What ELSE Happens in March of the Machine? 

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I'm just glad that Heliod is gone. That God was a complete jerk, from start to finish, and after what he did to Elspeth, he deserves to cease to function.

@@jacob4920 hes going to be back and dab on elsbeth again. cant wait.

@@jacob4920 I actually wanted him to get a redemption story, those are quite rare in magic since the last decade. Everything feels like if it is in a static karma, none of the good guys goes over the edge and none of the villians have a real reveleation over their actions.

@@MrAzulmagia And I just wanted to see comeuppance, which I personally got. Overall, though, your argument is mostly right about Magic's story writing. Although Gideon (ultimate sacrifice) and Liliana (overall character turn) are two notable exceptions to this. We need to see more of that kind of stuff.

@@jacob4920 I love those two examples. Gideon was always the quintessential boyscout and sacrificing himself sooner or later was his inevitable outcome, but he knew that all along. Liliana was an evil(?) mage that did a lot of questionable things in her quest to get away from the consequenses of her own actions. But after WotS, even when she got the freedom she was looking for all this time, seeing someone else willingly take the fall for her actions broke her.

I only watch magic arcanum for story I don't even bother with other channels. Also Ryan just tells the story do well.

Not only drone on and on, but some of them just read the story verbatim from the WotC site. I appreciate Ryan's approach.

This.

The whole story about the invasion on Theros is just a giant patchwork. I mean how could Heliod suddenly escape his prison he was sent the last time we were on Theros? And how can Kaya just casually one shot a compleated Heliod, when she struggled to kill Vorinclex, who got killed by a Zylpirian Redshirt without even a card. And yes the plan is great and all that to compleat the followeres and the gods follow because that is how Theros works. But how on earth did nobody try and stop that invasion, especially the gods themselves? Theros is a plane of heroes and the Gods all the time interfere in the mortals lifes but here they just had a day off? I mean Theros is a pretty small plane, so hiding the invasion tree should be impossible. And so on. Yeah Theros got really the short end of the stick in that story.

Cannot put to words how badly New Capenna sucks; it's an absolute flavor dumpster fire, and it has some of the dumbest looking card art I've ever seen.

It genuinely feels like the ending of this storyline was rushed- All these cards that feature things that don't happen... Every plane just winning against the invaders... it feels like there was some sort of interim set that got cut or something honestly. One second Phyrexia was about the invade the multiverse, the next... Elspeth wins?

I felt like New Capenna had better potential, considering that was where Urabrask was held up, and the constant talks on Halo research.

Spoilers for game of thrones final season Kaya killing heliod had kinda the same energy as arya killing the night king. Some rando who had no prior involvement offing someone who has deep and long story ties to other people who really should have been in front of the line for the kill

Fr, loved it. People need to read it themselves so wizards knows that really good writing is wanted by the mtg audience

Not my flavor of monster girl erotica

Yea that eyes comment was perfect for setting the tone for both inner vraska and the viewer.

Not only was the point of view perspective swapping between the version of Vraska a really clever interpretation for how phyrexianizing works in the brain, the attention to detail to actual psychological consciousness is really impressive.

It was my favourite story too, but I get really embarrassed reading any kind of story that uses different font/colour/capitalization to indicate different character/mindsets (In this, Vraska's actual mind fragment and compleated Vraska). I'm not sure why, probably all the Homestuck I've read in the past.

Yeah, I'm totally baffled how they basically completely glossed over Kaldheim and NONE of the cosmos beasts got cards...

it wasn't even just kaldheim either, Amonkhet literally JUST recovered from the hour of devastation and now they have to deal with a multiversal threat, especially given that innistrad just talked about how phyrexians cannot compleate a dead mind which amonkhet is FULL of thanks to the plane-wide curse of wandering which makes anyone who dies into a zombie. i would think the phyrexians would struggle on amonkhet but we get radio silence. Lorwyn is here but we get nothing on lorwyn's situation at all. Vryn, jace's HOME PLANE is shown to be fighting the phyrexians using the mage ring networks old glitches but no story there despite jace being pretty freaking important. and planes we've never visited show up in this set but we get zero look into how those planes are doing. this set is garbage

Holy shit, Toski and Koma both got compleated and we didn't get a card for them? Bogus, man.

@@MTGDuelist8870 actully it implied the innistrad zombies are special because of the planes magic

@@PrettierNPastel you are aware that amonkhet has a plane-wide curse that turns everyone that dies there into a raving zombie right?.

Considering the first Invasion "event" was a full block, and that was WITH build-up prior (INCLUDING a BLOCK of prequel), hard ditto.

the thing that annoys me the most is that they claim the story started in DMU which is such bs

Jace's line "This part hurts the most," definitely gives the impression that Vraska survives.

