Guest Article: Butter's Super Duper Bad Lore Prediction

Hey all, this is an article our friend Butters wrote for us. We gave him a different font to ostracize him. I dunno why. Hope you enjoy! - Dan

Hello friends. Who am I? Not Gaige or Dan, that’s for damn sure. Not sexy enough. I’m just some balding dad who is even worse at magic than those two.

So why am I writing something instead of them? It’s definitely not because I pester Dan on a day to day basis telling him to upload something for my entertainment and he got tired of it and told me to write my own damn piece. It’s because I asked to. And now their viewership is gonna take a nosedive because I have no creative juices and I’m an atrocious writer.

Me getting the creative juices flowing for this article.

Anywho, I’m gonna talk about some Magic story predictions, because you more certainly don’t want my card predictions. I am wrong about the playability of about 90% of the cards, just like everyone else. I’m here to give you my thoughts on the progression of Magic’s shitty story writing. Even though it’s bad, I am captured by it. I need it. I crave it. By the time this is posted, the rest of Eldritch Moon’s story has probably been figured out. But as of right now, all we know is Emrakul is the bitch fucking up Innistrad and everyone in Hanweir is part of Land Cronenberg. But my predictions are going past Innistrad, and even Kaladesh. Mainly because I think I’m clever, but I’m really not. Now, Let’s kick this turkey. I’m gonna assume you know the story so far. If you don’t, well, fuck you.

You know what they say: A town that eats together ends up morphing into a giant, horrific ooze together.

Now, Innistrad is in a shitty spot at the moment, and I’m willing to bet that Jace and friends are gonna be quite cocky now. They fucked up two of the three titans. Surely the third will also be defeated by their mighty friendship. And they’ll be right, but not before they get royally beaten. When all looks bleak, Lilianna will step up and use her massive army of zombies to hold back the Eldrazi swarm. This will buy the League of Friends the time to start thinking of a plan that will actually work, which will probably involve needing either Sorin or Nahiri. Speaking of Sorin and Nahiri, Sorin will catch up Nahiri, and boy will he have words with her. We can expect some world class dialog and discussion here. Nahiri will bitch about how Sorin is a fuckboy, and Sorin will call Nahiri a whiny brat. After an indeterminate amount of exposition, they will start fighting. And it’s a battle that neither side gain an advantage over. At one point, it will look like Sorin is winning, another, Nahiri is winning. It’ll be too close to call at first, and we’ll be left with a cliffhanger.

I'm still bitter about this piece of art. And fuck Dan for making me add pictures.

Now here is where I see the story going a couple of different ways. The battle will be interrupted by the friends. Option A) Lilianna stumbles upon them first and notices Sorin battling with currently an unknown planeswalker (in her eyes) and struggling. Seeing her opportunity to be the new Lord of Innistrad, joins Nahiri in the fight against him. Sorin is beaten and is forced to planeswalk away, to brood as her normally does, yet again to not contribute anything to the conclusion of the story at hand. Lili and Nahiri have a tense yet pleasant conversation about what just happened. There rest of the Gatewatch appear and it is discovered that this is Nahiri. WOOO! They found the next best person, according to what Ugin told Jace. Nahiri will be cold at first, but after learning that Zendikar has been saved, and that Sorin had now been effectively usurped from his own plane, she decides maybe she’s overreacting a bit and decides to help out. Her knowledge about imprisoning the eldrazi before, and that Sorin had imprisoned her in a shard of the moon, comes in handy in getting a real good plan together. But how will they use the moon to imprison Emrakul? If only there was a Moon Sage somewhere on the plane that could help with that… Tamiyo makes a timely appearance, or meets back up with Jace sometime before finding the Sorin and Nahiri scuffle. Lili, Tamiyo and MAYBE (Highly unlikely) Nahiri join the Gatewatch.

Arlinn gets one or two magic stories about how her and her werewolves fight off the Eldrazified denizens, but ultimately don’t succeed. Arlinn lives.

Option B) the entire gatewatch stumbles upon the fight between Sorin and Nahiri. They try to reason with them to stop their fighting, but since their relationship has been ruined beyond repair and because they don’t know how to communicate their feelings properly, they don’t. Eventually they realize Nahiri brought Emrakul here and help Sorin defeat her. Sorin doesn’t acknowledge their help and doesn’t appear grateful. However, he does learn his lesson about upholding his end of a bargain and the benefit of working with others. Now Sorin can contribute the knowledge of his previous experience of imprisoning eldrazi and using a shard of the moon as a prison for entities. Again, Tamiyo shows up and through the power of friends, imprison Emrakul. Lili, Tamiyo and MAYBE (Highly unlikely) Sorin join the Gate watch.

Arlinn gets one or two magic stories about how her and her werewolves fight off the Eldrazified denizens, but ultimately don’t succeed. Arlinn lives.

God, Lucy Lawless is hot.

Why imprison Emrakul instead of killing her? Because Wizards needs to keep their options open. If they want, they can never have the eldrazi come back into the story. It can be forever contained in Innistrad’s moon. However, if they want them to come back, they easily can by unleashing Emrakul. It’s a much better way of handling it than killing them all off now, and then decide later they want to bring them back and retconning their death. That’s just lazy writing. But then again, this is Wizards we’re talking about.

