Apparently the Spanish MTG twitter account has confirmed that Amonkhet will have new God cards.

Wheeeeee

https://twitter.com/wizards_magicES/sta ... 0143587328

I think it would have been a bigger mistake to NOT have god cards in an egyptian set. they are one of the most iconic things about ancient Egyptian culture.

I bet that the gods are just creations of Bolas, though. Really hope they don't bring Devotion back.

Odds on Sarkhan, Tezzerett, Ugin, Saheeli, Chandra, and Nicol Bolas being cards in this set?

I'm super happy Bolas is finally coming back.

I would kill for Divinity Counters to come back.
Super low on all those except Bolas.
Chandra, Tezzeret, and Saheeli all already have cards coming out this block. Despite Jace being in BfZ, they intentionally pushed his card off into SoI and didn't give the rest of the Gatewatch a card there despite them doing stuff. With the modern methods they use, I think that will be common from now on.
Sarkhan has what he's always wanted so it feels weird tossing him back in the mix.
Ugin... mmm low odds I think. Possible, but unlikely. He's a tough design to even try.

Ajani has a better chance, and any of the gatewatch that aren't getting cards in Kaladesh block.

agreed.

I think Sarkhan and Ugin will show up on the plane to confront Bolas, and since Tezz seems to be coming to Kaladesh (I haven't gotten that far, but it was what I have learned through context of conversations) I could very much see Tezz going "YOU GUYS GOT ME THIS TIME" and running away, with new best friends Chandra and Saheeli in pursuit to Amonkhet. I hadn't thought of Ajani (I had only seen a single splash art that seems to imply he will inexplicably be in Kaladesh) but it would make sense he would go to another plane with gods to find a way to fight gods.

Those are my guesses.

Ugin might show up, but I don't think he'd get a card. He didn't get a walker card in BfZ after all. And Sarkhan wasn't there, so he's clearly not following Ugin.

Anybody getting a card in Kaladesh is almost certainly not getting one in Amonkeht.

And the fact that the ENTIRE Gatewatch has shown up in Kaladesh (ugh...) kinda paints the picture we're never going to get a break from their entire roster, so Amonkeht already looks like Gatewatch vs. Bolas. Can pretty much write off any other party acting against him.

Sign me up for Divinity counters as well. Mostly, because they sound cool and it reminds me of old theories that Kamigawa's spirit realm was Bolas's meditation plane. This was back when we thought O-Kagachi was Bolas.

edit - All of those bastards followed Chandra and Lily? Damn. Here I was hoping Amonkhet would be Rocky III for Jace.

You know what I didn't get from the Khans story? The perspective from the dragons about how they feel about Sarkhan. Like, their whole world view is that Dragons are 1000% better than humans in every way, and then here's this random human that not only turning into a dragon himself, but joyfully...probably creepily rubbing up in all of their business, being all "man dragons are cool, am I right fellow dragons!"

Like, is he some kind of affront to their entire world view? If any of the elders heard that there was some human running around turning into a dragon and pestering their storm-cloud babies....would they mobilize against him before their human minions found out about the odd half-dragon man?

I don't remember Sarkhan having much to do in DTK's plot except be happy that dragons were back.

The next step for Sarkhan's development is to have the Dragonlords mitigate the impending uprising by reminding the humans that they, the dragons, only did what the humans would've done if given the chance. Then divert the ire of Tarkir's anti-dragon establishment to Sarkhan by painting him as the one responsible for the Dragonlords' domination. A situation where Sarkhan's dreams turn to nightmares feels right, and probably should've been used as the main plot for Dragons of Tarkir.

I am probably the only person who felt this way but Abyssal Gatekeeper's art always made me think of ancient Egypt.





On that note I have some good news and then some bad news for you.

While my engagement with Amonkhet has mostly been restricted to complaining about the architecture so far, I finally got around to/could be bothered to try and research if the name 'Amonkhet' actually means anything in ancient Egyptian. I'm sure I can't have been the first person on the internet who thought of that, but so far I haven't come across the topic anywhere.

