A very on-the-nose alter of "Lie-Smith", which I think is a Loki name original to Neil Gaiman. (I couldn't find it attested elsewhere.)

I enjoyed this story. That said, it's very quick and breezy and feels more like a movie scene than particularly deep fantasy.

Re: accompanying Jace to Zen3: I think Nissa was right, since she's the only other Zendikari planeswalker. I think Sorin would be a bad idea because the logical conclusion there would be one of them killing the other and I don't want either of them to die quite yet.

I assume Koth didn't show up here because they're saving him for the next Mirrodin set.

Re: PWs having been to Zendikar: I mean, I assume it's better-known now, given the interplanar events that happened there being hard to keep secret when they almost destroyed the multiverse and every planeswalkers was together on Ravnica to chat and gossip about it just a few blocks ago. At the very least, Chandra does not seem like the "good at keeping secrets" type.

Keeping the Eldrazi a secret and consequently their effect is actually really easy considering the population of zendikar can't share what happened with any other plane and the walkers involved are about... Ten people. Out of millions.

As for Nissa being the only other Zendikar walker, there was also Kiora.

The vast majority of walkers also didn't stick around to chat. A very very narrow group of them have been our viewpoint characters. I can believe Kaya heard about it from them, but as stated, it really makes it either feel ridiculously convenient or discouragingly small that the same few characters and planes are what the entire multiverse seems to revolve around.

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to seeing Kasmina come in and show is something huge and... Gods willing, new.

Yeah, Kaya would reasonable have been briefed on the party exploits of the Gatewatch at some point, but Tyvar feels a bit contrived here.

My headcanon is that we hear about the same planes a lot because of some kind of locality between them. I know there are holes in that idea, but I also just try not to think about it too hard.

I like the twist that Tyvar doesn't even know he's a planeswalker because he hasn't figured out the difference between Kaldheim's realms and the multiverse's planes.

No, that does make some kind of sense. I seen to recall some kind of canonical statement that planes do move through the Blind Eternities according to certain patterns, making travel easier between planes that are "adjacent". Didn't quite explain why specifically Zendikar, which was established as early visited plane, but generally it helps explain why the multiverse is so contained in the parts we see.

There isn't much in the way of direct movement outside what is known as "rogue planes" such as Shandalar, but there is a kind of proximity, hence the creation of things like the Shard of Twelve Worlds and the far flung likes of Equilor and the odd unnatural position of artificial planes.*

Though there are profound problems with adhering to the ideas of proximity, such as making it bizarre Zendikar was therefore "hard" to find of it's so accessible to the primary cluster around the Nexus. Further, it does nothing to alleviate making the setting feel small if we have such frequented planes, it only reinforces that.

* Fun fact: during the Time Spiral cycle we got a glimpse into which planes are the "neighbors" to Dominaria.

I mean there's a simple, straightforward explanation: some planes just are more pleasant to planeswalkers and thus are bigger attractions.

Lots would probably visit Zendikar just for the mana, not many would go to Tarkir to deal with Sarkhan's cuckoo tendencies.

This is true, but again, Zendikar began it's lore as a near mythical destination that some didn't even believe existed. It's hard to square that with the tourist destination it is now.

That said, to be fair, planeswalkers were common enough to be known to the population of the world. It's contradictory, but it's there.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2021-01-15

New story.

I admit, this one's a little bit harder to follow, but I really dig how Starnheim is described.

I actually thought it was a little easier to follow until we got to the action scene. Also it's part 2 of a part 2 story and just kind of stops? It feels like there is a falling action that's missing.

Also someone pointed out that the valkyrie pair names are each other's backwards. Cute.

I'm not sure I'd pay particular note to this if I wasn't Scandinavian, but the linguistic inconsistencies are starting to bother me. Immersturm, sure, was established already and I guess they wanted to shoehorn it in as some sort of easter egg. Omenpaths and doomskars? Why is one just straight English and the other some faux blend? Cosima? Feels kind of, idk, Spanish? All our words that start with C are loan-words from English, the letter itself is very uncommon. But more than any of those, I'm baffled that the character based on Harald is named... Harald. Why?

