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sylvan-librarian · 11 months

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The Last of the Animists: Exploring the Concept of Animism and How it Defines Nissa Revane

Prologue

Since the characterization of Nissa in the Kaladesh block is such a massive undertaking due to the density and quality of material therein, I decided at first to take a little break from my regularly scheduled programming (i.e. - having a public, frenzied, and unhinged obsession with my favorite Magic the Gathering character). However, I couldn’t stay away from the topic entirely, so here we are.

Introduction

The source of Nissa’s magic, its manifestation within Magic’s lore, and how it is represented mechanically on cards has intrigued me to no end over the years. Mechanically, I always felt that Nissa’s cards stood out more than the other two regularly-printed green planeswalkers (Garruk and Vivien). Garruk and Vivien cards often do what you would imagine a green planeswalker would do: create 3/3 green beast creature tokens, tutor creatures from your library, give overrun effects to your board, etc. The design space across these two characters’ cards always felt limited and uninspired to me. One of the things that intrigued me about Nissa, Worldwaker (read about my love for that card here) when I first encountered it in 2014 was the fact that it played around with lands rather than creatures: it animated lands into beaters, it untapped lands, it fetched lands from its owner’s library. This struck me as a unique, inspired design at the time, and it made me feel excited to use the card.

However, while yes, I have always found Nissa’s skillset a unique design for green planeswalkers – a fact that makes the desparkening all that much more disappointing to me – my primary interest in Nissa’s magic as a deranged Vorthos is how it is described in and displayed throughout the stories.

Nissa, as we are often told in post-“Nissa, Worldwaker” stories, is the last of the animists, a rare type of mage on Zendikar who can hear the voice of the world itself, but the plane of Zendikar rarely had anything nice to say; in “Nissa's Origin: Home,” Nissa’s mother, Meroe says that the soul of the land, which so often is a source of terrible nightmares for Nissa, “was never after anything other than random destruction.” Animism, we learn, is a taboo brand of magic to the Joraga (the tribe Nissa belongs to), and Numa, the Joraga chieftain, exiles Nissa because he, like many others, believes that the inherent anger of the land is due to some untold, unknown blasphemy enacted on the world by the animists. He tells Meroe, “[y]our people angered Zendikar and they paid the price. There is a reason that you are the last of the animists.” We come to understand that the reason for the plane of Zendikar’s anger is due to the Eldrazi Titans’ imprisonment on it. The world recoils in disgust at the eldritch monstrosities who eternally strive to break free of their imprisonment and consume and pervert every living thing in their way; the plane’s anger feels justified in this light, but almost no one on Zendikar understands this, not even Nissa or her mother.

So in short, animism in Magic the Gathering is the ability to connect with the soul of the world itself which allows animists like Nissa to (among other things) animate the land itself into living creatures that can fight alongside them.

However, the concept of animism has meaning beyond the lore of Magic; why did Magic’s designers label Nissa’s powers this way, and how can a real world understanding of animism help us understand Nissa in a new way?

Part I: The Animation of All Nature

Animism is a term developed all the way back in the 1870’s by British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor as a method to describe similarities in “primitive” religions. Let’s take a quick moment to acknowledge that Tylor was a bearded white man living in colonial-era Britain using words like “primitive” to describe the religions and philosophies of people he will never meet, many of whom were currently unwilling subjects of his own government. This is an unfortunate commonality in academic studies. That aside, Tylor’s description of animism gives us our first understanding of this term. He writes in his 1871 anthropological treatise Primitive Culture that “[f]irst and foremost among the causes which transfigure into myths the facts of daily experience, is the belief in the animation of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to personification” (emphasis mine). In other, simpler words, animists personify the natural world, assigning traditionally human traits to immobile objects. The root of the current English word animate, after all, comes from the Latin animus, which means “soul, spirit, mind.” The “animation of all nature,” then, refers to the belief that what we might call objects of the natural world have their own interiority. Tylor writes elsewhere that animism is

[a]n idea of pervading life and will in nature far outside modern limits, a belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies, a theory of transmigration of souls as well in life as after death, a sense of crowds of spiritual beings sometimes flitting through the air, but sometimes also inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls, and so lending their own personality to such material objects.

Humanity’s relationship to nature, then, becomes that of subject-subject rather than that of subject-object.

What does this say about Nissa, though? If you’re thinking that the above description is frighteningly similar to how Nissa views the world, you’d be right. While what Tylor argued back in the 1870’s was that animism is a crude belief system that would eventually evolve to the rise of world religions and later on the rejection of religion in rational society, Nissa’s practice of animism is very much alive and vibrant. It is hammered home often that Nissa deeply respects the personhood of objects, whether they be trees, animals, or even the ground itself. We see this very clearly in this long selection from the beginning of the Battle for Zendikar story “The Silent Cry”:

Every day there was something new, something Zendikar taught Nissa that surprised and delighted her. The land had hundreds of magnificent secrets, and it was sharing them with her. She would never have guessed that the giant mantises secreted a scent meant to simulate the odor of fresh worms and thus attract small song birds—but not for the mantises to prey on, rather for the purpose of enjoying the birds' melodies. The songs were one of the few things capable of lulling the mantises into an easy sleep. Nor would she have known that the vines draped between the close-growing, towering heart trees of the Vastwood Forest were more like arms than vines—arms that were holding hands. Each vine grew out of the trunks of two trees; it did not belong to one tree more than the other, it was shared equally between them, a tether that bound the trees. The vines connected one heart tree with its chosen companion, and allowed the two to share memories, feelings, and dreams. These trees were linked forever; they mated for life. And the gnarlids, the silly, beastly, sneaky gnarlids; they had a ritual that they managed to keep hidden from most everyone else on Zendikar. On the darkest nights, when there was no moon but the skies were clear, the gnarlids scaled the tallest trees, poking their heads above the canopies, and they laughed at the stars. Little breathy snickers that to anyone else listening sounded like nothing more than the leaves of the highest branches rustling in the wind. It was an inside joke meant only for them. Equally as impressive was the tribe of humans who lived in the lowest canopy of the Vastwood's trees—not in a central encampment, but spread out through the expanse of the forest. Five or six humans shared each treehouse hamlet, and there were over a dozen hamlets. The tribe was able to stay well informed of each other's movements and needs thanks to their ancestors, who had closely studied the language of the chatter sloths. The people sent messages to each other by speaking to the nearest chatter sloth. It was only a matter of minutes before the sloth would relate the gossip to its neighbors, who would pass it along through the network of tree dwellers. Soon all humans in the tribe would know of the hamlet's news thanks to the little gossipmongers.

It’s important here that Nissa shares equal amazement with the goings on of plants and animals as she does with the ingenuity of her fellow sentient mortals; to her, they are no different. To Nissa, the “animation of all nature” is not some crude, outdated philosophy that has been surpassed by rationality. It is her everyday reality.

