Welcome back, loreseekers! Today I'm back to tackle our third and final Magic IP set of the year, and what a way to go out. I have been so happy to see the excitement with which people have taken to Edge of Eternities - Magic's biggest push outside of the traditional sword and sorcery realm yet. To quote one of my favorite terrible sci-fi movies: If you're not living on the Edge, you're taking up too much space. If you know the movie I'm talking about, you also rented those Transmorpher style knock-off DVDs from Blockbuster, and I'm deeply sorry.

Edge of Eternities is the first set where I have an actual byline on the Magic mothership, so if you haven't check out the Planeswalker's Guide to the Edge of Eternities and The Legends of Edge of Eternities, please do! But also, remember I'm not Wizards of the Coast staff and my suppositions here do not constitute canon.

If you haven't yet read Edge of Eternities Design: Allusions vs. Tropes, you should! It talks a lot about how Magic is handling references in genre sets going forward, and it's an interesting read. With all of that out of the way, let's dive in!

The Weatherlight Seriema Crew

The Seriema by Sergey Glushakov

The first thing I want to tackle here is the crew of The Seriema, our new 'Weatherlight' in outer space (although I should note, the original [Weatherlight] also went to outer space at one point). The Edge doesn't overload us with legends this time around, and doubles down on character building a handful instead, showing us their growth into who we know today. Alpharael, Dreaming Acolyte shows us our Monoist character before his disillusionment and subsequent death, a fate altered by The Endstone. This results in Alpharael, Stonechosen, the version of the character we follow in the story. Similarly, we see Haliya, Ascendant Cadet as a young Summist and then coming into her own in Haliya, Guided by Light.

Mm'menon, Authors Exile was once a leader among the Uthros Combine, but was exiled and took up with Tezzeret, Cruel Captain, becoming Mm'menon, the Right Hand. Mm'menon is now Tezzeret's number two in the new criminal consortium he's setting up on the Edge. Syr Vondam, Sunstar Exemplar and Syr Vondam, the Lucent, don't really show any growth or change, just that Vondam is a Sunstar badass. Our original crew of two feature Sami, Ship's Engineer living their life aboard the Wurm Speaker before its ill fate, resulting in a Sami, Wildcat Captain that's more of a reckless outlaw, as we see with them gaining the rogue type. Their first mate, Tannuk, Steadfast Second was once Tannuk, Memorial Ensign, before his own exile from the Kav for committing a grievous crime (basically, hitting the lever on the trolley problem).

In any case, I think this is a really cool way to handle a set's Legends as central characters and I hope this becomes the norm going forward.

The... Fomori-Eldrazi Conflict?

One of the massive reveals, with big implications for Magic lore, is that the Eldrazi have been to the Edge, and that the Fomori fought them long ago before vanishing. This is cemented in Anticausal Vestige, our one and only Eldrazi in Edge of the Eternities. In the main art for Anticausal Vestige, the Eldrazi appears to be something similar to the broods we know. With a skull plate and bifurcated limbs, it appears to be of Ulamog, the Defiler's brood. What exactly that means, we don't really know yet!

It's also worth noting that the Anticausal Vestige doesn't really look like it's having a good time here. It's cradling its head with its limbs, almost like it's in pain. That's not behavior we've seen from Eldrazi before. Could it be that existing outside the bounds of the multiverse is bad for the Eldrazi? We also don't know! But it's fun to think about.

Guess Who's Back?

Tezzeret, Cruel Captain by Magali Villeneuve

Tezzeret, Cruel Captain is back, and this time he has an upgrade. We last saw Tezzeret fleeing the consequences of his own actions, having finally gotten what he wanted: a new body made of darksteel. You can see in his artwork that his body is different: while the shape is a similar style, it now has a darker cast and those flowing motes of light. That's because he's replaced most of his original etherium body into one that can never be hurt. And he's turned colorless to boot, as while etherium artifacts have an inherent color, darksteel has almost always been colorless. Neither we, nor Tezzeret, know for sure how he ended up on the Edge.

