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Counterspells - The Art of Magic Not Happening
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- čas přidán 1. 05. 2024
- We dive into the history of Counterspells in Magic - particularly their visual representation; with numerous diversions, including blue player stereotypes, the brief existence of Interrupts, and which thrull has the best teeth.
Very interesting and entertaining. Excellent video! Thank you.
The iconic cantripping counterspell exists mechanically in Dismiss and Contradict, but flavorfully they only match Laquatus' Disdain when combined. Dismiss has the perfect flavor text for this: "There's nothing you can do that I cannot simply deny.", while Contradict features Ojutai handwaving a spell away without looking at it in the art. They're not as good as the Disdain individually in terms of vibes, but combined they get there.
World Enchantments are the ancestor of Planechase. The idea was that you - a planeswalker - are modifying the world you and your opponent planeswalker are fighting on by transforming the entire battlefield, overlaying it with part of a different plane you've previously traveled to, and making the world you're fighting on taking on the characteristics of that world. That's why there can only be one in play at a time.
Homelands is the first set that takes place on a plane other than Dominaria. Arabian Nights was set on Rabiah, but that wasn't clear at first. That was settled later. Tempest block, the Weatherlight crew goes to Rath. Parts of Urza's Saga take place in Serra's Realm and Phyrexia. In Masques block, Masques, Nemesis, and Prophecy take place concurrently on Mercadia, Rath, and Dominaria (specifically Jamuraa and Keld) respectively. Mirrodin was the first set to not only go completely to a different plane but involve a completely different story that didn't involve Dominaria, Urza, Phyrexia, or the Weatherlight crew.
If you read some of the very first novels, they hadn't settled on a lot of the names yet. The Greensleeves and Gull stories refer to the plane as The Domains, which is now part of Dominaria, and Dominaria seems to be the name for the multiverse. Then they make Dominaria the name of the plane, the Domains an archipelagic continent on Dominaria, and Dominia the name of the multiverse.
Planeswalking also works completely differently in those first novels. There's no spark; any wizard can become a planeswalker provided they know the spell and have enough mana to cast it. The knowledge of the spell itself is a closely guarded secret, and it seems to require like 5,000 mana to cast. Having control of a city and all its denizens meant you had enough mana by virtue of every citizen living there seeming to contribute mana to the wizard at the top, and this contribution was a completely incidental byproduct of living in and working the land. The people didn't even know about it, and wizards got mad at having their peasants killed because it cut into their mana supply. Wizards who know the planeswalking spell were especially leery of any wizard who might have enough mana to cast it, and wizards who didn't know the spell were desperate to block mana access from the wizards who did. What's more, planeswalking at first only involved hopping laterally from plane to plane; I think Dominaria and Phyrexia were 6 planes away from each other so that you had to planeswalk 5 times to get from one to the other, and you always went through the same 4 uninhabited worlds in between them en route.
That is a tremendous amount of information, thanks for taking the time to write it up. Other comments had already led me to consider more closely the number of early sets outside of Dominaria, but your point about Mirrodin is really illuminating, and really drives the overall point home.
Not entirely coincidentally, one of our upcoming videos (which we recorded before this one, but is editing intensive, so taking a while to complete) references the early novels, but is entirely focused on the relationship between land and mana, which they seemed to really want to explain early on, but have left a lot more vague post-revisionist. In the same video, we were referencing Richard Garfield's writing on the setting of the game from around the time of its origin, and definitely encountered HIS description of lateral planeswalking - interesting that they held onto that model in the early novels. I'm curious, do you know whether they had anyone "in charge" of overall creative in those early years, who was owning continuity on this sort of thing?
@@ManaCritics I couldn't tell you for sure. I was seriously into the novels from about 1998 to 2003. I'm missing a few from my collection, but I've read most of them. Arena is the first novel, and the way the fights work in that book are very close to the card game. The card game itself is even mentioned at one point. They wear satchels around their necks from which they pull little sachets of dirt that represent given lands, and from which they draw mana. Their hand size is literally the number of things from their satchels they can hold in their hands at any given time. But over time, things get a bit different. If you read the final battle between Jodah and Lim-Dûl in Shattered Alliance, it sounds a lot more realistic but doesn't work the way the card game works at all. Those novels are only a few years apart, and I don't know if the writers had a coordinator or just some notes to work from. The Legends novels, which were written a few years after that, contain all kinds of mistakes, both internally and when compared to the characters in the card game. So if anything, they got sloppier as they went along. I would guess that the first 5 books, which tell something of a coherent overlapping story, represent Richard Garfield's original vision better than any books written after that.
Blue definitely appeals to the kind of person who think they're smarter than everyone else, hahaha. And flavor text on counterspells leans into it for sure!
21:40 There are actually some sets before Mercadian Masques that were set at least in part away from Dominaria! Homelands was set on Ulgrotha, Tempest block was set on Rath, and Urza's block was set on multiple planes. Also, if you count it, the Microprose computer game was set on Shandalar.
All fair, and I didn't remember that about Urza's Saga. So it really didn't take them that long after all. If I'm counting correctly 10 of the first 12 settings (counting all the core sets as one) were on Dominaria, so I feel the overall point stands, if not as strongly. On the other hand, Rath was only created for the purpose of invading Dominaria, so the plot really stayed heavily centered on Dominaria for an even longer time. Which still feels sort of silly to me today, but we've now bounced around plenty to my satisfaction, and I'm now pretty happy with the nostalgia when we revisit it. Loved the Brothers' War set, and the side stories were my favorite fiction in the current era.
The visible ptsd during the Knowledge Pool discussion makes my heart happy.
No Voidslime love?
Thought you'd appreciate that. I really do remember with the clarity of a traumatic experience, but also fondly. Guess I just contain multitudes.
No Last Word? Best flavor text ever
I mean, we could have easily gone on for like 5 hours - but honestly, we messed up the camera on the first go and had to redo the whole thing, so we were pretty tired at this point ;) But, you're right - it's been a while since I'd seen it, so had to look it up, but that's pretty iconic.
Id say red burn is as iconic as blue counter. Good work you 2
Yeah, fair, and Thanks. Feels like White and Green follow up with small and large creatures (and their White Weenie and Green Stompy archetypes) respectively, and Black...just kills things the best. Hard to make an archetype out of that, though.
Yeah I was gonna comment with Lightning Bolt being to Red what Counterspell is to Blue in terms of being iconic.
so tired of seeing mtg discussion content and its just commander bs.
I mean, we both play Commander, but it's neither of our favorite format - and I agree, it definitely seems to take up all the oxygen in the room, both in content and in set design. Loooot of legendary rares in the main sets that seem like they should have just been in the corresponding Commander sets.