#zendikar lore

[jasper-the-menace]

A quick summary of the MTG cookbook that dropped yesterday:

Ravnica: Krenko got hired by Jace to gather one recipe from each of the ten guilds.

Dominaria: Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar travels Dominaria looking for cool mortal fare for her new cookbook.

Eldraine: Storytelling with the Kenriths, Garruk, and Oko involved.

Innistrad: Tibalt being a little slut who is getting in the middle of everything.

Kaldheim: Tyvar preparing a feast for the valkyries to impress them. Also Toski helps.

Kamigawa: Recipes left by Tamiyo to her family, complete with stories that go with them.

Theros: Xenagos starts daydreaming about a new planeswalker pantheon.

Zendikar: Bruse Tarl driving his herds all over Zendikar and picking up meals from everywhere.

Kaladesh: Chandra reminiscing on her life on Kaladesh, featuring Saheeli and Huatli.

Ixalan: The culinary adventures of Vraska and Jace while they were looking for the Immortal Sun.

[magicwithclass]

Fatal Lore

Do card spikes help preserve the history of the game? Is that what is meant by fatal lore? Does the preservation of the history of the reserved list lead to recognition of older cards which in turn leads to buyouts and spikes? I ask these questions because I was looking into this card, fatal lore, and I found an article associated with it. On edhrec if you search this card an article from March 30, 2021 pops up. I was interested so I clicked on the article and, at first, I was a bit perplexed. The article was about a Yennett commander deck which revolves around cards with odd mana values. Fatal lore has an even mana value so I was interested in why they would suggest this card or use the card image in the article. I read it and there is one small section where an individual suggests a Yennett build that lets your opponent make choices but does not suggest this exact card. I wondered why use this image instead of many other odd mana cost cards that force your opponent to make a choice. Then I looked at the date of the article. At first, I thought that the use of the image was an attempt to spike the reserved list or manipulate the market in some way. This was around the time of the great reserved list spike in which almost all reserved list cards went up in price and buyouts were a common occurrence. It just so happens that fatal lore reached its almost 6 dollar high on March 3, 2021. The card was in everyone's mind because it had spiked in the same month and the article writer saw a chance to include a currently very popular and discussed card into his article; maybe to gain traffic. After all, if everyone is talking about reserved list cards and buyouts shouldn't your articles try to include that to appeal to the current hype and draw a larger audience? Yet, that preserved the card fatal lore with an article. There is not much to say about the actual card but there is an article that uses this card's image and that is because for a very short window this card was hot. It also shows a snapshot of the history of the reserved list. The card, itself, is not terrible. You either draw 3 cards or you destroy two of your opponent's creatures and they draw 3. If you are playing Sheoldred the Apocalypse then you can change that drawback into a reward. Forcing your opponent to draw is a popular strategy with cards like underworld dreams and Nekusar. Of course, your opponent will likely just let you draw 3 cards if drawing the cards will hurt them that much. Also, soemtimes your opponent just has an army of tokens and then this card becomes less effective. 4 mana for a draw 3 in black is fine but there are just so many cards printed and there is just not a perfect home for this card. If they ever make a commander that benfits from your opponent choosing and also benefits from drawing cards in some way than this card may finally find a place. Until then, this card is just fatal lore.

[stormtide-leviathan]

My kingdom for the short story where Urza comes to zendikar and gets shooed off by nahiri

[sirhernri]

Roilmages are cool :)

“…And if you look through the ice, you can see the-”

“The different colors, yeah! Like a rainbow!”

Noyan Dar bristled at the other merfolk’s rather pedestrian description. “Well, technically it’s dubbed the prism array. But yes, Isanke, the array does look somewhat like a rainbow.”

“I knew it.” Isanke smirked, then pointed to the Eldrazi frozen within the prism. “So, uh, what’s it supposed to do, besides freezing those things?”

“Freezing them is all it is supposed to do.”

“Oh, nothing more?”

Noyan rolled his eyes. “And what more could you want, of ice?”

“Well…maybe a weapon?”

“Wh- It is a weapon!”

“No, it just froze the thing. But it’ll be thawed in…well, it looks like just a few minutes.”

“Don’t be absurd- Oh, hmm!”

Noyan startled at the sight of rapidly melting ice. He backpedaled furiously to hide behind Isanke, who was now trying and failing to stifle her laughter.

“W-Well,” spat the older merfolk, “so mine wasn’t a permanent solution! I’d like to see you do better!”

Isanke shrugged and stepped forward. She took a deep breath, channeled her magic, then placed a hand to the ice. It shattered immediately, freeing the Eldrazi and sending Noyan into an even deeper panic.

