Magic: The Gathering (Unreleased Sets)

Yes, we have. Kiora summoned offworld beasts in Drop for Drop, the story of her battle with Theros's ocean god, Thassa. Here, we see the distinction between calling an entity on-world versus summoning one from off-world.

In fact, her entire reason for being on Theros was to find great sea monsters to summon to Zendikar in order to combat the Titans. That distinction gets brought up again when she summons Lorthos, where she explicitly states, "I did not call him. I summoned him."

And then the summoned Lorthos died, and he was the true Lorthos that died and not a magically-generated copy. It's pretty unambiguous.

edited 14th Jul '16 9:38:12 AM by TobiasDrake

Theros also had Elspeth summoning a bunch of superhuman phantasmal soldier copies. (Soldier tokens?)

It used to be in lore that you summoned the actual creature/person. I think Wot C retcon'd it somewhere along the line that you made a copy instead. I think the idea that P Ws (eg. the players) were essentially kidnapping people from across the planes, enslaving them to fight in gladiatorial combats for your personal enjoyment and then sending them home in bodybags was kinda fridge horror-y.

edited 14th Jul '16 11:16:54 AM by nightwyrm_zero

Welcome to the wonderful world of figuring out MTG fluff, an exercise that has been known to cause larger SAN penalties than the emergence of Emrakul.

Somebody animated Harmless Offering!

In my opinion, it's the easiest way to rationalize the wonkiness of the the new legendary system and not being able to summon more than one of a legendary creature yourself can just be explained as being a rule magic thing. I'm not saying it's a canon explanation, as there isn't really one. Just saying that if this is the case, the Thalia situation can be easily explained as the real Thalia being better.

Also, this is relevant.

edited 14th Jul '16 3:51:57 PM by ImperialSunlight

I am in madness! Trying to figure out magic's fluff has made me'mrakul!

edited 15th Jul '16 12:49:31 AM by NickTheSwing

Fighter also has trouble with the new Legendary rule.

He got used to it, though.

edited 15th Jul '16 12:35:00 PM by TobiasDrake

Luckiest draw of the pre-release was not being assigned to the back tables where the air conditioning was broken.

The Battle of Thraben.

Money quote, and something I'm really sad didn't make it onto the cards:

"The nice lady with the uncomfortable dress just saved our butts, Gideon. Calm down a second." - Chandra Nalaar

We all know that that is not the word Chandra actually used there.

Shorter than I hoped it would be, but it was great seeing the Gatewatch reassembled. I've missed Chandra, Nissa, and Gideon.

I also like how hostile the leylines of Innistrad are. On Zendikar, Nissa's advantage over Nahiri's efforts was that she could commune with the leylines directly. It's what allowed her to manually create the glyph and bind the titans by hand.

On Innistrad, it's the exact opposite. Innistrad's soul is not as loving and nurturous as Zendikar's. It's cruel and inhospitable, as demonstrated by its leylines being thorned vines and Nissa's point about summoning elementals being a very bad idea. Nahiri's methods are superior to Nissa's here, because Nahiri's cryptoliths allow her to manipulate the leylines while keeping a safe distance from the hostile creature that is Innistrad's soul.

That's the answer for why they can't just do to Emrakul what they did to Ulamog and Kozilek. Because Nissa can't commune with Innistrad. It would murder her for lulz.

edited 20th Jul '16 1:41:49 PM by TobiasDrake

Innistrad's lineup of elementals includes multiple hellhounds, creepy hooded grave things like Splinterfright, and creatures named Tyrant of Discord and Malignus. More are red than green, and those that are green tend to care a lot about death and dying. It's not surprising that Nissa is rather unwilling to poke that particular bush full of bear blood.

Yeah. There's only three Elementals in this block:

• Pyre Hound, one of the aforementioned hideous hellhounds.
• Wolf of Devil's Breach, an even more hideous hellhound.
• Bloodbriar, which actually contains a quote from Nissa in its flavortext discussing how uncomfortable these elementals make her.

Technically Insidious Mist is an elemental but it's not quite what we're talking about. It's a vampire temporarily assuming mist form.

I'm also counting classic Innistrad, which brought us such uplifting creatures as Ashmouth Hound, Scourge of Geier Reach, Splinterfright and Moldgraf Scavenger.

Moldgraf Scavenger is from SOI and is a Fungus. You might be thinking of something else.

<.< I probably wouldn't have caught that, but I have a BG delirium deck, "The Gitrog Cult", that uses him.

<Checks> Right, what I meant was Hollowhenge Scavenger, good catch.

Man I wish they would re-enable comments on Gatherer.

They disabled comments? Why?

They had an overhaul ages back that screwed up the comment system and haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.

That awkward moment where you go to upgrade one of your decks with cards from the new set and are dismayed to realize that the deck's already perfect as-is. ._.

So apparently they seal Emrakul in the moon?

That won't eventually have consequences at all!

Because of course letting Emrakul run around the plane would be a better option...

True. I guess they did the best that they could, since they couldn't burn Emrakul's physical form to ashes like they did with Ulamog and Kozilek.

So, what happens if you Awaken the Land that Imprison in the Moon turns a permanent into, and then destroy Imprison in the Moon?