Pattern Recognition #333 - Plane Crossing

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

1 August 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And so with that background information out of the way from last week, the question I find myself asking is 'why'? Why those four major methods and what purpose do they have?

Well, they didn't.

You see, the initial conceit of the game was that "You Are a Planeswalker". You yourself need nothing of the sort except as a convenience or for the novelty of it all. You summoned astral recreations of creatures and cast spells as you would have the mana for, and at no point did anything about what I talked about last week actually matter.

So what's the purpose of them?

Well, they were there for the story. They were there for the other people. Back in the olden days, Magic had a very interesting a deep story to it. Books and comics worth of lore and story and interesting things that fleshed out the world and made it more and more interesting.

I miss those days.

Anyway the purpose of those alternate modes of travel were, simply put, because of the necessities of the plot. Because it served the purposes of the story to have one method or another and from there and from there, it would be natural to keep using these methods.

In the very beginning of Magic, there was only Dominaria. Or Dominia if you were paying attention to Grizzly Bears. The introduction of other Planes through Arabain Nights and the retcons that it was Rabidah meant that the players needed some way to justify going there. And while the notion of "Just Planeswalk" was the answer, it was... shall we say ... a little too vague for most people? People didn't grok the idea as much as players do today, so the flavor writers of the time reverted to classic standbys.

The notion of a 'Magic Door' is so deeply ingrained into our cultural consciousness that portals and the like can be used without anyone raising an eyebrow at it. From the Wardrobe in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, to the Stargate of the Movie and TV series of the same name, to the Roman god Janus, the idea of going through a doorway or passage and emerging somewhere else is accepted to us without breaking our suspension of disbelief.

Because of this, when the early Magic writers wanted to move their characters from one world to another and they didn't want a Planeswalker to do it, going through a natural or artificial portal was the default method of doing it. Not to say this didn't happen often, mostly because very Early Magic tried and failed to keep each plane separate to avoid this sort of problem, but that fell through. One of the earliest instances of a portal in the story and lore was the one found deep under Castle Sengir, through which the plane's Dwarven population fled to destinations unknown.

However, this sort of method of travel has its restrictions. Namely, it's pretty much fixed-point to fixed point. Much like the Caves of Koilos and the portal found there, once you know of a place and where it is from and going, that's it. It becomes known, and in knowing, unless the plot is around getting to or through the portal, it's not that interesting anymore.

Which is where the Skyship Weatherlight comes in.

As the game matured, and a larger story was established in the setting to help not only drive the metaplot, but to keep the fanbase interested, two semi-parallel plotlines were created. The first followed Urza, Planeswalker  ^{Meld  Meld} as he built up forces and power for his inevitable fight against Phyrexia, while moving alongside it was the plot of Gerrard Capashen, one of Urza's plots and his own efforts to rescue Captain Sisay from Volrath, the Shapestealer. However, because Volrath's Stronghold wasn't conveniently next door, Gerrard and his motley crew needed a ship to get to where they needed to go because there was no convenient Planeswalkers to take them. And there were no (known) portals to where they needed to go.

And so the Weatherlight was introduced as a way to keep a consistent cast of characters across the story while enabling them to move from place to place. And this worked because much like the idea of a magic doorway was acceptable, we are equally conditioned to accept a named ship as part of the voyage, enabling it and becoming as much a character as anyone else. The Argo of Grek myth and legend is one such vessel, though I'm sure you can name others as well.

But in order to keep the Weatherlight special, restrictions had to be placed on itself and its construction. Because of the nature of its power source, and the efforts that Urza went into building it, making a second was prohibitive for anyone. Even the Phyrexian counterpart, Predator, Flagship was a pale imitation that Volrath quickly abandoned once he acquired the Weatherlight.

These restrictions proved to be prblematic once the Phyrexian storyline was over and done with. With the lack of alternate and viable methods of travel, the story was back where it began, but this time they accepted the nature of the Multiverse more readily. Which is to say, if you weren't around at that time, Wizards had just finished a multi-year long plot that culminated in a Phyrexian Invasion and now they were moving to more self-contained stories, each lasting about a year and three sets worth of cards.

Wait, was this 2001 or 2023?

Anyway, in this new era, the lack of interplanar travel was not a concern for the game as the newly introduced Planeswalker card type allowed for a consistent, if rotating, cast to anchor the meta-narrative of the game, while allowing for the exploration of more interesting and varied places. However, cast bloat became a thing, with dozens of Planeswalkers showing up and vanishing before Wizards tried to corral the most popular into the Jacetus League... sorry, the Gatewatch.

Well, this didn't work out, so Wizards went back even further and revamped the original concept of interplanar travel for non-Planeswalkers into something new.

The Omenpaths are a return to the classic naturally occurring portal system. But because of how they are tied to the Realmbreaker, they are much more stable than their predecessors. This takes away a lot of the risk of going through a known portal - that it might not be there any more or it might collapse through over use. Instead, the change is now that there are a lot of them. A lot. Like, really. A lot! Enough that active exploration is still ongoing of the new system.

This style of planar travel is so far the best one. You can have an Omenpath from anywhere to anywhere, and part of the plot can be in trying to find an alternate path to where you want to go. You can take a vehicle through the Path - and I am looking forward to an entire set based around this! You can maintain and rotate your core cast by simply keeping them together as they walk the Paths and they can go their separate ways by literally doing just that. Taking a different path. And then others can follow or they can backtrack without issue.

Because the game is switching its focus away from Planeswalkers and more to Legendary Creatures (thanks Commander!), this allows these named individuals to stay in the spotlight without some external device or person keeping them together. This means we don't have to worry about movement restrictions that are external to the plot. A barred or secret passage is a far cry in terms of how a story handles it than a broken engine or your local travel expert has flipped off to who-knows-where and leaving your party stranded without their driver.

What comes next, you may be asking? Well, seeing as how we've gone from A to B to C then back to B and then back to A, I think the next step in the future will be the return of interplanar vehicles. Stepping off the Omenpaths and back into the Blind Eternities. It wouldn't surprise me if the Eldrazi were partly responsible for this due to disrupting the Omenpaths. Magic Spaceships vs Cthulhu!

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Wait, did I just reinvent Spelljammer?

HELL YEAH! That would be awesome!

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. I'll see you next week with what this all means from an out-of-universe perspective.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!