I feel like Rakdos has been "dumb"ified a tad. Not nearly the character he used to be, in the Magic story...

@@jacob4920 fr, from the art of the cards I feel like he's how akul is described here, and ends up doing almost nothing

Having read the epilogues - thats not that far off, lol

Why would he call Vraska, who is a WOMAN, a "SON of a bitch"?? Wouldn't Vraska just be... a bitch?! lol

🤠

Perhaps the real Big Score was the friends we made along the way 😊

Oko needs to get parenting advice from Mando. I mean, Yuma...

It's a perfect JUNCTION, you might say! Which explains its' inherent importance to the multiverse!

I hope, If there are future returns to Thunder Junction, it will play up the trope of it being a place where people and groups can 'start over.' How cool would it be to see outcasts from Tarkir who want to restart the clans under Khans? Would members of the GRUUL clans want to leave Ravnica for a more welcoming environment? I hope there is a lot of possibility in the plane with Omenpaths to get more exploration time. And, the importance of it as a stable Omenpath nexus might get a certain Living Dragon Narcissistic Guildpact all bent out of shape too

@@jacob4920 so glad dominaria is the center of the multiverse. wait, no, ravnica is the center of the multiverse...

@@goncaloferreira6429 I feel like the Omen Tree rewrote everything (including depriving us of A LOT of Planeswalkers, which still ticks me off!). The new center might be someplace other than those two, just because of what the Omen Tree did. I blame Elesh Norn. It's her fault.

@@jacob4920 i blame bad storytelling.

Fuck it, we’ll buy another book

Funnily enough, I intend to DM a brief adventure in Thunder Junction... Wish me luck, and goddamnit do I wish there were more info out there. Like a setting book!

@@CasualLoLAddict remember to track how many other planes are using this dust ball as an outpost of sorts, and the izzet building literal communication mana towers and infrastructures from ravnica

This was beautiful

Meanwhile Malcolm be like 😑

@@thatonefirekestral Unfortunately Malcolm and Breeches were stated to have left the outlaw gang after that initial mission - only being there because Vraska wanted them to

I'm certainly not gonna suffer through WoTC's attempts at writing. Ryan presents it so well.

That would actually require Wizards to have TALENTED writers on their staff. Which I'm not sure is even the case anymore. Maybe it was, at one time, but their story writing since "War of the Spark" leaves a lot to be desired.

Rakdos almost feels like The Hulk, in how strong/dumb his character seems. I feel like Rakdos used to be utilized better than that.

@@jacob4920 Rakdos has basically always been, effectively, a character who shows up to be a big demon that usually jobs to sell the bigger threat (Kraj and whatnot, and Bolas, etc.). This is like the first time in a story he's actually NOT jobbed.

well, they DID change, just for the worse. maybe once the writer gets too good they fire them and/or they were replaced with AI...

Annie has to actually focus and activate her power; it's not running all the time. She had no reason to suspect Ashiok was anyone else. She was more worried about Oko, and watching out for Kellan. Plus, Ashiok isn't around all that much in the story, so it's not like Annie even had many opportunities to look them over.

@@MagicArcanum I think it's a pretty minor nitpick. Annie was suspicious enough of Oko in disguise when he first showed up. I can't imagine Ashiok showing up being any less suspicious than that. But I think it's a pretty minor oversight, and can be explained away as easily as Jace making Annie feel less suspicious.

@@MagicArcanum c’mon. It’s a crew full of outlaws. She uses her powers the moment she meets Oko. And then innately trusts everybody to never use it again? Supremely convenient to the story like I said. There is a scene where she is introduced to the entire crew including Ashiok.

She uses them on Oko because he shows up and says he just walked across the whole desert to reach her, and she realizes he doesn't have a speck of dust on him. So, she was suspicious. When Ashiok appears and explains their motives for hiring a team to crack the vault, she has nothing to be suspicious of. Especially because Eriette is there and pretty much vouches for Ashiok, as they have a history. I know it's a gang of outlaws but "honor among thieves" is still a thing and until Annie had an explicit reason to take a closer look at someone, she just wasn't going to. I'm not even sure it would have mattered - if she did use her eye on Ashiok right at the start, she'd know it was somebody in a disguise, but wouldn't have necessarily known Jace. So what would she do? Tell everyone else "this mysterious faceless person who hired us is actually somebody else behind all the smoke?" So long as the money is good, the gang probably still wouldn't care, right?

@@MagicArcanum Good point regarding honor among thieves. My inclination to investigate anyone remotely interesting is certainly a bit meta, from RPG games and stuff. And yeah, I agree I don't think it would have affected the plot meaningfully either.

Instead of bad guy avengers, it’s more like Ocean’s 11 (but we immediately make it Ocean’s 13 when we add Kaervek and Umezawa). Throw in some other heist and treasure movie tropes and send it to print. That’s what this story was like.

can't geralf create zombies? and gisa then reanimates them?

Like, how was Jace benefitting from spreading nightmares on Theros when we first visited?

That was the real Ashiok. Jace only impersonated Ashiok for this story. All will be explained when I recap the two epilogue chapters, which exclusively deal with Jace, Vraska, and Loot.

@@MagicArcanum I had a feeling I misunderstood. Looking forward to it!

Ashiok was Ashiok in Wilds of Eldraine, except at the very end. Jace was the Ashiok who let Eriette out of prison.

Just Jace doing more "Jace Things" in the Magic story. I roll my eyes whenever he appears in it, because there are always more questions than answers left in the story, when Jace gets done doing his crap. I really wish that character would have died, at the end of the Phyrexian War. But dumb characters in the MtG story are apparently immortal...

Glad you enjoyed it!