Of course, however, Magic the Gathering is a game of wizards battling each other, and its worlds and characters are full of wonder and, well, magic. The “animation of all nature” has another meaning to Nissa in that she can call out to the interior soul of immobile objects and, in a non-metaphorical way, personify them … as in, she can “animate” objects into living, walking, thinking, fighting creatures with a will of their own. In the first story of the Zendikar Rising arc, “In the Heart of the Skyclave,” Nissa and Nahiri, looking for a specific object of interest, are at a loss at which place to begin hunting for it in a giant, city-sized airborne dungeon when Nissa spots a lone fern:

Nissa crouched down to one of the ferns. Its leaves were as large as she was, but its flowers were tiny, delicate, and blue. "How is it possible for plants to thrive here?" Nahiri asked, coming up behind her. Nissa smiled. "You'd be surprised at how many things thrive in unlikely places on this plane." "How—" Nahiri began to speak again, but Nissa tuned her out. She rested a hand on the top of the fern, like a parent's hand on the head of a child. She closed her eyes and felt its life under her fingers, felt its struggle and its pride in surviving in such a foreboding place. Nissa smiled at that strength and that pride. And she called it forth. She heard Nahiri give a gasp as the elemental emerged into existence. It was a tall thing, twice her height, green and vibrant as its life force, its head a mass of fronds with small chains of blue flowers entwining its arms and neck.

The dual meaning of the “animation of all nature” is on display here. Nissa very clearly acknowledges the personhood of the fern, using terms usually reserved for descriptions of the lives of people like struggle and pride, and at the same time she animates the stationary fern into a creature, a person with a will of its own and strength to match. In the end, many elements of the Zendikar Rising arc were lacking, but I always found this particular scene to be a wonderful marriage of the best parts of Magic story: great character moments tied together with a childlike wonder at the beauty and power of magic.

Part II: Infinite Possibilities

Anthropology, however, has moved far beyond its Victorian, colonialist roots. On the same note, Nissa has grown and expanded far beyond the borders of what she previously was.

In 2006, anthropologist Tim Ingold published an essay titled Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought that reevaluates the concept of animism (there are, of course, many evolutionary steps between the philosophies of 1871 and those of 2006, but for the purposes of this piece, suffice it to say that things have changed). Ingold’s primary thesis is that animism should be considered less of a primitive branch of religious thought and more of an ontological philosophy, an experience of being present in the world. In his research, Ingold provides this anecdote:

One man from among the Wemindji Cree, native hunters of northern Canada, offered the following meaning to the ethnographer Colin Scott. Life, he said, is ‘continuous birth.’ I want to nail that to my door! It goes to the heart of the matter. To elaborate: life in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual. One is continually present as witness to that moment, always moving like the crest of a wave, at which the world is about to disclose itself for what it is.

This is a lot to unpack, but let’s use this to point out the similarities and differences between the previous 1871 understanding of animism. Like Tylor’s initial exploration of the concept, Ingold’s animists still treat the world around them with same respect and reverence; they still, in other words, still interact with the world with a subject-subject relationship instead of a more rational subject-object relationship. However, instead of fixating on the spiritual aspects of animism (i.e. - the inherent soul of inanimate objects), this modern take is more of a state of being, a practice of actively engaging with the world around you.

Ingold, in other places, argues that, while yes, animism intentionally blurs the line between what is considered ‘alive’ and what is not, the true cornerstone of an animist ontology is the process of change:

Wherever there is life there is movement … The movement of life is specifically of becoming rather than being, of renewal along a path rather than displacement in space. Every creature, as it ‘issues forth’ and trails behind, moves in its characteristic way. The sun is alive because of the way it moves through the firmament, but so too are the trees because of the particular ways their boughs sway or their leaves flutter in the wind, and because of the sounds they make in doing so.

An animist, then, in this ontology is in a responsive, conversational relationship with the world around them. They wouldn’t fixate, for example, on the personhood of a tree, but they would know how to have a positive, symbiotic relationship with the tree.

What does this new way of looking at animism have to do with Nissa Revane, though? It seemed like Tylor’s outdated definition of animism already had both Nissa’s worldview and the manifestation of her magic pegged down. What could be added? Well, like the definition of animism, like this “world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual,” Nissa herself has changed drastically in recent years.

If I had the time and bandwidth, I might set out to argue that, of all Magic’s heroes in the last decade, Nissa has gone through the most character growth of any of them; she has shifted through the most colors and she has gone through the most development of any other planeswalker. However, for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to focus on the most recent story (to date) that Nissa has appeared in: Grace P. Fong’s “She Who Breaks the World.” Now, I’ve made it no secret that this is my favorite piece of Magic fiction since the Ixalan days, so I’m certainly biased here, but the narrative meat in this text is rich and vibrant.

When we pick back up with Nissa in “She Who Breaks the World,” we find her at likely the lowest point we have ever seen her at. Her agonies are manyfold at this point. To start, she is still reeling from the unbearable trauma of what the Phyrexians did to her. She had set out with a strike team of her planeswalker allies to stop the Phyrexian invasion of the multiverse, but upon their failure, Nissa, along with many of the others, were captured. Her mind was chemically altered against her will to be utterly, completely submissive to the will of Elesh Norn (the Phyrexian leader, if this essay somehow reaches beyond the MTG sphere). Similarly, her body (again, against her will) was then chemically and mechanically altered to be more in line with the Phyrexian understanding of perfection. Then, Norn used Nissa’s body, mind, and animist powers to launch an invasion of the entire multiverse; Nissa ended up being instrumental in this process because it was her animist abilities that allowed Norn to directly control the Invasion Tree.

Nissa was eventually freed from the Phyrexians’ control in the aftermath of the war, her mind given back to her, and as much of the grafted metal removed from her body as could safely be removed. However, no level of healing could “cleanse the memories of what she had done” while her mind was under the domination of Phyrexia. She understandably has trouble forgiving herself for what she did, whether she had agency in the act or not.

Secondly, if that wasn’t bad enough, after she woke up with her mind intact, she discovered that she had lost her planeswalker spark. While she is not alone in this (all of the other planeswalkers currently on Zhalfir aside from Chandra lost theirs as well), it hits Nissa particularly hard because, for one Nissa has always had a deep connection to her home world of Zendikar, and secondly, Zhalfir is full of people she tried to ruthlessly kill while under the influence of Phyrexia. She cut down in cold blood dozens, if not hundreds, of these survivors’ friends and family. While the surviving Mirrans and Zhalfrins understand that she did not have control of herself during this time and forgave her, Nissa does not feel incredibly comfortable living around people she so directly harmed. She is restlessly homesick with no feasible way to get home and stuck with people she doesn’t feel worthy enough to be around. Furthermore, Nissa’s planeswalker powers are integral to the identity she has created for herself. This sense of self is just one more thing she has lost.

