I don’t. The imperial system is dumb. And my country is the main one using it.

I've been writing, sort of, trying to tackle an old story I once started using that joke-turned-character of mine, On-W, and I have a question relevant to MtG lore since my head has been filled with D&D lately:

Are half-elves a reasonable occurrence within the MtG universe?

Having a half-blood of some kind feels like it has particular importance to what I'm writing, since On-W's visual identity is being a naturally-occurring chimera of sorts, so I can play into his opinion of half-breeds, but I'm not aware of half-human hybrids in Magic that aren't the result of magic (putting aside odd races like the aven of Amonkhet).

I understand that it's a bit of an odd thing given Magic's established collection of races which are more-or-less anthropomorphic animals, but I'm wondering how much a half-elf (or half-whatever) would stick out in a Magic setting.

We do have at least two half-elf planeswalkers in the M:EM, so they can't be too rare, all things considered. Elves are one of, if not THE, most "human-like" in appearance of all the non-human races, with the possible exception of dwarves, so I would imagine that of all the races humans are likely to couple with, elves would probably be highest on that list.

EDIT: Actually, is Ellia a half-elf? If so, we have at least THREE half-elves in the M:EM. And, knowing me, I'm probably forgetting at least one.

Well Aamir and MANY of his siblings are half breeds.
But in terms of actual in canon occurences, there's Radha of Keld (1/4 human, but...) and Fonn from Ravnica.

Okay, neat. I'm so far behind on M:EM canon that I don't think I know half our stable of characters anymore, and it's been so long since I actively read any of our stuff that I've forgotten a lot of details about things I have read.

I have another question, that might be much thornier: is it reasonable for a planeswalker to, for lack of a better word, "sense" whether someone has a spark in them (ignited or no)? Is there some sort of "aura of potential" that a 'walker could potentially see or feel, denoting that the person they're talking to has a spark? Would such a phenomenon be any different than finding someone with great magical potential?

I don't have a canon answer for that, but personally, I don't see any problem with it. I guess my instinct is to make that the special "thing" about a particular 'walker. It sort of seems like each 'walker has some "thing" that sets them apart from other 'walkers, whether it be Illarion's ability to bring someone with him through the Eternities, Denner's ability to Delve, or Alessa's unique chronomancy. I certainly don't see why one could have the ability to sense the spark in others, even a latent one.

I think if you wanted to spread it over multiple planeswalkers, though, that wouldn't be as good of an idea. It would become like the Highlander sense thing, which, I mean, I liked for that, but not so much for the Spark. For one thing, we've had numerous stories where two 'walkers sort of need to feel each other out, trying to figure out if they were or were not 'walkers, and if suddenly they can just sense each other, that would kind of nullify all of those stories.

But as a character's special trait, I could definitely get behind that.

The oldwalkers could, absolutely, recognize latent sparks though their accuracy with it wasn't great. In canon Freyalise recognizes Jaya's spark but mistakenly thinks it's Jodah (nearby) who's sparky. In the M:EM I had Ellia recognize Halea's latent spark in "Wind and Void" figuring that even if such sense was lost in general, Ellia in particular is ancient, has studied the nature of the spark, and was looking for it.

I think a walker could permissably subconsciously pick up something and with enough time and familiarity grow to suspect someone might be a walker.

I kind of figured the familiarity would be a key factor, based on the one example I could think of (Raleris talking to the kids at the end of his story about Vasilias, though that was more hinted to the audience than stated outright). Not that I think that's a bad requirement, but the direction I was writing before I thought to question it was to just "see" it in a stranger's eyes or something.


Which has me wondering, how long has it been since the Mending, again? hasn't it only been like 20 years or so in canon? Regardless, I'm kind of of the opinion that, by their nature, oldwalkers have a different set of character drivers than neowalkers, and I don't particularly want to go down that route.

As far as studying the spark... I'm not sure whether that would be a point for the character, really. It could fit in to what I have so far, and the overall greed or lust for power that the character has, but I haven't quite nailed down whether they're... intellectual? enough to rigorously study it.


That's pretty much why I was asking, since if this isn't a "thing" that most 'walkers can do, then introducing it as something common among them would be a problem. At the same time, the reason I was asking was that I was writing for a character who's already got a big "thing" that makes them unique, though it's more their race than a specific power. I am simply loathe to layer on abilities for the helluvit, because even I find that so much "extra" makes things boring.