“Isanke!”

“Oh, calm down!” Isanke wore a smile as she gestured towards the melting shards lying on the ground. The remaining ice hovered into the air, wavering briefly in place before angling up and spearing the Eldrazi many times over. Finally it stopped its writhing, much to Noyan’s relief and irritation alike.

“Well…I suppose that worked, this time,” groaned the older merfolk. “But I definitely wouldn’t rely on that all the time.”

Isanke shrugged. “Just as well, ‘unpredictable weather’ and all!”

Noyan’s face grew stern again. “‘Weather’!” he parroted.

[To me, Roilmage’s Trick’s name and effect imply like just a distraction or a delay or something. But then there’s the art which definitely depicts a more forceful approach.]

[littjara-mirrorlake]

tell me things about moritte of the frost ? making a magic oc and she might be integral to her backstory so id love to hear anything you know

Ooooh, I love OCs!! Especially those related to Kaldheim and Littjara! Excited to see what you make 👀

Unfortunately I can't give you too much in the way of canon information. This is her bio in the Legends of Kaldheim article:

Moritte is an enigma. A shapeshifter from Littjara, she was born a Gladewalker. While many grown-up shapeshifters leave Littjara to explore the realms, Moritte wanted more knowledge. To reach that end, she took the form of a young Covewalker. Living among the Covewalkers, Moritte absorbed all their knowledge and secrets before vanishing into the mists. She now wanders the realms, the most knowledgeable shapeshifter of all, seeking the solutions to new unanswered questions.

It's vague, I expect delibrately so, but that's a little frustrating when you want actual details. I wrote a more in-depth post about expanding Littjara and changeling lore a while back, which might help if you're looking for headcanon inspiration.

As to the "knowledge" Moritte seeks, I'm inclined to believe it is cosmological, since that's a major part of Kaldheim's functioning--the way realms are formed, what happens to them when they break off the tree (they become planes!), and how Cosmos monsters are born. As a creature especially attuned to aether and the Cosmos, Moritte learning more about Kaldheim cosmology would also mean deepening her knowledge about herself.

Perhaps her quest for all-encompassing knowledge leads her to a revelation about the Multiverse even before the Phyrexian invasion forces everyone to be very, very aware of it. It might even entangle her with forces far beyond her comprehension. Namely, the Eldrazi. After all, what are Eldrazi but much larger Cosmos monsters? Wouldn't she want to find out?

After March of the Machine, I am almost positive that Moritte has left Kaldheim, traveling to learn the lore of other planes. (I know it very likely does not work like this but it would also be funny if all changelings were now planeswalkers, because of how Kaldheim cosmology works.) Some fun places for her to be: Arcavios for its repository of knowledge in Strixhaven, Kamigawa for its overlap of mortal and spirit realms, Zendikar for its history of entanglement with the Eldrazi titans.

I have correctly predicted major canon at least twice with my Kaldheim posts and I'm still riding that power trip a little bit.

[gammarailgun]

so this is a bit random for my blog but ive been dredging up my old magic the gathering hyperfixation because of friendgroups that play EDH and i had some random thoughts

ive always clicked weirdly well with the red/white color pairing but the reasons have shifted over time

and ive had this nagging brainworm that

magic as a whole is doing RW wrong.

allow me to explain

fair warning: this is going to get a bit political, a bit philosophical, and very strongly informed by who i am as a person

so

the core axiom here is that human nature in the absence of external factors is inherently good and altruistic. we know this because we are social creatures, and the fundamental basis of early social structures is coming together for mutual benefit. oppressive systems and harsh upbringings can and do quash this in favor of learned hostility and abusiveness but that core is always there. it’s why redeeming the villain is such a common fictional trope - if it wasn’t possible to change and grow and deconstruct learned harmful behaviors we wouldn’t write about it nearly as much now would we

magic as an ur-setting recognizes this to some extent. we see snippets of the kindness of strangers in Innistrad even amidst the horrors and the distrust and the paranoia, we see the selfless unity against the Eldrazi on zendikar drawing in all five colors of the pie, we see countless other examples throughout the planes

now, what does this axiom mean in the context of the color philosophies of red and white?

simple

red and white are not enemies at all

red is about freedom and impulsivity and emotion

white is about peace and justice and selflessness

both of those are deeply emotional, deeply raw, deeply human ideas!!

and the intersection of those ideas isn’t a controlling power structure, it’s compassion

and compassion is hardly oppositional - it’s cooperative and synthesistic by its very nature, it’s a harmonization of what those two colors are!

