Pattern Recognition #78 - A Response to the Tolarian Community College, Part 2

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 August 2018

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Hello everybody! My name is berryjon, TappedOut.Net's resident Old Fogey and full-time purveyor of all things historical, entertaining, educational and informative. If you're new to the site, this series is pretty much about whatever I want to talk about. My own personal soapbox if you will. But even I sometimes need the help of a Crystal Ball to knw what comes next.

Today, I will be finishing off the stuff I started talking about last week. Namely, with a workable definition of evil and villainy under our collective belts, I will now take a (hopefully) critical look at the three current "villains" in Magic, and examine why they are presented as such and more importantly, why they have failed in that task.

The first one I will discuss is the one I have the least problems with. Mainly because they are villains simply by dint of the dictate of Wizards.

Introduced in Rise of the Eldrazi, published on 23 Arpil 2010, the titular Eldrazi represented one of the first major changes to the colour pie since Legends which introduced multi-coloured creatures. In this case, they were colourless in a way that even Artifacts were not as there were now colourless Instants, Sorceries and Enchantments.

But that's not what I'm going to talk about. Rather, the Eldrazi were introduced out of nowhere in the third set of the Zendikar block. This was a massive mechanical shift in the block, enough that I and quite a few people I've talked to refer to the first two sets as their own block, while Rise of the Eldrazi is effectively a one-block expansion set on the same plane as the previous block.

Because of this sudden tonal shift, Wizards had to work extra hard to get players invested in the set and the new focus of the set, so they declared through text and flavour that what the Eldrazi were doing was eating the mana of the plane, draining it of colour and of life. And if they finished the job, the whole of the Plane would collapse into nothingness, devoured by the Blind Eternities.

Cool!

Aside, you know, for having next to no build-up, one of the worst mechanics in the game, and worst of all for the author in me, we were being told that they were this big threat, rather then being properly shown.

Now, I need to step back here and explain just what the Eldrazi are. The name itself was a descriptor given to them by the natives of Zendikar, as were the names of the three Titans that are used - Emrakul, Ulamog and Kozilek - though the latter three appear to be based off of some sort of self-identity that each individual Titan has.

The Eldrazi are not native to any plane, instead existing between the Planes, in the Blind Eternities. They move from Plane to Plane, feeding on them until they collapse from the lack of mana and move on. Ugin, the Spirit Dragon theorized that they were part of the natural life-cycle of the multiverse, feasting on dying planes so that they could make room for new planes, ones that would grow rather than decay.

Whether or not he is correct in these conclusions has yet to be seen, especially as Jace objected to this interpretation by pointing out the Zendikar was anything but dying, but was instead flourishing in terms of mana. Oh, and Wizards will take Jace's side in all things, making sure he is in the right. There's that to consider as well.

Now, each Titan is accompanied by what is called their "Brood Lineage". This is a technically correct term that fails to describe what is actually going on. Each Titan exists outside of Zendikar, and reaches into the Plane, forming an avatar of sorts. The example given by Wizards to explain this is that each Titan is a man, and Zendikar is a pool of water. The man/Titan stands outside of the pool, but reaches a hand in to grasp a fish. The hand is the Titan as represented on the cards in the game, and that is what the fish - the natives - see and interact with, never understanding the full scope of the Eldrazi.

The Brood Lineage are, like the Titans, part of the greater whole, simply more distinct. To go back to the analogy, imagine that you not only saw the hand, but also in the now-rippling waters as the hand moves around looking for fish, that each bubble formed by its passing was a new Eldrazi, each ripple and wave another monster.

If you're still confused, look at the Orz from Star Control 2. Same deal. Ish.

During the sets of Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch, we see that in the two years in-game since the first set, that two of the three Eldrazi have left Zendikar, and the last, Kozilek, is still 'winning' in its efforts to consume the Plane.

In these two sets, we are given the story of how Gideon Jura has been working with the local resistance to defend against the ever-growing forces of the last Titan. However, even he needs help, so he dragoon's Jace Beleren away from Ravnica (in a scene that inspired my opening for my article about Gideon), and Jace solved all the problems ever, allowing Nissa Revane and Chandra Naalar to do their thing to bind and 'kill' Kozilek and Ulamog.

