Multiverse Set Review: MODERN HORIZONS 2 (PArt 3)
MODERN SENSIBILITIES: GREEN & GOLD
JUNE 20, 2021 - By Nicholas Fair
Gear up, because Modern Horizons is out there in the world and it’s time for part three of my four-part review of Modern Horizons 2. Today I’ll be discussing the individual green and multicolor cards from the set as we head into the home stretch of this marathon of a review.
For those that are new to the Multiverse Reviews here on MtG-Multiverse, my goal is to evaluate and discuss new cards from the latest Magic release and assign them to known planes in the Multiverse if possible. These first three reviews are going to be card-by-card discussions, and Part 4 is going to have a larger discussion of art trends and themes of the set overall before finishing off with a final count of planes represented. Tune in for the final write-up early next week!
As with the other set reviews, I am only one person, and quite often I miss a thing or two (despite my best efforts!). MtG-Multiverse is also a huge community effort, so please feel free to send me your feedback or details on anything you think I may have missed at mtgmultiverse.feedback@gmail.com. Let’s get to it!
MODERN HORIZONS: GREEN
DOMINARIA
This card was first pre-reprinted (yeah, it’s weird) in the Strixhaven Mystical Archives, but we can see here that the true art depicts a Dominarian elf amidst a beautiful field of flowers. The setting and figure could be deemed a little generic for identification, though after some digging it’s pretty clearly meant to be a call-back to the Urza’s Saga card Abundance. Not only does it have an echo in the name, but it acts as a one-time effect of the enchantment, and the art shows the same figure in the same field. You can also note that the flavour text references Gaea, the Dominarian worldsoul.
UNKNOWN
We have a creature spell with storm! Wizards of the Coast first tried a variant of this back in Future Sight with Storm Entity, but that was storm-inspired more than literally storm. This is likely a riff on mana-hungry oozes that get larger the more magic that exists around for them to feed on (hence more copies), but we don’t actually know where Aeve is from. My guess would have been Alara, as a cousin of Manaplasm (notice the same sparkles in their jelly bodies?) but there is an official bio of Aeve with no home plane listed. You can read the official brief about Aeve over on the mothership and can decide for yourself.
TARKIR
Krushok are a species of very, very large rhinoceros-esque beast that inhabited ancient Tarkir, during the time of Ugin. They are associated with the Abzan clan, which was mechanically tied to +1/+1 counters, so giving this guy both Reinforce and Scavenge is a great tie-together of flavour and mechanics. It looks like this Krushok in particular has wandered into modern Atarka territory, though.
DOMINARIA: Aerona
Artist Kim Sokol nailed this art piece. The moment I saw it I knew it was a reference to the reprint of Gaea’s Blessing from Dominaria, depicting the same scene from another angle. The art piece has a beautiful serenity to it, and ties in nicely with the narrative of the two cards side-by-side. You may note in the flavour text that “Greensleeves” is quoted. Greensleeves was a Dominarian archdruid who was also briefly a planeswalker.
DOMINARIA: OTARIA
Oh Larrel. I’m a huge fan of the whimsy of squirrels in Magic, and so I’m very, very glad to see them return. This card is probably a reference to the storm card Empty the Warrens (at half mana and half the tokens) re-flavoured around a Deep-Forest Hermit from Dominaria. It’s worth noting that these very orange squirrels with high ears are very common in depictions of them on Dominaria, though they vary wildly in every plane they’ve been shown.
UNKNOWN
We have our second legendary squirrel in a year, and this one is a little bit more traditionally “squirrley” than the Ratatoskr-inspired Toski. The article on the mothership mentions that Chatterfang makes his home in the “Umbra Forest”, and fought in the “Orcfire Campaign”, but neither of those have official references in pre-existing cards. Lorwyn had an Umbra Stalker, though that probably is just a reference to the word umbra meaning “shadow”, and the Penumbra cycle from Dominaria become living shadows, which is also likely a naming convention instead of a world-building continuity.
UNKNOWN
Chatterfang here is also the only squirrel in Magic that’s black with green stripes, leading a few people to imply that he’s a mascot for Monster Energy Drink. I’m here for the cross-branding, honestly.
UNKNOWN
Wizards of the Coast released a “squirrel primer” insert as part of the Modern Horizons 2 Pre-Release, and on it they describe the Chitterspitter as “an acorn-generating device powered by the hopes and dreams of every squirrel in the multiverse.” I don’t quite know what that means, but it sure is provocative.
KAMIGAWA
The art for this card is just general enough to leave me questioning this placement, but let me walk you through my thought process. The art depicts an altar of some kind being torn asunder by vines. The forest in question is bamboo; meaning that it’s in a location illustrated with asian themes of some kind. Looking at it, it’s hard to tell what the shrine was prior to being pulled apart, but it looks similar to a shinto-style shrine. Although I don’t believe it’s meant to be a direct reference, the shape of it also reminds me of Baku Altar.