And lastly, there is the issue with Chandra. While they were technically a romantic couple after they kissed at the end of the previous March of the Machines story, “The Rhythms of Life,” things are still far from well between them. Apart from the tremendous guilt and shame Nissa feels from what she did to Chandra during the Phyrexian story arc (Nissa almost killed Chandra multiple times, one time even impaling her), both of them are still dealing with the fallout of their breakup as described in War of the Spark: Forsaken (even typing the name of that book makes me feel ill). Nissa wonders if Chandra can ever love her the way she needs and if that is even a reasonable thing to ask of her after all the two of them have recently gone through.

While this was a long, drawn-out summary, I think it was necessary to show what Nissa is going through on the cusp of her metamorphosis. The depression she is feeling along with what could probably be described as PTSD has left her stuck in the past. She laments the fact that she no longer hears the voice of nature. The leyline songs are completely silent, and when she calls out to the soul she knows dwells in all the objects in the world around her, nothing answers. She assumes this is punishment for what the Phyrexians made her do.

She’s wrong, however. Nissa and Chandra finally have a moment of understanding between the two of them, and as a part of this intimate moment, Nissa finally admits that her animist power no longer work; when Chandra expresses surprise at this, Nissa responds,

"They won't listen to me. I tried. Many times. But when I call out to them, it's like my voice isn't my own. Like it belongs to Phyrexia instead, like everything I've ever connected to is drowning me out." For once, Chandra pauses. "You know," she concludes. "You have good connections, too." "What do you mean?" "It's true—you did bad things while they had you. But everyone you've connected with over the years with the Gatewatch, we're just happy you're still here. With us." Chandra sets fire to a chunk of moist dirt that was about to fall on Nissa, turning it into a soft rain of ash. "With me." For the first time since she awoke in Zhalfir, Nissa smiles. Chandra, sweet Chandra, even if she doesn't realize it, has always understood and explained emotions better than Nissa ever could. Chandra continues, "Your connections aren't drowning your voice, Nissa. They're changing it into something new, maybe something even more powerful. Infinite voices, infinite possibilities, right?" Infinite possibilities. Nissa offers her hand to Chandra. "All right, let's try." Gripping Chandra's fingers in hers, Nissa closes her eyes. She retreats inward and listens for her inner voice. It's hard, much harder than before, but Chandra is dutifully helping her concentrate, blasting the falling rock away before it can reach her.

Nissa is greeted by ringing deep in her ears, but she refuses to be deterred. With her connections in mind, she picks the static apart into unique melodies, the individual songs she picked up from all around the Multiverse. She arranges them, harmonizes them, and this time, when she calls to Zhalfir, her voice is amplified in chorus. She offers an apology. The plane answers. It too was cut off from everything it knew, from the connections it had made. It, too, was scarred by Phyrexia and is growing into something new. It forgives her, and Nissa can finally forgive herself. Magic floods her flesh, her blood, her bone. She hears Chandra laugh, delighted by their success.

I could literally talk forever about this scene, how it is also a marriage of everything I love about Magic Story, but let’s zero in on how Nissa’s change in perspective is similar to how animism has changed meanings over the past one-hundred and fifty years.

In the same way that Tylor was fixated on how “primitive” he felt animism was, how it was just a cultural stepping stone on the way to enlightenment, Nissa remained fixated on her animist powers. To her, the voices of the natural world were oftentimes more real to her than the voices of her friends. The songs of the leylines, the elementals she could animate with a whisper, the power she wielded in defense of the worldsoul … To Nissa, these were all in all.

However, what Nissa learns from Chandra in the climax of “She Who Breaks the World'' is to accept that life is exactly what Ingold calls a “continuous birth.” Nissa embraces this conversational relationship with the world around her, and nature is no longer all in all to her. Hand in hand with Chandra, Nissa now lives “in a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual,” as Ingold puts it, and a world of “infinite possibilities,” as Fong puts it.

As the definition of real-world animism has shifted over the years, so too has Nissa’s magical animism. She used to obsess over her connection with nature with religious fervor, and even though Nissa worshiped no gods, her devotion to the soul of the world around her was stronger than many devout worshippers on Theros. However, in “She Who Breaks the World,” Nissa learns to recognize that she, and the rest of the world around her, is alive because she moves in her own “characteristic way.”

Epilogue

While I have certainly been burned by WotC’s treatment of Nissa in the past, I am cautiously excited for the stories that can now be told about her. Nissa is currently set up to grow and expand in interesting ways, and I hope (beyond hope) that future Magic stories starring Nissa will continue on the path that Fong set her on.

Nissa may be the last of the animists, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be the first of something else. I’m excited to see what that “something else” will be.

Bibliography

Every source quoted in this essay is linked directly before the quote in question. I was too lazy to create a reference page today. Sorry! 😬

#magic the gathering #nissa revane #vorthos #animism #media analysis #chandra nalaar

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bacchanal333 · 1 year

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Turning the Page: A Gruulfriends Snippet

There is so much pain when Nissa wakes up, and sees what is left of herself. What Zhalfir saved and what they couldn’t. There is weakness, nausea, darkness. Awareness that she will carry some of Phyrexia’s gifts - forever.

And there is Chandra. Nissa lets herself go to pieces for a little while, in arms that feel like home.

Time passes. Beyond the little room where she coalesces, the world spins in a million directions. For Nissa, the other planes will have to wait. Her spark is in no shape yet to carry her home to Zendikar. So she only rests, and heals.

She does not keep the arms Phyrexia gave her. Does not trust the sickly gleam of their copper, sees in their harsh lines only the atrocities she caused at Norn’s command. Chandra takes no small pleasure in reducing them to molten slag.

Nissa knows a sick plant must be pruned, its dead branches removed, if it is to thrive. She cannot be free of all the metal which Elesh Norn sank into her, but these limbs at least - she can trim.

At first she is helpless, and Chandra is her everything - more, that is, than she already was. Dressing her, feeding her, scrubbing her clean and changing the bandages around her stumps. Several times a day Chandra sighs, or sniffs back a tear. Starts to say - if only. I wish I could have saved more.

You saved everything, answers Nissa, her voice soft. Everything which matters.

The two of them settle into a routine. During the day healers fuss over Nissa, leeching any remaining trace of the oil from her flesh, seeing that the cavities and lacerations left behind by Meliria’s intervention remain free of blight; that skin and muscle heal and bond together without forming abscess or too much scarring. There are exercises she must do, stretching her limbs and forcing herself to take shaky steps for as long as her energy holds out - slightly longer each session, slightly further each morning.