As a for instance, there's an SCP that's this kind-of skinless beast which can perfectly mimic human speech in order to lure prey (seemingly not intelligent enough to understand what it's saying), which by itself is interesting, but then there's so many other aspects layers on top of it that it becomes uninteresting: it's seemingly undead because its internal organs don't function, it doesn't actually need to eat and just throws up when its lungs get full, it gives birth to human children which eventually morph into it, hints that pieces of it can also speak or telepathically communicate - it's all just too much that doesn't feel compelling, at least to me.

Canon is super shaky about the timeline, as far as I understand. A lot of that is on purpose, because they somehow have to reconcile how some characters are still alive with the fact that Dominaria has recovered somewhat and other stuff like that. Time has definitely passed since they made the "20 years" statement, but we don't know how much.

I thought as of Dominaria it was 60 years post-Mending?

I guess I should mention as well that Aamir has been established as being able to sense another walker's spark, but that's at least partially tied to his ability as a Luminarch as well.

I've been doing a little bit of worldbuilding, and I have some questions for the M:EM at large:

First, how many races is "too many," particularly for a non-developed, stereotypical Medieval high fantasy plane? I know that, normally, there are about 5-7 races per plane (usually filling out all colors, plus humans), and I know that we aren't beholden to color balancing rules, but even so, as I started listing out ideas of what races I had started making places for, I realized I already had 9 races before balancing for color. I'm sure there's ways to make it work -- such as to have it be a massive world which may not have connections to each continent (i.e. elves on continent A wouldn't know about dwarves on continent B) -- but at some point I feel there ends up being too much "tacked on" to make it an interesting world. At what point would you all put a cap on a plane's races?

Second, what exactly would {magic that relies on the written word} be called in the Magic multiverse? I think the standard go-to is "runic magic," but runes tend to end up being more like glyphs and symbols in popular culture, and I want to evoke more of a feeling of writing words instead of drawing symbols. Alternatively, I think the concept of "words of power" is fairly common-place, but I don't know if that idea has other connotations from its use in D&D, or what people would think of if I put out "word magic." Is there a sort of nomenclature for this thing that I could use?

Part of that runs into how connected the races are and how independently fleshed they are. In a place like Ravnica where there isn't a racial identity, you can dump lots of races into each culture. About 4 races per culture to run the curve.
If they are, however, autonomous, you probably don't want to stress it past the Lorwyn Threshold.


Mage script maybe? Give me a little and I can probably come up with something better.
I suppose it depends on if you're using it more like grammar or math.

If you wanna take the greek -mancy route "word" is Lexi, "name" is Onoma, "language" is Glossa.

I had to go back to check Lorwyn's race count because I couldn't think of them all, and I realized Lorwyn had more races than I thought. 9, to be exact.

As I realized how close that number is to the 10 guilds of Ravnica, I started thinking that I was asking the wrong question. If I try mapping out the factions of other planes like Mercadia, I think I see a similar number emerge.

So, to restate what you said but in a more direct way: it's not so much the number of races as it is the number of fleshed out factions, but a faction can be a single race. Either way, 10 seems to be a soft upper limit before the world starts feeling a little busy (going by Ravnica's standard), but that also seems to depend on, like you say, the total breadth of the world otherwise.

Some time ago I was asked the following question:

That was my answer:

What would you answer?

Inscription? Especially if you always capitalize Inscription no matter where it falls in a sentence?

I create a bubble in my head, take the portions of my personality that are shared in common and then run a simulated history through the bubble and watch how it develops, what it picks up in result and how it reacts to my thoughts. If unsatisfactory, I make a new bubble, siphon off a bit of the results as a seed culture and repeat the process. I try to find parallel anchors for thoughts and experiences in the real world so the final result can have a layer of authenticity.

Unless we're talking about the really terrible people, in which case, I just find what sin best motivates them and let the monsters loose.

I don't feel like I write enough (or play enough TTRPGs) to properly answer this question, but at the same time I don't think I've ever really written/played/what have you a character that wasn't heavy strokes of some part of me. I even notice it in my daydreams, where other characters trend towards my manner of speech.