Mercadia
Deepwood is a sacred grove where the dragon engine Ramos fell after planeswalking to Mercadia. It’s been depicted as home to a motley assortment of beings in the past, though I’m not entirely sure how we connected it back around to drawing cards based on counters. This is a really unique card, and I’m a big fan of it.
RAVNICA
If you’ve been keeping track of the different levels of technology across the planes, seeing street lights should immediately give you pause. Only a few planes have the luxury of a wired electrical grid in their cities, and Ravnica is by far the most technologically advanced, besides maybe Kaladesh. The background of this piece clearly depicts our favorite city-plane, though, with the domed buildings and floating spires echoing art we saw last year during War of the Spark. Also interesting to note is that Duskshell Crawler here is a mechanical reference to Pridemalkin, another expanded universe denizen of Ravnica from M21.
UNKNOWN
We’ve reached the last of the Elemental Incarnation cycle in Modern Horizons. Endurance is probably in the most visually detailed setting of all of them, but a forest is just a forest: you could argue for Dominaria or any other plane with enough variety to contain a hardwood forest and a spring-like season, but I’m not feeling it.
LORWYN
After looking at this art in HD, I realized that this art for Endurance is actually a really, really long deer elemental; you can see the antlers and the outline of its head in the center of the frame, with two of the long legs sticking down below. This would actually pass for a Lorwyn elemental quite easily given the similarity to other Incarnations from the plane. I feel it’s somehow wrong to break up a cycle, but at the same time, perhaps it’s necessary.
ELDRAINe
Plenty of faerie tales mention a basket gifted from the fae, but more often than not they contain a child instead of food, treasure, and a clue. Fae Offering is a great inclusion for Eldraine as it clearly features the blue-skinned fae that so define much of that world, as well as a quote from Chulane, a tale-weaver we were first introduced to as the leader of a brawl deck released with Eldraine. Chulane was actually created as an analog for the real-world author Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales.
MIRRODIN
The elves of Mirrodin were not very big fans of artifacts, though that didn’t end up saving them from the Phyrexian oil. This card most likely depicts a Viridian Zealot destroying an artifact dragon via oxidation magic. The look of the dragon in question is very sinister, which leads me to believe this takes place during the Phyrexian invasion of Mirrodin, but before it became New Phyrexia as the green-aligned elements of the plane were one of the first to succumb. It’s also worth noting that Entwine was initially a mechanic designed for Fifth Dawn, the third set in the initial Mirrodin block.
ELDRAINE(?)
Reading this card gave me whiplash. It’s a gigantic, animated elemental of trees and roots that has taken over a castle’s foundations. It’s hundreds of feet tall and made of stone and wood. This may be the physically largest 2/2 I’ve ever seen.
All that aside, this is a somewhat whimsical piece but it depicts fairly medieval and arthurian-inspired architecture, which Eldraine does have in spades. Of course, we’ve never seen an elemental on Eldraine, so this is only a partial fit and I’m not sure if worth including.
INNISTRAD
Fellow Magic nerds, I have a mighty need. Someone, please, alter Funnel-Web Recluse to have all eight legs holding magnifying glasses. Until this happens, I’ll just have to settle for saying that this spider is from Innistrad: a species of recluse that feasts on things that are best forgotten.
DOMINARIA
As I mentioned earlier, Gaea is the Dominarian worldsoul. She’s commonly referenced as a foil to Yawgmoth in earlier fiction, which is why we’ve gotten a few references to old Yawgmoth-flavoured cards in this set that have been flipped from black to green and showcases Gaea instead. This is, naturally, a reference to Yawgmoth’s Will.
Lorwyn
It’s hard to miss the visual reference that Glimmer Bairn is making to Gilder Bairn from Eventide; I mean how many small Ouphes do you see in cute costumes in Magic? That said, this card strongly resembles an Atog mechanically, as Atogs are small creatures that consume a specific resource of yours for a temporary boost. In this instance, tokens. Given this, I’m very interested in what the backstory is for its development.
UNKNOWN
Glinting Creeper has a striking resemblance to another ambulatory creature with Converge: Crystalline Crawler. They’re clearly not related, however; while the crawler is a construct made from hedrons, the creeper is a plant using a large crystal to refract light from a nearby monastery’s stained glass. The setting here is very cool, and I’d honestly like to see more of it; the open-ended flavour text reads like a Pokédex entry and is all the better for it.
