What Happened in Shadows over Innistrad Block?

[Music] [Applause] welcome to magic arcanum i'm ryan gomez behind the scenes is nicole burdick and we're so glad you're here because it's story time midnight hunt and crimson vow contain their own stories but they also connect to earlier events on the plane if you're new to the game or just straight up forgot about all the mind-bending madness that came before you're in luck because today we're covering what happened in shadows over innistrad and eldritch moon and friends i have to be honest with you this might be the single most convoluted storyline in all of magic i made several attempts at writing a script that could navigate the tangled web of both shadows over innistrad and eldritch moon but there were so many parts that required me to explain what came before a moment just so that i could talk about that moment it just became completely overwhelming and so rather than try and walk through it all in any sort of logical sequence we're just gonna treat it like one giant mustache minute because that's the only way i can capture the delirious nature of the whole block so forgive me in advance if i do not pause to call out your third favorite werewolf who only gets mentioned in the flavor text of that one card because this whole thing is gonna be one giant nightmare get ready here we go shadows over in astrad released in april of 2016 and told the story of innistrad a plane originally known for gothic horror now held in the death grip of cosmic horror thanks to a quite possibly insane planeswalker called nihiri who is nahiri and why is she insane well i already covered her in her own entire video and get ready to hear me say that a lot during this video but i do still want to set the stage for us here nahiri is from zendikar and many many years ago she volunteered to use her own home as a prison for the eldrazi what are the eldrazi i already covered that in their own video but basically they are a force of nature that lives outside of any physical plane of existence they roam around seemingly at random consuming everything in their path nihiri worked with the planeswalkers ugin and soren markov to seal the eldrazi away on zendikar keeping them from harming any other planes in the multiverse as part of their pact nahiri would stay on zendikar to watch over the jailed eldrazi and ugin and soren promised to return if she ever needed their help like you know if the eldrazi managed to escape their bonds or something important like that as luck would have it eventually the eldrazi did well not entirely escape but they got close nihiri sent a distress call to sauron and ugin and neither of them came to help nihiri took care of business herself and then went to find her friends to chew them out for ghosting her ugin was actually dead at this point so we can excuse him but when she came to soren on innistrad the vampire lord claimed he never got her message probably because it was stopped by the magical barriers he had put in place around his plane now i have ranted about this before in how much of a jerk move it was for sorin to deliberately isolate himself and innistrad when he had an obligation to answer a call should one come for him but that's all covered in you guessed it another video anyway nahiri doesn't really appreciate the fact that soren shows no remorse for his actions or lack of actions i guess and so she attacks him out of anger these two were friends who worked together to stop the eldrazi the greatest threat in the multiverse but they came to blows over one missed call just for perspective eventually the fight gets broken up by avacyn the guardian angel created by sorin to protect the people of innistrad avacyn tosses nahiri into the hell vault a supremely powerful magical artifact built in the style of one of nihiri's own hedrons the same kind used to seal away the eldrazi back on her plane of zendikar nahiri sat in that vault for a long long time and this was after she had sat on zendikar alone for a long long time acting as warden for the eldrazi so just like me during this global pandemic-induced quarantine she went kind of crazy bouncing around inside a solid stone monolith that's also filled with demons and other terrible things will do that to a person hopefully you watched what happened in innistrad block and remember that eventually avason herself also wound up inside the helvault nahiri used this opportunity to plant the scenes of corruption within avacyn and that sets the stage for the start of shadows over innistrad i am two full pages into this and i haven't even started talking about the cards yet but that changes right now because we've got descend upon the sinful our first pivotal moment card what is a pivotal moment well for some reason instead of getting true story spotlight cards they gave us these pivotal moment cards which aren't clearly identified by any sort of watermark or text line you just had to follow the online stories and there were a lot of them to figure out which cards actually depicted the stuff that was happening so descend upon the sinful the angels that had previously been protecting the humans of innistrad are now turning against them this is a big big problem because the humans are already struggling to deal with the vampires and werewolves and ghosts and zombies and demons and now with their own angels hunting them down their rice is really fried but who needs angels when you've got jace on the case yeah the blue plains walker comes to innistrad to investigate not only the now bloodthirsty angels but some of the other strange happenings that have been reported people seem to be gripped by madness which hey that's a set mechanic and so they're hacking each other to bits or spreading conspiracies or refusing to get vaccinated you get the idea with