Titans and Eternals

The Shadowlands are weird.

Not since Mists of Pandaria have we traveled to a realm that is so separated from the established lore of World of Warcraft. I remember, back in 2012, having some concern that our Pandarian adventure would feel sort of free-floating and disconnected from the overall mythos of Warcraft, and yet as we went through that expansion, we discovered that many of the creatures and peoples there that seemed so new and unique were actually tied into some of the fundamental lore of the game - the Sha were revealed as the sort of toxic radiation left over from an Old God's death, and the Mogu were revealed to be just as obsessed with reversing the Curse of Flesh as the Vrykul had been in Northrend - though they were much better at it.

Through our experiences with Old Gods, the Void, the Light, the Naaru, the demons of the Burning Legion, and actually, finally (albeit briefly) meeting the Titans themselves, we've managed to explore some of the great powers of the Warcraft cosmos.

I often refer to the cosmic chart that begins each volume of Chronicle, and in retrospect it's sort of hilarious that the Shadowlands are a tiny little sphere opposite the Emerald Dream. While I think there's potential to really expand upon the Dream, in terms of what we're seeing in this expansion, the Shadowlands are like a whole other multiverse unto themselves - more akin to the Outer Planes in D&D than what I'd assumed it was, which was Warcraft's version of the Shadowfell.

It had always bugged me that the Scourge was explained away as simply the creation of the Burning Legion, and so it's actually quite exciting to see that it's more like the Legion stole (or perhaps bargained for?) magic from the Maw to create the Lich King and thus the Scourge.

We do have a few other solid connections to the material world - for example, the Val'kyr we first encountered as members of the Scourge were, in fact, sort of copied from Odyn's use of them. But even that was a sort of copy - Odyn learned how to create the Val'kyr by dealing with an entity of the Shadowlands and thus cribbing the notion of the Kyrians - basically making valkyries from the recipe for angels.

But one thing that we learn when we journey to the Shadowlands is that the various realms thereof are ruled over by Eternals - beings who have existed since the creation of the Shadowlands and ruled over its realms.

The Jailer (ok, Blizzard seems to be inconsistent with whether it's Jailer or Jailor) is one of these beings, and we find that his name is actually Zovaal (there's a prominent part of the Maw called Zovaal's Cauldron, and some dialogue has confirmed this to be the Jailer's name) and that he was imprisoned in the Maw after he sought to conquer the Shadowlands for himself.

But this puts the Arbiter, as well as other eternals like the Primus, the Archon, Sire Denathrius, and the Winter Queen as members of a sort of pantheon of death.

And how interesting it is that this pantheon also had one that fell to darkness.

Naturally, there's a pretty grand tradition in fantasy to have some kind of evil rebel from amongst the most powerful entities. In Christian tradition, the Devil is such a figure, once a great archangel whose pride and ambition grew into contempt for the natural and good order of the cosmos. Arguably, Loki is in a similar camp, as someone who was once the brethren of the good gods, but who transformed into a horrible monster.

Falls to corruption are a pretty common theme throughout Warcraft. Sargeras has been, for most of its existence, the biggest bad guy, and very similarly, he went from the paragon of the Pantheon to its greatest enemy. Granted, Sargeras' evil, while born of his own choices and conclusions, is still a reaction to a more unfathomable darkness - the Void.

Zovaal/The Jailer's motivations for turning on his brethren are something we know far less about. For one thing, we hear about how the Eternals have ruled the Shadowlands since its creation, but we don't really know where that creation falls on the timeline of the Warcraft cosmos.

Numbers and sequence of events are things we don't really tend to get - for example, we know that the War of the Ancients was fought about 10,000 years ago, and that some of our characters might have been around that far back. We also know that the Draenei left Argus 25,000 years ago (though that might have been retconned to be only 13,000 - personally I prefer the notion that my Death Knight is over twice as old as Malfurion) but we have no idea what the dates are on, say, the creation of the Night Elf Empire, the rise of the Titans, or the wars between the Trolls and the Aqir.

We're given to understand that the sort of Big Bang of the Warcraft cosmos happened when pockets of darkness began to appear within what was once the uniform totality of the Light, and those pockets became the Void. And then, the matrix of light and void essentially allowed for meaningful existence to occur, with physical reality forming.

The Titans, for all their godly nature, seem to fundamentally be of the material world. But one imagines also that the Shadowlands, as a realm of death, would need for things to first be alive.

I think you could go deep into ideas about souls and "living" entities' eternal nature outside of life and death, and so perhaps there's some other way to look at it (you could imagine an "afterlife" actually being the eternal location of souls, and that life is just an expedition out of such a realm) but my sense is that the Shadowlands in the Warcraft cosmos is really a place for the dead, with only some of its realms having the macabre vibe that such a place would suggest.

We don't really know why the Titans exist, or even how, exactly, a planet transforms into one of these godlike entities (do we all die when Azeroth awakens? Or does she leave the planet as an empty shell, but intact and still possessed with the sustenance of life? Or do we literally find ourselves crawling along the surface of a giant, planet-sized lady?)

