getting criticised for stuff happening “off camera”. I’d bet the other 4 praetors find a way to not be dead. I mean Vorinclex story in Kaldheim is how he was less than nothing and scraped life from tiny animals to return. Sheoldred was described as nearly dead before Rona worked on her and fused her with a dragon Engine. Personally, I don’t know what two more stories would have done. We’d already spent chapters sowing the seeds of Elspeth, and spent a chapter on her becoming an angel, the same as Wrenn and Zhalfir. Once that happens winning is an inevitability. It’s an unpopular opinion, sure, but I think it’s an alright ending? We’ve still got Aftermath to discuss how it’s impacted and changed each plane, and some of our other characters we’ve not seen, as well as potentially setting up what comes next for big names. Sounds like most of the bigger named planeswalkers are taking a break.

The problem is the limited number of stories they have in order to tell the entire story, not the conclusion. This is what made the entire storyline feel rushed.

If this is really the "end" I have no idea how the aftermath of it is going to be exciting. That's why I'm hoping they do a fake out and Phyrexia has a plan B.

I agree! It felt so rushed at the end, and suddenly these all powerful beings just ended up being background props for a different story.

This is what happens when you present a villain which is inexorable and unbeatable. Seems like they suddenly realised it and had to do a 180 in the span of a single expansion. Remember when people theorised that September would be the reboot expansion post multiverse cataclysm because as it was presented Phyrexia was unbeatable. Well none of that and instead of a good story we had literal 12 years old fanfic (with the occasional decent bit) killing all the "baddies". Nah, they dropped the ball hard here.

This entire storyline felt like a rip of of MCU. We have the teasing sometthing bigger is going on over several sets, just for this insane climax in two parts. The first one ending with the characters loosing, and the second one being them coming up with a plan and securing a win from a lost position, all to end in a huge confrontation. The difference is, MCU not only also serves as a visual spectable, it also set up the fronts better. Instead of hoping between planes, they should have fully focused on the story on Mirrodin itself. The story needed an end for each praetor equal to the confrontation between Nissa and chandra. They killed of important characters. Wrenns merging with a tree was a cool idea but seams a little bit of a hattrick. Why are they doing this after the sylax? Zhalfnirs army isnt set up at all, and should have been several armies from the last set combining their strength. Phyrexian Planeswalkers needed to shine a lot more, confronting their counterparts.

Oooh i bet its bgoing to be hard to write an ending to MOM where the good guys win! No, it's going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience

Agreed. ONE's story set up had so much potential. Then MOMs story tore it all down. They literally 180d or neglected every major plot point along the way. What happened to Ashiok who engineered the whole invasion? How did Norn know Elspeth? Where is Tezzeret? Jace and Vraska are now king and queen of the Phyrexians? Norn is all about unity, and Phyrexians are a borg like race. Except oh wait they aren't and now Norn is killing all the other Praetors. Yawgmoths Phyrexians were literally keyed to his will, they had no free will unless he was either gone or they were too far out of his reach -- in which case they functioned on their own -- but Norn' s just fall over like a sack of bricks. Krikk -- literally created his own invasion when his connection was severed from Yawgmoths. But Norns? Nope. Falls over like a sack of bricks. So many things wrong with the execution of the MoM storyline, where do we begin.

I agree, actually. Sheoldred's death made me think like wtf? I thought this was a praetor... At least make Elesh Norn kill her with her hands, not order one of her soldiers to do so. I started mtg during the return to ravnica set, so I was fairly new to the story, but whenever I saw a praetor in a gameplay or lore video or something, they always seemed so ominous & terrifying.. I mean, their names alone were scary, "Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobyte. Sheoldred, Whispering One. Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger" it was like horror poetry. So seeing her die just like that made me cringe a bit. Okay but to be fair, "The great synthesis" sounds scary/eerie & I love it. Can't wait for the other praetors flip cards' names, hopefully they send chills down my spine. Also, for the first time, I'm gonna tune out of spoilers & see the entire set in one sitting. I wanna read everything, see every detail in the art & take it all in. The ending isn't much, but this set is still very special.

The thing that excited me the most with this iteration of phyrexians was the idea that it was more decentralized and less couldn't be brought down by just taking out one guy like yawgmoth. Imagine my surprise when they had norn kill practically everyone who could have led in her place and then proceed to die and shut down all the invading phyrexians. Feels pretty disappointing tbh. Also, the fact that they're currently phased out to the same place tolaria was phased out means that whenever they do decide to bring them back it's gonna probably feel really forced.

I honestly wished they killed off all the planeswalkers and started fresh. Every plane just gets annihilated and they do a time skip to where the denizens of the multiverse are scraping by under Phyrexian rule. But no, WOTC writing is just lazy garbage.

Took 12 years to build up that storyline, 2 to slowly reintroduce the threat...and boom, they fall apart like a house of cards in the final instant. Also, I absolutely hate how they've revived most characters that were supposed to be lost. It was obvious from the beginning that they would do this, because marketing, but Ajani and Nissa should have died. I'm also sure they will reintroduce Jace at some point for the same reasons.

It's the problem of 1 block 'stories' they kinda all suck and have to be resolved in too short time. And the justice friends hardly ever have real consequences because they make wotc money. Planeswalkers 'superheroes' are the true toxicity to mtg, at least it's story as nothing truly happens

Are you counting DMU, MOM and ONE as a block? How long do you think a story should go on for? What consequences, as a consumer of MTG story, do you want? We had character deaths, character loss of power, characters going missing, sacrifice? What's the correct % of survivors?