everyone on the plane a danger to everyone on the plane jace starts doing his best scooby-doo impression and investigating this mystery which hey that's another set mechanic meanwhile we swish pan over to soarin who is getting his own clues delivered right to his front door okay actually his front door is gone and so is most of his mansion that's declaration in stone which shows the complete upheaval of markov manor soren realizes there's only one person with the lithomancer powers required to do that and that's nahiri who i should point out was released from the hell vault off camera during the events of avacyn restored she had many many years to think about how to punish sauron for how he treated her and so she wasted no time in making her moves as soon as she was freed from the prison while soarin was pondering what type of cleaning fluid gets vampire blood out of marble floors jace was inspecting the warped landscape of the plane not only did nahiri play jenga with soren's house she had been busy placing cryptoliths all over the place they acted as a conduit for the plane's mana which jace discovered in epiphany at the drown yard realizing something big was coming jace teamed up with another planeswalker for help and that's tamio she was on the plane to do her own studies mostly of the silver moon and she tells jace that she's really only there as an observer she does not want to get involved tamio even makes a point here to explain that she has been present for other terrible things in other places she carries scrolls with detailed accounts of powerful spells but they are each bound with an iron band and they are never to be opened as a collector of stories myself this kind of resonates with me it's a neat way of showing how devoted tamio is to being impartial and observing history without celebrating it or profiting from it we could all learn a bit from that i think anyway i'm going to skip ahead to our next pivotal moment which is avason's judgment the angel decides that jace and tamio are now a threat to her purpose which is purifying the plane of the unworthy which is like everyone because that's what nihiri had been whispering in her ear while they were trapped together in the hell vault we can see avacyn's fall from grace on her legendary card from the set in which she transforms from a sunlit guardian angel to a cleansing fire with wings realizing neither of them can block fliers jace begs tamio to tap into the power of her scrolls and this is where we come to what i believe is a hidden message within the story here is the exact official text after jace asks tamio to open one of her ironbound scrolls did you ever make a promise jace i made one long ago and promises aren't just to be kept when the keeping of them is easy we make promises for times like this when we desperately want to break them no jace the scroll stays closed i have long thought that this was wizards of the coast making a commentary on their own reserved list yep you heard me the reserve list was a promise made to game stores back in the early days of magic breaking it now would be easy the company is big enough to survive any financial fallout and being able to freely reprint cards like the black lotus would make a killer secret layer but like tamio says we make promises four times like this and if we break them when it would be easy or even in our best interest to do so then they are meaningless promises so that is why i believe we will never see the end of the reserved list it is spelled out there in the story black and white clear as crystal you get nothing good day sir anyway avacyn is about to kill jason tamio when sauron steps in which takes us to anguished on making soarin realizes avacyn has been corrupted by nahiri's influence and even though it is implied some of her original goodness is still in there somewhere she is beyond saving and so sorin unmakes her this has huge ramifications because she was created to protect the plane and even in her warped state she was still a crucial part of innistrad's defenses with her removal jason tamio realized things are about to get way way worse and that brings us to eldritch moon with avacyn gone nahiri is able to summon forth emrakul the promised end using the portal she constructed at the drown yard as seen in cokes from the blind eternities emercul's influence is felt across the plain with many of innistrad's iconic creature types becoming twisted versions of themselves there are a few holdouts however the presence of the eldrazi is of no consequence to the plane's spirits for example so many of them come to the aid of the humans this includes thalia and odrick two legendary members of the church of avison which has now become a corrupt shell of its former self thalia effectively renounces her faith and becomes a heretic cathar now fighting to protect humanity from the bloodthirsty angels that once guarded them from the terrors of the night not every angel has gone bad though sagarda remains uncorrupted and does what she can to fight against her sisters who have become a melded abomination in the wake of emmercool's arrival sorin realizes things are now spiraling out of control his bloodline has been decimated and life across the plain has begun to reform itself to align with the eldrazi presence so he decides to start a campaign of vengeance which is our next pivotal moment the valderran vampires had so far avoided most of the carnage because they tend to live in the more remote regions of the plain so sorin appealed to their leader olivia and asked that she join him in his bloody crusade against nihiri olivia realized if she doesn't help sorin the terrible things of the plane would eventually reach her anyway so she might as well go out with a chance to bite a few more necks together the vampires seek out