now admittedly this is where my perspective as an audhd trans girl comes in. i’m someone that the world’s power structures reject, someone that doesnt fit the status quo, someone who’s constantly shoved into boxes that i don’t fit by people more powerful than me. and i have kind of a thing for the color aesthetic of Boros, so trying to turn something i like aesthetically into something that meshes with and permits and supports who i am is a reasonable bias to assume

but i still feel like there’s a core truth to be considered here

games are a form of art; there’s plenty of evidence i think that the people making Magic realize this. but that drags in the corollary that all art is political. all art says something about the world, about the systems we live in. and what does the Boros say? that combining the philosophies of freedom and selflessness is a contradiction and leads to yet another oppressive power structure. it’s a subtly anti-revolutionary, status-quo perspective that could be done far better

more importantly, it’s eschewing that compassion

boros is a police state and a military structure, one that exists to enforce rules and make demands and enact violence

it’s not an institution of compassion

and frankly no top-down power structure can be, not at a systematic level

so, what would doing red-white right look like in my view?

pretty simple: it would be a bottom-up portrayal of the color pair. one where the defiance of red and the justice of white stand in opposition to an existing power structure, one where the righteous fury of the downtrodden feeds into both colors’ fundamental natures and binds them together

so uh

yeah

thank you for coming to my ted talk

okay so a couple final disclaimers

- the last time i seriously caught up with mtg lore was around Magic Origins, with sporadic involvement stretching out to Guilds Of Ravnica. i’m not terribly familiar with any of the expressions of RW since then, and i’m mostly focused on the lens of Boros specifically because they’re the faction that got me into the color pair. if there have since been counterexamples i will gladly accept infodumps, new blorbos to build TTS EDH decks around are always welcome (winota my beloved) (the cat ears,,, 🥺🥺🥺). this also extends to my understanding of magic’s development and philosophy as a whole, so if it seems like arguing from a Magic-cultural context that’s several years behind the curve uhhh yeah that’s probably why

- i’ll admit i’m not tremendously well-read in terms of firsthand literature in terms of leftist/anarchist theory, queer theory, or Magic’s color philosophies, and so most of my information is secondhand - if i’ve grossly misunderstood something feel free to explain (although if you’re going to be a TERF in the reblogs about it you can kindly go shit yourself)

- i mean no ill will and make no particular demands or anything towards the writers themselves who came up with boros or the ideas they’ve expressed through the faction/color-identity; it takes a certain perspective to notice these things and assuming people will just Get It is unreasonable, and i’m not here to like. Annoyingly Insist that the game i have a tangentialhyperfixation on conform to My Vision Of What It Should Be

and uhhh yeah! trans rights are human rights, free palestine, and wishing all capitalists a very fuck you!

sierra out, roll credits

[vorthosjay]

Maro said today that the Kor of Rath originally came from Zendikar, but I seem to recall your saying that that's not the case. What is official canon on this? And how do the Kor of Arcavios fit into this?

Here's what I said (with some minor clarity edits since it's out of context now):

The Kor on Rath were kidnapped from another plane, brought to Rath through one of the many small overlays the Phyrexians did while testing and growing Rath for the Dominarian Overlay. Mark Rosewater mentioned that the Rathi Kor were from Zendikar in this article. That may have been the intent, and could still be the intent, but there are some problems with it. First, the article is that it was a conceptual idea, and as a design article isn't strictly canon, but "word of god" about the genesis of the idea of kor on Zendikar. Until it's explicit in a lore text, it's quasi-canon. I like the idea and generally support it, but I don't believe it's ever made its way into actual canon. The reason I'm hesitant about it is that lots of early ideas for things never make it into the text, and different ideas replace them later. Second, the Rathi kor have elongated skulls and different hues than the Zendikari. There are ones on Dominaria that look closer to Zendikari kor, and maybe those kor were affected by the experience on Rath.

We don't know how the Kor of Arcavios fit into this. That's another wrinkle.

[emberunderscore]

the mtg au only gets so much harder from fable as bolas but we make attempts (take so many pinches of salt, take multiple fistfuls of salt with all the words i say . ive been into magic lore for less than a week)

athena as chandra and jamie as nissa

havent read all of chandras lore yet but, yknow pyromancer and her wiki says shes passionate, impulsive but "she also recognizes the volatile nature of her inner fire" replace inner fire with destruction powers and boom c!athena probably

and nissa revane my GIRL !! (while i havent finished reading every single story shes ever been in yet) her whole bit is being connected to her home plane, while thats technically more plants and the earth itself i didnt think shes mom coded enough to say momboo. so i say bruin instead, and specifically bruin not c!jamie because they got more of that deltavera in they bones . honestly you might even be able to argue that ayasha (the elemental companiont nissa summons, "the awakened world") could be momboo in some way or another cause . thats literally the world of zendikar

then slightly more of a stretch and also i was busy playing stardew when i watch the video on lilianna so i only got about half of that into my brain

icarus morningstar as lilinna vess because hear me out . necromancy is something icarus would TOTALLY be obsessed with if it existed in an accesible means in fable and if we take her whole contract with bolas in war of the spark and her then betrayal i think it could *kind of* fit a little bit . also i think she had a thing where she wanted to try and bring her brother back from the dead so if we just replace that with haley .

