Honestly, I'm glad that they kept Zhalfir instead of following up on whatever it was that they were toying with when it came to Aminatou.

With all the various and sundry now done, or done for the most part, there are thoughts that I ultimately have about it all. I'll try to avoid being too negative.

The first is, no matter how you slice it, there was nowhere enough time for this to feel like a satisfying, earned victory. No more so than the fact that the Phyrexians somehow created enough to invade to start with. If I had to summarize the events, I would ultimately be forced to say "Perfunctory" and the combination of Wrenn and Halo saving the day was... a fairly bland Deus Ex Machina. (Trying to weigh it against the Legacy Weapon and I'm not sure how objective I can be) Taken as a whole, between All Will Be One and this, it was horrendously lopsided and segmented. All the tragedy that mattered was in the first half, and then a lot of that tragedy ultimately doesn't matter, which brings me to my second thought.

I'm glad Ajani is back. I'm annoyed they didn't finally kill Nissa off.
The problem is, however, that if it can be done once, they can just... restore what characters they want. Which is why the next stop being Eldraine and what happened the last time an Afflicted character ended up there makes me think we won't actually see much one way or another. Also they should have let Nissa bite it.

Beyond that, as a final note, I am... mildly torn. They had a lot of ground to cover, and none of the stories were badly written, never wanted to give that impression, but they spent a lot of time focusing on several planes, and there's a mild disconnect that we didn't see others, others that we know for certain were affected from the cards. And in that, it's what is strange because the ones left out all shared a common trait. Ravnica, Tarkir, and possibly Alara?
At the end of the day, if Alara got skipped, I'm going to be unsure how to feel. On the one hand, Alara is my favorite plane, so if the worst of this missed it, I won't be upset. On the other hand, they REALLY don't want to go back to Alara and that does bother me. (I mean, I get it, it ate up a HUGE amount of design space mechanically and flavorfully, but it was worth it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CvkMPo ... eGathering

Predictably the trailer is more badass than the actual confrontation

The hate boner for Nissa is still strong I see.

I have some scattered thoughts on this ending. I agree that it felt rushed. I expected MoM to be more of a "see Phyrexia get in a slug-out war with all of these planes!" and the next set after be the conclusion where the Phyrexians are defeated. I did not find their defeat satisfying as it was too convenient. I guess they just turned off the thing that stunned and scattered the first team? I've never personally been fond of the trope of "the well planned, tactical attempt failed but the gutsy 'from the heart' move somehow works". I also found the oil's effectiveness to be inconsistent for no clear reason. On Kaladesh, just a plop on Pia's thopter has her wondering how soon under her machine turns. Similarly, Saheeli's defensive mechanical beasts seem to be turned very quickly by the enemy. Meanwhile, there are multiple mentions on cards and in stories of creatures biting into/eating Phyrexians outright which I think would just turn them after they ingest the oil (and other creatures are turned by ingesting it, adding to the inconsistency). The elder dinosaurs I also think would be the easiest things to turn. You only need a small, agile flier to land on them and inject them to get them to eventually turn. I assume more oil would turn them faster, but even a little oil appears to be enough to start the unstoppable phyresis process.

A slightly more personal gripe: what happened to Othari and the phoenix chicks?? They keep talking about how "this is the last of the resistance" when they refer to the Mirrans there but there's no mention of those chicks - come on, WotC, I got emotionally attached to the little fellas

I loved seeing Hazoret with a new lazotep arm and, from the looks of the card art, she is fighting alongside the scarab and locust gods against the Phyrexians. It makes me kinda wistful to imagine those two coming out from Bolas's programming and coming to terms with who they are and what they did. I also think it's interesting that there's a card where it looks like a lazotep coating suppresses Elesh Norn's control over a person.

I am also curious to see what other gods on Theros succumbed to phyrexianization. So far, I only see Ephara remaining intact and there's flavour text that talks about forges going cold, the wilds withering, seas dispersing, and even death succumbing so it doesn't look good for the other gods. Heliod being killed by Kaya felt odd, like she just climbed him, he didn't realize, and she killed him? His death felt cheap and unsatisfying.

With so many iconic parts of the planes shattered (dead gods, the courts have fallen, we don't know what Torrezon is like, who knows what's going on with Ikoria's crystals, etc) I think that there can be an interesting "restoration" era of stories coming up where planes rebuild and are allowed to shift in new directions so this does open up a lot of growth opportunities. I think I liked the side stories the best out of all of this. I deeply enjoyed seeing the planes resist the phyrexians in their own unique ways, even if they would have eventually fallen in time. It helped showcase their uniqueness to me.

Lastly, I'm curious to see what they do with the compleated walkers. Jace and Vraska (she seemed to have a lot of oil burned out of her?) would have fallen comatose after New Phyrexia was phased out so how will they bring them back? I doubt most people would take in and care for a comatose Phyrexian after all of this. I admit, I also wish that they had killed Nissa off to make room for a more interesting green walker.

While the stories overal were quite well written (the New Capenna and Zendikar ones were the two exceptions...they were pretty bad), they obviously took on more than they could take.
Everything feels incredibly rushed...i felt absolutely nothing while reading these stories because everything was resolved as soon as i blinked. I was hoping that at least Nissa would die, but even that isn't the case. The two main casualties are Lukka (Who nobody really cares about) and Tamiyo (who people do care about, but who had little room to grow as a character). Vraska's fate is unknown, as are Vraska's and Jace's (Who is not even mentioned in the story..). It all just feels really safe.

The praetors are a prime example: nothing comes from either Urabrask's or Sheoldred's insurrection. All the praetors apart from Elesh Norn are killed without almost any screentime.

The broad canvas and very limited story space (even with more stories) means that this story was doomed from the beginning. I hope that the story team realises that more limited set stories with more depth to them is the way forward.