Emrakul was nowhere to be found, for as it turned out, she was being drawn to Innistrad to as as vengeance for slights real and imagined against Nahiri of Zendikar by Sorin of Innistrad. There, Emrakul began to devour the still-living Plane, and was eventually sealed away by the efforts of Jace and Tamyio, offering a lack of resistance which it attempted to explain to Jace through a telepathic conversation as being effectively tucked into bed while waiting for the time to be right and for the stars to align.

Through all of this, I have not once described anything that the Eldrazi have done, or are, as 'evil' or 'villainous'.

Rather, it is my opinion, based on the evidence at hand, that despite Wizard's efforts and protestations to the contrary, the Eldrazi lack anything even remotely resembling the capacity for villainy.

Do you recall what I wrote last week about the major types of conflict? Well, when you get down to it, the Eldrazi are, and in this I agree with Ugin over Jace as he has had more than five minutes to think about it, the Eldrazi are the (super)Nature in Man versus Nature.

The Eldrazi come, they eat and they leave. There is no maliciousness in their actions. They certainly fight to eat. Even the odd communication with Emrakul at the end of Eldritch Moon seemed to indicate more confusion about why the food didn't taste good than anything else.

You cannot call the Eldrazi 'evil' for the same reasons you cannot call a hurricane 'Evil'. They are forces of (super)Nature that come, destroy, and leave. There is nothing directing them to a specific goal (though Nahiri did draw one away from its feeding grounds), nothing about them that even indicates that they considered the protagonists as anything relevant.

The Edlrazi are not villains. They can't be. A threat? Oh, most certainly. I would like to see more of the Eldrazi in the future. But they cannot support a set or a block as the primary antagonist unless it is understood that the whole thing is a conflict that it against a force and not a person.

:sigh:

Well, time to talk about my most hated of the new villains. New Phyrexia.

I've made it abundantly clear that I despise them almost as much as I hate Jace, and this time I'm going to look at them from a non-mechanical perspective. I must also try to frame my arguments in as much a manner as to minimize my natural tendency to go "this is something that New Phyrexia did. Here is the same subject handled by real Phyrexia better".

The origins of New Phyrexia's villainy lay in their material origins. That being the Glistening Oil that was carried by Karn unknowingly inside him from his creation to his artificial plane of Argentum and from there it replicated, spread and infected its way into the creation of a New Phyrexia.

With the added implications that there are multiple planes that have suffered the same fate.

My first problem, one shared with the last subject today, is that this is a break in one of the stated narrative goals of the Time Spiral block. As part of the New World Order, Wizards wanted to move away from being Dominaria centric storylines and to finish it off with a proper capstone to force them away. For even in the time frame of Mirrodin - Kamigawa - Ravnica, the existence of Dominaria was always in the back of player's minds.

With Time Spiral, Wizards announced that they were closing the book on Dominaria, and that from there on forward, it would be new Planes, new villains and new heroes to fight them!

Four blocks later, (after Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, Alara, then Zendikar), New Phyreixa was introduced as the newest villain on the block (no pun intended) in a series of events I could spend a whole article complaining about. For now, I will leave you with the tease of "Mirrodin Pure".

To start with, the Phyrexians were a returning enemy for the protagonists. Sure, they were new to this particular group, and they were designed to be new in general, but in the end, it was heralded as the triumphant return of Magic's greatest evil.

You know, without the actual greatest evil, Yawgmoth.

So of the three 'villains' in modern Magic, two of them had their origins in the time that Wizards wanted to make a break from. And then we have the Eldrazi, who were not villains at all.

But onto the actual substance of New Phyrexia. I argued last issue that one of the marks of a good and compelling villain was that they have a reasonable goal, but act unreasonably. New Phyrexia's goal is simple really. Spread. That's it. It's an infection. New Phyrexia is a disease, and proudly wears this as its mantle.

