I'm not bothered that Kaldheim has brown people inherently. I actually think black vikings have a pretty cool aesthetic, what bothers me is that wotc holds such a clear double standard. The native people of Ixalan (the continent), Amonkhet (which makes sense) and Kaladesh are all based on the actual native people the plane is mimicking, but then you read a story of Kaldheim and you have 2 brown vikings, 1 brown god and 2 brown valkyries compared to 1 white character (and then 2-3 literal whos that aren't assigned one, and Niko who isn't from Kaldheim). It's really jarring.

Yes, non-white people existed in the real world and Vikings therefore encountered them from time to time, but that doesn't mean they met one around every corner of Tønsberg. And ideally I would love for all these planes to feel like vast and multifaceted places, but if they're going to keep making themeparks instead, then... I guess they don't really care, so expecting anything is silly. At least the people of Kaldheim look mostly at home in the setting instead of seeming like they got picked up from the streets of New York.

Kaladesh has several non-south asian people though. Chandra and her father being the biggest but also seen in art like Guardian Automaton shows a few black and white folks.

Amonkhet iirc had people talking about how Vizier of Deferment and a few other humans who looked more Greek/European than Egyptian, and a few people I saw wondered if there was a Greece like equivalent before whatever nuked the plane into one city.

Ixalan story is literally all about the first contact and conflict between two places, the Legion of Dusk was all white to reverse it. In fact only the pirates of the plane are really diverse.

Yeah, in Amonkhet humans range from caucasian to black. And in Tarkir the caucasian-looking Anafenza disrupts a mostly asian plane.

Really, all planes thus far have been multi-ethnic.

I mean, it would be pretty unrealistic to depict Egypt of all places as having a single skin tone.

Indeed, Ancient Egypt particularly in late Antiquity was one of the most ethnically diverse places in the Old World, and I think Magic did a good enough job on that front, from Anointer Priest to Samut herself.

...

Do y'all really not know about the Siddi or the Kashmiri? India's never been monolithic in skin tone. It's one of the pet peeves about talking about diversity these days. The conversation's so western-centric that it downplays the interactions of other cultures or conflates stuff that are not the same (Like Black and African American. Not all African Americans are Black. Not all Black people are African American.. in either the term "African" or "American."). Though, it's not as condescending as the "Brown People" concept. At least with "Black" it can be somewhat traced back to some sort of common line thing. Brown is a term applied to particular random people groups after divergence where common lines would have to include almost everyone. It's as bad as those arbitrary Eastern Europe initial country lines after the fall of the Soviet Union. {continues rabbit trail in my head} And that's why Georgia/Armenia would be a crazy fun inspiration for a plane. Think of the dancing.

TLDR: It's more that the whole area around Alexander's conquest is a lot more diverse than people are acting.

There's been quite a lot of story spotlight cards revealed so far

I'm not really sure if Starnheim Unleashed is represented by Niko's second story or not.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2021-01-20

Okay, quite a few things:

- Apparently Tibalt was infected by phyrexians at some point, which explains why he helped Vorinclex. However, this seems pretty irrelevant since he's doing what he does anyways.

- Halvar at some point saved Koll from a wolf, which is why the sword was made.

so in order to get people to listen to him, tibalt cosplayed as the god of trickery and lies
because if there's someone I'd listen to it's him

The article just glossing over Tibalt tricking Valki like it's nothing kind of robs any sense of grandeur from the Kaldheim pantheon. Tibalt is a trickster, but I've never regarded him as exceptionally clever as much as just exceptionally sadistic, and him beating a god at their own game is a bit weird to me, it'd make more sense if he was just physically/magically overpowered.

People listened to Loki a bunch in the myths too, so there's something to be said about that. The Skoti in general seem less like cosmically important beings and more like local heroes, which is fitting, I suppose. It reflects less the real-world Scandinavian worship of gods that have power over nature and harvests and more the fallible characters of the stories told about the Aesir and Vanir.

Theros has more of the former, where the general populace are in awe and worship of the distant gods, along with the latter, where individuals actually get to know the gods and they are pettier and more limited than mortals believe. On Amonkhet, the gods are closer to the people but they stick to their divine roles; they are powerful and awe-inspiring and benevolent and they otherwise don't have their own thing going on (because they are mind controlled puppets).