DOMINARIA: KROSA
Baloths are a type of massive beast that has been found on a few planes, most notably Zendikar and Dominaria. Although both species are green, angry, and gigantic quadrupeds covered in spikes, there are a few notable taxonomic differences. Most notably, Zendikar baloths often have large, curled horns or a large nose spike, whereas Krosan baloths have a longer snout and wider head with a small frill at the back of their skull that covers the nape of their neck in almost all depictions. In this instance, looking at the baloths in-frame, this feels much more akin to a Dominarian baloth.
DOMINARIA
When Wizards decided to reprint Hunting Pack, they probably took a look at the old art and decided it needed to be re-interpreted according to modern aesthetics and art direction. This is an interesting case in that in a vacuum there’s very little to identify Dominaria here if we don’t have the old card to go by first. Glowing energy-cats and a giant, red-maned saber-tooth-tiger are a bit out there for any plane, though I think they’d fit nicely on Ikoria. But we do have the old art, and this is clearly a 1:1 translation of the tigers from the Krosan forest being mutated by the Mirari, so there it will stay.
ALARA: JUND
This is probably the most on-the-nose reference in the entire set. Wizards of the Coast really did just add “Ig” in front of Noble Hierarch’s name to invert the meaning, reverse the meaning of the flavour text almost exactly, and then change the colors it made to the colors of Jund instead of Bant. Then, in the art, human turned into a goblin, and the same artist who rendered the first Hierarch rendered this new one, gong so far as to mirror the staff-hands so they directly reflect one another visually. Case closed.
Kamigawa (probably)
Jade Avenger is a Frog Samurai. He’s a frog. But also a Samurai. Where else can he go? There’s no more samurai anywhere else in the multiverse! Sure, Kamigawa doesn’t have any frogs with sword skills that we know of, but given how weird that world is, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. I mean there’s turtle-goblins with swords, samurai that ride giant moths, rats in hats, and of course the genju, so nothing is off the table. The real story behind this frog, for the record, is from an internal debate Wizards of the Coast has on occasion about making older cards with rules text identical to modern keywords update to have those keywords. Invariably Chub Toad is brought up as a sort-of-big frog that has Bushido 2, and that squashes the conversation. Until now.
Shandalar
Take a look at the flavour text: it’s spoken by Mokgar, a hunter from Kalonia. Kalonia is a green-aligned forest on the plane of Shandalar, where mana is found in nature with incredible vibrancy. In this case, it looks like the cobra has jewels for eyes. This feels like it should be a reference to Lotus Cobra, but I think it’s just an original card all its own.
LORWYN
Lorwyn had some of the most absurd looking treefolk in it; and I say that as praise. They were knobby and convoluted, more truly living trees than many of the treefolk we’ve seen on other planes that are more “wooden humanoids”. As Lorwyn is a plane of eternal midsummer (sometimes) it feels very likely that this beautiful fruit tree would call it home.
DOMINARIA
This elf is using the time portals to more quickly mature his plants for a more efficient harvest, or to harvest in seasons when gardening isn’t conducive. That’s absolutely genius, and such a fun expansion of the time rift phenomena on Dominaria. This card is very clearly a call-back to Search for Tomorrow from the original Time Spiral Block, as both are 2G with suspend 2 for G, and both give you a mana-producing permanent for your trouble.
THEROS
Enchantment creatures are essentially exclusive to Theros, so Sanctum Weaver would have probably been slotted there without any additional evidence. Luckily for us, she’s a Dryad designed as a reference to Utopia Tree but with additional benefits for decks running enchantments. The Therosian god Karametra is the god of seasons, the harvest, and the season of spring, and makes perfect sense as a reference in the flavour text. There’s even a call-out for the Setessa, the green-aligned polis inspired by the stories of the Greek Amazons.
LORWYN
I would be amazed if this bashful, cute little oak wasn’t designed to be a Lorwyn native from the get-go. the gnobbled, somewhat goofy look is a shoe-in for the very whimsical treefolk of the plane, and the lush, springtime forest full of rambunctious squirrels is a great visual that fits perfectly in the world. It even resembles Ambassador Oak from Morningtide in both art direction and “treefolk making tokens of an unrelated tribe.”
DOMINARIA: Jamuraa
Wasitora, whose claws we see about to sink into this unlucky guy in the art, is the queen of the Nekoru, a species of noble cat-dragons. She made her home in Jamuraa, a place once ruled by Nicol Bolas when he once sought domain over all of Dominaria. I’m not sure why she proliferates, but I’m not mad about it. You can read more about her over on the Wiki.
UNKNOWN
Squirrels come from all manner of planes, and although this cobblestone road and beautiful woodland are somewhat similar to many seen in Irish and Scottish countrysides, there’s no obvious plane to link that to beyond Lorwyn or Ulgrotha: and neither have a monopoly on them, visually speaking.
