Ahoy planeswalkers!
This week, Wizards has given us the gift of a few early spoilers! Only a couple of the cards have folks licking their lips for deck-building or drafting, but many of the commons and uncommons have intriguing art and flavor text. We also got our first episode of Magic Story. While I won’t be discussing this story in-depth, I will be mentioning some of its contents, and there will be some spoilers.
So, let’s see what we can learn (and what we can guess) about this plane! Let’s start with one of the set’s flagship mechanics: Embalm!
I’m excited to see more of what Embalm is going to be. It’s a nifty cousin of mechanics like Flashback and Unearth, and it captures the flavor of mummies in the pop culture imagination really nicely. Of note, since each Embalm creature has its own token, expect the various Embalm creature tokens to make up the bulk of the tokens in this set.
Here’s what I’m most psyched for with regard to Embalm, though: this would be so cool on a legendary creature! Wizards seems to be setting up how dangerous this world and the Trials of the Five Gods are—heck, the entire Gatewatch nearly gets killed immediately upon their arrival! It would hammer that home very effectively if we had a legendary creature fall to one of the trials in story, and then get the “honor” of being resurrected as a mummy. And, since the mummy tokens have the same names as the cards with Embalm, you could not have both the living and the embalmed versions of the legendary creature in play at the same time! I call that a flavor win!
Speaking of the Trials of the Five Gods, we also got our first glimpse of one of the trials in one of Monday’s spoilers:
It seems likely that the plot of Amonkhet is going to revolve around the Trials of the Five Gods—they’ve been featured on the Amonkhet home page since the set was announced and they are being pushed as the theme of the prerelease. The Trial of Strength appears to be a monster-infested labyrinth, odds are it’s the green (snake) god’s trial. We don’t have much to go on for the other trials. A couple of the Invocations, however, do show denizens of Amonkhet facing the sorts of traps associated with raiding the treasures of Egypt’s pyramids, so I suspect that navigating a trapped pyramid is another god’s trial.
There are a couple of ways that I could see the focus on these trials playing out in story. We might see each Gatewatch member enter one trial, perhaps needing to prove that they are worthy to remain in the city, under the gods’ protection. With Gideon seemingly so pushed as a face of the set, though—well, Gideon and Liliana, but I can’t see Liliana taking on something like this—I think it more likely that we’re going to be seeing Gids face all five trials over the course of the first set.
We have one other potential hint about the Trials of the Five Gods: the art on the Game Day playmat.
This is a fascinating image (and easily my favorite Game Day playmat art since Shadows Over Innistrad). Before the Amonkhet information page was updated earlier this week, it stated that the point of facing the trials is “to claim an honored place in the Afterlife” as one of the “Worthy.” It is very difficult to tell what is going with the bident in this image. Most likely, this figure has just completed the Trial of Zeal and is receiving a boon from the bident-wielding jackal-goddess Hazoret. But the association between the Worthy and the Afterlife raises a question: what if part of the honor of being deemed Worthy is actually an immediate trip to the Afterlife, if you catch my drift? What if the lives of Amonkhet’s greatest warriors have been offered up as sacrifices to Bolas for thousands of years, somehow fueling whatever plan he has in motion for his plane? This could jive with Nissa’s discovery in this week’s Magic Story that the leylines of Amonkhet are tied to death.
I’d like to close by digging into my favorite artwork that has come out this week.
I initially saw this as part of a set of new images from a Spanish-language mini-trailer (not the proper set trailer) on the Magic: the Gathering YouTube channel. I love this character and the storytelling in this image. I was so enamored that I was about to predict that this was going to be one of the set’s legendary creatures—and then this spoiler dropped.
So, not what I was hoping for. Still, there are a few nifty details to note here. First, look at his spear in the upper-left corner: the first few times I looked at it, I just saw a spear with a cut-out, but it actually has two metal prongs that don’t meet. The tip of the spear is another evocation of Bolas’s horns! This is going to be a fun theme in the art—finding all the Bolas horns is going to be like hunting for Hidden Mickeys at Disney World.
Next, and more importantly, look at the bottom left corner of the image. His two bracers are the same. While his left hand comes out of the bracer, his right hand does not—he has a blade where his hand should be (a blade that tricks the eye a little by its resemblance to the head of his spear). We’re looking at someone who lost his hand, presumably while overcoming one of the trials, and now appears to be facing another. He is in an arena with a statue of Hazoret visible in the background, so this might be her trial—a significant detail, since hers is apparently the last of the five trials (note Glorybringer’s flavor text). This picture makes me want to know more about his backstory. Alas, because of Embalm, we know how his story ends. (I bet his mummy token looks awesome, though—a mummy with a dagger in place of one of its hands!) If this guy is just chattel for the trials, I can’t wait to see the actual competitors in the trials who will surely be among our legendary creatures in this set.
Happy spoiler season, everyone! I’ll be back in two weeks with more thoughts about the storytelling on the cards once most of the set has been spoiled!
Beck Holden is a Ph.D. student in theater who lives in the greater Boston area. He enjoys drafting, brewing for standard, and playing 8-Rack in modern. He also writes intermittently about actually playing Magic at beholdplaneswalker.wordpress.com.