To be left alone.
I see Glac as the "more sociable" of the two and by that I mean, doesn't evict people immediately out of his vicinity.
Anjo, as soon as he gets a hint of intrusion, goes into a rage and burns everything.
I give Anjo a strong black background here as he ultimately has selfish reasons for the starstill.

==xx==

If you guys wanted to get more intense, we could argue that the dragons knew about the eldrazi, froze the plane to prevent a collision course with some eldrazi (perhaps giving up their sparks in the process), and now brood in their respective homes unable to start the plane again either because they can't; or they like their new homes; or they are afraid of eldrazi still.

I think it would be cool to concept them after Ugin and make them brooding ex-planeswalkers.
That would give them a great motive to stop the plane.
It would explain why the population of Starstill doesn't understand / know what happened.
And maybe other planeswalkers on the plane would bring up jealousy among the dragons; or maybe they are old friends bringing them updates on the multiverse?

I'm gonna have to hard veto any Eldrazi showing up. That's WAY too close to canon.

And also unnecessary? Like, we've got a solid plotline here. Why continually slap on more random big complications?

Not sold on the utility of making them ex-Walkers since Elder Dragons are already kind of ridiculously powerful, powerful enough to travel Dominia even without the spark, and the Lesser Elders were just a small step down...

I would have figured Anjo was the more "sociable" of the two, if "sociable" included letting others worship you.

Ditto.

Maybe this is Anjo's way of cementing zir power? Zie lets the Starstill stay in place because it provides suitable conditions for zin to have a bunch of cultists vie for favor, all for zir amusement?

Glac seems more like the one that'd retreat into the icy wastes and never interact with anyone.

That would set up Gruff's faux pas (whatever it was) and the resultant anger of Anjo as a significant change of state. Suddenly Anjo isn't seeing ANYONE and the cultists are FREAKING OUT, but they don't know that things were set off by a lost goblin Planeswalker, so they're searching for someone to blame... ANYONE to blame... And then they find out that some fools have been trying to raise a moon to counteract the effects of the Starstill, and well... assumptions are made.

I mean I'm just spitballing here, but it fits a lot of what we've talked about so far with the cultists and Gruff and the conflict as a whole.

Sociable and enjoying fame are two different things.
One can enjoy people coming to wirship you, but if someone brings up a problem you instantly retreat or bring destruction to any who were nearby. How I see Anjo.
Meanwhile, you can be a recluse, but enjoy or even assist those that come in search for you. How I see Glac.

Also, what has and hasn't been confirmed? It would be amazing if whatever has been settled on can be put into the OP of the thread. Namely mechanics and flavor / concept.
I didn't say I wanted eldrazi to show up, I'm saying that's why they stopped the plane, to prevent them from showing up.

Nothing, which is why people keep suggesting big picture alternatives instead of working on what we really need to start working on--the fine details of one, definitive narrative.

Which obviously I think should pretty clearly be the Moonrise plotline. Nothing else that's been suggested is as interesting as that idea, and most of the alternatives would result in the main thing that makes Starstill an interesting plane being destroyed, which is something Wizards has already pretty much determined to be a lousy way to resolve block plotlines.

I mean, we haven't even definitively settled on the dragons being Lesser Elders! That's like... huge key stuff that should really be set in stone so we can move on.

This sounds great.

Well then stop shooting down my ideas

I think the plane was stopped for a good reason (i think it would be interesting to say that it was to avoid the eldrazi), and that it is currently unable to be started again because people are unable to make that kind of sacrifice again.
If the dragons gave up something in order to stop the plane, they don't have it anymore. The best thing I can think of is a planeswalke's spark. Some planeswalkers might not know this, other planeswalkers might recognize that this is the sacrifice needed to start the plane again, but are unwilling to do so. That could make the dragons angry, that other planeswalkers could be so selfish compared to what they, the dragons, gave up.

I'm not saying that there isn't another way, but that also doesn't mean that the Moonrise will definitely work. I think it should be an idea that doesn't work, and then once people discover that it doesn't work everyone starts blaming everyone else, and it becomes a planar war of who's fault it was.

I do believe there are "good" dragons, but I really don't want these guys to be "good".
I think them stopping the plain out of selfishness makes more sense than stopping it out of selflessness.
Especially since they're dragons.

I meant good as loosely as possible. In the case I suggested Starstill is their "homebase" maybe even it was their homeplane.
This is where they bring everything they've ever collected. If they stopped the plane from encountering eldrazi, it's because they didn't want to have to start over again.

in short, I do agree that it should be more selfish than selfless (that's the best thing about a dragon); but that doesn't mean that it has to be only good for the dragons. I'm okay with them stopping it simply to make them more comfortable (that's how I proposed the dragons in the first place). I just feel that's slightly too selfish for my tastes. I wouldn't be unheard of, but I'd like to respect these dragons a little more than that.

