Theros: Pastoral & Pastiche

what do you know of Greek myth [Music] perhaps images from MGM's 1981 epic clash of the titans streak across your mind in response to such a question images of Perseus weaving his way through Medusa's lair as Harryhausen's Gorgon hunts her prey in stop-motion images of grandiose temples rocky cliffs and the sea set to the soaring score by Laurence Rosenthal and the London Symphony Orchestra [Music] maybe instead you think of the double-page spreads of Frank Miller's graphic novels or the silver screen machismo of Zack Snyder's filmic counterpart I remember seeing 300 a couple of times in theaters I remember having fun with such a stylized rendition of the Battle of Thermopylae just a year prior I had climbed the steps of the Parthenon on a summer tour of Athens I had seen the source world firsthand if but a few millennia removed and then a couple of years later along side a small class of fellow undergrads I needed the stanzas of Homer's epic poem it was my first contact with written myth it reminded me of being a youngster enraptured by illustrations of sea monsters stricken by lightning bolts in the pages of rented library books maybe instead you've championed the reigns of another Spartan warrior this one a bit more fictional than King Leonidas before God of wars dipping into Norse mythology in 2018 the bloodthirsty Kratos had a score to settle with the big baddie Ares himself the original trilogy on PlayStation 2 and 3 had this cathartic base of kill everything gameplay while also being sneakily educational about those figureheads on Mount Olympus what we know about Greek myth Fenn is inconsistent it is filtered through the media machine and diluted into the cultural milieu through films and comic books and literature and video games my own anecdotes perhaps overlap with yours at certain junctures but there seems to be no uniform experience with the source material nonetheless even without knowing the origin stories in full modern audience can read the silhouette of the great messenger with his winged sandals and understand the connotation advertisements should also be included in that list of instructors I suppose to ask the question what do you know of Greek myth therefore is to gauge these relationships we have with the past and invoke elementary images of gods and monsters in faraway lands it is a question that lead designer mark rosewater posed to the room of fellow creatives in the earliest days of developing magics riff on ancient Greece as innocuous as it may seem this question informed everything we see in the finished product what do you know of Greek myth and its white board if responses was the beginning of Pharaohs and the retelling of the tales already told before coming to his team in magic are indeed to pitch tharros almost a decade ago mark rosewater already had two seeds of inspiration sprouting in his mind the first was a kids book he picked up while scanning the library with his youngest daughter he only remembered the subtitle God's heroes and monsters but it served as the main point of reference to understand the most resonant qualities of Greek mythology the second was a card from Future Sight a somewhat unremarkable draft common the type line made it special enchantment creatures were still a novel idea at the time and represented unexplored design space mark then hired the budding designer but still intern Ethan Fleischer as his strong second and assigned him research ethan hit the books and then wrote his own classical mythology and Magic the Gathering became the go-to handbook for the team throughout design and development it functioned as a glossary of the mythical monsters that already existed in the game as well as a cachet of examples of the Greek stories that could easily be adapted into the color blind Pharaoh sought to repeat the successes of innistrad is another magic world design from the top down as opposed to bottom-up design which starts with mechanics and then outfits them in a fantasy shell top-down design uses flavor to inform new gameplay take this example from born of the gods the second set in the original block impetuous sunchaser retells the story of Icarus we can understand this from the illustration of course but the text box and power and toughness are top-down representations of the characters ambitious behavior he's relatively weak but must attack including the first turn he's cast this is momentarily advantageous but once your opponent presents a fire to block it's likely that Icarus will overextend his abilities and cascade into the water below the flavor text also explains his doomed hubris this is what the first trip to theros was all about it started generally with three tropes those of gods heroes and monsters then became more and more concentrated and focused with each individual card design references and allusions to popular Greek myths like that of Sisyphus who must endlessly push a boulder up a hill and watch it rolled down once he arrives at the top are of course present but the creative designers also wanted to reward those knowledgeable of the more obscure stories a personal favorite was hundred handed one a type of Hecate on curries monsters with a hundred hands and fifty heads that helped Zeus and the Olympians overthrow the Titans Ethan Fleischer designed this card and of course he did it's brilliant but theros was also content with mixing mythology and hardcore history anak since I meet er King Leonidas and Gorgo Queen of Sparta respectively two figures that very much lived and died in the real world they exist in the same fantasy setting in which hydras are not beasts of far-off fiction but tangible and immediate threats that could destroy them the full range of historically accurate to completely imaginary as present in these cards from the sip of hemlock which killed Socrates to the Colossus of a Krause and omage to the one standing colossus of rhodes a seven wonder of the ancient world but this card is also a nod to another beloved sword and sandal epic jason and the argonauts from 1963 once colossus of a crows becomes monstrous it can attack much like the giant statue of Talos that terrorizes Hercules in the crew on the isle of bronze in the film it is a mash-up of two entirely distinct references separated by hundreds of years in time once again there is primarily wanted to achieve full resonance with its core audience by allowing designers to have their own fun with the source material this becomes more significant when returning to this worlds but we'll get to that the setting that these characters occupy is also a top-down design that blends the fiction and the real just before the release of the original theros block came return to Ravnica which was an expansive bottom-up design of an endless european cityscape I did