How do you relate to a disease? Are you supposed to cheer for them? Agree with them? Their purpose, their reason for existing is to simply create more and more of themselves. There is no grand plan or design. Heck, there's barely any forward planning at all! They have a goal, but they act simply in the spur of the moment, forcing change in everything they touch.

Where I called the Eldrazi a force of (super)Nature, New Phyrexia is like a wild animal. It strikes out at anything around it, only concerned with its own wellbeing. It doesn't care about anything else. It can't as to to do so would be to defy what it means to be New Phyrexia. To consume.

Let me take a minute here to catch my breath.

Part of the way in which we define a good villain is in how our heroes interact with them. With New Phyrexia though, merely the act of interaction is enough to put you at risk. How can you fight something like that in a manner that the players can relate to?

You can't. Not really. Unless your players are geneticists and nanotech engineers.

So let me give a shout out to all the Magic players who are geneticists and nanotech engineers! I have no idea how many of you there are, but you are the first line of defense against the Glistening Oil!

And while we as the audience can appreciate and sympathize with simplistic motivations, the application and presentation of this was yet another nail in the coffin of failure that New Phyrexia represents. At this point, the coffin is more Nail that wood.

You see, New Phyrexia's victory was presented, despite Mirrodin Pure, as fait accompli. For those of you who don't speak Latin or French, this is a turn of phrase that shows that the goal has already been accomplished and that there is no sense in defying it. With the release of New Phyrexia as a set, the war between the two sides was presented as already having been won. That the efforts of the two previous sets were in vain and that, from the get go, the Infection was going to win.

And being told that, despite your best efforts, you lose? That's a slap in the face of many players, myself included.

New Phyrexia fails at being a good villain because Wizards has completely failed to make them something the players as a whole could relate to. There were the headliners of an entire set in which the Villains Win and there is no one to oppose them. There were no good guys left.

And it wasn't a victory that was earned. It was given to them by Wizards.

Moving on before I really start to blow a gasket, let's talk Nicol Bolas.

Now, let me get one thing out of the way first. I'm not angry over the massive and colossal retcons that came with the release of Core Set 2019 with regards to the history of Nicky B. I know what the vast majority of what we had on Bolas came from pre-Revisionist history, and I've known for twenty years now that anything from before the Weatherlight Saga can be redone without warning or apology.

It's just disappointing.

Nicol Bolas, Eldger Dragon Legend (though he will also go by the descriptor "God" in a pinch), is one of the oldest being in the known Multiverse. Having an established minimal age of 31,000 years, he was one of the first generation of Dragons on Dominaria alongside his twin, Ugin.

As he grew older, he became a Planeswalker an survived an apocalyptic war between his brethren. Then, he participated in the first Planeswalker's Duel against an unnamed and undescribed leviathan of some form. He slew it, and devoured the body, leaving behind only the Talon Gates, the last physical remnants of that Leviathan and the first of the Time Rifts that would later threaten Dominaria.

Taking up residence in the region, he eventually took over the nearby nation of Madara. There, he created a small demi-plane which he called his "Meditation Realm" in which he would cast his spirit while his body lay in his temple at the nexus of three leylines of mana.

However, in response to his tyrannical methods, Tetsuo Umezawa with the aid of certain allies, destroyed his physical body at the same time as he severed his spiritual connection to Dominaria.

Nicol Bolas was, effectively, dead.

However, such was not to be. As he had tied the entrance to the Meditation Realm to the Talon Gates and the Rift there, his spirit stayed alive in his private world. Until the Time Spiral crisis, in which the temporal breakdown of Dominaria allowed the Rift to access both the 'present' and a time when Bolas was alive. Copying his body, he returned to the physical world and recognizing the existential threat the rifts possessed, closed the one of his creation.

So far, so good. Character development (including the retcons), successes, failures, and multi-layered presentation of a character that was little more than background fluff for most of his existence.

Then came Shards of Alara. You see, the Mending, the sealing of the Dominarian rifts, caused all the Planeswalkers to become depowered. Old Planeswalkers like Nicol Bolas, or Sorin Markov or Liliana Vess or Jaya Ballard, all became mere mortals and had to depend more on their internal powers, rather than the unlimited power of the Planeswalker spark.