(this could mean that centross is jace beleren which honestly, dont think hes smart enough for that , and from what ive read jace is NOT a fighter but i also put centross as penelope in the epic au and hes not smart enough to be her her either . so)

alternatively (probably if ic is not lilianna) rae could be jace beleren . really freaking smart, not a fighter, mind powers, gets tricked by bolas into releasing a terrible monster from a prison, blue

i was also distracted when i watched jace's lore video but i read like 3 lines of his wiki and im reading the eldrazai return story so i kinda have somewhat of an understanding of his character. so im actually completely right in every way

[sylvan-librarian]

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! 😬

[mk-writes-stuff]

who crafted the back brace for tantum?

Oooh this one also has a bit of a story attached. I’m always hyped to tell though :)

Pirates’ Roost spoilers and mentions of abuse and cancer below the cut

The short answer is a woman named Saheeli Rai, who I’ve never actually brought up before. She’s an artificer (metal mage) who’s from the Sun Empire as far as anyone in the Pirates’ Roost knows, and she’s the resident mage/wife of their Warrior-Poet (important religious/cultural figure) Huatli

The longer answer of how she got involved in this… well, Tatum and crew went to the Sun Empire to help Tatum’s brother Apatli, who had cancer. When they came to bring him back, Tatum got arrested for being a deserter and their very nasty mentor figure who mistreated them in the past showed up to offer to bring them back into the fold

Apatli wasn’t too thrilled and decided to essentially trick everyone into thinking the suns were mad at this decision by summoning a storm to blot out the sun. Saheeli suspected it wasn’t in fact the suns willing this and tracked Apatli down to ask what he wanted. She agreed to try to get Tatum released

Huatli and Saheeli ended up having a talk with Tatum where Tatum explained why they deserted (abuse from aforementioned mentor figure and no one willing to help them). Huatli used her authority as Warrior-Poet to have them freed, and Saheeli made them the brace as an attempt at remuneration for everything the Sun Empire had done to them

Thanks for the ask! I hope that’s a good explanation. As always, I’m game for any more questions anyone has :)

(Also, if you know magic lore and are starting to think this doesn’t quite line up, Pirates’ Roost is canon-divergent from Zendikar Rising)

[arclundarchivist]

Another episode where I honestly don’t have much to comment on.

First half wasn’t really my vibe, though I’m curious what happened to Fearne outside of her losing health.

Glad Imogen and the others walked back Laudna’s idea to give in to Delilah, *hopefully*

The snippets of lore we got about the Teeth following the battle I *did* find interesting, excited to learn more about The Teeth, Domunas and the Titans.

Interesting that the Ossended Host are made up of various unique cultures.

And curious to see what other strange beasts come charging out of the madcap menagerie in Matt’s brain.

Getting some Zendikar/Ikoria vibes from the whole situation.

Will likely be back for Candela to see it live next week, genuinely looking forward to that.

——

I do need to say though….I feel like the urgency of the Solstice is going away.

They’re looking for power ups/aid sure, but….there’s an army of Aliens, Ludinus is moving about unchallenged, Ruidus is literally tethered to Exandria.

And they’re getting skeletons to fuck, seemingly nonplused or unhurried despite all that’s before them.

I don’t know if this is the place to say it, and while I’m glad most of the party has turned away from their apathy towards the Gods it just…….doesn’t feel like they care about the end game, and by They, I mean the players.

I can understand hesitancy, and I understand that at this point Ruidus will be hanging in the sky until they’re ready to face it but I feel like dropping the solstice so soon has kind of muddled this campaign.

Like an End Game Threat and it happened at Level 10, I understand why they’re avoiding it but something just feels like it didn’t click properly and now we’re going to be on this separate ride until the players finally decided to go face the “imminent” threat.

And Matt is going to facilitate that because that’s just how he is. Travelercon was two weeks away for four months/j

This isn’t me ragging on the cast, and I like that we’re getting a look at the Shattered Teeth, but the campaign just feels….off kilter to me at times.

