17 KiB
[BST][D][FF]So... if you found yourself as a Magic: The Gathering-type Planeswalker in Generic High Fantasy Land... what would you do?
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Author: u/Gavinfoxx *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4ctgyx/bstdffso_if_you_found_yourself_as_a_magic_the/
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Score: 12
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Created: 2016-04-01T02:35:03
Post:
So let's say you go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow in some sort of generic Fantasy setting. You're healthier (mentally, physically, emotionally, and oh you are immortal and super hard to permanently kill) than you've ever been, you don't seem to age, and events come to pass (work with me here!) that you find yourself a Planeswalker, with no way to get home (let's say that you're a modified copy of your original self, and the planes you will ever have access to will never be able to get to our Earth, just copy information FROM, which is how you got here in the first place, or whatever. I dunno, point is, you'll never get home).
Now, let's also assume that Land Magic / Planeswalker Magic doesn't function precisely like it does in the game, the many different variants of the card game being an imperfect simulation of the rules you find yourself working under, and you have to actually travel to different areas, spend time bonding with lands with mana wells, research spells and summons, and eventually Walk from your Generic High Fantasy Land to a Trickier, Less Dreary, More Interesting Generic High Fantasy Land, whereupon you will be able to bring your bonded lands into being locally and reshape the Realm and do all that Planeswalky stuff.
But the moment you leave your dreary tutorial realm to go find access to the cool stuff and really change things, you are at risk from dying due to hostile Planeswalkers, but the rewards of possible access to the better magic and the training wheels taken off would make it worth it, but you won't ALWAYS find yourself in a duel or something; you'll have a lot of downtime to use your magic.
What do you do?
What don't you do?
What spells/cards do you research as high priority? Consider the things that are rarer or more often banned or otherwise 'weird' as harder to research and get.
What game mechanics do you put as high priority to figure out what you are working under? How do you figure out your rules?
What weird side effects would you be wary of? What is in the fiction or lore that is especially notable to beware?
How would you keep your values and goals and sense of self given the massive amount of power inherent in the magic system? Including the very strong possibility that the style of magic itself will warp your personality, depending on what you favor?
Who or what forces would you specifically fear? How would you escape their notice or fight them?
What do you cast? How do you build your 'deck'? Assume you have to build it card by card, until you get up to some (60? Another format?) limit.
You'd end up using your magic outside of a duel, for a lot of time -- what would you use it to do, what spells would you cast, and when?
What creative ways would you use to try and 'break' the magic system to do unexpected things? What unexpected things would you try to do?
Comments:
u/legendofdrag [+20] (22 minutes later)
Learn artifice, because almost every single artificer in magic (planeswalker or not) has been extremely high on the powerful wizard scale. Also blue is the color of magic itself as well as the color that can magically make yourself smarter, so focusing on that seems like the best bet.
As far as escaping notice, blue is also the color of teleportation, invisibility, mind control, and flight. Even with access to only effects that are "common" it's the color that has the most utility.
u/DaystarEld [+8] Pokémon Professor (5 hours later)
Jace is OP for a reason. As Rational!Harry remarks:
Mind is the foundation of our power as humans, any kind of magic that affects it is the most important sort of magic there is.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+5] Mouse Army (16 hours later)
Also counterspells aka meta-magic.
u/Soothsilver [+4] (3 days later)
Also time travel magic.
u/FishNetwork [+14] (24 minutes later)
The scenario, in a lot of ways, seems akin to "What if you received a HUGE inheritance?"
It would represent a fundamental change in the sorts of problems that I have and the way that I'd relate to the world.
I'm used to thinking about problems at an interpersonal scale. I don't think I'd have a great intuition for what I should do with the power to shape nations.
So, I suppose my initial plan would be to wander for a while, meet people and see things.
I suppose my big "fear" would come from the possibility that there's some magical-incentive for other people to go hunting other Planeswalkers.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+6] Roll the Dice on Fate (6 hours later)
At my starting level of power I'm about as vulnerable as I can ever expect to be. Therefore I would be very cautious and grow my power slowly, avoiding altogether worlds where the means to kill me are common and trying very hard not to make any enemies. Also, this would be my only chance to live a normal life without the dynamics that power brings. Now, I don't particularly put much stock in a normal life, but if I'm only going to get one chance at it I may as well give it a go. Only once I reach a high level of power would I make more overt moves.
u/Pakars [+4] (8 hours later)
I'm pretty sure that many people here would lean towards colorless arifacts and Blue, with smatterings of White/Black.
