Specifically check the front page of Mythic Spoiler. I always go straight to the "Newest Spoilers" list, and Chandra's Defeat is no longer there for some reason.

Also, a aligned khenra zombie.

Not sure if the mummies will still be here (since there is a card with eternalize), but at least zombies will keep on expanding

Rewatching the Amonkhet trailer, there's the chant that outlines exactly what Bolas intended.

...the why is still a mystery, but it's not like the chant was misleading.

Not sure how any of these are "driven by fire", or how they even have any willpower left.

Why is Bolas such a dick tho

The guy who admits to creating races to watch them wipe themselves out has to be something of a dick.

This is what makes this sort of storyline unfulfilling, tho. I'm firmly on Don Bluth's school of storytelling: you can handle anything as long as there is a happy ending. Not to say any story has to have a happy ending, but we've got two half-victories already.

My tone may be flippant but I do actually have to know: what has Bolas got beyond 'God damn I'm evil'?

From what I gather, Bolas is mad he lost his godlike power during the mending, and tries to get it back.
I don't know his not-skelly army factors into this.
I'm also still holding out hope that Bolas picked up a couple of fanatic Planeswalkers while Amonkhet was in action.

My theory is the blue mineral thing is tied to the curse of wandering and hes going to fashion it all into some sort of artifact to extend his life a few more thousand years.

Its clear that whatever he's doing on Amonkhet has something to do with life-force absorption, given Hour of Revelation.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but there are several things I like about Nicol Bolas. Firstly, he is an unbelievably ancient being, one who has seen and done more than all of the neo-walkers put together, hundreds of times over. I am always interested in the nature of the minds of characters that ancient, because we have no perspective on what a life that long is like.

We view Bolas as evil because others' lives mean nothing to him beyond their usefulness to his plans. And while I would never justify that sort of casual disregard for life, I would pose the question of 'can we really blame him?' First of all, he is a dragon, and dragons are apex predators in almost any Magic setting they are found in. But even if he were not, his lifespan alone must twist the perspective on the value of life. The current average life expectancy for humans on Earth is between 70 and 80 years, give or take depending on where and how you live. Imagine if you live to 100. Most of the people you know will have died before you, and you will have watched them go. Now, imagine you live 200 years, and go through it two or three times more. Now double it again, and again. People keep dying, and instead of living 70% of your lifespan, they're living less than 10%, and that's only at 800 years, not the literal thousands and tens of thousands we are talking about with Bolas. It must be difficult if not impossible to develop any sort of relationship with - or empathy for - lives that you know full well will end in what is, compared to your lifespan, a blink of an eye.

Bolas also fits into the schemer trope, which I have always liked, and is my favorite color combination (well, he's my favorite color combination AND red, I guess). He's also an Elder Dragon and, though we've been given very little information about it, the Elder Dragon War was one of the first pieces of MTG flavor that drew me in.

And finally, the other thing I really like about Bolas is that he's beating the Gatewatch. Now, I know that sounds like "oh, he hates the Gatewatch so anything that beats them is good," but hear me out. The Gatewatch has been built around the concept of comic superhero teams like the X-Men and the Avengers, because of their popularity. My belief in terms of comic book stories, and even fantasy writing in general, is heavily tied to the Hero's Journey. I dislike heroes that are stronger than their opponents, because there is either no tension whatsoever, or the tension comes from convenient external sources like kidnapped hostages or loved ones. When I read a Superman comic, particularly an early one, I feel little to no tension that Superman would in any way lose. He's too strong, and too much stronger than his foes. When I read an X-Men comic, even the early ones, there's a good chance someone's going to lose. Maybe it won't be the team as a whole, but individually, someone's likely to get beaten. I like that tension of not knowing what's going to happen before I read it.

And then, every so often, the team runs into a Magneto, or Apocalypse, and gets curb stomped, and then there's some REAL tension as to what will happen.

The Gatewatch, thus far, have had it easy. They face three ancient, unfathomably powerful beings on Zendikar. One just leaves, and the Gatewatch tackle the other two with relative ease and little to no personal struggle or loss. The only difficult part came from Ob, who had virtually nothing to do with the overarching story in any real sense. On Innistrad, their problems literally solved themselves. On Kaladesh, they waltzed through a mostly pointless revolution. I think it's fair to say that I have felt no sense of tension whatsoever from almost any Gatewatch story I have ever read. There is no sense of danger to them.

Nicol Bolas provides that danger, and not just for the Gatewatch, but for the Multiverse as a whole. Do you have a favorite plane floating out there? If you do, now Bolas showing up on that plane is a legitimate threat. Like Magneto was to the X-Men, like Doomsday for Superman, Bolas has been established as a serious threat. In some ways, Bolas is one of the few reasons for the Gatewatch to even exist. There's no point in watching a gate if nothing can get through anyway. Bolas can shatter the gate and everything on the other side.

Bolas is best in small does imo, but I do agree mostly with Raven (except Bolas was pretty much a dick from the word go, and not just to things beneath him).

But yeah his big motivation atm, unless it's changed from what I remember, is getting back the power he lost to the mending.

Right not. Prior to that his motivation was generally to be a spiteful being.

So it's becoming somewhat apparent that Bolas built up a system for two different undead armies. There are the class of undead made from those that die during the Trials, who are relegated to something of a servant/slave status and controlled by the lazotep cartouches on their chests. There are also an elite army of "Eternalized" zombies, who appear to be made up of the actual winners of the Trials that Hazoret has killed (and a random cat?) and who get sent through the gate to the afterlife where, via some process, their bodies are reformed out of the lazotep ore that the other mummies harvest. One class of zombie army is made to produce and fuel the other, but to what end. Also the plane itself seems to have gotten in on the whole "undead army" game via the Curse of Wandering, that created an even crappier, if far more numerous, army of undead as well.

So, what do we think Bolas needs an army of lazotep zombies for?

Given that he started the zombie cycles out of a need to get more power, I'm assuming whatever creates the lazotep army stores life energy or mana for him.

Kind of a bummer the lazotep zombies aren't , though, since it seems like the culmination of the mummification process.

Yeah, but if that were the case, why a lazotep zombie army? Why not just some dark monolith or pyramid that stores the mana and life force of those buried therein? Why would he need his mana batteries walking around and slaughtering things?

Probably to storm dominaria or phyrexia or some other enemy of his after sending them through tezz's portal since you cant properly bring life with you to other planes now and summoning that many zombies through a spell like army of the undead would take too much mana.

See that also have a few holes because it would be more forward thinking of Bolas to start building an army in hopes that a guy who isn't even born yet would become a 'Walker some day, later become Bolas' minion, and then find an inventor who also isn't born yet on a plane in the middle of an inventor boom who can make a breakthrough to re-make planar portals just in time for Bolas' army to ripen and be ready for use.

The plan didn't have to be *that* specific. "Get a functional portal network re-established" seems like something Bolas could have on his to-do list, and his Lazotep army of doom can probably wait around until he's got it, whether it's within the 60 or so years he plans to grow his forces for or not.

Plus, we still don't know a) the magical properties of Lazotep; nor b) the true nature of the Gates of the Afterlife

What I don't get is the need to kill everything. Sure, Bolas has no real issues in pragmatic terms, but it would be wiser to just keep Amonkhet as a farm, as he has done for the past few generations.

As far as we know, there's nowhere else in the multiverse that has lazotep.