[rowanoke]

Rowwwwaaannnn I’m bored. I’ve seen you reblog the occasional Magic post, do you play? If so do you use Archidekt to save your decks online? I’m curious what your best one is.

I used to play! I pretty much played exclusively during the gatewatch Era, starting about the time Battle for Zendikar released (my first deck was Eldrazi) and stopping right around War of the Spark! (Although more specifically I had stopped playing after the Amonkhet block and just jumped back in momentarily when they went back to Ravnica, I think skipping out on the Kamigawa, Eldraine, and Kaldheim sets if those happened before? I was vaguely aware of them but not playing really)

I've never used Archidekt before, but sometimes I use tappedout(.net) to build fun decks and untap(.in) to play with a few select friends like once a year. As far as my best decks, I wouldn't really know about my online decks bc they're all kinda "for fun" builds and not meant to be competitive (my online friends are babies) but I think I still have a few irl decks I could put on there at some point. I was never the type to buy specific cards for a deck though, so they're definitely not optimal by any means.

These days I've been getting more into the lore and settings of mtg, and I'm preparing to run a Plane Shift DnD campaign! Actually just today I finished to Agents of Artifice book and started The Purifying Fire 😊

[judaselias]

Backstory time for Sarkhan. Originally from the Mardu clan on Tarkir, a world where dragons are extinct. Only their bones remain. Long post on lore incoming.

Our boy is an enthusiast, and happens to hear echoes of Ugin (dead). We will try to keep the timelines simple, this is in Khans timeline (KTK).

Fate Reforged (FRF) is set 1000y in the past and involves Sarkhan changing the events there so Ugin survives his battle against Nicol Bolas, going into stasis instead of dying.

Dragons of Tarkir (DTK) is the current timeline where the five dragon broods won out over the khans and now rule Tarkir. Only Sarkhan has knowledge of the alternate timeline, and in DTK times he was never born. Therefore he is the one and only TIME BASTARD.

But we have skipped ahead. Before the events of Tarkir block, he sparked as a planeswalker and found his way to Alara. There he met and pledged allegiance to a regal and powerful dragon. A planeswalker as well, the fearsome tyrant Nicol Bolas.

Here begins the bad times, best shown by Cruel Ultimatum (C13/MM3 printings) and Sarkhan the Mad.

Poor lad has gone from bad boss Zurgo to heinous master Nicol Bolas, one of the greatest villains in the multiverse. All because he wanted to find the coolest dragon.

While under the thumb of Bolas, he plays a role in unlocking the Eldrazi titans sealed on Zendikar, which starts the snowball rolling toward freedom. But not yet.

It will only be after he meets Narset, travels back in time, and restores dragonkind to his home plane that he can at last be unshackled from Bolas, and stand as Sarkhan, Unbroken.

I may have some details off as I wasn't around for Alara, feel free to comment.

[angrykittenz62]

Honestly, loved it. Ixalan feels like a more realized Zendikar to me.

Huge Creatures with an adventure theme is fun. Absolutely love Pantlaza and Gishath.

Especially since we don't need a lore reason to see dinos, as opposed to Eldrazi which feel like they're gonna need a strong story reason to see new cards outside of any Horizons or Commander sets.

Pirates are fun, silly li'l guys. Vampires are assholes. Merfolk are always great. And Dinosaurs have a non-abstract religious following, unlike the Eternal Pilgrims.

If we ever go back to a 3 set block structure,(fingers crossed), I'd love one of those to be on Ixalan. Also, I'm absolutely in love with the psuedo paleo-art alters. Sidharth Chaturvedi did my absolute favorites.

My only real gripes were the Jurassic Park cards. None of them seemed particularly interesting and it felt like they were designed for like a Secret lair or something and got tossed in last minute.

Feedback on The Lost Caverns of Ixalan

I’m about to write this year’s “State of Design” article, and I’m interested on your feedback of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. What did you like? What did you not like? Tell me all your thoughts. 

[vorthosjay]

Some lore speaks to Zendikar’s Roil being an immune system like response to the Eldrazi. Come the time of Zendikar Rising, the Eldrazi are all gone, are they not? But I believe the Roil still exists. Is Zendikar in the end stage of fighting off a disease where it’s no longer infected but still recovering, or is it permanently damaged by the infection? Or was the immune system metaphor wrong?

This is the philosophical argument behind Nahiri and Nissa's conflict in Zendikar Rising. IMO the Roil is here to stay, Zendikar is just changed, and the problem was that Nahiri wasn't ready to accept it.

[sylvan-librarian]

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