Just hopping in to say that I like what y'all have been doing, tho I know too little about most of the original storylines to be of much help; Ravnica being my favorite MtG setting, I'm hyped with what you'll do with it. By all means cast nets in the YmtC section for inspiration, I'd have a lot of fun contributing there

Hey, thanks for commenting all the same.

Alright, so I've been turning over what I have laid out and where we're headed, other than Nyx, obviously, and I think I've got a pretty good flow of how the rest of the story is set to play out.

We have Gideon and Chandra arrive in Meletis and quickly find the Sky Sage, under the auspices of either Medomai or the Temple of Kruphix.
Tamiyo, having been around for a while, has collected quite a theoretical understanding of Nyx and more importantly, how the nature of stories and belief work in Theros.
Being someone intimately familiar with the nature of stories and ostensibly having gotten a pretty solid grasp of languages, she can trace the histories back all the way to the Archonmachy, where the Gods became the central powers, and almost undoubtedly, has accumulated what would be somewhat blasphemous knowledge, which is why she's under the auspices of Kruphix, as he is the only god that knows how old the rest are, and how... memory has something of a sliding scale for creatures composed of belief.

It's at this point that I want to introduce the idea to the story that was hinted at before in the main canon. Essentially, things were fine when the gods were things of belief that kind of came and went and were transformed by the telling of the tale. It was only with this current generation of gods that something went amiss. The gods started believing in each other.

So, while Xenagos is immediately the biggest threat to Theros, there's something wrong in Nyx that opened the door in the first place so that he could exploit what it is that he did.
But... to find out more, there's only one place to go and it's a question of how to get there.

Here we arrive at a crossroads where we could kind of follow the same as before, and sail to the edge of the world and stare off into the Blind Eternities, which is a moderately striking visual. The other prominent alternative is to end up going and conferring with Phenax and undergoing an ordeal, instead of the stuff with Erebos and Daxos being dead. What with the fact he isn't.
Personally, I much prefer this path, because there are even bigger consequences to be stated, as Phenax was once a mortal too, and therefore should know not just the path from the Underworld, but into Nyx as well.
What's more, we can... nominally get a small cameo out of Ashiok acting as Phenax's go between, which gets more exposure to all the characters featured in Theros to actually have a role to play.

Ashiok, at Phenax's behest, negotiates an ordeal where our heroes, minus Tamiyo, must face their own nightmares. We can explore more of the backstories of each of the characters and really dig into their psyches, but in the end, the pair emerge triumphant and Phenax shares with them the secret into Nyx. Once there, the pair begin to really understand more about how Nyx works, how the stories and legends become imprinted in the sky, and what that means when someone busts in as violently as Xenagos did.

There should be some degree more tribulation before Chandra and Gideon finally confront Xenagos, but in this moment, face to face with the cause of the disaster on Theros, he explains himself instead of being a silent kaiju god to be Deicided. He explains about how jarring it was to find the gods were such limited things in comparison the multiverse, but he also shares that he and Phenax are not the only ones keeping secrets. At this point, the major pantheon intervenes, pushing Gideon to strike him down. Heliod, more than most, is urging him on, using his divinity to cause Gideon's indestructibility to flow into his weapon as well, making it a kind of knock off Godsend, able to kill the indestructible.

In front of the entire pantheon, Xenagos then tells Gideon why Heliod is so desperate to throw him out of the pantheon when he allowed Phenax to stay. Heliod isn't natural.
Heliod is an echo of a planeswalker, the founder of the Order of Heliud, but the Order, in ancient times deified the memory of Heliud and the only god that remembers that genesis is Heliod himself, terrified of being exposed as a lie and a manipulation from beyond the stars.
This leads to an enormous clash between Xenagos and Heliod, something that tears the firmament asunder, and caught in the middle is Chandra and Gideon. Knowing that only disaster could wait, Gideon is forced to end the fight by slaying Xenagos.

