Pattern Recognition #360 - The Blind Eternities

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

20 March 2025

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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 to the surprise of no one, Jace has fucked everything up again. What did he do this time? Well, I'm not quite sure of all the details, so today I'm going to lay out some background information about the setting of Magic that has always been there, and has been a subject that I have touched on before because this game can be so very interconnected. And how this all leads into Jace's latest fuckup.

Today, I'm going to focus on the nature of the Blind Eternities, and what they are and what they are not. Because some people haven't read their own background material and are just winging it.

The Blind Eternities are the vast majority of the Multiverse of Magic - if they exist at all. Which they do, mind you. It just that I'm going to be contradicting myself a lot here, and that's part of the point of the Blind Eternities.

To start with, all the planes of the Multiverse, from Dominaria to Ravnica and beyond, exist as discrete and individual entities in the multiverse. The only times that planes have encountered each other were deliberate hostile actions by Phyrexia, and by the impostors to their name based on Argentum/Mirrodin. The Planar Overlay of Rath onto Dominaria, and the Realmbreaker. Because of this uniqueness, and the (typical) inability to travel conventionally from one plane to another, there had to be 'something' to exist that kept the Planes apart.

This is where the Blind Eternities comes in.

The Blind Eternities occupy the non-space between the Planes. I say this because there is no way to conventionally measure distance or even time in the Blind Eternities. To the point where the ancient Thran referred to it as the Halls of Time, to indicate how one could get lost in time and space there.

Because of this lack of understanding of direction and distance, those who were able to perceive the Eternities did so in their own manner. In many ways, because a Planeswalker's Spark is derived from the Eternities, what they see is a reflection of themselves as their minds fail to process the nothingness between. Jace Beleren is said to see it as endless glass, a confusing cacophony of visual noise that reminds him of what it is like to be a telepath surrounded by minds all the time. Vraska senses is a reflection of her nature, of the endless cycle of rot and decay. Urza saw it as a great machine, an endless artifice of pure efficiency and grand design.

And those who traveled via the Skyship Weatherlight? They saw nothing at all, for the travel was effectively instant.

There was no actual traversal time at all for people who moved between planes. And while many of them, including Jace when he 'Walked from Ixalan to Dominaria after the removal of The Immortal Sun, seem to perceive a measure of motion and knowledge that there is something being traveled, but exact quantities are hard to come by.

The closest we get to seeing the Blind Eternities properly, from a relatively neutral point of view, comes to us from the Time Spiral, where we get the protagonists using Venser's "teleportation platform", in reality a machine that he is using to jumpstart his New'Walker Spark. Teferi notes that he's perceived the Eternities before, but while on the machine, one he realized what it's actually doing, he saw the realm for the first time in a new light.

And he was still confused as heck.

Despite this distance and lack there-of, there have been explorers in the Blind Eternities. People have discovered planes new to them by not going to a place they already know, or that is more in tune with their inner nature as those who first Spark are wont to do. Gideon went from Theros to Bant, finding a place that would be more suitable (or so he thought) to his way of life than the life he had before.

Urza Planeswalker made time to explore the Multiverse and the Blind Eternities, deducing that there must be a finite, but extraordinarily large number of Planes out there, so many that no one could see them all in their lifetime, even for a Planeswalker, because the Planes themselves are finite and will eventually decay into nothingness. This is a sentiment shared by Ugin, who uncovered the Eldrazi, and studied how they acted - I'll come back to this later.

But in his explorations, he discovered for himself a few interesting aspects to the Blind Eternities. The first was that there was a flow of mana through the Aether. The immutable and ineffable substance between the planes was both a divider, a barrier and a conduit of sorts. And worlds that were major sources of mana, both too anf from where what he called "Nexus Planes".

Dominaria, he discovered, was one such plane, but equally discovered that as a result of his ascension to Planeswalker, he had accidentally created the Shard of Twelve Worlds, a self-contained microcosm of the Multiverse that had cut off a major source of mana from the Multiverse. Investigating this in case it would cause trouble down the line (as isolating Dominaria like this did protect it from further Phyrexian intrusion) he came across a very old plane that he learned was named 'Equilor', because all mana was equal there. It had been a Nexus before Dominaria, and the residents of that place claimed that theirs was the oldest plane that still existed, having gathered immense amounts of knowledge over the course of ages. Urza tried to bring them on-side in his war with Phyrexia, but they countered that the Phyrexians were nothing new, and that they would survive them just as they will survive all who came before and after.

Urza returned to Dominaria, having learned that the Shard had been broken. But such was the non-distance between Equilor and Dominaria, that if you set your watch to it, about a century passed on the way there, though for Urza, the trip was much shorter.

Though this was all Pre-revisionist, so for the most part, it can be changed by Wizards in the future.