two deep dives on Ravnica for this series and made a point about its inversion of the concept of the basic land theros as basic lands are on the opposite side of the paradigm they are idyllic representations of a bountiful pastoral countryside I placed great emphasis on basic land art because it provides a peek behind the scenes of world building the reprinting of basic lands from a mechanical perspective is redundant at this point and so their affective funk is to communicate scale and setting and values and ideas that can otherwise be crowded in normal cart illustrations essentially they serve to show off a new world the for artists who provided the original suite of basic lands for tharros are also worth mentioning for their grounded and realistic styles the tharros we find on Rob Alexander's Forrest and Adam packettes mountain is not magical or overtly fantastic in any sense they are vistas that can exist independently of the game world Stephenville Odin's island is particularly effective at showing us a rock formation that looks fully Greek and Rowell Batali's Plains places us directly in the Mediterranean on a gentle and breezy evening as the Sun sets in the distance the cypress trees both allude to the myth and take me back to my time spent in the country in this way these basic lands also succeed in meeting our preconceptions about ancient Greece they align with the picturesque and grand tour visions of the Mediterranean that filters through that media machine I referenced earlier tharros is pastoral and elemental and very much lines up cleanly with the original concept of the basic lands that Alfa built the game around tharros is the living color pie that is primordial a world before technology and Industry a haven for nature to fully express itself look at the five original theros mono colored gods they are deities that are so cleanly divided between one another with no overlap in flavor or function they're the manifestations of planes Islands swamps mountains and forests and they occupy these segregated landscapes which serve as their dominions in complete contrast to Ravnica and its guilds which blend together as a result of living in an overlapping city the peoples and creatures of tharros are fully disconnected from one another if you've ever spent time on a farm or tucked away in the mountains for a weekend you'll know how peaceful it is to separate from the ongoings of daily urban life there are spiritual advantages to living in the countryside and theros provides us a glimpse of that specific type of tranquility the citizens and creatures in these dominions also mirror their God's interests with the elements they embody so many blue cards for example use water and motif they are all tied together by this one material of nature the provincial substance of their God fossa MAGIX Poseidon similarly red cards are heavily composed with lava the colors most essential connection to the god / furrows rarely is their crossover white cards for example wield sunlight as a weapon and never tap into the primal energies of the forest that is greens territory and by extension belongs to the God now Leia this is what I mean when I say that Pharaohs is the pastoral I see affinities between this iteration of ancient Greece and the island of Catan where hexagonal tiles represent distinct landscapes on an incongruent game board that also divides them by numbers on dice the Settlers of Catan like the citizens of a crow sand Meletis and set esse are people of the earth they build with raw materials and lean into the elements to survive the salty air is probably crisp as it rolls in from the breezy sea life is good under the Sun but there is another element at play in theros that I believed to be responsible for both the successes of the first block and the failures of the second visit this is the pastiche and to explain I want to start with two cards the first is cyclops of one-eyed pass from born of the gods and the second is nick's born brute from pharaoh's beyond death both of these vanilla creatures utilize pastiche to great creative effect the first Cyclops has text from the ferry ad which is theros his version of the Iliad and the excerpts we get from the other cards in the block provide a larger picture of the reference material Nix born Brut quotes the Caliph a Oh which is therosis version of the Odyssey both snippets of flavor text refer back to Homer's epic poems and imitate their style and structure if on a much smaller scale they are a celebration of the ancient works which have now been recontextualized into the game world and alongside the Caliphate we also have caliph II beloved of the sea she is a pastiche of Odysseus himself I've always been fond of cards like this because they bridge players from magic to the real world and can be the catalyst for engaging in research some players may even read The Odyssey as a result of this kind of exposure which is so rad in its own right stevan Bella Dean's the ik Rowan war is another example of pastiche done well in tharros it's weaving together a few references into one piece the card mechanics are a mini recreation of the Trojan War via the progression of a saga the heroes in the painting mimic the aesthetics of black figure pottery found in Greece as early as the 7th century BCE and the painting itself is emulating the textures of tapestries which have been a method of art making since the Hellenistic era this painting is a beautiful representation of top-down design with its privileges of resonance over historicity and its willingness to reimagine the past in the context of a fantasy world and this same sort of exercise makes up the majority of the first block entire wiki pages are filled with the references to ancient Greece and how they've been remoulded in Pharaoh's like I said prior Pharaohs was just aiming to meet the expectations that aligned with the subtitle from the kids book the cherry picking that ensued always meant that we'd never get a full or accurate representation of these stories violence of course is permissible but the intense sexual content for instance has been scrubbed in the translations and full-blown errors have carried over as well the entire concept of a Kraken for example didn't originate in Greek myth it was a Norse monster but Mauro and team argued that it has since become a staple to this genre Clash of the Titans revolves around a Kraken so why can't Pharaoh's have one too this is where pastiche enters into a grey area where censorship and cultural inaccuracies become permissible in favor of striking resonant chords so when we return to theros in theros beyond death the Kraken showed up again but so did a bunch of other illusions this time not specifically to ancient Greece but to the first visit to the plain it dawned on me while scanning the