I'd also like to point out the course correction on Tezzeret's features. Since his debut, Tezzeret has skewed darker and darker in skin tone, which combined with his dreadlocks (a feature French artist Aleksi Briclot shared at the time), led many to assume Tezzeret was black. But Tezzeret's original appearances in the webcomics and cards like Chris Rahn's Tinker in From The Vault: Exiled depicted him with pale skin and white-blonde hair. But Tezzeret the Seeker had a medium brown appearance, which was followed by Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas's gray pallor, and those led directly to the ethnicity confusion with Tezzeret the Schemer. Tezzeret, Cruel Captain addresses this and depicts him as a slightly tan, but obviously fair skinned man without the characteristic dreads.

What's Old is New Again

Astelli Reclaimer by Carly Milligan

Edge of Eternities features a bunch of classic Magic fantasy creatures reimagined for a space opera setting. The angels of the setting are called Astelli (Astelli Reclaimer), beings of magic born from the same process that creates a supervoid. They're leaders among the Summits, who worship them for being incarnations of a sun's light, while the Astelli themselves resent the collapse of their mother-stars. By contrast, the Susurians like Susurian Voidborn are said to have emerged from the supervoid as well, but as an aspect of its all consuming hunger, not its light. Similarly, a third stellar force exists in dragons: Nebula Dragon and Nova Hellkite seem to indicate these cosmic dragons are born from the stellar change of their host stars. Lhurgoyf has also been reimagined as a cosmic force in Cosmogoyf.

The set features two classic Dominarian creatures, the Eumidian insectfolk (first seen in Xira Arien) and the Kavu (first seen during Invasion) as our major alien species this time around. The Eumidians are a very common species on the Edge, but because of Terrasymbiosis, their process of terraforming by changing themselves along with their planet, individual Eumidian broods can be as alien to each other as anyone else. I thought this was a really cool detail and look forward to seeing Eumidians from other cultures in the future. The Kavu this time around are no longer bestial creatures grown by Gaea, but a partially subterranean species that are famous for their mining (not unlike space dwarves). They're unique to Sothera, so it's unlikely we'll see very many on our next visit. Something fun to note about their starships, like

Debris Field Crusher, they're all converted mining vessels!

It's not clear if Ragost, Deft Gastronaut is a homarid, he's listed as a lobsterfolk, but it's neat to see so many Homarid-ish creatures we've gotten over the last year or two. If Homarid IS following a bunch of other unique Magic types to being a more general one, we likely won't see that change until it would matter. Also note, based on his story, it seems likely Ragost is the chef aboard Inspirit, Flagship Vessel, the ship full of intelligent mechanics adrift in the Garden of Apeiron.

Guidelight Found

Codecracker Hound by Julia Metzger

Just early this year (if you can believe it), we were introduced to the Guidelight Voyagers, led by Mendicant Core, Guidelight. These characters were our first in-universe Magic robots, and stood out from the rest of the crowd by being from a mysterious home they didn't know how to get back to.

Well, Codecracker Hound seems to have given us the answer to that months-old mystery, as it features a Guidelight Synergist in the background. We know now that the Edge features robots of all different kinds generally referred to as mechans. Mendicant Core seems to be a self-aware mechan, called an android, leading a group of unconscious robots called drones. It's a great self-reference between two of my favorite sets in Magic ever, both by creative lead Miguel Lopez.

We're not quite sure what this means yet, but it seems like the Voyagers were stranded in the multiverse in a way similar to how Tezzeret has now found himself stranded in the Edge. Personally, I think this is a lot of fun, and having them be mere middle-of-the-road contenders in the Ghirpur Grand Prix shows that the Edge's technology doesn't automatically give them... an edge.