Bolas took this very, very badly. And in desperation, he began to enact at least two plans to regain the power that was being drained from him, millennium of knowledge and strength he could no longer grasp.

In order of how they were encountered, his first plan was on the shattered Plane of Alara, where he hoped that by manipulating the Conflux, the reunification of the five Shards, he could simulate the power required to ignite his Planeswalker's Spark into what he was before.

For those of you keeping track at home, Bolas was attempting to utilize the same work that Urza did to Serra's Realm to power the Weatherlight in order to regain his lost power. If the Weatherlight could planeswalk again, it would be more powerful than Nicol Bolas.

However, Ajani Goldmane found out about this plan, and sabotaged it just enough that Alara survived, an Bolas didn't get what he wanted. Ajani was now on Bolas' list of people to crush once he got his godhood back. Priorities, you know.

Next, on Amonkhet. Shortly after the Mending, Bolas attacked the plane and reshaped it in his image, creating an unsustainable army generator of undead golems created from the best of the best of the population of the Plane. With this army at his call (and his first taste of the Gatewatch), he then moved on to sending agents of his to Ixaland to acquire the Immortal Sun, the physical manifestation of the Planeswalker's Spark of Azor.

And now, he has his sights set on Ravnica for some reason. Which we will see over the coming year.

In contrast to his previous depictions, post-Time Spiral Nicol Bolas is a character that is very simply portrayed. With the exceptions of the two chapters of the Amonkhet story in which we see his rebuilding of plane in his image and the other in which he makes a well deserved mockery of the Jacetus League, Bolas' entire characterization can be summarized as....

"MORE POWER!"

....

:sigh:

Alright, let's get this over with. Nicol Bolas, as a modern character, is a one-dimensional creation whose motivations and methodology all boil down to his desire to regain his former glory. Despite, you know, still being one of the most powerful individuals in the multiverse. To Liliana, he says that he wants (and by extension, granting her) the power they held before the Mending back. Despite the use of said power requiring the Mending in the first place.

It is implied through Ugin's not-at-all-self-serving-and-biased flashbacks that Nicol has been haunted by the specter of dying since he saw one of their older siblings be brought down and killed by humans and their hounds on Dominaria.

And what will his motivations be come Ravnica part 3? No clue.

I've complained that the previous villains that I've covered were under developed. They come in out of nowhere, do 'villain' things, and are then promptly forgotten about except when Wizards goes "Hey! Remember these guys and their totally evil ways?"

For Nicol, the opposite is true. He's been around in one form or another since Legends, and there's a lot of built up history and mythos around him. While it is acceptable that a lot of that, dating back to the late 90's is well out of reach of the vast majority of the current player base.

This weight of history is something that Wizards has been trying to pare down. This isn't without reason, mind you. Just look at the incomprehensibility that came from comics since the 70's or thereabouts. Too much, and your audience won't care. Their eyes will glaze over as you attempt to recite history that has no relevance to them any more.

But if you reduce it too much, well you get a caricature, and not a character.

In an ideal world, Nicol Bolas would occupy the niche of the "Evil Mastermind", the one whose plans are insidious and victorious by degrees. He would allow the heroes who oppose them their well-earned victories and not fall into the sunken costs fallacy.

There is room for an intelligent, long term villain to help drive the plot of Magic. I mean, look at Yawgmoth! Or not. I mean, he was off-camera and off-page for most of his story. Which isn't a bad thing. It means that when his presence was directly felt, it is felt more keenly as you become aware that this maleficent force has its attention on you.

Bolas could have been like that. Someone who stays in the background, moving through pawns and pieces in some grand stratagem that would take an equal genius to figure out.

Good thing Wizards has Tamiyo in their narrative pocket.

My concern with Bolas is that he is overused, and when he is used, it's done badly. Yes, there are moments of brilliance that shine through, but on the whole, he's not really a character to oppose the heroes or to be opposed in return. He's a goalpost for them to cross on their way to whatever mandated end state for the set is.