card image gallery that this set was much less an expansion of the first block and much more a reiteration of it it was a pastiche of a pastiche of course this is the kind of risk you run with returning to a world design top-down how do you balance expectations for the familiar with innovations of new material let's look at another pair of cards to show you what I mean on the left is Nessie and game warden from journey into NYX and on the right is tree shaker chimera from the new set the first card is magics attempt at an ancient Greek chimera is the second card in all earnestness the same thing this is confused further because both illustrations are done by Vincente pros to me the second card is primarily a reference to the first one which itself was a reference to a beast from myth it's a riff on a riff a cover song of a cover song Knight leia and her second iteration tow a similar line both illustrations are virtually the same concept in composition and both are done by Chris Ron the second God feels like it's filling a void of expectation that players have for the return to this world rather than standing alone as its own design and it creates confusion between the two cards and gameplay in the process re-releasing this character with ever so slight changes suggests that going back to tharros without these gods just wouldn't be tharros so the five mono colored gods were recommissioned and the other ten to color gods appear across the set in names flavor text and card art once again beyond death in this way is making a reference not to ancient Greece but to Pharaohs magics version of ancient Greece maybe I'm being too picky or particular but scanning the card image gallery of both said simultaneously has me crossing my eyes it's as if for every specific character design or events or visual gag from the first visit there was a pseudo equivalent present in the second visit our con of Suns grace reminds me of that one white rare from the pre-release celestial art con also by Matt Stuart Brian giant is essentially benthic giant but out to terrorize during the day Nyad of hidden coves sends me back to my study on the art of David Palumbo wavebrake hippo camp is eerily familiar and so is Hero of the games bronze hide lion is too but like its first iteration it's also a reference to the trials of Hercules these strange doublings keep going each one leaving me feeling like I've been here before and then the sense of deja vu comes full circle with this card in 2010 Clash of the Titans was remade this time it had ten times the budget a more ambitious scope for its special effects and leaned into all the Hollywood action movie tropes that it could muster it's a generically bad movie but it made some minor plot adjustments and streamlined the story much like every cult classic redo though it doesn't do anything particularly new with the work that feels more like a copy-paste cash grab than a piece of art with something to say Cinna massacres review said it best I saw the remake recently and of course I had no desire to see the remake I mean come on Clash the Titans without stop-motion but I gave it a chance it's not often when a remake helps me to notice how something in the original could have been improved but still you can't beat the charm of the original like many other remakes of its kinds the 2010 version does pay a cheeky tribute to a character from the original film it's the mechanized owl called boo boo that Athena gifts to Perseus to guide him on his journey what's funny is also got a mention boo boo makes a cameo in the remake and it's the same Bobo Grey merchant of asphodel like boo boo is the same green merchant of asphodel it's a full-on reprint with new car darts of a cult classic from Magic's past Gary as he is affectionately known by players kind of encapsulates my qualms about theros beyond death and one card the elements of pastiche present here is a mechanical one and thus one that radiates throughout the game experience to cast Gary in theros beyond death limited means to relive the events of the first go around but this is a farce anyone who has returned to a place knows that bittersweet nostalgia that comes from playing with memories when you copy a copy there's a tangible loss and quality in the resulting image when we went to theros the first time we were presented in amalgamated world of Greek myth high fantasy and clever illusions wrapped and campy aesthetics the return to Pharaoh's has been all of those things but with one more axis involved which is the self referential instead of a sequel I get the feeling that beyond death was the remake it's nods to the past or both the past of ancient Greece and the past of magic itself the mechanics are the same with a couple new ditions the visuals are modified versions of previously used compositions and concepts and the world is still cleanly divided by colors and elements and gods in the basic land suite we catch a glimpse of the Pharaohs underworld its motif of chains and giant pillars is meant to evoke weight and imprisonment but saturated skies are both disquieting and serene when I look at these images I can't help but wish we were down here the entire time for this set I think it would have been much riskier to abandon all expectations and elements of what made the first block successful and fully commit to this world the one unknown and so lightly explored before in this way I think beyond death would have been the sequel that is suggested by and lines up very nicely with that subtitle I'd like to end with these full art basics of Nix I suppose these to illustrate my point the giant mana symbols swirling in the night sky are not representations of basic lands but if the abstract sign of those basic lands this isn't a mountain at all but a reference to magics iconography that serves to symbolize a mountain it's a pastiche of the game itself it's the first time we've seen such self-awareness outside of an unset for better or for worse not to mention the affinities they have with the aesthetics of another trading card game in book 12 of the Odyssey Odysseus recounts the troublesome journey he has just endured to navigate the dangerous waters surrounding the sirens he then is shipwrecked by a six-headed sea monster marooned for a month on the Island of the Sun then loses his entire crew to a storm that Zeus sends his way as punishment from here he must restart his journey losing all progress made in the weeks prior he then concludes this book this episode like all my episodes is once again brought to you by the lovely people at card Kingdom use card Kingdom comm / studies to pick up some pharaohs beyond death cards or some OG basic lands I recommend Stephenville Odin's islands in foil of course thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Rhystic Studies