Further I think she actually talks to Jace, and that he himself evaded being fully compleated using his mind magic

@@keithfilibeck2390 I’m not so sure she spoke to the real Jace, I think it could have been entirely imagined by her, or perhaps it’s a small portion of Jace’s consciousness left behind when he created that partition in her mind.

Yea i dunno how MA got the impression she was vaporized. from what i remember he put some shock like device on her chest and she started to convulse until she apparently died

Same!

Especially since the article on how the planes are doing implies the scarab and locust gods were helping Hazoret fight off the phyrexians

Amonkhet's battle card is one of the coolest of the entire set, too. I used it just the other day to great effect!

@@jacob4920 really? I can't wait to test it :3

Yeah, there was lots of cool Amonkhet stuff on the cards, but nothing in the story...bit of a loss if you ask me. I hope we get back to Amonkhet at some point to explore how things have changed now that their society has been revealed as a lie, but Bolas is no longer pulling the strings.

@@Quimusik My opponent in that game had to discard Zetalpa (you know him). And a few turns later, when I transformed Amonkhet's battle card, it becomes an Aura spell that enchants any creatures, in any graveyard. I immediately swiped Zetalpa from the graveyard, for free! That's what I call getting the bang for your buck! lol

@@jacob4920 Yeah its one of the most broken uncommons in draft

God, I miss the old magic novels. The Ravnica block story was so good, there are *still* characters from those books I would kill to see be made into cards! ...Unfortunately, with how badly War of the Spark got flubbed, a crisp $10 says that Wizards is holding it up as evidence that there's no market for them to publish the full novels anymore.

Well, that should have been at least 2 books, there was still a lot of untold story around all that was happening that could have been fleshed out more.

That just gives me hope for the return of the dragon bros!

How? the entire story was just the writer ignoring how the Oil works. Zetalpa, Zacama, and Huatli's entire entourage should have been infected. Also, Fynn didn't defeat Koma, Tyvar did.

@@Enja_Near fynn's card is literally him after killing koma and the flavor text confirms it. tyvar fought a compleated serpent, but that wasnt koma

@@sunstrid3r44 "All elves live in the shadow of Koma. Is there any creature better to emulate than a serpent? That is not true of the serpent he sees now." Tyvar's tattoo starts moving when Koma is nearby so there's about 3 flag markers. Sorry man but they double booked Koma's death.

@@Enja_Near yes, but this part just shows koma appearing, not tyvar fighting it, the part where tyvar fights a serpent is later in the story.

@@sunstrid3r44 Tyvar literally jumps in to the sea to fight said serpent in the story the paragraph after what I quoted.

Yes as we have plenty of low tier villians for lackeys. Like tibalt... Oh wait

Bro didn't even have a character. I don't get why folks hate him so much.

@@sevranararis7704 Pretty sure that's exactly the problem. He's this random dude that is never relevant to any of the stories he shows up in (even on his home plane), and so each of his cards feels like they would've been better served being just about anything else.

where did Lukka touch you?

Did the bad. Never explained why he did the bad. He is part of the group now? Yea...not a popular dude.

Glad you enjoyed it! ...now go buy something! 😅

If you want to consider an unnamed cameo an appearance, that's fine, but it doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what Sorrin was doing or how he personally fared in the invasion.

I think it would be more appropriate to do that after The Aftermath expansion, as there is still a bit more story to tell, and the fate of many planeswalkers is still unknown but might be revealed in about a month.

If you want to consider an unnamed cameo an appearance, that's fine, but it doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what Sorin was doing or how he personally fared in the invasion.

I was considering doing something like that in the next few weeks!

Based on what we know about Elesh Norn, she wanted to strike everywhere once she had access to the Invasion Tree because she couldn't be sure she'd always have it. She was also very confident in her army's strength, and really, you shouldn't need more than a handful of phyrexians per plane anyway, because each time they defeat a defender, they'd end up switching sides. Given enough time, your army would grow to outnumber the defenders. She obviously didn't count on Elspeth showing up, Jin Gitaxias attacking her directly, and Wrenn taking over the tree. Aside from those (arguably unpredictable events) I think her invasion plan was pretty solid and would have been a sucess.

@@MagicArcanum ok thank you for the reply! It just felt so rushed to me that the phyrexians a menace to the multiverse for years were on the rise striking everywhere but then got taken out by a handful of planes walkers and a small army(compared to the new phyrexia) from zhalfirin. Liked the story, it just felt off that it ended so quickly and relatively speaking concisely. But thank you again!

That's not the same as appearing in the main story or side stories.

@@MagicArcanum I mean that is a trivial distinction. They have never done an article like that so it could be treated as side stories with no problem. Is it canon? Yes.