Anyway, the first part wasn't that hard to find out, because as most of you probably know, Amon (or Amun) is a major deity in the Egyptian pantheon, and the names of Egyptian deities conveniently tend to have a meaning. The English Wikipedia page for 'Amun' gives the meaning of the name as "the hidden one" or "invisible". This sounds totally on track, considering it makes perfect sense for Bolas to choose a hidden or invisible plane to hang out. What's more, this seems to confirm that Amonkhet is the invisible destination that Vraska planeswalked to and that Ral couldn't track, meaning we can probably expect her to show up there. As to the second part, I have no idea what 'khet' means because it's not a word that I recognise, and reliable online dictionaries for ancient Egyptian are hard to come by. I've found a dictionary entry that translates it as "wood, stick", but that doesn't sound right. I suspect it's a word referring to a place of some sort, but it's really the first part of the name that's important.

"et" is usually a suffix for feminine beings things (ie "Sekhmet", "the female powerful one" ["powerful one" is just "Sekhem"], "Kauket", "dark female one" ["dark one" is just "Kek"])

The feminine of Amon is technically Amaunet, but it could be spelled as "Amonkhet" especially since there are no preserved vowels.

Well Bolas has a pretty nice figure, maybe he was mistaken for their goddess when he appeared 1000 years ago and just went with it. Made some power harnessing pyramids and maybe theres even some stargate style planar portals. Perhaps thats why he made the plane hidden from magic and other walkers.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I think it's weird that people keep trying to make up reasons why Amonkhet could be the place Vraska went to when it's pretty clear that she's going to whatever dark void she ended up in when she first planeswalked. That place wasn't an Egyptian plane with crazy Bolas motifs. It was a black nowhere that was nothing in all directions. Whatever it is, it is probably her safe space that she retreats to so she can collect herself and plot, sort of like a certain meditation realm, but more naturally occurring. Why Project Lightning Bug can't identify it is anyone's guess, especially since we just found out that was a thing the project could even do.

That 'confirms' nothing.
Nor does Kamigawa have anything to do with rivers, for example.

It's a stretch to say it's hidden or invisible.

Amon/Amun is also one of main deities of ancient Egypt, worshiped nearly to the point of monotheism for several centuries as Amun-Ra. It's safe to say that the name is pretty big for evoking "Egypt!"

There's definitely some wiggle room with the vowels, but that wouldn't explain where the -kh- comes from if 'Amonkhet' was supposed to be the same word as 'Amaunet'. Even with different conventions of transcription that exist for ancient Egyptian (e.g. between different modern day languages like English and German), I'm pretty sure the consonant cluster would be preserved as either -kh- or -ch- and was probably spelled out in hieroglyphs as well. So I don't think you could just spell 'Amaunet' with an optional -kh- in there. I'm not an egyptologist or anything, though, just talking from my own experience. So the bottom line is, I still think 'khet' probably has a meaning of its own rather than just making the word feminine.

And that's exactly what I thought when I first read the name in the announcement. But I would be sorely disappointed if they just made up the name that way and it turned out to be gibberish, and given the naming conventions of many other planes, it makes sense to look for a possible meaning behind the name of a new plane. The Egyptian words and syllables that people are most familliar with come from names of pharaohs and gods, and that's a good starting point for coming up with a meaningful plane name, because the names of Egyptian gods and paharohs pretty much always mean something. From a creative perspective, it would be too good an opportunity to achieve both resonance and meaning to just string meaningless sounds together that have nothing to do with the plane itself. As we have all demonstated now, many people are familliar with the name of Amun/Amon, and Wikipedia cites a credible source for it meaning 'hidden' or 'invisible' (I also checked the Wikipedia article in a few other languages that I can read well enough to tell they give the same meaning). Being 'hidden' or 'invisible' is a quality we know planes in Magic can have, so I really want to believe I'm on to something there. It's just too good to be coincidence.