And so, we also have to wonder a bit about the Shadowlands - did they just come into existence as soon as there were mortal souls that needed to go somewhere after death? Or were they created intentionally? And where did the Eternals come from? How similar are they to the Titans?

As the expansion begins, the plot hinges primarily on the immediate problems - you're trying to get the Alliance and Horde leaders out of the Maw, expose the traitors amidst the Shadowlands realms, and explore the Maw with your seemingly unique (apart from other players) ability to traverse it.

But I do think that before we actually fight the Jailer, as we seem likely to do by the end of this (unless Sylvanas is the final boss and they keep the Jailer around for future conflicts) we need to figure out what he is, exactly, and how he's connected to the rest of the cosmos.

A couple notes: first, it's implied that the Jailer's forces within the Maw are utterly vast - rivaling the Burning Legion in numbers. Additionally, during the Maldraxxus Afterlives short, some people noticed that Draka struck what looked like a Burning Legion outpost - one that perhaps even Illidan and his Demon Hunters had also hit during the Illidan Harbingers short.

We know that the Maldraxxi have the task of fighitng the Shadowlands' enemies, but the implication I had always assumed was that they only played defense, fighting foes within the Shadowlands themselves. This seems to imply that they are sometimes sent to the mortal realm.

We know the Legion has done some infiltration of the Shadowlands in the past, as Kil'jaeden got Frostmourne and the Armor of Domination from there. But even if the Legion is in total disarray since the end of their eponymous expansion, I'm very eager to explore whatever interactions they had with the Shadowlands.

Given that Draka died before the Lich King was even a thing, I wonder if that missions had anything to do with the House of Eyes trying to discover what the Legion's interests in the Shadowlands were.

Zendikar Rising's Pathway Dual Lands

 One of my prized possessions in my Magic collection is a Revised Edition Underground Sea (which I'm given to understand is actually fairly valuable.) This was one of the original 10-card cycle of dual lands, complete with Tundra, Plateau, Savannah, Volcanic Isle, Tropical Isle, Scrublands, Badlands, Bayou, and Taiga were the original dual lands. These lands were very simple and straightforward - each simply counted as two types of land. Underground Sea was an Island Swamp, Taiga was a Forest Mountain, etc.

This was before land types were printed on the type line of the card, so the rules had to be a little more explicit. But the thing that made these dual lands so good was that they had no drawbacks (except for land-type specific destruction, such as Orcish Raiding Party, a Fallen Empires enchantment that could wipe out plains, which might also take out your Tundra.)

Nowadays, no land is allowed to be strictly better than a basic land, with dual lands usually coming with some drawback (usually coming into play tapped.)

Ravnica brought us the Shocklands, which I think tend to be considered the best dual lands outside of the originals, and Ikoria gave us the Triomes, which are pretty darn good, especially making three-color decks highly viable these days.

But the new pathway lands are going to possibly give the Shocklands a run for their money.

The Pathways are two-faced cards, and they're simple as can be - you just pick a side and you can get the color you want from them.

The only manner in which they aren't strictly better than basic lands is that they aren't basic and they have no land types, but otherwise, there's really no drawback. They come into play untapped, with no cost.

Where these do fall behind compared to other dual lands is that you make a choice when you play them and you have to be happy with that choice, unless you have some way to return it to your hand or dig it out of the graveyard. Still, in my experience, dual lands are most crucial in the early turns, when you want a card that can give you the color you need for that next spell - and in this case, you'll be able to get that color with no real costs.

Land, of course, is both a brilliant mechanic to govern the pacing of MTG, but it's also a source of frustration when you get unlucky with your draws. It's always interesting to see how new lands like these can help with that issue.

Now, the Pathway lands are rare, which means that amassing a full collection (40 cards) will probably take a bit of luck and persistence. But I think they're going to probably be staples in Standard for the next two years (and are a welcome replacement for the shock-lands, which rotate out of standard when Zendikar Rising releases.)

Afterlives: Maldraxxus

 The second of the four Afterlives shorts is now out!

In this short, we get an explanation of Draka's place in the Shadowlands, and a preview of the storyline of Maldraxxus.

I'll confess, this is somewhat underwhelming after the holy-crap revelations from the Bastion short. Essentially, Draka died protecting her son from Gul'dan's assassins, and her warrior spirit sent her to Maldraxxus, where she found herself somewhat ironically sent to the House of Eyes - Maldraxxus' spy and stealth wing. After the House of Plagues fell to some sudden betrayal, she's sent to deliver a message to the leader of the House of the Chosen (which is kind of the warrior/death knight/paladin wing of the covenant) only to find that her own house, the House of Eyes, was similarly struck.

This certainly sets up the plot for Maldraxxus, but you're not going to find yourself gasping in awe at any big moments here.