Scry would be extremely high on my list of effects to get access to, off the top of my head. The divination-like series of effects(card draw, scry, loot, shuffle, and tutor effects) are incredibly powerful in game, and in setting they'd be just as ridiculous, since most of them involve seeing likely possible futures.
Breaking the system actually isn't extremely difficult. The first things I would work on would be getting access to would be things like Soulfire Grand Master and Time Walk (Or any similar effects - There are more common versions of the same things, if I remember correctly) - Time Walk with Buyback means you literally have all the time in the world to amass whatever you need for victory.
You're in the Narutoverse and some big bad mean S-rank ninja are after you(Or choose your own deathworld with suitably dangerous creatures)? Start a time walk chain, walk on over to them and prime some detcord.
Walk The Aeons is 'Just' a rare, instead of a mythic or legendary(Most time walk effects are rare).
If that's too hard, you can use get and use spells that shuffle Time Walk back into your library and reclaim it with a tutor spell, but that's more expensive in general, even if it would be easier to assemble('common' and 'uncommon' effects - Archaeomancer, Memory Journey, Runic Repetition, etc.).
Jace is the scariest planeswalker in the entire setting, for good reason.
I might reply to myself with answers to the rest of the questions later, I guess.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (2 days later)
This is a remarkably specific question. Are you setting up a quest or a story, by any chance? Perhaps an SI?
Things I would want to know:
- Can I die from deck depletion?
- What is the maximum size of my deck?
- Are my spells like cards, where I use them once and then they're gone to the graveyard and not usable again without some sort of recovery?
- What determines the research cost of a spell?
- Do I have a graveyard, and can I animate things from it?
- How can I predict the location of mana wells?
- How many mana wells are there on this plane, and where are they? If the answer is "a lot and not horribly far", then I'll stay on this plane and bond everything with completionist frenzy. By the time I leave the tutorial I want to have several hundred mana available, of all colors.
If its research cost weren't ridiculous I would want to get Future Sight as quickly as possible. Combine that with a ton of mana and you can play as much as you want.
u/Gavinfoxx [+2] (2 days later)
Whistles innocently Nothing to see here, EJ...
u/eaglejarl [+1] (2 days later)
I'll be interested to see it when you launch. Make sure you link here.
u/Dwood15 [+1] (11 days later)
I'm interested in a si.
u/gabbalis [+2] (11 hours later)
What weird side effects would you be wary of? What is in the fiction or lore that is especially notable to beware?
The lore contains The Mending. Basically, all the BS planeswalkers were pulling: Throwing planes at each other, traveling through time, world-shattering duels... took it's toll on the multiverse, and caused time rifts to begin to appear, leaking energy from the multiverse and causing it to start falling apart. After several walkers fixed the issue by filling those gaps with their Sparks, the multiverse had enough energy to retaliate, and it nerfed the nature of the Spark itself in the event called The Mending. Long story short, walkers lost most of their godlike power and immortality, and basically became glorified worldwalking archmages.
So, step 1) try not to do anything too worldshattering and,
step 2) someone's going to screw it up eventually even if it takes millenia before it happens, so prepare for a mending. Nicol Bolas managed to regain much of his power through a gambit to eat a chunk of a plane's mana, and Liliana managed to buy eternal youth from some demons post-mending.
u/gabbalis [+1] (11 hours later)
Next we have things like the Eldrazi or Phyrexia. It isn't clear whether we can expect to see these threats in particular, but in general, one should remain vigilant for threats of the general description: "Plane Eaters", and "Interplanar Infections and/or Expansionist Empires" Basically the solution to those is more or less "Just run. Get help."
u/None [+2] (11 hours later)
Get the fuck out before Yawgmoth shows up.
u/dsraider [+2] Goblin King (2 days later)
Going Black would probably make you a lot of enemies right off the bat. People tend not to like necromancers taking up residence nearby...
Going too strongly White could also do the same. The forces of evil might try to pick a fight with you. However, the ability to heal would be very useful, and so would protection spells. In real life you would probably have to worry about random arrows from bushes as much as dragons.
The more neutral colors such as Red, Green, and Blue would be best from a survival perspective. Maybe mix some White in, especially without green.
I'd probably thus end up going Simic Blue Green. I'd provides a nice mix of meta magic, draw/scry, healing, and protection. This would make me hard to find, and hard to kill.
I also would totally use magic to create incredibly dangerous monsters, like the Simic guild does. Why use generic ones when you can make your own?
u/FluffyButterBiscuit [+2] (10 days later)
What do you do?
Immediately try to break whatever limits are present.
What don't you do?
Attract the attention of big scary things before I can reasonably escape them/beat them.
What spells/cards do you research as high priority? Consider the things that are rarer or more often banned or otherwise 'weird' as harder to research and get.
