Conversation: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2026-02-22 12:28:16)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2026-02-22 12:28:16)
Divert (You may have damage that would be dealt to this creature be dealt to you instead.)
Hydra X (X additional creatures are needed to block this creature.)
Passage
(
: Target creature can't block this creature this turn.)
Crawl (This creature can be blocked by tapped creatures and can't be blocked by untapped creatures.)
Well, now that I'm watching the Magic panel, it seems everyone is saying it "Thare-os," so I don't know what's right.
I'm interested in the fact that there seem to be blue, red, and green "walled cities," but no white or black. EDIT: Wait, maybe it's white, red, and green cities. The first city sounded blue when they described it, but apparently its inhabitants worship Heliod.
Huh; I assumed Theros was pronounced as in 'heh', or 'feather'. Ah well, silly ancient greeks and their own language; pronouncing their own words wrongly :)
I didn't know this, but google says it's an existing greek word that meant "summer", in the bible and everything, and occasionally used to be used as a boy's name. I don't know if the connection is deliberate, but given the greek theme I assume it is.
So presumably the correct pronunciation is whatever the greek pronunciation would be, and wizards are right if they matched that, and wrong if not.
Someone on blogatog said "Theros is pronounced like hero correct? So Theer-os not There-os, and is it os as in ostrich or os as in comatose?" So I pronounced it wrong when I first saw it. But when someone said it had a double e, I thought it was supposed to be like "three-ros" which seemed obviously wrong. But that's in my accent; these vowel sounds are one of the things where there's three or four worldwide, but British English conflates two, and American English conflates a different two, and you only find out when you hear a pun from the other side of the atlantic :)
Oh, come on. If they wanted a long 'e' sound, they should have written 'ee'. We don't exactly go around calling the Greek Demigod 'Heercules' after all.
Unfortunately, we didn't get to Theros in the P2theM podcast. Marvel and DC announcements from Comic Con trumped Magic: the Gathering. :s
Apparently Theros is pronounced "Theeros," and I've been saying it wrong. Oops.
The art so far is all very impressive.
Oh wow, that generally sounds awesome. I hope that heros, gods and monsters works as well as it sounds and isn't gimicky, but I have reasonable faith that it will. I also really love the greek flavour, enchantment theme, centaurs and minotaurs!
@Link That was revealed at PAX Aus, live-tweeted here.
@jmg You're quite welcome.
Where did you find that gem about centaurs and satyrs?
You know, Dude, you're doing me an excellent service by rounding up all this information for my Power to the Meeple podcast on Monday. So thank you for that. :)
(I should probably mention that all this info will be old news by the time 2 weeks pass and the podcast hits. But I've always assumed the majority of our audience is casual enough to not really notice.)
New: elves are replaced by centaurs and satyrs as green's common creatures.
Link, you're correct about the specialty cards. The Hero cards come in the prerelease packs. I've also updated my first post with Thassa's art. Nyx, the home of the gods, is the night sky, so the nw frame is flavorfully relevant as well. The god mechanic might be grandeur, so the frame might show that they have the ability. It's also interesting how Elspeth is the Hercules analog.
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/55998229408/so-now-what-can-you-tell-us-about-theros
FAR too soon to be landfall. Plus they said (IIUC) that the new mechanic is a futureshifted one.
Scratch that about Landfall. However, I'll hazard a guess that the gods are Enchantment Creatures.
I think it's neat that the gods have an alternate frame treatment, but I think it looks a little bit goofy. The "night sky" shadows in the art are beautiful, and a wonderful design, but I don't think it words so well on the card frame. I wonder if the gods are going to have some sort of alternate mana cost, and what their mechanic is going to be.
Does anyone else have the thought that Landfall might be in Theros?
The art for Thassa, the sea goddess, has also been revealed, and is equally as epic as the others. However, I don't have a link to it right now. I'm pretty excited by the gods, and the way there's one for each color.
I'm glad I called the enchantment theme right. It was pretty obvious when looking at RtR and M14, and I would have been sad if they didn't follow through.
Elite Creatures and Hero Cards are both just "alternate play style" card types, correct? Hero cards are for the prerelease, and the Elite Creature is for the Hydra encounter deck, I think.
A lot of info about Theros was revealed at SDCC today. Elite creatures make me think of Jack's enormous creatures (cf. Island Turtle). Hero cards are a new card type which play like Vanguard. The block has an enchantment theme and a future-shifted card - maybe Arcanum Wings or Daybreak Coronet? God cards appear to have new frame: here's Erebos. Art for Heliod and Nylea were also revealed. The blue and red gods haven't been yet (five card horizontal cycle).
Edit: More info at PAX Aus. Thassa is the blue god. Minotaurs, hydras, and krakens are some of the monsters.
Interesting question.
One thought. The best existing examples are probably planeswalker cards. I remember reading an article that said they tried to give the feel of an independent ally by making them act on a predictable schedule, but it didn't really work. But the current implementation is supposed to feel a bit like an independent ally. Not because Garruck CAN do things the player doesn't want, but because the normal flow of the game incentivises the play to have Garruck act in a Garruck-y way.
Second thought: alextfish and some friends eventually implemented a turing machine in magic. So you could encode a simple AI (eliza, siri, etc) in the game :)
The idea that you don't control something is usually brought forth by random effects and coin flips.
As far as I can tell, the only reason cards that players rather than spells or permanents do most keyword actions (e.g. destroying, regenerating or detaining) is historical templating (indeed one might wonder why the player should regenerate anything!). It currently matters not at all, unlike with damage, since cards can care about the source of that damage.
Tricky, tricky, tricky. I get the impression that this is technically two questions: How would you represent free will as an effect (i.e. on Insants and Sorceries), and how would you represent a permanent with free will (Like our friend, Floral Spuzzem, who asks us to sit around while makes a decision).
Wikipedia tells me that "Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors". The factor here, I assume, would be the Planeswalker as an agent of force. That means that you'd need to somehow design a card that the player could make no choices for, and one that didn't use a random determination to resolve (since choose at random isn't a real 'choice'.)
We're getting a little 'Un' here, but the only way I can think of this working was if a person who wasn't a participant in the game made choices for the creature experiencing free will. For example, a card could tell you to go to a website where a human being updates what that card does on a regular occasion. One week, the person may force the creature to always attack. Another week, the creature might enter the battlefield and draw you a card. It isn't perfect, but it's an answer.
Yikes, that's deep. But I mean how would you go about creating a card that's mechanic was top-down "free will"? For example, make Floral Spuzzem work as printed.
Oh, I play with the old cards all the time, but in a different way. I have a big box... which is kind of like a very, very large cube... which I draft out of with friends on a regular occasion. But I can't play cards like Reef Pirates in a constructed deck nowadays if I want to win at least one out of five games.
But, yeah, I'm the kind of goofy bastard that makes an EDH tribal snake deck, then tries my damned hardest to win by Overwhelming my opponents with snakes, knowing full well that each of the 5 players I'm playing against will have at least 6 board wipes in their decks.
The quality of the Mythics and Rares keeps going up, and I keep making decks out of commons. I like playing the underdog... but staying an underdog is a hard wire to balance on when gigantic weights like this one are thrown on the line.