UNKNOWN
And the award for cutest creature-type lord goes to… Squirrel Sovereign! Funnily enough, he actually has the ‘Noble’ creature type, meaning he is royalty in some legitimate sense, whatever that means. We’ve never seen squirrels with the “winged ear” crown before, though, so this fuzzbucket could be from anywhere. A fun tidbit, though: the flavour text is a direct reference to the text on the card Goblin King.
DOMINARIA
The art may be abstract, but the flavour text is explicit: this anthem is an evocation of Yavimaya, one of the great forests of Dominaria and the home of the Maro Multani. Take a closer look at the art: the leaves form the shape of a squirrel, a deer, an elephant, and a lot more animal friends.
UNKNOWN
Zendikar is a plane known for its evolving wilds, but I’m not too sure about this artwork being placed there. The vibrant, lush wildlife is clearly meant to be a transformation of whatever was there before, but through magic anything is possible.
UNKNOWN
My first instinct upon seeing a new dinosaur card is to immediately see it visually fits on Ixalan as Ixalan is the plane that brought back the creature type to Magic (previously they were all “lizards”, bah!). Ixalan is home to a wide swath of dinosaurs, but the majority of them are feathered and incredibly bright members of the Sun Empire, which this green-skinned kaiju is definitely not. The skull shape of Thrasta in this full art is somewhat reminiscent of Rotting Regisaur, which has been placed on Ixalan as the only home of Regisaurs, but the match is tenuous at best.
UNKNOWN
Luckily for us, Wizards of the Coast released a small bio for Thrasta, and revealed that she dwells on an unnamed plane beset by never-ending storms. Sadly this means we can’t find a home for her for now, but maybe we’ll visit one day.
AMONKHET
Remember the card Timeless Dragon from Part 1? Although that card was an “eternal-eternalize” pun design that didn’t fit on Amonkhet, Timeless Witness here is a different story. A riff on the card Eternal Witness, this card has eternalize and turns into an Eternal, a process found only on post-Bolas Amonkhet. The spiritual hyena is plane-accurate, and although Amonkhet doesn’t have any printed shamans, I’m happy to chock that up to making this card a callback. The pillars and beautiful ferns in the background match an Egyptian temple, and I’m going to guess that this is a peek at Amonkhet pre-Bolas’s destruction. It could even be set in The Great Menagerie, home to the green-aligned god of might, Rhonas.
ZENDIKAR
Landfall: make a treasure or food on a 3-mana 3/2 in green means that this tireless scout is a reference to the Innistrad card Tireless Tracker. Although no printed cards reference it, Innistrad did once find itself home to elves, though they went extinct long, long ago. This could be a peek at an earlier Innistrad and show their native elves, though it’s just as likely to be a Joraga elf from Zendikar. Given that we know what the elves of Zendikar look like, I’m going to place Tireless Provisioner there for now.
DOMINARIA
Although this is simply new art for a card we already know the home of, I felt that including it in the review was necessary given how vastly different this art is from the original. It’s great to see Titania in her more raw, elemental form.
RAVNICA
There are two equally likely narratives for this hungry, rose-smelling dino off on a whirlwind adventure, and I can’t decide which to go with as more likely. Scenario #1 is that this dino is currently sitting in Ravnica, post War-of-the-Spark, after being summoned by Huatli as one of her warriors against Nicol Bolas. The background certainly fits, though it’s a little understated for Ravnica, and the proliferate trigger hints heavily at War of the Spark’s core mechanics as well, just like Huatli’s Raptor. Scenario #2 is that this is a dinosaur on its native Ixalan, but on the main continent of Torrezon that we have yet to visit in-game, but is implied to be controlled by the Legion of Dusk and be very inspired by 15th century Spain. Both seem very likely; what do you think?
EDIT: Thanks to reddit user Infinite_Bananas, we now know that this is a Ravnican card. Artist Randy Vargas confirmed it on Twitter.
Lorwyn
The initial cycle of Commands were all from Lorwyn, and were depicted as spiraling magics breaking free from a jar or vessel of some kind. A ‘command’ in Magic is always a “choose 2 of 4” spell, and we’ve gotten them in Dragons of Tarkir and more recently Strixhaven, so they can be found all over the multiverse. This card’s beautiful scene depicts a new Lorwyn-style command spinning forth from a squirrel-shaped jar, and the field fits with everything we know about the plane, so I’m happy to put it there for now. Look close: you can see the eyes of two squirrels this spell summons in the other, overturned jars.
