Which, to no surprise, contradicts earlier material published, admittedly obscure material, but all the same.
The vec, dal, and kor were all just from Dominaria in earlier versions.

My gut money on the Sliver homeworld is still Fabacin. I have no real evidence to back up this assertion. Other places I'd consider putting my money are Kyneth (because it seems like the kind of place that would reward adaptability), and Ergamon (because it seems like the kind of place Slivers could thrive).

Most likely however, if we ever get to see the Sliver homeworld, it will be a new plane that we've not heard of yet. I do hope that there might be a UR that hearkens back to when Volrath abducted a Sliver Queen for study on Rath.

Are we really sure about the amphin being from Shandalar, though? I know there was that article that came with M15 stating that all cards in the set were from Shandalar, but I think it wasn't written by someone from Creative. Plus, that would include things like Kird Chieftain, which in turn is a reference to the original Kird Ape from Rabiah... I think 'kird' is Arabic for forest or jungle or something like that. I mean, it's not impossible given that Shandalar is a rogue plane and there are 1,001 Rabiahs, but I don't think the author of that article really had the creative authority to make that statement. Or was there another source stating that the amphin are from Shandalar? I'd rather see them on a plane like Muraganda, and Shandalar already has merfolk as a blue amphibian race.

@Shandalarian Slivers: God, yes, they're awful. Changing either their mechanical or visual identity would have been bad enough, but both things at once? That just leaves me speechless. And sure, we (or Creative) can try to make all kinds of excuses for their 'adaptation', but what's the point? What's the point in calling those things Slivers when they have nothing in common with the original Slivers? Even the ones from Future Sight that were implied to be from unknown planes conformed to the original Sliver model. If they ever do the 'Sliver planeswalker' thing that poor soul asked MaRo about, I'll set something on fire.

Edit: I'd really love to see a full block set on Shandalar, but they'd have to 1.) at least vaguely take into account the things we know about the plane and its history from older sources, and 2.) get rid of the bloody pseudo-Slivers. The latter shouldn't really be a problem as the Shandalarians were already fighting them when we last saw them, so they can just say the Slivers were exterminated off-screen (maybe with the help of a planeswalker) and call it a day. I wouldn't say no to more cool references and easter eggs like they already did with the city of Lesh, too.

I was fairly certain the amphin had been linked to some location in the shandalarian atlas, but since the archives are down, I've no clue where to start searching.

And you're actually confusing the statement that was made about the core sets. Someone from development said that all the m10 and m11 cards were from Dominaria, but that was refuted in sort order after causing a fair amount of chaos.

Fair enough, that could well be. I guess it won't really come up again until we get a proper Shandalar block anyway, given that they can't flesh out the plane in the Core Sets anymore. Still, I think the amphin would compete for creative space with the merfolk, and Amphin Cutthroat's flavour text sounds too interesting to shove that (sub-)plot in between all the other interesting stuff that's already going on on Shandalar.

Doug really hates the old canon, does he not?

http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/tcg/ar ... s/frontier

http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazi ... arcana/267

Don't ask me how far back they actually go, I'm only pointing out that they're back up.

Ascribe not to malevolence what can be explained by ignorance.
This is, as I said, a fairly obscure source, official or not. It was the art guide to Rath, which had a lot of collected information from The Duelist as well as internal documents.

Comics can be found here:
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Multiverse/planeswalkers.aspx?x=mtg/multiverse/webcomics/main

In the Shandalar comics we've got the names Kenan Sharmal, Ravash Mog, Bani Bakur and Anthanor and the city Ardestan. So... pretty basic fantasy names, I'd say. More interesting, the comic also makes a huge point about Shandalar's mana being special. So abundant that even lowly commoners can use it, but weird, and possibly alive somehow, so that Leshrac and Tevesh Szat can't use it. Lim-Dûl can though. That all seems to have fallen by the wayside, though since the comic is a bit of a mess, never explaining what's up with the mana, why Lim-Dûl can use it or what people's actual plans are, it's not surprising that a lot of it was ignored by later writers.


I've just gone through all the Rath era article of The Duelist, Rath and Storm and the Rath Cycle art book for my blog. They say Rath is a parasitic plane of Dominaria and only mention it crossing over with that plane, not with any others. They also only mention species taken from Dominaria (The Vec, Dal, Soltari, Thalakos, Dauthi, Skyshroud Elves and Rootwater Merfolk) or those "probably" created by Volrath's experiments (Slivers, Spikes, Licids). Reading it all in one go it seems abundantly clear that the intention was that everything on Rath came from Dominaria.

However... it is never explicitly stated that Rath didn't also take creatures from other planes, the Kor are never explicitly mentioned as being from Domnaria and the Slivers are never explicitly mentioned as being Volrath's creations. So bizarrely, and perhaps by accident, the recent revelations about Slivers and Kor did not contradict anything concrete and can easily be reconciled with the Rath era lore by just saying "oh, the Phyrexians also brought stuff from other planes to Rath".

The amount of lore from Tempest block that gets contradicted by Urza's block, now there's a huge ret-conny mess!

Thanks! I guess I just suck at digging up buried websites...