And moments after, Heliod tries to slay Gideon and Chandra as well, for knowing too much. Gideon's power flares and shrugs off even the mighty blow of the God, which shakes his divine confidence to the very core, suddenly faced with the truth of the matter and forced to cope with the broken illusion of his omnipotence. Heliod flies into a rage and Phenax discreetly steals the planeswalkers away.
With a newfound terror that he can be matched by mortals, and dealing with the fall out that he is nothing more than an echo, Heliod darkly broods.

Unfortunately, Gideon.... did not take the nature of the gods well. His faith has been tested and found brittle, and this time, Gideon is the one that pushes Chandra away as she tries to be empathetic. He decides he needs to rethink.... everything, not having been shaken this bad as when Chandra faced the Purifying Fire and leveled the Order on Regatha. So, we end the story with Gideon fleeing and Chandra chasing, as an inverse book end to how we began.

And all of the tale written in the scrolls of Tamiyo. Secrets and all.


So! That misses out on the more traditionally Greek tragedy of Elspeth dying, but I think this version of events actually makes Theros a PLACE that is tied to more of the multiverse, adding to the sum of the whole instead of being a one off backdrop for the characters to have an arc.
This one diverged pretty prominently from the previous canon, despite hitting a lot of the same plot points, which I suspect is going to continue a trend from now on... and that's going to be pretty prominently felt when we next visit Tarkir, and in an extremely appropriate turn of events, see Fate Reforged into something new.

Alright, Theros is in the past, which means moving on to... one of the most irritating problems we have in front of us to even start with.
Tarkir.

What to do about bloody Tarkir?...
To start, I'm going to go ahead and tell you right now, I'm pitching Sarkhan out of the leading man role. His entire existence literally becomes a problem here, figuratively and literally in the canon.
Even further complicating matters comes both Ugin and Sorin.
In a larger sense, Ugin's main troubles don't even really start being a nuisance until later when they decide to show us wittle baby Bolas and effectively blow up any sense of menace or majesty he ever had but having Nicol as a wee little brat of a runt.
Sorin, I think I'm choosing to forego purely because of Innistrad being in a state and kind of reinforcing his motivation to keep specifically his home safe and to hell with the rest of the world.

Which brings us to the person I think could actually be serviceable as our protagonist: Narset.

Suffice to say, there's... a lot to comb over and sift through for this block, which is a primary reason I was putting it off. I'm still turning ideas over in my head for how exactly to go about this, but it's not a charming idea given the mess wizards made of using a time travel plot where the time travel actually changed something. In a multiverse that actually functions in discrete universes rather than timelines.

I actually kind of liked Narset. I know a lot of people hated her, especially related to the shoehorn into the non-neurotypical "role", but I always thought she was kinda neat. More from the cards than anything else mind, but she was.

I think here is where we need to decide a lot of stuff that will come back later: The nature of Ugin, the nature of Bolas and their relationship, and so on. The canon version was... pretty lame, taking one of the Multiverse's best noodle incidents, the Elder Dragon War, and kind of wrecking it into a shape that doesn't get a set because it was too lame.

I think that it Does make sense for Ugin and Bolas to have some sort of history and relation. Perhaps Ugin is "just" another Elder, and his battle with Bolas on Tarkir was part of the War, and Ugin managed to esoterically survive. But I'm not sure the timeline works for that and Azor. Ugin might be something else -- perhaps a literal Spirit Dragon, in being removed from flesh and created as a spiritual entity. Or perhaps he's some sort of latecomer offspring of the Ur-Dragon, the equivalent of Typhon if the Elders were the Titans, of similar pedigree but in another age.

Without unravelling the truth of Ugin and Bolas I'm not sure we can produce a cogent Tarkir.