Imagine, if you will, that his plan for Amonkhet wasn't what we saw. What if, instead of going for one huge army all at once.... Which, by the way, required excellent timing on his part. Too soon, and the army wouldn't be big enough, too late, and the system he set up would have imploded due to lack of new citizens.

Instead of all at once, he created a plane were there were yearly Trials, instead of constant ones? Where the best of the best would train and make the efforts to become champions? Rather than everyone dying such that maybe one in twenty on a good day got to become Eternal, every year you got a large batch of Eternals, with the losers - those who didn't perish in the attempt - given another chance to improve.

What if Liliana led the rest of the Gatewatch to Amonkhet in time for one of these champion selections, and while the group appreciates the culture behind it, they investigate on the way to killing Liliana's demon and discover the existence of the Eternal Army, and realize with growing horror that this is what Nicol Bolas has been constructing here when he decided to rebuild the plane.

He doesn't show up at the end. Rather the army just up and walks through the Planar Bridge that Tezzeret stole in the previous story and the protagonists are left wondering where they went and why as around them, the citizens of Amonkhet celebrate and their faith in the God-Pharaoh is renewed. The reward of eternal service is real, and they take to the selection process with renewed energy. After all, why order your Eternals to kill off the potential reinforcements to deal with the inevitable losses?

Show Bolas, not by being present and bouncing Gideon around like a stressball. Show him through the fact that he can manipulate a society and world to such an extent that they willingly serve him and his purposes. Sacrificing themselves for the glory of Nicol Bolas, even when we, the audience, know this is a bad thing.

Leave us wanting more.

But Wizards may make a fun card game. But they still can't tell a story to save their skins. This has been true for yeas now. Since, oh, I want to say the Alara block, which is the first that didn't have novels to go with it.

Characterization is vital and important to a game that incorporates the story as much as Magic does. How can we be invested in the game and the characters when Wizards can't be bothered to do the same? I remember a few years back, with the impending release of Magic Origins, and one of the press releases stated that Wizards was making a concerted effort to put the story back into the game.

My response was a very vitriolic "WHY DID YOU STOP IN THE FIRST PLACE?"

And the poor villains they've been dragging into the light only make these problems worse.

There's no easy fix, sad to say. A good story is not something you can just whip up on demand. Villains need to be built up and given their chance to shine. They can't just win because the author says so, and lose because of the same. Effort needs to be made. Effort that Wizards doesn't even know where to begin with, institutional knowledge lost a decade or more ago.

Now, Professor of the Tolarian Community College, you asked whom we thought was the best villain in Magic is or was. Now, I can't say it's the Eldrazi. They're not villains. I can't say New Phyrexia. They're rage-inducing. I can't say Nicol Bolas. He's disappointing.

I wanted to say Jace, for his crimes against the plot, but that would be cheating myself and you out of an honest answer. I can't say Yawgmoth. Yes, he was a great villain, but his time has come and gone and in retrospect, he worked simply because we saw Urza in action and our minds filled in the gaps about how evil and powerful Yawgmoth must be if Urza wasn't sure he could win.

It's not Konda, or Starke. I used them as examples last time because I didn't feel they were the best villains in Magic's history.

I mean, there is no easy way to say who is the best villain in Magic. There are many different criteria, and many different ways to judge the good or the bad in the antagonists we've encountered.

So, to you, TolarianCommunityCollege, my answer is this:

Nahiri, the Harbinger.

A victim and victimizer, her grief caused her to punish the innocent in the hopes of harming the guilty. In the short time we got to see her in action, she made her reasons for acting clear, and while we can sympathize with her desires, the scale to which she took them was far out of proportion. She assumed that the Eldrazi could never be defeated, and with that assumption, failed to account that someone might actually do the impossible.

And she's still out there, looking for a way to stop that which has already been stopped. Her quest is already completed and she doesn't know it.

She's a Tragic Villain. And the best Magic has to offer at the moment.

Thank you, and join me next week when I go back to Ravnica, talk about the plot between the two sets, and introduce the black hole of plot known as Jace Beleren.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!