But with Dominaria removed from the Multiverse for a time, followed by the Mending a few thousand years later, it is no longer the Nexus of the Multiverse. It is currently unknown where it is, or even if there is one 'locally' to the setting of Magic at this time. Some have theorized that Ravnica will become a new Nexus given it's multi-coloured aspects, but this is just supposition at this time.

The Blind Eternities are neither a void, neither does it have substance. It is, from those who have studied it, a combination of raw aether (as the natives of Avishkar describe it), the fundamental building block of magic itself, and the Planes themselves. The existence of the Eldrazi as a life form native to the Blind Eternities came as a surprise to a lot of people (except for Ugin), as the Blind Eternities are antethetical to life as everyone knew it. Unless you were a Planeswalker or protected by one or equivalent (Venser's Stepper, or the Weatherlight), you DIED when you entered the Eternities. Horribly. One person was killed this way by a Planeswalker, taken out and then left unprotected. There was nothing left.

But the Eldrazi, it was observed as they interacted with Zendikar, were just animals. They were feasting on the Plane itself, returning it to the base components of Aether and in general acting less as attackers and more as carrion birds, devouring what should have been a Plane at the end of its life to make room for a new one in the fullness of time.

Ugin theorized that they were a natural part of a much larger 'ecosystem' in the Blind Eternities, and really didn't like the idea that they could be killed. And Jace, in one of his extremely rare moments where I can agree with him - and yes, I feel bad saying that - called Ugin out on hoarding that knowledge and preventing the Gatewatch from finding a more palatable solution for everyone.

Ugin just happened to be dead for most of that, having his death retcon'd away in universe in Tarkir, the previous block, and he came to Zendikar as soon as he could to try and resolve the issue given that the other two who were supposed to help - Nahiri and Sorin - were MIA. Still, Jace did have a point. Ugin could have left some info about the Eldrazi lying around.

He didn't and now two of them are dead-ish, and a third is sleeping away until Innistrad is ready to die. Who knows what effect that will have?

But how does this all tie back into Jace and his latest collossal mistake?

Well, the Meditation Plane is the center of this. Constructed by Ugin (and stolen by Nicol Bolas), the Meditation Plane was designed and built to be as isolated as possible from the Multiverse. Ugin, who by nature, has no inherent color, found the flows of colored mana to not be to his liking, and so he wanted a place that could avoid those flows across the Multiverse.

He basically built a pillowfort in the back of his closet and went in there to read and listen to his music when everyone around him was too loud. And I can respect that as an introvert myself. It was hidden away from the Multiverse, Ugin using his best skills to basically do everything in his power to make it unreachable and unattainable. In fact, finding it required that you be guided there by someone who knew the way.

Oh yeah, Planeswalkers can guide other Planeswalkers to new Planes, allowing one to follow the other. It's how Ajani led Elspeth back to New Capenna after she lost her way.

Ugin used it as his private getaway, while Bolas used it both as a redoubt of last resort, as well as a personal throne-room. It has been damaged several times. When Bolas killed Ugin. When Ugin was resurrected by the Plane, when Bolas was killed by Tetsuo Umezawa, in the Time Spiral Crisis when Bolas was resurrected and, well, usually Bolas or Ugin is involved.

The Meditation Plane does heal itself though, so it's still habitable.

At last, after the War of the Spark, Ugin took Bolas inside it, and closed it off, sealing the two of them away for good.

But....

I really hope you've read up on the plot for Tarkir:Dragonstorm.

So, somehow, thanks to the Omenpaths and Loot, Jace was able to access the Meditation Realm. He discovered that it had been abandoned in the past few years, and no one was home. In his attempt to rebuild the Multiverse in his image (because what else could he stand?), he tried to connect the innate nothingness of the Meditation Plane through the Omenpaths with all the other Planes and cause a huge, colossal, and UTTERLY STUPID idea of using the Meditation Realm and Ugin's Spirit Gem (think a Phylactery for a Lich) to retcon the Phyrexian Invasion (an action that even Teferi knew would be stupid and impossible because that was PLAN A for URZA!) out of existence without considering the consequences of his actions.

You know, typical Jace Plan.

This has (apparently) resulted in a massive and colossal Divide By Zero error across the Multiverse, with the Meditation Plane being devoured by the Blind Eternities, and a lot of stuff breaking all at once...

Fuck Jace. Seriously.

Dammit, we're on the Road to Mending 2.0, aren't we?

So yeah, the Blind Eternities are the non-space between Planes. They exist, but don't. Can be traversed, and the time and distance involved is literally the speed of plot. And now Jace has gone and broken it in the local cluster of Magic.

And we have no idea how it is going to end up.

Thank you all for reading! I'll see you next week when I talk about the ending to the Slow Grow Tournament! See you then!

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!