Impression from first story:
• Kaya's whole setup seems kind of nonsensical. Some guy out there not only knows that Vorinclex has ended up on Kaldheim, but also put a bounty on his head, so Kaya hops to Kaldheim and convinces a bunch of people that don't like fighting (on, might I add, the plane where everyone loves fighting) to track down and kill some beast.
• Kaya can apparently phase other creatures into the terrain, which is extremely overpowered, but elects to not use it against the hill sized trolls for some reason. One of said hill-sized trolls also swats her, which is apparently of no consequence, I guess Kaya is just built different. Also not really sure why the Trolls listened to Tibalt without hesitation right after his disguise got dropped.
• Vorinclex's depiction was pretty cool.
Overall it was alright. I'm not really getting a character from Kaya other than being snarky. Honestly both Kaya and Niko come across as rather egocentric. Ironically somehow more so than Tyvar, who I'm still not sold on, but he feels more grounded than the rest of the cast as far as first impressions go.

Niko's story was significantly worse. I don't consume much literature, but the first story was really difficult to digest, there were paragraphs I went over multiple times and still didn't understand. It certainly doesn't help that the author keeps throwing in distracting elements in the middle of events, and all the names just blend together into a mush. Also there's like five characters described as having brown skin for some reason, plus the image that accompanies Birgi. (Although one of the valkyries turns pale in the second story for some reason). Fascinating how Kaladesh and Amonket feature pretty much exclusively people of the ethnicity the plane is based on, but we wouldn't want the cold north to have too many white people.
Second story is a bit easier to digest, but it kind of falls apart for me once the serpent appears and becomes a jumble again. I feel like Koma is supposed to have a scale that the story doesn't really sell me on. That said it looks kind of tiny in the artwork too, so maybe it's just not as big as I'd like to envision it. I'm not actually sure what happened at the end and if like Niko fell into the rift or something, and then if he got carried out or the valkyries followed him into it, but at that point I had kind of given up.

Kind of strange that Tyvar's card has absolutely nothing to do with his actual powers as a planeswalker.

"Harald" is an old Norse name, I don't see why you see fit to nitpick that.

As for the rest, I get it you have a hateboner for non-white characters but some of the things (i.e. Kaya phasing one of the troll's limbs, Koma's scale given how lots of flavour text describe it as leaving burrows) is just proof you should have paid more attetion instead of self-liking your comment.

Yes, Harald is an old Norse name. It is specifically the name of Harald Hairfair, known to have unified Norway, and clearly the character Harald Kell(?) is based on. Just like Haktos is based on Achilles, but he actually gets a fantasy name. I don't know what part of that was hard for you to parse, but maybe you spent more time writing your fantasy story instead of reading my post. With the quality of your snarky quips I can totally see why you'd be on board with wotc's storytelling.

protip: you can't like your own posts, and no, I don't have a separate account for that purpose, I only see likes in AF&S and it weirds me out every time how often you guys use it

Dude, what?

Yeah honestly I'm not a fan of the "like" feature. I think that on any board with a feature like that, it subconsciously makes people tailor their posts to get likes instead of trying to just speak as honestly as possible. It also adds a kind of "appeal to authority" whenever there's discussion where people look at more heavily liked posts as more correct instead of evaluating people's words on their own merit. It's a big part of the reason I enjoy message boards more than communities like Reddit. People are able to just have conversations instead of turning every discussion into a public grandstanding contest to see who can get more likes.

This board isnt active enough for the like feature to even matter

The ‘cold north’ of our world has plenty of brown people, including many that the actual Vikings interacted with on a regular basis in territory such as Greenland. The Vikings knew them as ‘skrælingjar.’

And ethnically most modern Scandinavians have little in common with the Vikings, in any case.

The Vikings also weren’t exclusively northern. They raided, colonized and traded as far south as North Africa, and would have interacted and been familiar with people of diverse ethnicities.

This is just another problem with Magic’s new shallow-plane creative strategy of treating planes like ethnic enclaves. They don’t make sense like real-world diversity does. If Kaldheim had even of a fraction of the depth somewhere like Dominaria, these ‘racial purity’ objections wouldn’t have the purchase they do.

Technically skræling reffers mostly to indigenous american communities vikings encountered, but vikings did go as far south as North Africa and Thor is even said to be "half Aethiopian".