I'm not kidding about hard vetoing the Eldrazi.

They CANNOT be introduced here if M:EM is going to be involved. That breaks one of our cardinal rules.

Besides, it's just not a very interesting idea. Why overcomplicate something that's working fine on its own and is super intuitive? Particularly with something as random as the Eldrazi. It's a distraction from what should be the main narrative.

They aren't being introduced here except to explain why something happened in the first place. It's not distracting from the main narrative, it's the reason the main narrative is the main narrative in the first place.
I can understand it being that minute a detail is awkward, but it still adds an exceptional amount of flavor into the set, especially with the dragons, and their history. I like deep plots and settings, and somehting as minor as that makes a huge difference to me.

The eldrazi are not in the set and are otherwise not in the story except for the fact that the reason the plane was stopped was to avoid them. I can understand if it does get vetoed, but I disagree with the fact that it must get vetoed.
It's like saying we can't mention the Guildpact from Ravnica; it's like saying we can't have our planeswalkers know of the other planeswalkers; it doesn't make sense to me.
The whole point of these forums is to use what MTG has, and build off of it. The eldrazi have been around for who knows how long, Zendikar isn't the only plane to be affected by them.

So... the Starstill occurred millenia ago? Because that's when they last existed outside Zendikar, unless you mean to say the Starstill occurred recently, when they were freed. Which would mean the events in our Starstill would be a hundred or several hundreds of years after current events in canon (which could make sense, if it's after the eldrazi were somehow defeated, since they'd have no reason to keep it starstill'd then).

Yeah, no, those things are not the same thing.

Whatever, if you want to push this, go for it, see if anyone else likes the idea. I can almost guarantee though that if you go with this, it'll make it inadmissible to M:EM. Barinellos is the final authority, and I am strongly confident that he will feel the same way I do. (Hell, I should be checking with him to make sure using Lesser Elders makes sense, for that matter.)

See also: the timeline problems Storyteller raises. In fact, the Salvation timeline estimates them to have been trapped more like FIVE MILLENIA ago! That seems way off from just about every other estimate others have given so far for the Starstill timeline.

In the story of the new Nissa card we know that the eldrazi have been leaving zendikar.
The other option is that the starstill is actually the plane frozen in time. People were left unhindered, but everything in the plane is literally where it was forever ago, unless somebody moved it. That would throw time out of whack in whichever direction you want to go.
As for keeping it starstilled, in order to freeze the plane the magic took a great sacrifice, that they are no longer able to make whether its giving up a spark, or multiple sparks, or something else entirely.

@Keeper: I'm not saying it has to be this way, but it should get a fair chance.

It had a fair chance to be a good idea. It didn't succeed.

And I don't know why you're talking about the starstill breaking down since "then magically everything started to get better" is the exact opposite of an interesting and conflict-driven narrative.

When did I say everything started magically getting better?
So far, I have said things going against that.

I know. I suggested this possibility.
I can actually kind of see it. Hm, yeah.
*Assuming the Eldrazi doesn't get defeated for another century, but ARE defeated*
Eldrazi are leaving Zendikar ->
Eldrazi are approaching (original name for Starstill) ->
Glac and Anjo cause Starstill ->
(Time passes) Eldrazi are defeated ->
Some planeswalker happening by informs Glac/Anjo ->
Glac/Anjo tries to get planeswalker to sac spark to restart plane ->
battle! Planeswalker flees ->
Glac and Anjo decide to aid the citizens to work on Moonrise.

Could work, but this assumes that Glac and Anjo are decidedly good for the most part.
If you could convince us that that and the "centuries after current canon" thing works, it might be possible.

While I don't care much for the idea, I don't see how using Eldrazi is different from using, say, Angels. I really don't see how they are impossible if Elder Dragons are okay, since they to my knowledge have established lore, unlike Eldrazi which are just floating predators in the Blind Eternities, afaik.

Leaving aside the fact, for the moment, that this would effectively mean that M:EM might as well not be involved since that's way outside of the timeframe we're working in...

I still don't even understand why the Starstill would affect the Eldrazi at all. It seems like a total non-sequitur.

@Mown:

Simple.

There are EXACTLY three Eldrazi and their role in the timeline is very likely to be filled in in more detail in the future, which means that there is a VERY significant chance that something here would be contradicted, either due to the timeline, due to their functioning in the BE (which has already been contradicted once because no one at Wizards has any idea how to keep track of their own god damn canon), or due to their involvement with other major canon characters.

We KNOW however that there were multiple generations of Lesser Elders, and we know that the Age of Dragons spanned for Millennia, so there's lots of room to work here. The Age of Dragons also is very unlikely to be contradicted or changed anytime soon.

Angels... are... not anywhere near either of those things? I'm not sure why you're mentioning Angels.

The actual presence of established lore ironically makes it much easier to see where the wiggle room is.