At night, Chandra feeds her dinner bite by bite, and then they talk, or they sit, until all too soon Nissa’s weariness weighs down her eyes and they crawl together into bed. Since that first moment when they were reunited, they have done no more than kiss while Nissa recovers, but each kiss writes a new chapter in her memory from which she draws strength during the long and wearisome days.

Nissa focuses on what she can control and what senses remain. She studies the twinkling freckles on Chandra’s cheeks and the way her hair refuses to lie flat, when it isn’t bursting into flame. With her long ears, untouched by the oil’s depredations, she listens to Chandra’s soft breathing in the dark, or the tears which run down her cheeks when she thinks Nissa is asleep. Smells her scent, when the fire mage lies beside her. And feels - oh, even without fingers, how she feels her.

Nissa feels the beat of Chandra’s heart against her chest when they lie skin to skin; she feels her love’s fingers tracing gentle lines along the tattoos on her back, shoulders, face. And of course those lips. Chandra kisses her chin and cheeks and even, growing mischievous, her ears. Nissa returns each kiss, and each press of her lips is a caress she wishes she could give. More will wait for later.

Then, a message comes for Chandra, from another plane.

I won’t be long, Chandra says. Back before you know it.

She is gone only day. She returns not alone. Saheeli, and Huatli too, are with Chandra when she bursts back through the door into Nissa’s chambers. Fresh from Kaladesh, their arms filled with treasures from another world. Saheeli brings the greatest of all. Chandra practically vibrates with anticipation, with - hope. She kneels by the bed as Saheeli opens the long box she carries.

Pia’s work is unmistakable, and Saheeli’s own efforts too. Two splendid, glittering arms of lattice and filigree. Fingers and wrists and elbows to reach and grasp and hold. Independence. Possibility. A fresh start.

It will take time. Long weeks of practice and exercise, strengthening muscles and teaching them new tricks. Nissa will not spend a single one alone. Chandra Nalaar, her love, her all, will stand by Nissa’s side (Nissa Revane, her strength, her cause) through every step.

Hand in hand.

Thanks to @sunokasai for the inspiration for this story.

#magic the gathering #gruulfriends #chandra nalaar #nissa revane #march of machines spoilers #fanfic #nissandra #mtg

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loreholdlesbian · 2 years

Photo

Card transcription

Nine cards

The first

Kytheon, Perfect Champion 2UU

Legendary Planeswalker- Gideon [mythic]

0: Until end of turn. Kytheon, Perfect Champion becomes a 3/3 Human Warrior creature with "Whenever Kytheon deals combat damage to a player, draw a card and put a loyalty counter on him." He's still a planeswalker. Prevent all damage that would be dealt to him this turn.

0: Scry 2. Kytheon can't be blocked until the end of your next turn.

0: Until your next turn, creatures attack Kytheon if able. At the beginning of your next upkeep, if Kytheon has six or more loyalty counters, you win the game.

The second

Jace, Voice of Beasts 3GG

Legendary Planeswalker- Jace [mythic]

+2: Create a token that's a copy of target non-Illusion creature token you control except it's an Illusion in addition to its other types.

-1: Create your choice of a 1/1 green Snake creature token with deathtouch, a 2/2 green Wolf creature token with haste, or a 3/3 green Beast creature token.

-5: You get an emblem with "Whenever a creature token you control deals combat damage to a player, draw a card."

The third

Liliana, Angel-Pledged 1WW

Legendary Planeswalker- Liliana [mythic]

+1: Put a +1/+1 counter on up to one target creature. It gains lifelink until end of turn.

-1: Exile target enchantment.

-5: Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield with a flying counter. It becomes a 4/4 white Angel.

The fourth

Chandra, Hellfire Savant 2BB

Legendary Planeswalker- Chandra [mythic]

+1: Create a 2/1 black Elemental creature token with haste.

-3: Sacrifice a creature. If you do, draw a number of cards equal to its power and Chandra, Hellfire Savant deals that much damage to each player.

-7: You get an emblem with "All damage dealt by sources you control is dealt as though its source had lifelink." Chandra deals 6 damage to each opponent.

The fifth

Nissa, Zendikar's Vengeance 1RR

Legendary Planeswalker- Nissa [mythic]

Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, Nissa, Zendikar's Vengeance deals 1 damage to each opponent.

+1: You may sacrifice a land. If you do, draw a card and you may play an additional land this turn.

-2: Return target land card from your graveyard to the battlefield. It becomes a 4/4 Elemental creature with haste. Exile it at the beginning of the next end step.

-7: Add twelve R. You don't lose this mana as steps and phases end.

The sixth

Kaya, Geistbinder 3UR

Legendary Planeswalker- Kaya [mythic]

Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, create a 1/1 white Spirit creature token with flying.

+1: Mill three cards and choose one of them. You may play that card from your graveyard this turn.

-3: Exile a nonland card from your graveyard. When you do, Kaya, Geistbeinder deals that much damage to any target.

-9: You get an emblem with "Instant and sorcery cards in your graveyard gave flashback. The flashback cost is equal to its mana cost."

The seventh

Teferi, Mad Timemage 3BR

Legendary Planeswalker- Teferi [mythic]

+1: Draw a card and you lose 1 life. You may sacrifice a creature. If you do, scry 2.

-2: Take an additional turn after this one. At the beginning of that turn's end step, you lose the game.

-3: Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield. It gains haste, Exile it at the beginning of the next end step.

-7: You get an emblem with "At the beginning of your end step, return to the battlefield each creature card in your graveyard that was put there from the battlefield this turn."

The eighth

Vraska, Gorgon Knight 2WU

Legendary Planeswalker- Vraska [mythic]

+1: You may remove a counter from a permanent you control. If you do, draw a card.

0: Put a petrification counter on target tapped creature. It becomes an artifact in addition to its other types for as long as it has a petrification counter on it. (It isn't a creature.)

-2: Gain control of target artifact.

The ninth

Elspeth, Death's Champion 3BB

Legendary Planeswalker- Elspeth [mythic]

Creatures you control have deathtouch during your turn.

+1: Create a 1/1 black Soldier creature token with menace.

-1: Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. It gains indestructible until end of turn.

-9: Destroy all creatures and planeswalkers you don't control.

End transcription

Art is all by Martina Montrasi @rododea95 on twitter. I didn't pick the colors, I was just working with the (extremely cool) art she made

Gideon: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1540497198777090048

Jace: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1539244830165016579

Liliana: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1539684405056356353

Chandra: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1538155754850500609

Nissa: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1538531853275111424

Kaya: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1543744721595531266

Teferi: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1549179542060818433

Vraska: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1549535441648586755

Elspeth: https://mobile.twitter.com/rododea95/status/1554242706787995653

#original post #mtg #magic the gathering #custom magic card #random designs

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googlyeyesonmagiccards · 8 years

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Have you done Nissa, voice of zendikar?

I have now!