LORWYN
This is a first. It’s well established that Wren’s Run is a location on Lorwyn; a forest where the elves of the plane tend to hunt and where boggarts tend to get, well, into trouble. Simple so far, right? The kicker is that we’ve never encountered Hydras on Lorwyn before; in either its daylight or dusk variations. When Shadowmoor emerged, a large amount of creatures that had been hibernating in the land emerged, but none printed were hydras, so this is almost like a zoological discovery! The look of this hydra makes it seem like Lorwyn is home to a unique kind of hydra that have markings and tentacles that look similar to roots and vines; a great visual distinction we can use to identify them in the future. The Reinforce mechanic on this card is also initially from Morningtide.
MODERN HORIZONS: MULTICOLOR
MIRRODIN
When Wizards of the Coast designs 2-color gold uncommons, they often act as benchmarks for limited that tell players what that color combination is trying to do. Arcbound Shikari is a great lord for all of the arcbound, as they are Mirran constructs that use +1/+1 counters. The Shikari are a special class of Lenonin, the lionfolk on Mirrodin’s razor fields, and this art seems to imply they’ve gotten into the business of making some replicas to reinforce their ranks.
Ravnica
This is the first time we’ve seen Outlast since the one callback in the last Modern Horizons, and when it was introduced in Khans of Tarkir. Needless to say, this card does not take place on Tarkir, as it’s visually very European, especially with the robe design and high collar. The name doesn’t give us anything as “Arcus” simply implies being related to archways, and the flavour text is simply telling us about archery. At best guess, this archer’s art best resembles a Selesnyan Temple Garden, and she could very reasonably be identified a member of the Sagittars.
DOMINARIA/HELL
Here she is! The card with a name so long she couldn’t ever see print… until some brilliant designer at Wizards of the Coast decided she didn’t need a mana cost. Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar is a chef and mage who once summoned a Lord of the Pit named Vincent during a mage duel. Initially introduced as a joke in the flavour text of the card Granite Gargoyle, she was fleshed out in the short story "Chef's Surprise" written by Sonia Orin Lyris as part of the anthology ‘Distant Planes’. Once she ran out of food to feed Vincent, Asmora was dragged to Hell to serve as his personal chef… lest he eat her instead. She ended up authoring The Underworld Cookbook, and works with servant imps to cook spectacular food. Given that her story takes place before the modern concept of the multiverse was solidified, it’s up in the air if Hell is a sub-plane of Dominaria or a separate plane that is linked by planar portals, but either way, that’s where she makes her home.
UNKNOWN
What a cool name. “Breathless Knight?” I would totally love to see an entire legion of “The Breathless” in Magic lore. As for now, this headless knight and his curiously headless horse are likely a reference to Headless Horseman from Legends, and beyond charging amongst undead legions we have nothing to go on for giving this guy a planar home.
ZENDIKAR
Card designer Andrew Brown tweeted about creating this card, and references making it as a nod to the community’s “bewildering love of the card Saddleback Lagac” from Oath of the Gatewatch. I don’t understand what’s bewildering about it: just say the name out loud once and you’ll understand.
For placing this card, Lagacs are giant lizards that are often used as mounts on Zendikar, though it looks like this one has captured a rather unlucky Kor Hookmaster.
DOMINARIA: CORONDOR
Designed as part of the series of cards in the Dakkon storyline, Carth is a human from Dominaria who vowed vengeance on the planeswalker Geyadrone Dihada after she slew his family. Geyadrone tricked Carth into summoning Dakkon and bound the two of them together in order to weaken Dakkon, but the two eventually escaped and became friends. Carth would eventually father the line “Carthalion”, which notably includes the 80’s-hair Jared Carthalion from last year’s Commander Legends.
UNKNOWN
More cool thopters with no obvious visual reference in the multiverse! Chrome Courier here has a unique design that we’ve never seen on a thopter before, and although the spires behind it are vaguely Azorius, they’re not nearly close enough to what we’ve seen on Ravnica to place it there.
RAVNICA
“What do you want to be, now that you’re grown up?” - Yolov, Simic bioengineer
The Simic on Ravnica are the blue-green guild, and are referred to as the “Simic Combine”, a combine being defined a group of people acting as one for a commercial purpose. The biomancers of the Simic use chambers like this to trigger evolution in their test subjects as part of The Guardian Project, creating new krasis to protect their guild, and their world.
DOMINARIA: Corondor
Creator of the Blackblade that was wielded by Gideon in War of the Spark against the God-Dragon Nicol Bolas, and ancestor of Korlash, we were first introduced to Dakkon Blackblade back during Legends. A blacksmith who ignited his planeswaker spark after forging a soul-drinking blade of unfathomable power, Dakkon is a major fan-favorite and a warrior of legendary skill who can even claim to have killed an Elder Dragon.