They do articles like that all the time. They often accompany Commander deck releases and give us a little paragraph about the legends who are the face cards for those decks. I will admit these short biographies do count as canon, but they are a far cry from being part of the actual story. They are an admission that they created cards that didn't appear in the story, but had to address it, and so they do with minimal effort.

Holy shit a short paragraph!? 🤯🤯🤯

I think in an earlier version of my script the emphasis was more on "We learn Anhelo, who is Errant's father, was compleated" but over the course of some revisions I lost that thread and forgot we already knew their relation so I reworked it into what I said in this video. My mistake. (Though to be fair I also say I don't really care for New Capenna so it should surprise nobody if I miss a detail from that set's side stories) Where did we see Giada and Errant together, though?

@@MagicArcanum Huh, I can't find that bit. might have gotten confused by the Legendary Team-Ups write up.

So combining their magics to cast the spell does lead to Quint's spark igniting. I didn't say anything untrue. Sometimes I have to abbreviate events to keep these videos at a watchable length, but if anyone wants the full experience they can always go read the stories on their own, right?

If anything I got the opposite impression. It felt like Serra was telling Elspeth she could pick one place to intervene, and everywhere else would likely suffer for her absence, or at least be forced to fight without her help. If the angels were going to become supercharged anyway, it means Elspeth's choice had a lot less weight to it - she wasn't giving up her worldly desires or putting the good of the multiverse above favored planes like Theros; she got to have it all, without really making any self-sacrifices.

My problem here is that Linvala glowed a little bit earlier on, and then much more during the fight with Nahiri. If we take that to mean it was thanks to the angels of New Capenna arriving, then it means the characters fighting Nahiri had basically no agency of their own. The angels didn't even have to be in the room to affect the battle there. I would much prefer it if Linvala and Tazri somehow "dug deep" and found the strength to defeat the planeswalker ruining their home, rather than some off-screen angels giving them the edge they needed as they zip by on their way to the main confrontation on New Phyrexia.

@@MagicArcanum it's less that the angels of Capena directly interfire and more that they teached Linvala how to make and use Halo, knowledge that she used in the battle with Nahiri

When would they have had time to teach her that? And if they did, why was she surprised by the power suddenly radiating from herself? I find it much more likely that the angels arrived on the plane as the group was assaulting the skyclave, and as part of their Surge of Salvation (story spotlight card) it "somehow" unlocked extra powers in Linvala, Tazri, and any other angels/people with a halo on the plane (we just didn't get to see any of them, because we were contained to the room hosting the battle against Nahiri.)

@@MagicArcanum she has a Halo manifestation before the final battle "With a collective gasp, the elementals stagger back, confused and alarmed. Tazri looks and sees Linvala radiating with light and charging forward" and then she dodges the question of what happend "I glimpsed the exit a mere moment before the elementals arrived," replies Linvala with a sly smile. But that isn't what Tazri was asking. The angel's light . . ." she showed to know what she was doing. Even in the final battle the one surprised is Tazri (who had an anglel halo on her neck) and not Linvala. "Tazri looks down and is stunned to find that she is shining with an incandescent glow, too, the halo about her neck brighter than ever before."

​@@prinnynaito That is not teaching, that's having your agency removed by someone downloading a power up into you. You take no credit and your effort didn't matter. Bad story telling all together.

That's actually on my "To Do" and I should have it ready in another couple of weeks 😁

@@MagicArcanum Awesome, looking forward to it!

This is not an appropriate place to discuss leaked cards, or what we think we know about Aftermath.

@@MagicArcanum Fair enough.

Glad you found us!

I think in an earlier version of my script the emphasis was more on "We learn Anhelo, who is Errant's father, was compleated" but over the course of some revisions I lost that thread and forgot we already knew their relation so I reworked it into what I said in this video. My mistake. (Though to be fair I also say I don't really care for New Capenna so it should surprise nobody if I miss a detail from that set's side stories) And yeah, Vraska's ending seems to be intentionally left open so they have the option to bring her back later if they want, but if they don't, then she got a fitting send off. I'm not really going to talk about the legendary pairs. The main objective of this channel is to recap the actual stories and explain how they relate to cards in the set. Those tiny paragraph explanations are just filler; they are technically canon, but they add nothing to the story, and feel like WotC doing the absolutely minimum to justify having certain cards in a set (they also often do this for Commander deck releases, where they give us a tidbit about the face cards for each new deck.)

nah ur wrong lol that’s not how storytelling works

I wish the oil could only turn flesh into machine and not infect machines too. I know originally it exclusively infected machines, that's how Argentum got turned into Mirrodin but when the oil can do anything there are no stakes

I've tried covering the older stories (most recently with a look back at the previous visits to Innistrad, before we returned for Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow actually) but those episodes weren't nearly as popular as the ones in which I cover current stories. People just aren't searching for "what happened in Lorwyn?" these days, and the view count proves it.