#Nissa #Nissa voice of Zendikar #chandranalaar-kaladesh #googly eyes #googly eys on magic cards #mtg #magic the gathering

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moisellethefae · 7 years

Audio

Nissa Revane continues her fight against the Eldrazi, all while hoping Zendikar was right to choose her.

Original Story: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/zendikar-2015-08-12

Patreon iTunes Google Play Soundcloud

Voice Credits: Nissa: Bace Jeleren @bace-jeleren Kor: Christina Eddleman http://twitter.com/christieddleman Vampire: Rhythm Bastard http://rhythmbastard.rocks/ @rhythmbastard

Sound Credits: Sound Editing by Christina Eddleman "Magic Forest" "Cambodian Odyssey" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Sounds from: https://www.audioblocks.com/

#mtg #battle for zendikar #bfz #magic story #magic the gathering #voice of all #uncharted realms #vorthos #audio drama #audiobook #magic #fantasy #nissa

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phulkor-resource · 2 years

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sweet pioneer lukka deck that looks to cheat titan of industry into play:

1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance 2 Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast 2 Nissa, Voice of Zendikar 3 Titan of Industry 1 Mizzium Mortars 2 Strangle 4 Transmogrify 1 Fire Prophecy 1 Snakeskin Veil 2 Valakut Awakening 2 Voltage Surge 4 Courier's Briefcase 4 Esika's Chariot 4 Careful Cultivation 4 Fable of the Mirror-Breaker 1 Boseiju, Who Endures 4 Cragcrown Pathway 1 Den of the Bugbear 2 Forest 1 Lair of the Hydra 3 Mountain 4 Rockfall Vale 2 Sheltered Thicket 1 Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance 4 Stomping Ground sideboard 1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance 1 Snakeskin Veil 2 Anger of the Gods 1 Chandra, Awakened Inferno 1 Fry 1 Kaheera, the Orphanguard 2 Redcap Melee 2 Rending Volley 2 Ruric Thar, the Unbowed 2 Unlicensed Hearse

#mtg #mtgpioneer #pioneer #lukka

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wielderofmysteries · 4 years

Text

Jace Beleren, Masculinity, and the Trans Experience

(This post is a Twitter thread I wrote in response to a Goblin Lore podcast episode called “Jace Beleren and Toxic Masculinity”.)

I feel I have a unique perspective on this topic as a trans man. Trans man Jace isn't my headcanon, but it's an interpretation I love. He's my favorite character of all time, and as a trans man, I feel like reading Jace's flaws as toxic masculinity isn't quite right.

There are several "pillars" of toxic masculinity that Jace doesn't have. He doesn't have the self-destructive emotional repression, worship of sex and violence, or desire to subjugate women and his peers that men who experience toxic masculinity have.

Even BEFORE Ixalan, Jace was an example of many positive masculine traits. He was curious and emotionally open. He wrongly believed he could make decisions for others, but he cared for people, wanted to protect them, and couldn't sit idly by when he knew people were in danger.

In Agents of Artifice, he financially provided for Kallist and Liliana, and in Magic Story invited the Gatewatch to live in his home. Jace wanted to heal Garruk, tried to stop his rampage and had a Hedron implanted in Garruk's shoulder to relieve the effects of the curse.

"I don't want to hurt you, Garruk."

"Lucky for me, I don't feel the same way."

"Garruk, this is not a fair fight. You've suffered enough. Please. Come with me."

[...]

Jace stood in thought. Garruk held him by the throat, could end his life in an eye blink, had already proven he was immune to Jace's illusions. Garruk laughed again. If Garruk was open to having friends, then Jace might have been a good one.

"You win," said Jace. "We will leave you alone. I will not seek you out. But please, if you change your mind, come find us on Ravnica. Something is still not right here. We can help you."

In "Revelation at the Eye" Jace tells Ugin that Zendikar isn't a puzzle to be solved, and that it didn't matter if killing the Eldrazi has consequences, there are real people on Zendikar fighting for their lives and he needs to help them.

"Zendikar isn't a puzzle to be solved," said Jace. "It's a place. It's somebody's home. And those people are out there, right now, fighting for their world and wondering if anybody's going to help them kill what's killing them."

He showed scenes of suffering, then—of families mourning the lost, of landscapes ravaged by Ulamog, of even the skies and seas teeming with the Eldrazi menace.

Ugin cocked his head. The hedron architecture of the chamber seemed to melt and flow, became a pattern of tessellating dragons mocking him from the walls.

"So certain," said Ugin, "and so young."

Ral Zarek tried to kill Jace and ruined his relationship with his close friend Emmara, but in "Project Lightning Bug", Jace forgives him. Jace is honest about his feelings with Ral even after Ral was openly rude to him.

"I don't remember home," Beleren said quietly, unbidden.

"What?"

"You talked about growing up in Ravnica. A lot of my memories from my childhood are gone. Chopped up in my head into a few impressions. Most of what I remember begins here, on Ravnica. I'll never have roots here the way you do, and I admit I'm off to other planes a lot. But I think of myself as Ravnican to the core, too."

In Kaladesh block he wanted Chandra to be able to confide in him, and didn't want to stay home when he heard she could be in trouble. He used his mind magic to help Nissa sleep when she had a sensory overload in the busy city.

Nissa looked up. Jace and Gideon were exchanging a look. Both glanced at her.

They stood as one.

Jace turned toward the coat room. "I'll head to Kaladesh. It should be easy for me to—"

Lavinia appeared in his path, one hand resting on the pommel her sword. "Again?" she said, in a weary, disappointed tone.

He frowned up at her. "You can't expect me to sit here and do paperwork!"

Across the streets, beyond the barricades, the Consulate's panharmonicons are still blaring "The Gremlin's Wedding March" at us on infinite repeat at double speed. They left them on all night, and after the moon set Nissa started crying, hands clamped over her ears.

[...]

Jace sat down with her. They talked a minute and his eyes flashed. She curled up in a big potted plant and didn't wake up until the sun fell on her.

But what does being a man mean to Jace Beleren? Well, take a look at his feelings towards Gideon. Jace saw Gideon as the male ideal. I think Jace admires (and is envious of) the way Gideon is a representation of positive masculinity.

Eyes widened, jaws set. They understood their task, he was certain of that. But were they actually prepared to perform it?

What would Gideon say?

Jace smiled. Of course.

"For Zendikar," he said, raising one fist in the air. It felt thin to him, lacking Gideon's armored fist, his baritone war cry, his iron conviction.

None of that mattered. The soldiers shouted as one voice, holding their weapons aloft.

"For Zendikar!"

Gideon is not violent or hypersexual. He's kind, not afraid to ask for help, a defender rather than an aggressor. The pillars of toxic masculinity are absent in both Jace and Gideon. So why does Gideon's mere presence make Jace insecure? I think that insecurity is dysphoria.