DOMINARIA: Corondor
Artist Richard Kane Ferguson was the original artist for Dakkon Blackblade back when we first saw him, and did the art for Blackblade Reforged as part of Gideon’s Signature Spellbook. His art style is incredibly distinctive and a major fan favorite; and I am psyched that he has returned to Magic again in order to render Dakkon ascended as a planeswalker.
DOMINARIA: Corondor
This card may be named after the planeswalker Geyadrone Dihada, but the art depicts Dakkon Blackblade. The event depicted is one of her ploys, though it’s hard to tell which as she’s generally known for her machinations. The biggest end-game plan of hers that we know of involved Dihada absorbing the soul of an elder dragon slain by Dakkon; but it’s hard to say what that has to do with drawing and discarding cards.
DOMINARIA
Another mechanical and artistic call-back, the Drey Keeper here is beautifully illustrated by Kev Walker as a reference for his iconic card Deranged Hermit. The hermit is from Dominaria’s wilds, and there’s no reason to believe this druid isn’t either. It seems that the elves in Dominaria keep leaving their homes to live amongst the squirrels, and they always end up with long, curly white hair.
ALARA: ESPER
On the shard of Esper, the Ethersworn are a special rank among the etherium-infused: those that have replaced the majority of their body with etherium and become as near-perfect as physically possible (according to their beliefs). This sphinx is almost entirely etherium besides its feathers, meaning it’s an incredibly powerful member of the consortium.
UNKNOWN
Although a mechanical combination of the cards Lightning Helix and Shrapnel Blast, I’m not sure where this card is meant to take place. The figure throwing the molten metal is floating in the clouds, but there’s nothing else about them that gives us any insight about its origins. For now, it’s unknown!
DOMINARIA: Kush
Garth One-Eye is a powerful mage from ancient Dominaria, descended from a line of blue-green magic users but able to use all five colors of magic. He eventually ascended into a Planeswalker, and was introduced to the world in the first Magic the Gathering novel ever published: Arena. When Garth initially designed, he was able to “cast” any card from Alpha, but that proved to be too over-the-top, and designers settled for naming one iconic alpha card from each color instead. Read more about his design over on the Mothership.
RAVNICA
My vote for deepest cut in Modern Horizons 2 is still up in the air, but the general here is in contention. A noble Wojek of the Boros Legion on Ravnica, General Ferrous Rokiric was responsible for bringing order to the plane during a time when the Guildpact first went out-of-balance thousands of years ago. He recovered ten stone titans that acted as a nearly indestructible army, bringing peace and order back to Ravnica. Funnily enough, his name “Ferrous” literally means “made of iron”, and probably goes to describe his demeanor as a member of the Boros Legion. Read more about him on the wiki.
UNKNOWN
An ancient demonic planeswalker similar in appearance to Tevesh Szat (they both have tentacles instead of legs), Geyadrone was the villain of the comic Dakkon Blackblade from the 90’s. We don’t know about her origins or what plane she comes from, but she frequented Dominaria on more than one occasion to enact one of her schemes. You can read more about her on the Magic wiki or on the mothership.
UNKNOWN
You may have noticed the flying dragon in both of Geyadrone’s arts in this set. That’s most likely the elder dragon Piru, so if you have a Dominaria cube or deck, you can feel totally justified in including Geydrone Dihada in it.
Ravnica
The Gruul of Ravnica are so focused on bringing down civilization and following the old ways that they’ve invented a new form of magic that is designed specifically to incite rebellion: anarchomancy. The Gruul are always smashing something, best exemplified by the keyword Riot during our last visit to Ravnica. This shaman even shares the cityscale-styled tattoos of the Gruul, although I believe the card design was created as a mirror to the Modern-playable Izzet Goblin Electromancer.
Ikoria
Fun fact: this art was used for the front of the Modern Horizons 2 collectors booster boxes, except with a color-shift made by the packaging design team. When the box art was initially spoiled, the design of the creature had fans speculating we’d get another Ikoria mutate creature, perhaps a commander-worthy 5-color legend of some kind. Alas, not the case. You still can’t deny the obvious similarities the creatures in this art have to the elemental elks we saw last time we visited Ikoria, though, as well as a passing similarity to the multi-eyed appearance of their nightmares. This feels like it would work right at home in that world, especially because some of the most beautiful landscapes from Ikoria, the full-art Triomes, were done by the same artist as this piece: Robbie Trevino.
UNKNOWN
This terrifying planeswalker is unlike any we’ve seen before: Grist is a collective of insects and the very first non-humanoid planeswalker printed in black-border Magic. It is unknown if Grist is a single insect queen or a group of insects that share a spark, although designer Mark Rosewater has said that it’s likely that whenever Grist planeswalks, it takes insects of the new world into its hive and forms a new body out of them and the body of whatever animal nearby makes a good meal. Artist Victor Adame Minguez noted that in this rendition of Grist he made a large insect in the eye of the main skull: possibly the “real” Grist amongst all of the insects in the hive.