I tend to agree. I only know Tarkir by summaries, but Ugin himself I like and keeping both dragon-related good guys (for a given value of "good", especially given the first canon Sharkan) out of the Dragon Plane needs a very good explanation. Sorin being just mentioned in passing, or having visited Ugin off-screen, I can dig, but those two?

Speaking of which, is there any intention of ever using Sarkhan? I think he has some potential, and while his absence in Zendikar was well argued, keeping his away from his home plane would be kinda weird. Since we're willing to make deep changes to the canon, we can easily write away the most egregious problems and come up with a storyline that makes Ugin and Sarkhan make sense. Not that I'm opposed giving Narset a more central role.

Brainstorming ideas:
-Both Narset and Sarkhan get flung into the past, but we mostly follow Narset as Sarkhan is just kind of a mess. This needs some backstory, though, since we didn't see Sarkhan the Mad.
-We play the closed loop version of time travel, meaning the 'walker's actions in the past are actually the keystone of the present status quo.
-We throw the actual time travel out of the window, adding a hoard of dragon eggs that are potentially mystically kickstarted into whole-ass adult dragons to have the dragon-khan war. Maybe some phoenix-spell that allowed the legendary dragons to preserve themselves at the last moment? The hoard being hidden might be thanks to the 'walkers, effectively giving the heroes knowledge of the present rather than flipping the timeline on its head.

(I wasn't overly miffed by Ugin's version of the Elder War, but I get taking it out to preserve Bolas' mystique. Still, the writers had something cool going with them having diametrically opposed narratives for the same historical event - the subjectivity and malleability of history and all that - so I suggest we use that at some point)

In my mind, we might want to drop the time travel angle as anything more than info gathering/visions.

Say this is our setup: Ages ago, Dragons ravaged and ruled Tarkir, and the greatest dragon of all was Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, who was like a god to the other broods but was also known for his wisdom and a mutual respect with mortals. Something (possibly bolas related) happened, though, and Ugin vanished, followed by the tempests that once seemed to birth dragons swallowing them up. In truth, Ugin, who is some high-end relative of the Ur-Dragon, survived Bolas's attempt on his life just barely, and drew the other Tarkir dragons into torpor to restore his strength. However, whatever magical system was set to seal and regenerate him isn't disgorging Ugin on a timer; he needs to be freed by something outside his prison of convalescence. This prompts us to go on a Vision quest to see the era when the Dragons faded from the world. When Ugin is awakened, the other great dragons are also allowed to emerge, and don't take kindly to what presumptuous mortals have built in their wake.

As for what Ugin is, I keep coming back to how he's a multiplanar "spirit" being who, if we keep the canon around Tarkir as a touchstone, seems to be something of a dragon source. Essentially, his existence is very similar to the Ur-dragon, but lesser in that Ugin is a discrete and comprehensible being rather than a giga-myth spanning the Eternities themselves, making me think he's some sort of avatar, summoning, divided spirit, or castoff, possibly even closer to the power of their parent than the True Elders. To me, this would explain why Bolas hunted him, since he'd probably want to take that power for himself. After all, Bolas is (arguably) the last of the Elder Dragons; after slaughtering most of the rest of his species he might want a higher seat even than "planeswalker".

For set structure, the way I see it, KTK is unchanged. DTK and FRF swap places both in release and in the timeline, with some figures being re-imagined because of it. That is, the age of Dragons is the past, and the set that depicts a conflict between the Broods and the Clans is the "Present, Act 2" we leave on, where the revitalized dragons and ailing khans are locked in conflict that Ugin is spinning too many plates to mediate and that can be left in the air for any revisit to the plane.

I do think we need an outsider 'walker, though. Somebody's got to tell Ugin that the entire Eldrazi situation has gone pear-shaped, Sorin gets involved in Canon, and he could bring in Nissa as an involved party. Tezzeret could also make this something of a Zen reunion since having a Bolas agent on the hunt could make sense... or we could intro a different Bolas-aligned walker in Set 3 as an antagonist; if there are no other quick use plans for Sarkhan, perhaps that's when he comes in, as Bolas's Champion while the newly-ascended Narset stands as Ugin's.

