So, apparently Commander Collection: Black is coming:



I don't know if you can see it at that resolution, but the reprint of Reanimate in the bottom left-hand corner has flavour text reading

"Death is a small price to pay for immortality." - Baron Sengir

What's more, the figure in the art looks suspiciously like it could be Baron Sengir as a child, especially since it seems to have a black pigtail dangling from its head.

All I can say to that is that they'd better not acknowledge 'A Song for the Plague Rats' from The Secrets of Magic, although it really seems to be a nod to that. Even the flavourtext would make sense in the context of that story, even though the story itself doesn't make sense in the context of, well, anything. (The most glaring problem in that story is that Baron Sengir supposedly became a vampire as a child when he ended up with a curse his father was going to put onto himself in order to stop aging... Considering the Baron Sengir we know and love is very obviously not a child, you can probably see why this doesn't make any sense).

Here's a more in-depth discussion of the story in question as well as other Homelands material in a thread I made a while ago: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=25917

They could smooth over the story into proper continuity, or it could have been a hallucination from Ravi's "herbs".

I mean, the one detail that would have needed smoothing over the most was his age when he became a vampire, but if the card depicts what I assume it depicts, that's the exact thing they doubled down on... The fact that he just randomly happened to know Ravi ages before they met again on another plane is also really jarring IMO. The story in general has basically nothing that I'd want out of an origin story for Baron Sengir (or Ravi), except maybe his transformation into a vampire, which can't have happened before he was an adult, so personally, I don't think there's anything worth keeping here. (And if they really went out of their way to depict it on a card, it's probably not a hallucination.)

I get that it's kinda ironic that I of all people advocate ignoring a published story, but I'd argue it's just one of those cases where retconning it wouldn't be the problem, the problem was approving and publishing self-contradictory material in the first place. Think more Test of Metal and less Agents of Artifice. And considering all the (legitimately good) novels they retconned and replaced with watered down BS, or the fact that they completely ignored 'Ach, Hans, Run!' when making a card for the titular character, trying to force 'A Song for the Plague Rats' of all things into the canon is a weird hill to die on for WotC...

The only way they could still smooth it over (again, assuming that the card is what I think it is) would be to explain how the Baron got magically aged between the short story and his later appearances. Maybe he dabbled in alchemy when he was tired of being a kid, or maybe one of the planeswalkers who picked him up had a way of aging him. "I want to be this big, bad vampire lord, but no-one takes me seriously because I look like twelve and don't even have three hairs on my balls, could you maybe do something about that?" Worst backstory ever...

I never read the original story. The problem is Baron Sengir died as a child, became a vampire, and 'grew up' into his current appearance, right? That is pretty weird.

I do think vampires in some fiction continue aging, just as a slow rate and often becoming something more monstrous rather than just an old human. But that's different from a vampire that looks like a child going through an aging up process like living humans do.

Is it confirmed that Baron Sengir died and that his type of vampire is a post-mortem transformation? Or could he be transformed by the curse, so he is still 'living' or some semblance of it and so he continues aging?

There are also sometimes immortals that still age until they reach a point that they settle down, like some fairies or gods (we see Dionysus born and age until young adulthood and stop).

Not that I think these explanations were thought of. Just some things that come to mind. Regardless, it is, indeed, weird for Sengir to die as a child but appear as a middle-aged vampire.

Yep. I actually thought I'd posted a link to the thread in the OP where I explained it in more detail, but it turns out I got my own walls of text mixed up and posted the wrong link, sorry...

Here's the correct one: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=21707

So, yeah, the story itself acknowledges that the vampiric condition would stop people from aging.


Sengir vampires have indeed confirmed to be undead, though I can't tell you what exactly the sources for that were from the top of my head (or whether the short story in question brings it up). I'll try to find more info about it, though. Also note that the flavour text of the new card reads: "Death is a small price to pay for immortality." - Baron Sengir
So the card that appears to show him as a child being transformed into a vampire suggests he actually died an returned. There are vampires in Magic that do age, but those are exactly the ones that aren't undead, namely those from Innistrad and Zendikar.