Mysteries of Sothera

Sothera is a star system with a lot of mysteries, especially when it comes to Evendo, Waking Haven and Uthros, Titanic Godcore, as well as the Wurmwall and the Garden of Apeiron. How does one little star system have so much going on? Let's dive into it a little bit.

Evendo was a planet encased by ice until the shattering of Kavaron, Memorial World. The debris from Kavaron caused it to begin to thaw, which awakened the dormant Eumidian seedship under the ice. The Eumidians have been expanding their terrasymbiosis project ever since, but as they do so, they keep encountering huge creatures, like the Glacier Godmaw, Ouroboroid, or even Baloth Prime. But more importantly, we learn Evendo's freezing may not have been natural. The Cryogen Relic hints at an ancient hand at work here, freezing the planet for reasons unknown. Perhaps to keep it contained?

Then there's Uthros. We know the Uthros Combine is studying the corpse of a dead space god inside the core, and we've gotten hints as to its nature from things like Gigastorm Titan, but what is it, really? And why is there a Vaar node (shown in Temporal Intervention) in the Wurmwall? The Vaar are elusive beings who ascended to the Hylderhigh (Binding the Old Gods) millennia ago, leaving behind nodes to connect them to the physical realm. The Endstone clearly wants to be taken by the Vaar, but again, why? We don't have answers this time around, but it seems like something dramatic happened in Sothera millennia ago, and what we're seeing are the results. Perhaps it was once the site of an ancient interstellar war?

Cards like Bygone Colossus are designed to stoke the imagination for what wonders... and horrors, will await us on our return to the Edge. And speaking of horrors...

Sliver: Resurrection

Thrumming Hivepool by Rob Rey

There's a few cards this time around that tell a mini-story about the last days of a ship lost in the Wurmwall. In Wurmwall Sweeper there's a hint of a sliver, hiding in the lower left corner of the art. Through the flavor text's decrypted logs, things go more and more wrong as the crew encounter creatures like the Comet Crawler and then the Insatiable Skittermaw, but the true horror is at the bottom. Thrumming Hivepool gives us a look at the Edge's own sliver problem, and it's interesting to note how they share features with the other creatures in this little mini-story.

Another fun fact about the mini-story, it may be what happened to Sami, Wildcat Captain's old crew! Their ship, the Wurm Speaker, crashed into the Wurmwall and Sami was the only survivor. They were rescued by Tannuk, Steadfast Second, which was the start to their partnership. Could the fate of the Wurmwall Sweeper be what befell the Wurm Speaker? I don't know, but I like the idea and it would make Sami's comments that slivers aren't real deliciously darkly ironic.

Puns and References

I'm running out of word count, but before I go I wanted to call out some of my favorite references and puns in the setting. Full Bore means 'to go all out', but a bore is also the term for the drilling tool this Kav has. Invasive Maneuvers is a play on the term 'Evasive Maneuvers'. Lithobraking is a term referring to a spacecraft deliberately using an impact with a celestial body to stop. That's also known as crashing. The team settled on Melded Moxite as the term for the rare fuel source on the Edge, moxite being both a play on Magic's famous magical stones, the moxen, and a play on the nuclear fuel of the same name (Mixed oxide fuel, or MOX).

Red Tiger Mechan is our on-the-nose Voltron reference, which amusingly does not have any voltron (as in the Magic archetype) abilities. Close Encounter is a term for an encounter with an alien species, but also a pun referencing the fisticuffs happening here. Glacier Godmaw feels like a strong homage to The Empire Strikes Back, when the Millennium Falcon escapes the exogorth. Ragost, Deft Gastronaut could arguably be a nod towards the infamous lobster Doctor Zoidberg from Futurama. Vote Out is a reference to the popular hidden role video game Among Us. Dauntless Scrapbot is a reference to Pixar classic Wall-E. The Dominion Bracelet is a nod to the classic sci-fi novels by Doc E. E. Smith's Lensman series. And finally, Lost In Space is a nod to the classic TV Show of the same name.

And just like that show, I'm off the air! See you again soon!