Calix, Destiny's Hand
Legendary Planeswalker — Calix
: Look at the top four cards on your library. You may reveal an enchantmetn card from among them and put that card into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
: Exile target creature or enchantment you don't control until target enchantment you control leaves the battlefield.
: Return all enchantment cards from your graveyard to the battlefield.


Now that they've caught the planeswalker cast up on women, they are introducing sexy twinks to balance out the big daddy planeswalkers.

I mean, there’s niche Planeswalkers, and then there’s this guy

I wonder if he's too high on the curve for Boggles to try as a 1 or two of....

So, not only do planeswalkers keep coming back from the dead with their spark intact all the time (Ugin, Garruk, Will, Rowan, supposedly Davriel and now Elspeth), now the gods can just create nyxborn dudes with sparks out of thin air? Good to see WotC have given up on their "storyline" as much as I have.


That said, I really like the design on this one. Cool card.

Yeah, one of the requirements for Walkerhood used to be natural-born member of a natural race. Alas.

Considering Karn is the planeswalker that brought the Mirari/Memnarch to Mirrodin, this hasn't been a thing for at least a decade.

Not to mention that aside from Calix, Karn, and possibly Ugin, all of the planeswalkers thus far have followed that rule; in fact I am more annoyed with how much they go through to give non-walkers the ability to traverse planes (the Eldrazi, the Planar Bridge)

Karn has a Spark implanted in him, not like they tried to say “Yeah the golem was just built and somehow ignited”

I mean, at least Karn's spark (or sparks - first Urza's, then Venser's) was natural in origin, the seat of his consciousness is a unique kind of artefact (Xantcha's heartstone), it's heavily implied that he merged with the souls of Gerrard and Urza when he ascended, and his ascension happened at the climax of the entire Weatherlight/Invasion saga. So I'd argue he's in no way comparable to Calix. And it's just generally the careless, convenient way in which sparks have been treated recently, like with all the resurrected 'walkers I listed above, or with Teferi getting back a spark that he sacrificed 60 years ago off screen and with no explanation where it came from.

I'd argue the fact that WotC deliberately shut down most ways of interplanar travel after the Mending in order to make planeswalkers feel "more special" makes this particularly infuriating.

Karn's spark still came from a natural organic source (Urza, arguably Galcian before him). It was lore critical that beings not properly born (like Phyrexian newts) couldn't spark up. I'd be fine if this guy had a stolen spark, but his own? It bothers me.

I'm of the opposite opinion on general travel. Portals are old, arguably pre-storyline as a concept (Planar Gate much?) and randomly declaring that the Mending shut down all the paths other than the spark smothered a lot of storytelling opportunity. It shouldn't be easy to get non-planeswalkers around but with SS-grade magic, artifice, luck, or circumstance? Not impossible.

Yeah, I really don't like this. If the God of fate really wants a walker to do her bidding, she should have been able to find someone with a spark (they don't seem to be as rate as we've been led to believe, it seems) and just been like
"Yo, it is your fate to complete this task for me." Would not have required any more effort from the writing team, and there's no conflict with previous material. Like, I get that they want to play with the internal conflict of "I was created for this task, but now I have seen things beyond the world in which my creature conceived me, and maybe I can be something other than what she intended", which is a cool trope and all, but maybe not worth undermining decades of lore to achieve.

I'd like to add a point about the Eldrazi: They don't technically traverse the planes, they exist in the Blind Eternities, aka the space between planes. Ugin once described the physical forms of the Eldrazi titans that manifest on planes like hands reaching into a pond (the pond being the plane and the fish who see the hand being the people on that plane). What they did when they killed Kozilek and Ulamog was grab the hand, drag the whole person into the pond and then blow it up.

Are we sure it was created in in the sense of making him out of Nyx-stuffs, or is it more along the lines of Demigod-dom that we are seeing among some of the other legends in the set, where they are sort of appointed to the station and charged with a task. Like, is it not feasible that Calix wasn't just a guy that Klothys didn't just appear to one day and say "Yo, I'm like a god and such. I'm going to demigod you up and your new job will be to hunt down this pesky Elspeth lady because she's hecking up my weave." And thus Calix, Agent of Fate was "created" as a mortal was imbued with Nyx-stuffs and set to his task. And then later, at some story relevant moment, his spark ignites and he's all well dang, I'm a 'Walker now!"

Like, that just makes more sense to me than assuming that the word "created" means the exact wrong thing necessary to ruin the basic understanding of how 'Walkers naturally happen without also giving some context alongside t.

We’re in a set that’s honoring Greek lore with female Satyrs and male Nymphs. Clearly history and lore take a backseat to the whims of Here and Now.

I think it is very possible that the story card here is brief and therefore reductive, and Klothys made a demigod but she did not make the base human Calix once was. It is not entirely grammatically wrong, albeit misleading, to say that even if Calix was a natural human, Klothys made an agent of fate (of/from him).

The issue would then be that they are using this very dissatisfying method to convey incomplete story points.

Feel like somebody should go bug Mark about it.
As far as I'm aware, even if he's not a story guy, he's the only wizards liaison that's still social media active.

People are trying. He's not biting.
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/190125302833/i-thought-artificial-creatures-couldnt-have-a
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/190126057558/so-does-calix-being-nyxborn-this-making-him-an

"Why is he artificial"

You are the ones that straight up said "was created". Not "was made into an Agent of Fate" or anything but he straight up "was created as a". Don't be a smug dismissive prick when we work off what we're given. If you can't answer in a real way just don't respond.

(Disclaimer that I kinda hate MaRo. Like not as a person but as a blog because he's just a mouth piece for Wizards. I hate company blogs that try to look all relatable so that's not gonna go away because you stuck some middle aged dude on it.)

You do realize that his confusion might be because the character is not an artificial being and he may have read the "created" line with the context that Calix is just a person. I mean, I read the blurb with about the same level of understanding because nothing in the art would lead me to believe that Calix is Nyxborn. The only thing star-fieldish about him is his clothes, which seems on par with the other demigods that we have been told were living (or dead) mortals who were chosen by the gods to ascend to the position.

Yes the language used probably wasn't ideal, but it was likely thrown together by someone on the Brand team or in Creative who was thinking in the correct context and didn't expect that some people would read it in a different way....probably to save on word space.

Created has explicit meaning.
If there were any other inflection meant to be conveyed then "charged" or "appointed" or any a number of other words would be not just less ambiguous, but less harmful.
The only way you could get away with "created" in this context is if English were not their first language.

This.
Granted, a lot of people simply ask stupid or pointless questions that aren't going to get a proper answer to begin with, but that's a different problem. (Though if Maro let me run his blog for a while, I promise you it would stop. )

And I agree with what people have said about the wording choice. The blurb goes out of its way to say "created" not once but twice, so I'll have to assume they really mean "created" in the way normal people would use it...

Honestly, assuming something Creative does is "the exact wrong thing necessary to ruin the basic understanding" of how a thing works might as well be the new default. I feel like all the precedence we have would support it...

Edit: For what it's worth, the starfield effect is also on his hair and his left leg.