Yes, its already established by now that the gods of Kaldheim are basically just mortals that became divine, though they are unquestionably divine due to their connection to the world tree.

I am aware, I am speaking to their general treatment in the story and world. For example, Phenax is a mortal that became divine, but he is still treated as a distant cosmic god on Theros.

https://xantchaslegacy.tumblr.com/post/ ... 8488943616

I mean this is technically true, but I think this is the first time I've heard grotesque mutilation and repurposing as "reproductive cycle".

As it seems from his pov I don't trust how clever Tibalt says he is. Considering he said he got some magical binding chains that likely did most of the heavily lifting.

That's more or less how I felt about the German (or pseudo-German) words and names when Innistrad was introduced. For instance, if you're going to use the word 'Geist' on every other card or so, maybe make sure you know what the correct plural of that word is? Because that would be 'Geister', not 'Geists', and having to read that all the time is just incredibly jarring. They made sure to inform us that the correct plural of 'polis is 'poleis' when we visited Theros, so why is it easier or more important to get it right for a dead language (granted, it might be true in modern Greek as well, I don't know) than in a modern one that's the first language of a sizeable portion of your European market? There is also ''graf', which is technically Dutch for... grave? Graveyard? Something like that, but there is also a German word 'Graf' that means 'Count' (as in, the nobleman). I found that confusing as hell because I didn't know the Dutch word, only the German one. So when you're using a blend of several different languages (which is fine, given the setting), maybe make sure the words you pick don't mean a completely different thing in another one of those very same languages? The return to Innistrad gave us 'Lurenbraum Fortress' which... I don't even know what language it's supposed to be (my online research tells me it's probably not Dutch, though), but to me it sounds like they simply took a bunch of unpleasent and vaguely German-sounding syllables and frankensteined them together into a meaningless monstrosity.

Oh, and neither Immerwolf nor Immersturm are "proper" German, although I can see what they are trying to say with them. ('Immer' means 'always' or 'all the time', but you can't just take that word and use it for a compound noun like that). Those two names have actually grown on me, though. It's the kind of name that a German-speaking creative team would never have come up with, but I can buy that, after centuries of exposure to those things, people might actually come up with them in-universe. Well, probably not on Kaldheim of all places, but you get the idea.


Edit: Ravenous Lindwurm also feels wrong to me. 'Lindwurm' has nothing to do with Magic's idea of wurms, it's just an archaic fancy pants synonym for 'dragon', and it would have never occurred to me to use it for anything other than that on a Magic card. I don't like it, and it also doesn't feel right in a Norse setting. Heck, it would have been a perfect naming convention for Eldraine's dragons, but definitely not for Kaldheim's wurms.

Lindwurm is an Old High German word and is most often associated with wingless, snake-like dragons so I think its appropriate.

Speaking as a German, I think "most often" is a pretty big stretch here. The physical descriptions of dragons in most legends aren't very specific in the first place. It's true that "lind" means something like 'soft' (or maybe 'flexible' or 'sinous') in Old High German (the word on its own doesn't exist in modern German, though), and I'd say "Wurm" was used as a catch-all term for vaguely snake-like, worm-like, reptilian creatures in older German texts (it just means 'worm' in modern German, though). Don't get me wrong, I can see what their thinking process behind the name was, but at least to modern ears, the term 'Lindwurm' is a fixed expression that's used as a pretty generic old word for 'dragon', and it's not like they couldn't have used it for an actual dragon. Plus, it still feels out of place on a Norse-themed plane.

The lindwurm shows up in Scandinavian folklore as well (we call it "lindorm" in Swedish), and without looking it up and thus only basing this on what I remember from fifth grade, I want to say that it was described as wingless.

Hm, okay, that's interesting. I guess that makes it even weirder that they used the German version of the word on the card, though.

I guess they just went with the German because "wurm" is well established in Magic vocabulary. And I looked it up, viking lore actually had both benevolent lindwurms (which were usually cursed princes) and monstrous ones. In particular, the monstrous ones, with no wings (but two legs, for some reason?), were common as frames on rune stones.