I'm only 5 feet tall. People treat me like a kid, think I need help, and certainly don't see me as a man because I'm very small. It feels bad knowing my looks don't inspire others or make them feel safe like big tall guys can.

Gideon is super tall, muscular, conventionally attractive. He's charismatic and a natural leader. Gideon's like a human lighthouse. Jace is average height, out-of-shape, often pale and sickly, and his telepathy makes people automatically distrust him.

It's easy to see why people follow Gideon's lead so easily rather than Jace's. As a trans man, I personally related to Jace's insecurity. He feels inadequate compared to Gideon.

"I'd rather stand," said Gideon.

Jace stood up. It was an error. He still had to crane his neck to look Gideon in the eye, and now the size difference between them was glaringly obvious. He hated feeling small. Hated it.

Jace wanting to lead the Gatewatch didn't come from a desire to dominate others and be an ~alpha male~, but from a desire for people to believe in him. What Jace really wants is to prove to himself and others that he's competent and that he can be trusted.

This vision appeared whenever the man was struggling at a task.

[...]

"Listen, you aren't really suited to this task. Let me handle it." The vision's voice was gruff but friendly.

It came off as condescending.

The man was annoyed.

"I can do it myself."

The hallucination sighed. "You and I both know you're not suited to this. Let me handle it, you go philosophize on the other end of the beach."

"I said I can do it myself." The man let his irritation reach his voice.

"No, you can't. I call the shots and execute, you stand to the side. That's how this works."

The man responded by throwing his hook at the hallucination. It went straight through the figure's eye and landed behind him on the sand.

The time he spends with Vraska is so good for him! I loved that [the podcasts hosts] talked about how he was finally happy to follow someone else's lead! He didn't need to be a leader, he needed someone to trust him. She respected and loved him and thought he was incredible for who he is.

Vraska looked him in the eye. "You're incredible. You know that, right?"

Jace returned her smile and felt his cheeks warming. "I do my best."

"Well, your best is incredible," Vraska said, turning toward the central tower and approaching a large gate on what appeared to be its back side.

Liliana never told Jace he was incredible.

Liliana would have scoffed. She would have made a dismissive joke, rolled her eyes, and called him a show-off. She would not bother to talk to him for days. She would consume the body of a demon with a crocodile's jaws and laugh over the sound of its flesh tearing off. She would do all sorts of things, but she would never call him incredible.

It was important for Jace to get that validation. Now he's not insecure about his appearance. It's not that he finally developed into someone who was caring. He was caring all along, but he was held back by insecurity about how others perceive him. He learned to love himself.

Despite all his good qualities and deeds he still felt insecure because it wasn't easy to visually see him as a "strong man". I think it's important to acknowledge positive masculinity even when the man in question isn't attractive or charismatic, and even if he makes mistakes.

As a trans person, Jace's experience reminded me of the struggle to "pass". It's frightening how easily insecurity can turn into toxic masculinity when you feel different from "real men". If you don't look the part, some people will just never acknowledge you.

Next to 'perfect' guys like Gideon, it's easy to see our own perceived weaknesses and shortcomings. Easy to feel resentment for it. But from this struggle comes the strive to be better men, to be confident in ourselves, and comfortable in our bodies.

There's SO much I wanted to talk about, like how Jace's trauma shaped his need for control, how the IRL gamer guys he was created to represent actually hate him, how he's a male victim of abuse by a female partner, etc but this thread is already terribly long.

TLDR; I think toxic masculinity as a reading of Jace is missing some perspective. The trans perspective. Not all insecurity men experience is toxic masculinity. Sorry I totally should have waited until part 2 was out, but I couldn't stop thinking about that episode.

There's a lack of trans men's voices in... basically everything, and this is something I think we should definitely be included in. I'm so grateful for the Vorthos community opening these kinds of discussions. Super excited for part 2 of the podcast!

#mtg #jace beleren #magic story #analysis #long post

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mtg-cards-hourly · 4 years

Photo

Nissa, Voice of Zendikar

Artist: Raymond Swanland TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

#mtg #magic the gathering #tcg #raymond swanland #nissa voice of zendikar #duel decks: nissa vs. ob nixilis #legendary #planeswalker #nissa

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cur10uscr0w · 4 years

Photo

Let me know when you find out, Nissa

[id/ Nissa from Voice of Zendikar, expression drawn in concentration as her cloak and hair whips dramatically around her. A text post reads: how do i uninstall anxiety. /end id]

#Nissa Revane #anxiety #mtg #magic the gathering #memetg #magic the memening

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sylvan-librarian · 1 year

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Nissa’s Pilgrimage Part 2: Duels of the Dual Origins

Time for another deranged essay about Nissa. Last time, I wrote about my own attachment to the character (which hopefully explains why the hell I’d go to the trouble of writing an entire essay series about her), but this piece discusses a more practical matter: why was Nissa written into the world of Magic The Gathering in the first place, and what role does she play within the game’s larger narrative? That matter is a little complicated because it involves extensive rewrites and retcons on the part of the story team at Wizards of the Coast.

Nissa Revane was introduced as a character in a video game first: Duels of the Planeswalkers, which was released on the Xbox 360 (an ancient relic of a bygone era) in June of 2009, a few months before Nissa’s initial appearance as card in the first Zendikar set, which hit shelves in October 2009. According to the Voice for Vorthos panel at Pax Prime 2015, the designers of Duels of the Planeswalkers needed a face character for their black/green elf deck, centered around the way elves were presented in Lorwyn (read: racists). Since no existing planeswalker fit the mold, the design team, according to Jeremy Jarvis, created this “kind of a villainous, you know, hardcore, staunch xenophobic person that would run this elf deck. That was the need for her; that’s how she was created. She was visually meant to be slightly off-putting; it’s why she doesn’t have eyebrows and her eyes are just these solid green orbs.” This was Nissa’s introduction, and it was how she was presented in Magic’s overarching lore from her introduction in 2009 all the way to Magic Origins in 2015. After some cursory digging through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I found Nissa’s original blurb on Magic’s website, circa 2011:

Her planar travels have taken her to other places where elves thrive or even rule, such as the sunny world of Lorwyn. There she met elves who fully embraced their role as the pinnacle of nature, using both life magic and its shadow to assert their primacy.

Yikes.

Further insights into Nissa’s original personality can be found in the 2010 novel Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum, which recounts Nissa’s journey to Eye of Ugin with Sorin Markov and the vampire Anowon and Nissa’s subsequent release of the Eldrazi Titans. In this particular scene, for example, Nissa explains to her vampire companions that all “‘elves receive power from the land. We do not need to cut and hack and burn as humans do.’ She looked from Sorin to Anowon. ‘You are all, human and vampire, suckers of life. You are the same in our eyes.’” Later on, we get Nissa’s thoughts on goblins. Despite her previous protestations, she starts to warm up to her vampire ally Anowon, who thus far has been nabbing goblins every few days in order to feed on them; Nissa rationalizes his actions this way: “He was a vampire after all—a merciless vampire. He could not be trusted. On the other hand, he had conducted himself fairly, and who could blame him for feeding on the goblins, who were, after all, barely lifeforms. They were not children of the forest, but rather opportunists of the stone and dell.”