Kamigawa doesn't have anything to do with rivers (at least not literally), but it has a lot to do with kami. Sure, I'm stretching the definition of 'confirm' quite a bit, but I think it would be pretty odd if the recent info about Vraska 'walking to an invisible destination shortly after the announcement of a plane that has a word for 'invisible' in its name were completely unrelated. We already learned that Vraska is up to something sinister a few weeks before that, so why would we need that second piece of info if it wasn't somehow important for the transition to the next block (assuming she won't randomly be involved in Aether Revolt)? The only other way in which I could see that making sense would be if Ravnica III was the next block after Hour of Devastation and all of this was a hook laid out two blocks ahead. I mean, that's not any more speculative than assuming she planeswalked back to that black, empty void. We just don't know much about that place, but I don't think it would be particularly useful to Vraska, except for resting and hiding from planeswalkers temporarily. Is there any info about that black void other than The Shadows of Prahv, Part 2? Because all it says there is this: "Just before your 'guard' would have killed me, I was torn from this world. I was cast into a dark tomb with no way out." [...] "It felt like lifetimes before I learned how to escape, to slip the confines of a world. But during the eternity I was trapped, I resolved that all should receive the death they deserve." Heck, I'm not even sure this describes a definite place rather than just being thrown into the Blind Eternities and then being stuck on a random, unspecified plane due to not knowing how planeswalking works. I know it might just be many people's wishful thinking, but establishing Vraska as an agent of Bolas would make sense to me, and then she would have a reason to planeswalk to Amonkhet. With Ajani suddenly showing up, Tezzeret making a comeback and every 'walker conveniently knowing everyone else, it looks like this is heading in an anti-Bolas direction where 'walkers will either side with Bolas or the Gatewatch in the not-so-long run. And surely Bolas would take measures to hide Amonkhet and prevent random planeswalkers from stumbling in and ruining things in his absence. If he's been there for more than 1,280 years, it might have been intended to keep out Ugin specifically.

I would say, though, that Occam's razor suggests Bolas-as-Amun-Ra to be the more probable answer. I mean, he does kind of have the solar disc between horns motif going (though he's also a big serpent associated with darkness or at least , which would make him a great Apophis). Plus with the art and our latest outings I think we're more headed for The Mummy's ancient egypt than anything grounded in heavy mythology. See also Krakens in Theros...

It's been a long time since Kamigawa and Wizards considers it a failure, attributing the same to having been too esoteric.

I think that motif-wise Bolas is indeed Ra, even down to the solar association, which is kind of weird since he is the iconic "dark combination", .

Maybe his new card will be ? It makes some sense, since he's been around long enough to experiment with every colour of mana and we've already since a character switch the for (Marchesa).

Then again, maybe he's also the Apep analogue, especially if the actual gods turn against him.

That's all true, but I really just meant Amon in name, no that his actual role or attributes will be projected onto Bolas. 'Amon' being the name of a god just makes it easier to find out the meaning of the first part of 'Amonkhet', and it's a resonant Egyptian name that people are at least passingly familiar with. Then again, Theros also had some inside jokes and easter eggs for Greek philosophy nerds specificly, so they didn't completely shy away from esoteric things.

I don't think I'd be cool with an actual Bolas PW card that is anything but Grixis-coloured. Those colours are at the core of his vey nature, that's why Gem of Becoming and the Imperial Shrine are/were a thing. All of the other surviving Elder Dragons were shard-coloured, too, and I'd prefer him to not break that cicle, even if he's a planeswalker now. I think the older a planeswalker is, the less convincing a colour change becomes (I'm looking at you, Sorin). That reminds me, if Bolas established his position on Amonkhet before the Mending, I hope they don't make the same mistake as in Fate Reforged and pretty much ignore the fact that Bolas needed his Grixis mana lines to stabilise his presence on a plane back then. The artbook shows a body of water, which could work as the blue and possibly the black mana line, so I'm cautiously optimistic there might be a mountain somewhere nearby...

Re: vraska as Bolas's agent
See, I'm not arguing against that, I'm arguing that dropping Amonkhet in as an invisible world is needlessly complicated, particularly when the Meditation Realm exists. Y'know, a private world that only exists as a bubble glued to Dominaria?

It's as Szat said, it's all a matter of Occam's razor, and the idea of Amonkhet as a hidden world is... Honestly kind of contrived when there are explanations that otherwise make sense.