UNKNOWN
The fact that this art for Grist almost looks like a human at first glance, before you realize it’s actually a sentient mass of writhing, crawling, flesh-eating insects atop a human skeleton, is almost even more creepy than the more explicit full-art variant.
RAVNICA
This card looks plucked directly from the set War of the Spark, save for the ‘caring about discard’ mechanic. We’ve got a Lazotep Eternal amidst the iconic autumn foliage of last year’s revisit to Ravnica, and a Dimir reference in the flavour text. Getting to use the Amass mechanic is also cool because it supports casual amass decks that needed a little bit more juice after the mechanic left standard.
RAVNICA
Cryptozoology is the study of cryptids: creatures that have been claimed to exist but never proven to exist. In a world where the Simic guild can splice any creature with any other to create insane combinations like ‘Human Insect’ and ‘Elf Ooze’, Lonis searches for something even weirder. She may be a snake elf herself, but she’s hunting for the equivalent of Ravnican Bigfoot. According to her bio on the mothership this includes the likes of the noxbur shroom, the owlipedosaur, and the lamplight crab.
UNKNOWN
Sure, he’s got a ladder made of corpses (or tiny dolls?), but this zombie seems pretty generic to be a “master of death” on any plane we know of. Whoever he is, though, he’s a lich of some kind, and keeps coming back from death time and again.
INNISTRAD
Right in the flavour text, we get an answer for where Moderation takes place. It references “The Book of Bruna”, likely a holy book written for or about the archangel Bruna of the flight Alabaster. Bruna most notably did not survive the invasion of Innistrad by Emrakul despite her and her sister’s best efforts, though the people of Innistrad may still take solace in her memory and teachings. The statue in the artwork is clear evidence of that.
DOMINARIA
The Elder Dragons of Dominaria are the children of The Ur-Dragon, a primordial being that exists outside of space and time who is the origin of dragonkind. Elder Dragons on each plane are born to be the progenitors of that plane’s draconic races, with Tarkir and Strixhaven notably included. On Dominaria, there were two clutches of eggs that birthed forth the Elder Dragons. The first contained Nicol Bolas and Ugin, among others, and the second contained Piru and her siblings. Piru would eventually become the life-mate of the elder dragon Chromium, and would later mother the dragon Crosis the Purger with him. In the Dakkon Blackblade comic, the planeswalker Geyadrone forced Chromium and Piru to fight Dakkon Blackblade, and Dakkon slew Piru in short order. Her death released a massive torrent of energy that Geyadrone absorbed, and created a massive chasm in the earth known as the Dueling Chasm of Golthonor, which her flavour text is cleverly referencing.
INNISTRAD
Priest of Fell Rites is designed as a reference to the card Unburial Rites from the original Innistrad, with Unearth to functionally replace Flashboack. Being a reference to a card from Innistrad isn’t enough to tell us where this card is from, though. That said, warlocks in the woods doing evil magics fits nicely with the gothic horror theme of the plane, as we haven’t seen too many “witches of the woods” motifs otherwise. Honestly, I can think of no plane that fits the art better.
THEROS
Although we did just have a plane of red and blue giant wizards on Kaldheim, the giant in this art is very clearly a disciple of Keranos, the Therosian god of storms and prophecy. The card is a mechanical callback to the card Prophetic Bolt as well, giving the name ‘Prophetic Titan’ a fun double-meaning. Having blue-red care about delirium also echos the flavour of Keranos as well; you can see great flashes of insight about the future, but only those mad enough can comprehend it.
RAVNICA
Amazing. This is a Rakdos devil that’s wearing a mask of a devil atop its own face. The redundant theatricality is just what I’d expect from the multiverse’s most violent carnival. This card is also a clever design because it’s an above-curve creature with haste, likely giving you a trigger for the Rakdos mechanic Spectacle, while also asking you to discard a card to keep it, enabling the Rakdos mechanic Hellbent.
ULGROTHA
“Nope, no monsters in the forest. Nothing in there but squirrels.”
I’m beginning to think that Joskun of An-Havva is a little oblivious. Unless, of course, the squirrels ate all of the monsters in the woods. You can’t blame him though, he’s a simple man from a small town of dancing folks. I didn’t think we’d get another card on Ulgrotha, home of Baron Sengir, but I’m glad we did. For those unaware, An-Havva is a township on the plane of Ulgrotha, initialy visited back during the set Homelands.