If I can find them, Intruder Alarm + Sprout Swarm gives me an arbitrarily large force of saprolings. If that doesn't work, Presence of Gond + Midnight Guard. If that doesn't work, find some other way to make the mana or card limit irrelevant. This assumes that there are no significant drawbacks to having an arbitrarily large following of mana constructs at my beck and call. If that works, find Ashnod's Altar, Gemstone Array, and Skullclamp. If that doesn't work, there's other options for the same result.
What game mechanics do you put as high priority to figure out what you are working under? How do you figure out your rules?
Is mana burn a problem, what happens if I control a large amount of creatures/permanents, how true to life is the 4 per deck construction rule, etc. Test all of these by trying to cast more spells and seeing where I can't.
What weird side effects would you be wary of? What is in the fiction or lore that is especially notable to beware?
Mana Burn, which is drawing on mana and then just letting it sit unused in your head without a safe vessel to store it in, the Eldrazi, which are world devouring eldritch beings beyond comprehension, and Nicol Bolas, who is responsible for everything bad in the Multiverse, probably. Also Phyrexia, but you can usually run away from those guys.
How would you keep your values and goals and sense of self given the massive amount of power inherent in the magic system? Including the very strong possibility that the style of magic itself will warp your personality, depending on what you favor?
I heavily favor green and black. This means that I should let natural instincts tell me what to do, and my instincts are telling me that I can do whatever I want as long as I can pay the cost since I'm the most important person to myself. That said, realistically speaking I'd probably keep a journal of what I want and why and consult it once in a while. There's no way that ascending to relative godhood isn't going to completely skew my priorities since most of those are based on ensuring survival and having the power to crush worlds tends to mess with that.
Who or what forces would you specifically fear? How would you escape their notice or fight them?
The aforementioned Eldrazi because depending on how you look at their lore they're either going to try to swallow me whole which is a problem or they swallow magic itself which makes it difficult to fight them. That said, fifteen flying squirrels can take down Emrakul, so I'm not /that/ worried.
What do you cast? How do you build your 'deck'? Assume you have to build it card by card, until you get up to some (60? Another format?) limit.
Whatever cards are required for an infinite combo, something that makes angel tokens, and bubbling cauldron. If we're relying only on commons and uncommons, Midnight Guard, Presence of Gond, Thermopod, Fecundity, and Gemstone Array are all in that category and allow for infinite mana of any color as well as infinite cards. The sequence probably goes Gemstone Array, so I don't have to make more than four mana bonds, then Midnight Guard, then Presence, then Thermopod, then Fecundity, then viscera seer, then bubbling cauldron, then Angelic Accord. Once this is secured, Lich's mirror.
You'd end up using your magic outside of a duel, for a lot of time -- what would you use it to do, what spells would you cast, and when?
Mostly scrying via viscera seer and researching to see if my abuse of the system is causing huge entropy somewhere.
u/Gavinfoxx [+2] (10 days later)
Damn. That's the sort of answer I want to hear about...
u/Gavinfoxx [+2] (26 days later)
I finally started my mtg sorta self insert quest thing!
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/planecrawler-quest-mtg-semi-si-quest.28496/
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (a day later)
If I can't go home, but I can copy things from home, copy home. Surely there are 4 biovisionaries on earth.
u/Gavinfoxx [+2] (a day later)
Well, YOU can't copy people from home (unless you find a spell that lets you. You can go look for one if you want, it'd have to be from a real card though. Do you know one?)... but someone or something can, presumably with significant limits.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (2 days later)
Sounds like summon spells and land copy spells or card draw spells might work.
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (a day later)
Any of the wish spells, probably.
u/luminarium [+1] (17 days later)
There are wish spells in MTG!?
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (18 days later)
They allow you to take some sort of card "you own from outside the game" into your hand, usually restricted by card type. In tournaments, that means from the sideboard, outside usually any. It sounds like it corresponds pretty directly to "Get stuff from my homeworld in here!"
u/luminarium [+1] (17 days later)
Phase 1
I would learn magic, spells, especially the very useful ones, focusing on protection and escape early on and gradually progressing to more versatility-granting spells.
Phase 2
I would create a religion with myself as its deity, and gradually spread it out to all the world.
Phase 3
I would use my followers to take over the plane, with a focus on precision strikes against the leadership of the opposition, with the followers acting as the spies to find the ones that go into hiding.
Phase 4
I would start instituting humanist, progressive ideologies throughout the plane and progress to developing a functional plane-wide government to establish peace.
Phase 5
I would start focusing everyone's work on technological advancement.