Pattern Recognition #332 - Crossing The Planes

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

25 July 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!

Today, I'm going to be covering something of an in-universe subject, and you can all consider this to be a preliminary primer for my subject matter. After all, it's all made up and the numbers don't matter! On with the show!

Traveling through the Blind Eternities is no easy task,even for the best of mages. With the natural abilities of Planeswalkers, it is only natural that those who are more aware of the nature of the multiverse seek to emulate this skill or find alternative or workarounds to achieve interplanar travel. Some of these were more successful than others, and some were impossible at various points in time due to outside effects and causes.

I'm going to cover all the major methods here, and while there is some overlap between a few of them, mostly they will cover their own subjects.

Natural Portals

The rarest of the bunch, natural portals occur when two planes intersect each other in the Blind Eternities - or more likely, approach close enough that the sort of intersect and interact with each other. An accident of motion on the cosmological scale.

Interestingly enough, we've actually seen one on a card. Though I don't think it was intended as such. The art for Chaos Warp from the Bloomburrow Commander sets shows a curious circular portal taking an individual from Bloomburrow to Kamigawa. While this is allegedly an Omenpath, it doesn't match what we know about those, so I am concluding for now that this is one of those extremely rare instances of a natural Portal. It will probably never happen again.

But, there was a time and a place here natural portals were a little more common than not. The Shard of the Twelve Words was a conglomeration of a dozen planes and demi-planes around Dominaria in the aftermath of Urza's Sylex Blast. Because of how tightly bound together they were, in addition to the anti-Planeswalking boundary of the Shard, naturally occurring portals between these twelve planes popped up with relative frequency in the aftermath of Urza's Ruinous Blast and the Time of Ice that followed. However, once the Shard was broken and the Ice Age ended, these Portals quickly faded into the background and became as common as any other - which is to say pretty much never.

Planar Portals

With naturally occurring portals happening at effectively random, the next step for most wizards was to try and build their own. The first Planar Portals were built over naturally occurring ones with the intent to stabilize and make safe the basic thing that was already there. The Caves of Koilos are an example of this, though how much of this was the device built there, or the actions of Yawgmoth's mentor or other factors are vague enough to be annoying.

However, instead of following a random and by-definition unstable path across the Blind Eternities, some enterprising Wizards attempted to use what they had learned from established portals and tried to build their own.

Most of these efforts met with failure for three primary reasons. The first is that unlike natural portals, there was very little way in protection from the Blind Eternities while transiting the path. This was usually fatal. So it wasn't like people could survivie the trip in the first place.

The second issue is that there was no way to tell exactly where your portal would end up. Now, if you astoundingly lucky, you could have an actual Planewalker scout out your portal and guide the other end to a safe location, but for most people, well, the implication in the flavor text of Wormhole Serpent is just scratching the surface with regards to the bad things that could happen to people who used artificial portals without proper percautions.

Lastly, power requirements. It turns out that punching holes across the Multiverse takes a lot of energy. There's a reason why the Planeswalkers who could do this naturally were breaking the multiverse just by existing. so much power in such a little package would be enough to Planeswalk. But even they had their limits, and the power required for be building of a Planar Portal would quickly grow immeasurable over the distances involved.

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This is not to say that it was impossible. Most (infamously), the classic Phyrexian Invasion saw the deployment of dozens inf not hundreds or thousands temporary portals by the invaders to generate enough mass of invading forces that they couldn't be defeated piecemeal by the defenders. So many were used that they became part of the landscape after their fall. The land Hinterland Harbor from Dominaria shows the size of just one of these portals.

These only worked because they were ultimately expendable. Temporary measures to push enough forces into Dominaria to ensure the capture of the Caves of Koilos and reopen the permanent portal there. And even then, only because of how close the artificial plane of Rath was to Dominaria were they able to function at all. So close that they were able to be used as anchor points for the Rathi Overlay, the physical culmination of the material Invasion.

Of course, these weren't the only ones ever built. In terms of the game's plot, the creation of a new portal by Rashmi, Eternities Crafter which she figured was just a general teleportation portal was something so much more. Enough that Nicol Bolas and Tezzeret colluded to steal it and utilize its interesting properties to enable the former's invasion of Ravnica.

Once the kink of the lack of safe passage for organic matter was worked out. You know. Little things.

Vehicles

With creating Portals proved to be too restrictive in one form or another, the next effort went into replicating the nature of Planewalkers themselves. Beings that could travel from one plane to another under their own power. And so, intelligent Wizards that they were, some wonderful individuals attempted to create machines that could mimic this facet of a Planeswalker and travel between the Planes in style!

And with one exception and one partial credit, every effort has failed.