…barely lifeforms.

Yikes again.

Needless to say, there was little to like about Nissa’s original presentation in Magic fiction. Aside from how poorly written she is in Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (on top of being xenophobic, she is also presented as belligerently naive and an incompetent leader), there is simply nothing fascinating about a stupid racist. Many other villains in Magic’s lore are beloved and have countless fans of their own: Bolas, the Phyrexian Praetors, and even Nissa’s mortal enemies, the Eldrazi Titans themselves, are fun to like, depending on personal preference. Their villainy is so overblown and impossible that it’s easy to suspend our disbelief and just enjoy the fictional mayhem for what it is. However, in our current cultural climate where stupid racists have spent the last decade driving the world closer and closer to hell, the original Nissa’s brand of villainy just isn’t very fun to engage with

However, Nissa’s presentation in Magic’s lore did a complete 180 between 2014 and 2015, retconning nearly all of her villainy and transforming her blatant, remorseless xenophobia into a simple distrust of outsiders and a desperation to protect her home. Her motivations of seeing “elves at the pinnacle of nature” was completely erased from her background entirely, replacing it with a respect for all life, and her magic, which was previously tied to summoning and buffing elves and elves only, became inexorably tied to the land and its leylines.

Readers wouldn't receive the full retcon of Nissa’s backstory until “Nissa’s Origin: Home” was released in the summer of 2015, but we did get a glimpse of who Nissa would eventually become in the 2014 story “Nissa, Worldwaker,” a piece of webfiction revealed in tandem with her card of the same name during the preview season for the 2015 Core Set. It’s interesting to note that at this time in Nissa’s development, the story team appears to keep Nissa’s old self largely intact; instead of simply erasing the rough edges of her backstory like the Magic Origins retcon would, it seemed at the time like “Nissa, Worldwaker” was supposed to be the beginning of Nissa’s redemption arc. For example, look at the opening blurb at the very beginning of the story:

The elf Planeswalker Nissa Revane has led a difficult life. She's been exiled from her tribe, the Joraga, on more than one occasion, and becoming a Planeswalker set her even further apart. She traveled to different worlds, seeking to understand the nature of elves' responsibility toward nature, but she always returned to her home plane of Zendikar. Whatever peace she managed to find for herself came to an end with the rising of the monstrous Eldrazi. These vast, interplanar beings, devourers of entire worlds, had been imprisoned on Zendikar millennia before. Desperate to save her world, Nissa broke the lock that kept the Eldrazi on Zendikar. Her hope was that the Eldrazi, freed of their confines, would travel out into the Multiverse. Their threat would spread, but Zendikar would be saved. It didn't work. At least one of the three Eldrazi titans remains on Zendikar, threatening all life on the plane with annihilation. Nissa stayed to fight the Eldrazi, but she fears it's hopeless. To defeat the monstrosities that assault the plane, all of Zendikar would have to fight as one…

Notice that while the story is clearly setting Nissa on a new path, it doesn’t deny what her character was previously, nor does it deny that the events that took place in Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum did in fact happen the way they were originally reported. In “Nissa, Worldwaker,” we are presented with a Nissa a few years after she naively set the Eldrazi free, broken by her endless fight with Ulamog’s brood and wracked with tremendous guilt from the actions she took at the Eye of Ugin.

The story opens with Nissa getting rescued by a human man named Hamadi after Ulamog completely annihilates Nissa’s Joraga clan down to, apparently, Nissa herself. Her first reaction upon waking up in her savior’s tent shows that much of her old xenophobia still remains: “‘Where am I?’ Nissa said. Mistrust everyone. Even though the human saved her, the old Joraga instincts remained. She felt vulnerable, naked under the furs, and she knew her full power was a long way from returning.” Nissa and Hamadi later talk about this with each other: how nearly all the civilizations of Zendikar were isolated and separated from each other, and it took the rise of the Eldrazi to bring them together.

Then, Nissa listens as Hamadi begins to tell her about the destruction of his home and his people, and it’s here we begin to see Nissa’s transformation; as she listens to Hamadi’s stories,

a growing ache welled up within her body and lodged itself in her throat. She was responsible for all of it, all his loss and all of Zendikar's devastation. Hamadi had pulled her, a Joraga elf, from certain death. He had risked his life and had saved hers. And she was the cause. Dark memories started to crawl into Nissa's mind from all the worst places. All her failures, her foolish choices, her selfishness and arrogance, poured into her gut like a lead weight. She became tangled in the web of her past that was filled with the bodies of a thousand innocents who had fallen to the Eldrazi. She could have saved them all.

This is the most important section of “Nissa, Worldwaker” for the character’s burgeoning growth, but this story also shows readers something else: the transformation of Nissa’s magic. Nissa’s first card, Nissa Revane was a planeswalker that cared only for elves, and all of her story appearances have shown this narratively. However, with Nissa, Worldwaker, we are given a card with a completely altered skill set. In this card, Nissa animates lands into creatures that fight for the player and untaps lands to symbolize how her deep connection to the land can generate a near endless amount of mana. While I assume the primary reason for this shift in Nissa’s skillset was due to the team’s desire to explore a new design space, the story, “Nissa, Worldwaker” also tries to explain this shift narratively; by rejecting her former tribalism and xenophobia and embracing all life on Zendikar, Nissa unlocks the might and the loyalty of the land itself. This is driven home by Hamadi revealing that the nickname he has been calling Nissa throughout the story, “Shaya,” means Worldwaker.

While this created an interesting setup for future Nissa stories, Magic’s story team clearly decided that Nissa’s previous way of life (read: racism) made her unsuitable to be a hero of Magic the Gathering, so they instead opted to retcon her entire backstory as a part of making her one the iconic five planeswalkers for their Magic Origins initiative. At the time, Wizards of the Coast announced that they would be getting rid of the yearly standard set release model they had been using - two three-set blocks and a core set per year - opting instead for three two set blocks per year and no core set at all. Forecasting deeper, more focused storytelling, Magic Origins was marketed as being the “final'' core set while also introducing revised backstories of five planeswalkers who would be the focus of Magic storytelling for the foreseeable future: Gideon Jura, Jace Beleren, Liliana Vess, Chandra Nalaar, and Nissa Revane.

While a handful of the other stories in the Magic Origins arc simply revised certain elements to make these characters more palatable to readers - Chandra’s for example - Nissa’s revised backstory, “Nissa’s Origin: Home,” reworked the character from the ground up, completely erasing from the narrative much of her characterization in Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum and elsewhere, and even bringing into question the canonicity of the redemption arc forecasted the previous year in “Nissa, Worldwaker.”