And why imprison Emrakul instead of driving her off? Because the moon is Chekov’s Gun and not using it is stupid. And Wizards needs to tie up some storylines, they can’t keep adding stories with no conclusions. Tying this up allows them to focus on the current stories, and develop the new ones without having too many threads going off in tens of different directions.

Now for Kaladesh. This is a bit less involved than Innistrad. It’s going to be a smaller problem compared to Zendikar and Innistrad. However, it should have a connection to another big threat that the Jacetice League will come across. My money's on Bolas. We haven’t seen him really involved in a while. Tarkir doesn’t count because that technically happened a long time ago. It won’t be so high stakes. We mainly end up there because the Gatewatch just defeated the fucking eldrazi trio. That’s some bad damn good work. They need some R&R. So Gideon and Chandra get all hot and bothered for each other. I mean, they just looked death in the eye and won, who wouldn’t be? So they hop, skip and jump over to Kaladesh because Gideon wants to see where Chandra is from, and she’s hesitant to go, but decides she needs to face her past. They get back, have a few magic stories about being a couple and shit is great, but find out that the place is in trouble by some shadowy, corrupt fucks. They see the guards aren’t too nice to the citizens, people are in low spirits, and THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH.

Turns out Jimmy is a planeswalker and bitches about the cost of living.

They go on a crusade to oust the people in power and put honest citizens in place. Turns out, Tezzeret and Bolas are the fuckers pulling the strings. Tezzeret gets a card, but Bolas stays in the shadows for the most part, getting a small role. The new planeswalker helps our friends out, and they foil Bolas’ plan, or did they? Bolas already got what he was looking for and was basically working on getting some bonus information. In addition, he now knows there is a group of planeswalkers going around being goody two-shoes. But the Gatewatch also are on to him.  Without really knowing much about Kaladesh, it’s hard to speculate on specifics, but Bolas could potentially have his hand in the ruling class of Kaladesh for a long time by now. As Kaladesh is an artifact plane, it probably has something to do with the phyrexians. However, the phyrexians won’t have a part here.

I don't know what she does, but I bet it's cool. Probably robits.

Here’s where the speculations stop being speculations and become more like terrible fan fiction. Since I already mentioned the phyrexians, I’ll talk about them first. We probably won’t see the phyrexians for a little while longer unfortunately. Wizards still has some other storylines to wrap up. Before we do, we’ll be going back to Theros and getting Elspeth back. The next we see phyrexia will be on Elspeth’s home plane, where at the conclusion of that debacle, will discover that Elesh Norn has figured out how to planeswalk to other planes infected by phyrexian oil.

So what do we get to before more phyrexians? Well I’m glad you asked. Because the next plane we see visit after Kaladesh is Shandalar. It’s been a long time coming man. Why there? Because Lilianna needs help with the chain veil problem, but Jace needs more information on the veil and it’s origins before he can really help. So away they go. But guess what mother fuckers! Garruk is there and boy, he has beef with Lili. Oh wait, who is also there? Ob Nixilis.Why? Because fuck I want him to be and we have gone into fan fiction territory. Yeah this is a lot of black focused planeswalkers, but most won’t have a card, at most, Lili and Garruk will get a card, but Ob won’t.

Now that I think about it, Shandalar seems like it would be similar to OG Zendikar and Worldwake. Rich in mana, old ruins. Goblins, elves, angels, and dragons. Fuck guys, let's go!

Jace and Lilianna encounter Ob first. Ob recognizes Jace as one of the punks that ruined his revenge on Zendikar. They get in a tussle and it is a close one. But when Lili starts to use to chain veil to whoop on Ob, he recognizes what it is and backs off. He ain’t no dummy. So instead he decides to stalk the duo and see what they are up to. They finally reach the Onakke catacombs, Jace starts his research and casting spells to figure out how to rid Lili of the curse. That’s when they are attacked by Garruk. Lilianna is forced to hold him off as Jace completes his spell research. They are successful and make their escape. Afterwards, Ob Nixilis approaches Garruk with a proposition of helping each other destroy their enemies. I would like to call this the Brotherhood of Evil Planeswalkers. Other potential members to join would be Tibalt, as he just loves chaos and fucking with other planeswalkers sounds like fun, Vraska, as she has beef with Jace, Ashiok, if he/she gets disrupted by the Gatewatch when they rescue Elspeth, and Sorin if he gets kicked out by Lili and Nahiri.

The point of the Brotherhood is the same as the Gatwatch, to bring the story in tighter and not have too many plot points in limbo. Smaller plots will still exist from time to time, but we’ll really have the two major problems on the phyrexians and Bolas, with the Brotherhood trying to disrupt the Gatewatch along the way. The story will still have planeswalkers that won’t join the Gatewatch or Brotherhood, like Raz, Sarkhan, Narset, Kiora, etc,  that will assist. Ugin will continue to give advice which the Gatewatch won’t follow.

But what the fuck do I know. I’m just some nerd. I’m probably wrong. I mean, I’ve never been right before. Let me know what you think will happen and if I’m full of shit.