AMONKHET
Aftermath is currently an Amonkhet-only mechanic, but more importantly, this depicts a great before-and-after scene that mirrors the cycles from Hour of Devastation. The art here shows the bounteous Luxa river, Magic’s analogue for the Egyptian Nile as the ‘before’, and shows a heart-piercer manticore about to be destroyed by falling meteors as the ‘after’; likely a nod to the rise of Nicol Bolas and his triggering of an apocalypse similar to the story of Exodus in the Judeo-Christian Old Testament.
ALARA
One of the very first cards added to the MtG-Multiverse when it was first printed in Planechase 2012, Shardless Agent is a beautifully explicit example of using new card designs to tell a story about the world they’re on since we last visited. After the set Alara Reborn, we saw the shards of Alara smashed together, but not much else beyond them discovering one another and preparing for war. Seeing an etherium-enhanced rogue with green mana, once entirely absent from Esper, explains that Alara has changed and those inhabiting it have adapted with the new environment. This agent has brand-new art as it is full-art, and gives us a great look at “modern” garb and style that we may find on future Alara outings.
THEROS
The amount of love we’ve gotten for Keranos in this set is making me think we’ll see more of him when we visit Theros next. As he’s one of my favorite gods on the plane, that’s really exciting news. He’s the god most commonly associated with Oracles, though many gods have their own, and the god of Horizons, Kruphix, has a few prophets.
THEROS
Like Kestia before her, Sythis is a legendary Nymph and enchantment creature, probably because not many creature types fit on a type line alongside “Legendary Enchantment Creature - ”. The Nymphs of Theros are aligned closely with the god Karametra, and Sythis here even has a helm and urn designed to pay homage to her god. If you ever see a Nymph, odds are good it’s from Theros: the plane is home to every Nymph in magic but one.
UNKNOWN
A few friends and I were discussing this card and how it looks like a heavy metal album cover, and it was brought up that because the figure is having the metal in his head melt that he could be on Mirrodin. Alas, although there aren’t any other known worlds where you’d describe a being “melting into slag”, this art certainly depicts nothing resembling Mirrodin or New Phyrexia.
DOMINARIA
As I mentioned during my discussion of Flametonuge Yearling, the Kavu are a race of creatures only found on Dominaria. They are, unlike other species of the plane, spawned directly from the world-soul Gaea as a response to the Phyrexian Invasion, and if not designed expressly to defend the plane, they did a great job doing so. Territorial Kavu here also has the Domain mechanic, which was one of the primary mechanics of the Invasion block. It was first introduced as a way to express the different factions on Dominaria coming together to fight off the imminent threat of Yawgmoth and the Phyrexian scourge.
SERRA’S REALM
This is the kind of thing I love to see on my premium magic products: call-outs and renderings of climactic scenes that never got the chance to shine in earlier sets. This is a great moment when Radiant, Archangel of Serra, tries to kill Urza planeswalker by plucking out his powerstone eyes (the Mightstone and Weakstone). She nearly succeeds, but in attempting to reunite the two stones she causes a massive explosion and is killed. The flavour text? Her last words, right as she realizes her mistake. Read more about Radiant on the wiki.
LORWYN
Well, it’s no Mulldrifter in limited, but it’s absolutely from the same plane. Wavesifter exactly the kind of mish-mash surreal elemental that Lorwyn does incredibly well. Part fish, part bird, part weird spiral-making entity, Wavesifter is looking for truths in seafoam. What mysteries does the water hide from a fish that lives above it?
WILDFIRE
In Part 2 of the Modern Horizons 2 review, I mention on the card Chance Encounter that Yusri is most likely from Wildfire. Given how little we’ve seen of the two arabian-themed planes in the modern era (Wildfire and Rabiah), there’s not too much to compare to. That being said, Yusri’s color identity here and creature type are the biggest clues to his origins. Wildfire is home to the Emberwilde Caliph, a red and blue aligned consortium of Djinni that rule the plane. Wildfire also has five confirmed Efreet, while Rabiah has four confirmed Efreet. Neither are particularly visually distinct or unified (ah, early Magic) but we at least know that Rabiah had a sub-theme of the wild spirits of the world being in every color besides white, which was opposed to them. For now Yusri is put on Wildfire, but it’s a coin flip away from going the other way.
Wildfire
Seeing the inside of this temple in the ‘normal’ art for Yusri should shed some light on his location for us, but I’m not familiar enough with Middle Eastern architecture to parse just what we could learn.
Part 4 Is up next
Wow, that’s three of four parts finished. Tune in later in the week for the final part in the series, and for my wrap-up where I add up all of the planes we visit as a part of Modern Horizons 2 and dig into some of the art direction and design themes of the set. Until next time, enjoy playing with Modern Horizons 2, and as always, let me know your thoughts.
-Nick