In the original canon, Nissa embraced the xenophobia and tribalism of the austere Joraga tribe, and she was only truly ostracized when she became a planeswalker. In the new canon, Nissa spent her childhood being ostracized by the Joraga because she and her mother were the last of the animists.

Nissa constantly has nightmares, and the Joraga clan believes that these nightmares are a curse the world of Zendikar has placed on the animists because of some unknown crime. Numa, the chief of the Joraga, tells Nissa’s mother one night after Nissa wakes up screaming and startles the village: “‘Your people angered Zendikar and they paid the price. There is a reason that you are the last of the animists.’” Nissa overhears this, and being young at the time and not knowing any better, she runs away to avoid causing any more trouble for her family.

This sets Nissa on her hero’s journey, where she comes to embrace her burgeoning animist powers, learns that her dreams are not a curse from Zendikar but instead a plea for help, and experiences her first major failure (of many). She journeys to the Akoum mountain range for the first time and finds the mountain where the Eldrazi Titans are imprisoned. Not understanding enough about the threat she is facing, she attempts to reach her consciousness through the mountain and is met with the oppressive, impenetrable, alien mind of Emrakul, the greatest of the Eldrazi Titans. The trauma of realizing she is no match at all for this creature causes her planeswalker spark to ignite and she ends up on Lorwyn.

Here again is where Nissa’s story diverges dramatically from her original background. Originally, Nissa was fascinated by Lorwyn’s fascist elves; as mentioned earlier, we are told that there “she met elves who fully embraced their role as the pinnacle of nature, using both life magic and its shadow to assert their primacy.” In the revised origin from “Home,” Nissa does, in fact, meet Lorwyn’s elves, but she is absolutely horrified by their way of life. After she finds Dwynen’s tribe slaughtering innocent, helpless boggarts simply because they are ugly, she exclaims, “‘There is so much evil … So much darkness already. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it all. It’s horrible. It’s awful.’ Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of her precious Zendikar. ‘Yet you insist on adding more.’” Obviously, this does not go over well with a bunch of elf supremacists, and she is forced to planeswalk back to Zendikar before she gets executed.

And here is where Nissa’s two origins largely converge. Strangely enough, despite Nissa’s characterization as belligerently naive, incompetent, and wildly prejudiced during the events of Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum, nothing in this novel has been officially retconned as of yet. In fact, other than a few flashbacks to show personal growth, Nissa’s life during this time wasn’t addressed in a meaningful way until late 2022 in Magic The Gathering: The Visual Guide. In the small blurb we get about Nissa, we are told:

Joined by the vampire planeswalker Sorin Markov, Nissa journeyed to the Eye of Ugin, the magical control center of the Hedron Network. Nissa’s distrust of vampires ran deep, and she betrayed Sorin by destroying the central hedron—rather than helping him repair it—in the hope that Sorin was lying and the Eldrazi would leave once they were freed. The truth was far worse.

In essence, we are told that the basic events of Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum did in fact happen largely the way we were told they did. Without being instructed otherwise, we can really only assume that the Nissa in the modern canon was probably less incompetent, hateful, and racially prejudiced than what the novel told us.

But why was Nissa changed so drastically, and what does this mean for us readers and players? The answer to the first question can be found in the Voice for Vorthos panel at PAX Prime 2015. Kimberly Kreines, one of the Magic Story Team’s lead writers at the time, explained:

We want her values to reflect the way we as a company are evolving as well and we want to set ourselves up for the best success with this character moving forward, and so the parts of her personality we chose to preserve, we carefully thought about that, and where we see her evolution going next is, you know, we’re happy with where we are with her right now, and excited, really excited, for the potential of all of these characters.

In other words, Nissa’s shift from a racial supremacist to a shy cinnamon roll was part of a larger shift in the evolution of the Magic Story Team’s values. It’s important to note that Nissa was not the only character whose sharp edges got polished down during the Magic Origins stories. Chandra, for example, had been presented previously as selfish to a fault, not really caring who gets hurt by collateral damage. Jace gets transformed from a mind mage who is more than happy to destroy the minds of basically anyone who gets in his way to someone who only destroys the minds of those who he believes deserves it.

Seen in this context, one can see that the changing culture at Wizards of the Coast pushed their creative minds to ensure that the main characters of their world were more heroic (or at least less terrible) than they had been previously. You can definitely view this through a cynical lens and argue that the protagonists of Magic stories from 2015 and beyond have suffered extreme ‘Disneyfication,’ in that they are now more palatable to a wider audience than the morally gray (at best) way they were presented previously. And the relative backlash at the time reveals that is certainly what many Vorthoses believed. For example, a 2017 article from Hipsters of the Coast argued that Nissa’s change may have been worth it in the end, but that many Vorthoses also had “their confidence shaken” by these abrupt changes to existing lore.

Fast-forward to 2023, however: Magic’s player base is larger than ever, and many of these new players came into the game in a post-Magic Origins world. Nissa’s original story has almost been forgotten. These days, Nissa is mostly known for her relationship with Chandra (more on that later), how she and Chandra’s relationship has been mishandled and botched throughout the years and then, finally, given the respect and honor it deserves (definitely more on that later), and for being a green menace during the both War of the Spark standard season and in the early days of the Pioneer format.

To conclude on a more personal note, I came into Magic the Gathering in 2014, and I fell in love with Nissa’s cards and Nissa’s character during the Magic Origins and Battle for Zendikar stories, so the dramatic shift in Nissa’s character portrayal did not bother me then and still does not today. While an argument can certainly be leveraged against Wizards of the Coast for, at times, sacrificing story quality in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, I can’t say I see that in the Magic Origins changes to the game’s main cast of characters. From my point of view, Nissa as a complex character - a genuinely good person who has made terrible mistakes then learned from them - is much more interesting and relatable than a Nissa who is a genuinely terrible person (racist) that gets a chance at redemption (realizing that non-elves are people).

If you stuck through this meandering, long-winded nonsense, thanks! I hope you learned something or at the very least found something to enjoy about it. Next time, I will be talking about Nissa during the early days of the Gatewatch story arc, so I hope you are prepared for a lot of…

See you next time!

References

Annelli, J. (2022). Magic The Gathering The Visual Guide. DK Publishing

Byrne, L. (2017), Retcons of Revane, Part II

Lee, A. (2014) Nissa, Worldwaker

Magic Story Team (2015). Nissa’s Origin: Home

Magic Story Team (2015). Voice for Vorthos Panel at PAX Prime 2015

Wintermute, R. B. (2010). Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum. Wizards of the Coast

#magic the gathering #nissa revane #vorthos #gatewatch #essay

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