nahiri and in yet another pivotal moment sorin encounters the full force of her wrath the two duel and it is surprisingly close with nihiri eventually getting the upper hand and she ends up partially encasing soren within a bit of rocky wall she leaves him there unable to move and taunts him she says from here you'll have a great front row seat as innistrad suffers destruction at the hands of the eldrazi the very thing you were trying to prevent by sticking them all with me on zendikar thousands of years ago to be clear sorin is able to regenerate from his own wounds enough to not die from being in this position but the constant pain and pressure do prevent him from focusing enough to planes walk out back over in the major city of thraben jace has rallied with the rest of the gatewatch and if you don't know who they are i covered them in another video so you can pause this one go watch that if you need to the gatewatch thought it wasn't too late to save the plane and they tried to enact the same plan that they used on zendikar with chandra delivering the killing blow backed by mana channeled through nissa but they encounter some problems the ley lines of the plane are not cooperating because they've already been twisted about by nahiri with her cryptoliths and everyone is under a constant mental assault from emmercool and a constant physical assault by the now fully corrupted life forms of the plane things look pretty grim for our heroes and this is reflected in emrakul's influence another pivotal moment court it is the timely arrival of liliana along with her army of zombies that turns the tide and makes up our next pivotal moment card dark salvation the mindless ghouls are immune to emrakul's influence and so they make a perfect decayed meat shield around jace gideon chandra and nissa giving them some breathing room from the assaulting masses this brief window of opportunity gives tamio a chance to use one of her ironbound scrolls the magic it contains allows her to imprison emmercool within the moon or does it yeah while everyone is celebrating their victory tamio confesses to jace that she wasn't in control of her own actions and that the scroll she used didn't really contain a spell anything like what she just did it turns out emrakul had realized it was not the right time for her to be on innistrad and rather than continue to fight she used tamio as a puppet to strategically place herself somewhere unreachable during all of this jace and emmercool had been engaged in a mental chess game where we get the impression that the planeswalkers are completely outclassed by the eldrazi and that is knowledge that still haunts jace to this day and that's it that's what happens across shadows over innistrad and eldritch moon but do you see what a mess that was you could walk into original innistrad maybe having heard of like dracula and you were fine but to understand this story you have to know nahiri and her relationship to soren you have to know jace and his history with the gatewatch and you have to know how all of those connect to the eldrazi it was a lot to fit into two sets i would say maybe too much honestly most of the good stuff happened in these side stories where we learned about the git rock monster and odrick who would clearly be played by george clooney in my live action adaptation shadows over innistrad was a story of revenge nihiri wanted to make soren pay for not being there when she needed him was that juvenile yes did a lot of innocent people suffer absolutely was sorin equally to blame here for breaking his promise to nihiri i think he deserved to be held accountable but i don't think bringing an eldrazi titan to his plane was really justified but madness is a running theme for the block it starts with nahiri who had a lot of time to stew on things while in the hell vault and then it was amplified by the arrival of emrakul so i don't think any character was acting rationally i did find it funny though how jace came awfully close to losing his mind for like the hundredth time because the scariest thing for a mind mage to face is the prospect of losing his own mind like he did on ixalan and in the crypts of zendikar and back on vrin and every time they need to give him a challenge that can't be solved by punching shadows over innistrad was a story of promises broken and kept the whole thing started because soarin failed to uphold his pledge but the gatewatch proved they were better than that by doing what they said they would and helping planes across the multiverse buried in there is tamio's promise regarding her scrolls which i still think is a veiled reference to the reserve list and thalia's broken promise to the church which actually earned her the respect of saint traft and a lot of other ghosts so that worked out for her in the end shadows over in astrad was a story of redemption liliana became an unlikely hero and secured her place among the gatewatch and the surviving humans of the plane proved they were strong enough to handle an eldrazi invasion making them some of the toughest people in the multiverse sagarda is now taking over avison's role as defender of the plane while the vampires werewolves zombies and other creatures of the night return to normal or as normal as things can be before we get into midnight hunt but that is a story for another time what is your take on all of this what was your favorite moment in the shadows over innistrad storyline let me know down in the comments and then make sure you like this video and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the great stories you'll only find here on magic arcanum we'll see ya [Music] you

Channel: Magic Arcanum

Views: 62,516

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Id: 7MD_9EGF5rw

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021