Views: 205,198

Keywords: magic the gathering, mtg, trading card game, themagicmansam, theros, clash of the titans, theros beyond death, world building

Id: H981fHM6Li8

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ObsoletePixel]

Delightful video in a time where I certainly needed some content to enjoy unapologetically

I can't help but feel that Sam's being a bit hard on THB here, but a lot of his criticism is salient nonetheless. A lot of the cards are self-referential, and I'd love to see more varied composition since a lot of stuff looks rather similar. I also do agree that a journey to the underworld proper, even if it was a subtheme of the set itself, would have been wonderful and a really cool spin on what we've come to expect from Theros. But the sagas of the set beyond the ones reviewed are design slam dunks -- which makes sense, the card type is particularly adept at telling stories (as is intended), but [[The Birth of Meletis]] and [[The Binding of the Titans]] are fantastic works of establishing Theros as a setting narratively, much in the same way the basics of our first journey to the plane do in terms of establishing and grounding the world itself. Escape is also a great keyword at establishing the story of the set, arguably better than heroic or constellation at grabbing your imagination and running with it as a keyword. That said, there's still shortcomings in that, with cards like [[Ox of Agonas]] not being particularly evocative, as fun as they can be to resolve in limited.

I think that Theros Beyond Death is a mixed success in terms of its design, but there's definitely lessons here to be learned for future visits to old planes -- lessons I hope WotC has learned by the time we pay another visit to Zendikar. Nonetheless, great content from Sam, and I hope we get more uploads from him in the near future. My subscription box feels empty without his content in it :)

[u/goblin_welder]

Thank you. I needed this

[u/WanderingWillshaper]

new mtg content it's rhystic

This is a good night ladies and gents

[u/Wulfram77]

I think THB suffered from being a single set. That pushed it to be a generic Theros set rather than focusing on clear themes like the Underworld.

[u/AssistantManagerMan]

I loved Theros Beyond Death. Theros was the set that got me into Magic, and to me, Theros Beyond Death felt like coming home.

[u/StaniX]

Man those comparisons near the end really aren't flattering for the new set's art. The old ones seem much more distinct and nice looking.

[u/ArmoredKappa]

I hope this dude does a video about Oko like he did for Jace.

[u/AnneONhymuus]

I was so happy to see this video in my inbox. Was actually rewatching Sam's (pretty much) entire channel recently, and wondering if he would make a comeback soon.