It is supposed to mimic the American West and the gold rush, in which a "new" territory was flooded by people looking to take advantage of the resources and trade opportunities.

And every other Phyrexian planeswalker that wasn’t scrapped

I mean, the point of Oko is that he's changed and gotten harsher over time to the point that he's resembling the very people he once railed against.

@@charcharmunr Yeah, both his appearances include him going "Hmm... Am I the bad guy? Eh, who cares" whilst his mention in WOE where Kellan's mom talks about him has her go "He wanted to do good, but he was so filled with hate and wish to burn the world down it overpowered it" (and that was a long while before we get to the present where he reached full blown "I'll just do whatever I want even if it's pretty much entirely unrelated from my original goals")

Oko took his employment very seriously; he felt any personal issues to be resolved would have to wait til he was off the clock. When he says he will come back for Kellan, while he clearly doesn't want to, I don't think he was lying about it. On some level he did want to connect with the boy, but also had no intention of ever helping him or bailing him out, and absolutely not at the cost of mission success. Kellan to Oko was a stranger with a connection that made him curious, and the potentiality to prove his usefulness. He expected Kellan to be useful and self sufficient, and then would consider opening up to him. Kellan wanted the kind of unconditional devotion that comes naturally to him from his father, something Oko is probably not even capable of. That mismatch, compounded with the opposition of their moral alignments was a recipe for interpersonal disaster between them. Oko lied to, used, and manipulated Kellan just the same as he would anyone else, but didn't denounce him until Kellan directly attacked him. Had Kellan just waited to be rescued, I think Oko would have returned to free him eventually and although he absolutely would have continued to use, deceive, and manipulate him, over time maybe Kellan could have reawakened some shred of empathy in Oko. We'll never know now though.

Vraska knew it was Jace the whole time and they were working together to get what was in the vault. The "betrayal" part of the story spotlight was that she wasn't loyal to Oko, who thought he was calling the shots but was in fact being manipulated by Jace and Vraska the whole time.

@@MagicArcanum I'm aware of that, but I'm just saying I'm pretty sure they could have just paid the gang for the job. Hey, the thing in the vault isn't for you, but we do have money.

@@sethb3090 you could make an argument that them paying a group of villains would probably have consequences, because those villains will likely use that money for villainy but also, dunno how wise it is to start out your new life as parents with a group of motivated super murderers plotting to come after you, probably not great parenting putting your kid in the middle of that

Annie has to activate the eye. It's not running all the time. She had no reason to be suspicious of Ashiok so she never took a close look at them (not that they were in the same room very often anyway)

He's an otter planeswalker next set

@@robjohnsonmusicandgaming I think that's just an old ral skinned as an otter. They're in MH3 tho. 👍

….and I thought the jokes from the Rakdos guild were forced

For like three years I tried to do weekly story time videos (or at least 2-3 per month) and I quickly used up interesting topics without getting a lot of views. It was a fast track to burn-out, so now I focus on the big story recaps for each main set, and fill the other weeks with other content that is still story-driven (like my new series The Question, where I usually share a fun and thematic deck idea based on some element of the story or events happening in my own life)

@@MagicArcanum I gotchu. :< Its just that, its my selfish wish to have a weekly arcanum story. or even a daily 30 second story bites. I like your narration style a lot. :(

Isn't ashiok Jace?

You might want to hear the recap for the epilogue chapters before you decide that.

Yes, that's what the epilogue chapters are all about, and I'll cover them in a future video.

@@MagicArcanum awesome, thanks man! Meant it as a critique of Wizards, not the video!

We know he promises Satoru technology unlike anything found on Kamigawa, and he hyped up how much of an adventure it would be for Rakdos (who was mostly bored with life on Ravnica anyway and wanted something new to do). For the others it is less clear. Presumably Geralf is there to study bodies and get new ideas for his own stitching, and Gisa came to make sure he doesn't die where she can't play with his corpse. Malcolm and Breeches are "in" because they genuinely like working with Vraska. Eriette owed Ashiok for getting her out of prison. Kaervek might have been hired for actual money since he's low on resources but high on ambition.

thunder junction is just that, a junction it exists to have all the main characters pass through (in rootin' tootin' cowboy outfits)

@@colinbamsey5262 clever with the play on words there

Unfortunately, in that case, I believe the amount of bodies was specifically just folks who got moved to the plane for the whole corpsipide thing.

That's explained in the epilogue chapters which come after this story and I will recap in a future video.

Their current work is 4 years in the future. When they realize something is a problem and say they are going to change it.. it takes a while for the changes to happen. Like, the set you will play 3 or so years from now, is the set that Wizards are currently working to create.

That's explained in the epilogue chapters which come after this story and I will recap in a future video.

Thunder Junction is a plane based on the Old American West. When a character goes to Kaldheim, does anyone complain about them wearing thick furs or a helmet the way a Viking would? Dressing in the style of the plane is a totally normal thing in mtg. If your plane is the wild west, why would your characters choose to wear their normal clothes and look like an obvious interplanar visitor? This is just an example of people not recognizing the American West as a legitimate and respectable culture. It's not a meme. It was once a way of life, and still lives in the culture of the region.

I don't know about that. It's pretty rare for a card to depict a character, location, or event as it stands at the conclusion of the story - plus, Tarnation needs to exist under the vault. The card Tarnation Vista makes it look like Tarnation itself is quite large and the Fomori Vault card doesn't seem to show any part of the city, even rubble. So if we are to believe the Vault card shows the vault after it fell for some reason, it's still a little too convenient for it to have perfectly squashed every inch of Tarnation but also didn't fall deeper into the big quarry that was featured in the story.