So, with the discussion, it becomes clear one major difference to be taken. Wizards wanted to tell some kind of screwed up Back to the Future story where Sarkhan/Marty ended up ERASING himself when he gets back, as of that made any gods damned sense.

That isn't the story to tell, though. We don't need Back to the Future, but with dragons.

We need Terminator. But with Dragons.

The crux still centers on Sarkhan, though Narset remains out actual protagonist. We end up at the scene of Crux of Fate, but instead of Ugin, Sarkhan becomes a dragon and claims he's Ugin, maybe with some manifest chicanery from Ugin himself, who is hugely weakened by it. This ends up killing Sarkhan, but in his dragon form and he's stuck like that as a ghost... Flash forward to Sarkhan's ignition and it's actually his own dragon ghost that triggers it

Meanwhile, with Ugin needing to recharge, all the biggest baddest dragons end up in Hideaway keyword cards and the dragon storms stop until something awakens Ugin at least.

Meanwhile, Narset was the anchor for time travel all along and Sarkhan's death strands her soul, split in two times like Teferi during the brother's war.

That explains her visions of the past, and when she reunites with her own spirit, Boom, Planeswalker.
She can have 3 cards total.

Sounds cool; the visions might be immersive, as in "relive events as X past figure" to keep the feeling of being thrown in the past. There might be some reincarnation stuff going, if we wanna go for it, to keep with the theme of reverberating history.

Ideas I like:
-Ugin historically acting as a mediator between dragons and humans, and his disruption bringing strife.
-Ugin, as a primordial creating presence, is weaker than the most destructive Elder, because fighting is not his job; Bolas, on the other hand, is ceaselessly grasping for MOAR.
-having an entire set dedicated to depicting the past.


I dig that. I like Sarkhan eventually turning to the Light Side for Ugin as he finds an alternative for his worship, and we could put the seeds of that at the end here. I'd personally introduce him before Set 3, though, even just as a shadowy meddler before his proper spotlight.


I'm not familiar with the saga to get the references.


So Sarkhan is never in Bolas' grasp, or does he send his minion there and Sarkhan turns to Ugin? Also, doesn't that mean that Sarkhan is out of the game for good since he has no body in the present after jumping back?

EDIT: maybe the manifesting stuff causes Sarkhan's soul* to splinter (too vast of a power for a human soul to handle) so his dragon-soul takes the long way presentwards to his young body - the reunion triggering the Ascension - while a weakened body with his mortal soul returns to the present via time jump? This could justify the classic trope of villains becoming weaker when they make their face turn - in this case, he's missing a chunk of his dragon-soul-powers, which are stuck in a time loop - but maybe having that extra chunk of powers-plus-soul-splinter was what caused him to be unstable (and thus an easy target for Bolas' manipulation) at first. He will get stronger later as he organically develops his own powers if we so choose, of course... wait. This would mean that the existence of Ugin's "avatar" within Sarkhan would be perpetually contained in a time paradox-loop, though, and Ugin would just help Sarkhan manifest his dragon-soul as a separate entity. How freaky do we wanna go with time shenanigans? Being a Homestuck, my tolerance for bull**** maight be higher than average.

*If soul tampering goes too close to Spark disruption for our taste, Ugin's avatar could just inherit a trace of Sarkhan's intellect - an impression of his soul capable of limited interactions, but without a true identity behind it.


I also caught about nothing of the first part of that sentence, but I should probably go read the Crux of Fate scene you mention.

Been thinking of getting into magic fan fiction with a semi-reboot of the lore (similar to how DC comics will reset itself), would it be okay to dust this off and put my own ideas I've been brain storming in?

I don't see why not.
I'd be interested to see what else people can come up with. If you want to use the thread as a framework, I pretty much hit a dead end with it.