This feels like it's written like it should have been released before the stories...

It doesn't really tell us much that we did not know. It would have been nice to learn something about less prominent planes like Ulgrotha. Weird that Amonkhet isn't there.

The timing of release and the haphazard and scarce info about most planes makes the article oddly superfluous.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/featu ... he-machine

Legendary team ups

That team up article gave more info than the entire planeswalker's guide!

Some of the team ups are hilarious. Fblthp giving Borborygmos peripheral vision in canon is gold.

I also like that Giada is Errant's guardian angel. That adds so much to the card.

Athreos (Who is fine!) finding out that Kroxa can actually eat Phyrexians by the bucketfull without it having any effect on him and chaining him to Kunoros so that the dog can lead him to where he can eat the most Phyrexians is just chef's kiss.

I think one of the things I liked the least was how the Praetors were handled. When Sheoldred got executed I was thinking the whole time, "ha, no, that's a decoy or a fake or something. There's no way the black praetor would die shrieking and crying. She'll be back in some form as a surprise - maybe as part of the civil war?" And then she never did.

Urabrask's whole rebellion was pointless and he died fairly ignominiously.

Vorinclex died to a random soldier after being told "you should look behind you" was a frustrating end for a being of such ferocity. If Teferi time stopped him and he got killed even that would've been better

Jin dying in his weird tank after starting his own rebellion which brought down Norn. It especially bugged me because if he succeeded, and Elesh Norn died, the invasion would've still failed, right? Like they said that the oil was tied to Norn and her control at some point if I'm remembering correctly so if she died the phyrexians would still sputter out as an invasionary force.

At the end of the day, the praetors had a very Team Rocket feel to me. Norn, Jin, and Sheoldred were Jessie, James, and Meowth (respectively) and Vorinclex felt like Wobbafet, popping out periodically and accomplishing nothing. "We'll compleat you next time, Pikachu!"

Prepare for trouble!
And make it double!
To protect the planes from devastation!
To unite all peoples within our nation!
To denounce the evils of skin and flesh!
To extend our reach to the Eternities above!
Norn!
Jin!
Phyrexia blasts off at the speed of light!
Surrender now, or prepare to fight!
"VOOOooooRINclex!"

That's an insult to Team Rocket. Team Rocket could learn from their failures, grow as people, relate to each other, and do pretty well at anything other than stealing that max-IV Pikachu. I mean, I guess I haven't watched Pokemon in the last two decades or so, but I remember them pretty clearly and that they were kind of the best things in the show despite being the comical villains. The Praetors (less poor wasted Urabrask) were more like the Captain Planet Rogues Gallery -- easily reduced to simplistic examples of evil, fundamentally static, and still kind of trivially dispatched by the Deus Ex Machina of the week

That Elesh Norn is now a complete monster by tv tropes' standards is **** wild

Oh. Hey. They decided to start putting out the aftermath junk.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic ... -the-world

Also: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic ... ond-repair

I'm not liking this direction of mass planeswalker depowering. They deplowered the last two white aligned antagonist walkers for crying out loud!

I don't really want to read the stories but I have seen the leaks and have been worrying about the direction things might be going. Is it just a lot of walkers desparking or all of them or just the ones with ties to phyrexia?

It's not just the ones with ties to Phyrexia, but it isn't all of them. It seems fairly arbitrary.

Which means I'm sure it's whatever marketing has found to be the most profitable to smear across the front of packs.

Here's the full breakdown of the Aftermath consequences from Making Magic

1. A LOT OF CHARACTERS DIED
-While not every single Phyrexianized creature died (there are some future stories to be told), most of them did.
2. MOST CHARACTERS LIVES WERE RADICALLY CHANGED
3. MOST PLANES WERE FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERED
-It has become an integral part of the identity of each plane. There's now a "before the war" and "after the war."
4. ZHALFIR IS NOW ITS OWN PLANE
5. NEW PHYREXIA IS LOCKED AWAY
6. MOST OF THE PLANESWALKERS LOST THEIR SPARK
7. THERE ARE NOW OMENPATHS ALLOWING NON-PLANESWALKERS TO TRAVEL BETWEEN PLANES
-Now, the Omenpaths can vary quite a bit. Some can be tiny, some huge. Some permanent, some temporary. Some stable, some moving. They present a great risk for non-Planeswalkers, as there's no promise of a way back. And not every plane is connected to every other plane, so some trips can be quite a journey. All that said, traveling between planes is no longer limited to Planeswalkers.
-There are numerous sets in design right now, for example, that we couldn't have made prior to this change, so this cosmological shake-up is going have a huge impact on the narrative Multiverse and the game.

CAN YOU GIVE US THE LIST OF ALL THE DE-SPARKED PLANESWALKERS?
No. This set tells of ten that have been de-sparked. Future sets will nod to those who aren't de-sparked by having them on planeswalker cards and those who are de-sparked by having them on legendary creature cards. We like the idea that the players will slowly learn this over time, and we think it will spawn much discussion.

CAN YOU GIVE US A FULL LIST OF WHO DIED IN THE PHYREXIAN WAR?
That's another list that's going to slowly come out over time. We have a lot of Magic sets to make, including a lot of return sets to do, so we want the fate of some characters to be something that gets revealed through cards in sets. And remember, just because a character has disappeared from their own plane doesn't mean they're necessarily dead, as the Omenpaths now exist. Part of the fun of the new cosmology is having old favorites pop up in places you might not expect.

Yeah sounds like marketting ****. I am both relieved and disgusted


Edit: maybe not relieved, this set is giving me anxiety and I dont even care about the story as much as most of you. I cant even imagine how you guys are feeling. Hell, some have left the community over less

Only two stories. I guess that's more than the latest Theros but still