You see, Planeships as they would have been called, ran into a few hurdles that most could not overcome. The first is the problem of Navigation. Much like Portals, dealing with the Blind Eternities leaves you... well.... Blind. You don't know where you are going or where you came from. The extranormal senses of Planeswalkers allow them to follow the paths of mana between Planes, but a ship? No such luck. Once you got out into the Multiverse, you were lost. And not in the fun way either.

Of course, getting out there was a problem as well. Take all the power requirements of normal portals, and multiply that exponentially. You see, Portals usually had very short transit distances, but a Planeship would have to go the whole way. It would need to maintain a bubble of conventional reality across its own existence against the infinite crush of the Eternities, and do so in such a manner that still allowed it to get into and out of a Plane in the process. Oh, and provide power to move as well as everything else required for travel. The expenses add up fast.

The only success

Built and designed by Urza, Planeswalker  ^{Meld  Meld}, calling the Weatherlight a marvel of engineering would be selling it short. Created by the mad genius as part of his Legacy Project, the Weatherlight was one of two core components to the whole thing, and needed to be everything that all others had failed to create. Urza solved the navigation problem by creating devices that would mimic his own sense of direction across the Planes, as well as creating through proxies, a fairly detailed map of the Multiverse around Dominaria to start getting people to learn how to do what he could do intuitively. The power source was an issue that stumped even his genius as he understood very well the requirements involved. He finally got what he wanted when he collapsed Serra's Sanctum into a powerstone, and used the energies of a dying Plane to power a single ship. This was effectively a unique power source, and there was no way to create another. In fact, it was this lack of a powercoure that prevented the Weatherlight from Planeshifting after it was restored by Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain.

Of course, Urza did cheat. While the Weatherlight could travel the Multiverse 'normally', what it actually did was exit the Plane it was currently in, teleport (or close enough) to the destination Plane and then re-enter the new place there. This was done to minimize time in the Blind Eternities, and was the primary method of Planeshifting for the vehicle.

But there was one honorable mention, right? Well, the Ambulator of Venser, Shaper Savant was potentially a version of a Planeswalker Vehicle based on the principles of Teleportation, but this turned out to be a manifestation of Venser's post-Mending Spark ad how he was using it as a crutch to convince himself he could perform the act of Planeswalking. Once he was freed of that restriction, he became Venser, the Sojourner, the first of the new Planeswalkers.

The Omenpaths

Originally, the World Tree of Kaldheim connected the Nine Realms into a single unified (by traversal) world. While each of the realms was unique and distinct, the existence of this Tree allowed travelers to Open the Omenpaths and move from Realm to Realm. In essence, each of the Nine was a separate Plane, linked by the multerversal access of the Worldtree. This was similar in construct to the Shard of Twelve Worlds, but with a much more cohesive travel system and without the isolative drawbacks of the Shard.

When the Phyrexians of Argentum stole The Seedcore to grow Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree, they utilized this aspect of the Tree to organize their Invasion of the Multiverse. By growing Realmbreaker from the heart of New Phyrexia, the invaders attempted to reach as many Planes as possible in as short amount of time and rush them all with Oil and machines to flood the multiverse with both.

Thankfully Jace stole their plot armor and they got beat up for it.

Now, the sharp and explosive growth of the Realmbreaker reached into the Multiverse and touched countless Planes, far more than what was expected or anticipated by the instigators of this crisis. And with the Phyrexians phased out and replaced by Zhalfir, the Omenpaths of the Realmbreaker now form an intricate lattice of paths across the Multiverse, connecting the unconnected in countless potential ways.

Omenpaths are shaped like Triangles, the most stable two dimensional shape, but their depth and appearance can vary. They act as natural portals, but use the existence of the Realmbreaker to support them, and to maintain consistency. An Omenpath will always go from one place on a plane to the same place on a different planec, unlike natural portals that can wibble and wobble about, once you know where one end it, it stays that way.

Because of how new they are and their stability, the Plane of Ravnica under the command of the Guild Pack, Niv-Mizzet, has commenced a massive mapping program, as well as moving to expand communications and transportation across the Multiverse with Ravnica as the growing hub of the same. A sort of Multiversal Grand Central Station, if you will. After all, getting invaded twice in as many years by extra-dimensional armies makes them wary about other such potential threats. And getting to them first.

However, on the world called Thunder Junction for its electrical storms and multitude of Omenpaths in close proximity to each other, in a Fomori Vault, the individual now known as Loot, the Key to Everything was found. This person possesses an intuitive understanding of the Omenpaths, and can tell where they go as well as finding otherwise closed Omenpaths. What this means for the future, well, we won't know yet.

But a storm is coming through the Omenpaths. A Dragonstorm.

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.

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