One thing I'm really curious about regarding the Shadowlands conceptually is whether, in normal times, individuals can travel the realms at their leisure. While the Kyrians wind up purging their own identities, there's no indication that members of other covenants do so (though obviously those sent to Revendreth can't leave until they've finished their atonements and passed their evaluations.) But it makes me wonder if Draka, for example, was able to travel to Oribos and meet up with her husband, Durotan. We have no indication of which Shadowlands realm he wound up in (there are far more than the four we've seen, so it would stand to reason that he'd be in some other one, likewise most of the other NPCs who have died over the years) but I'd hope that Draka could, you know, see her husband in the afterlife.

We do sometimes see people from other realms in certain Shadowlands zones. While the Kyrian found during some quests in Maldraxxus are prisoners of war after the invasion that makes up the Necrotic Wake dungeon, there's also, I believe, a Venthyr in a remote part of Bastion (part of the zone I'm sure is meant for max-level content.)

It is interesting to me that the Warcraft afterlife certainly doesn't seem to prioritize "rest" as a post-life reward. The dead all seem to be put to work, the exception being those who are sent to the Maw (though I think the monsters in the Maw might also be the souls of evil people bound there.)

The Maw and Torghast Impressions, and Thoughts on Level 60

 While you visit both the Maw and Torghast, the Tower of the Damned (which is in the Maw) during your leveling quests in the main story campaign, naturally neither really starts up properly until you're at level 60.

The Maw is, as I've said before, intentionally a very inhospitable place. It's grueling, dangerous, and encourages you to get in and get out as quickly as you can. You can't mount there, and the enemies seem to hit harder. If you want to reach a remote location, you need to act carefully, as you can't just corpse-drag, because you just revive at the "graveyard" and have to make your way back. In fact, there's a currency called Stygia that you'll lose half of if you die, though you can recover it if you make it back to where you died (in a mechanic that feels lifted directly from the Soulsborne games.)

Ironically, Torghast, by contrast, is an area in which you'll get to super-charge your power fantasy. I've only been doing what I believe are pre-determined layouts for story quests, but overall the place is a procedurally-generated infinite dungeon. As you ascend its levels, though, you'll also pick up various powerful buffs that will make you feel like you're decked in late-expansion epics while you're still wearing a bunch of questing greens.

In Torghast, the enemies drop Phantasma, which can be traded to various brokers (the Shadowlands equivalent of Ethereals, basically) for additional buffs, and you can often find other anima powers after defeating foes or sometimes just by smashing pots.

If the Maw is like a Soulsborne game, Torghast feels much more like Diablo. While things can turn south if you're not careful, the buffs you get stack up to make you feel like a whirlwind of death for the... er... death monsters inside.

Torghast's gameplay loop will eventually reward you with legendary items that you can power up over the course of the expansion (and I believe customize.) After completing three runs (again, of the standard, "story quest" versions) I'm only at 150 out of 1000 of the currency I believe you'll get to make your first legendary with, but we'll see how that ultimately goes.

Torghast is some very solid solo-content, but I do hope that as I explore further (and especially over the course of the expansion) that we'll see some new monsters and environments within. I really liked the Horrific Visions, but they were certainly not without their flaws (particularly the way that their difficulty and scaling was mostly built around a timer - something Torghast, blessedly, does not use!)

For max-level content, I'm finding myself flooded with things to do, and while I'm not sweating it on the Beta, I do think it'll mean that you'll have a pretty serious time getting your main set up with all the tutorials for the level-cap systems - I've only done a bit of the Venthyr covenant campaign, I haven't run any max-level dungeons, and, well, there's just a ton to do.

This, of course, can be a good thing. I think on live I'm going to push those dungeons first to get myself some halfway decent gear so that the other stuff goes a little smoother. The fact that Castle Nathria launches just two weeks after the expansion means that serious raiders are going to be playing a LOT when the expansion comes out.

I'm happy to say that, while I still need to figure out the Soulbond systems a bit, my sense is that they are not as obnoxious or obtrusive as Azerite Armor. Gear is just gear this expansion, and the additional gameplay systems... well, it's too early to tell, isn't it?

Naturally, I'm getting to that point as a beta tester where I'm, on one hand, excited to see what the expansion has to offer, and I'm also eager to report bugs and see them fixed before the expansion goes live, but I'm also hesitant to put in too much effort on the fake version of my character that's just going to get wiped when the beta ends, and to avoid filling up before the real meal arrives.

Overall, I think that conceptually, gameplay-wise, and lore-wise, we're in for a good expansion. But again, there are some things that don't really become clear until we've had the thing out for a few months.

There are some big bugs in the Beta and I'm hoping they'll resolve those soon, but at least the big systems are up for testing, and that's pretty crucial.

D&D Cosmos for MTG Fans (Part One of Two)

 With the Forgotten Realms coming to Magic: the Gathering, I thought it would be fun to go into an explanation of the complex cosmic lore of Dungeons & Dragons, with an eye to making it accessible to those who are more familiar with Magic.

I, myself, played Magic long before I ever played D&D, so I sort of came to this in the same way.

The cosmos of D&D has undergone some revisions and changes over the years (4th Edition was quite different,) but the cosmic order that the game tends to return to is what is known as "The Great Wheel."

This ultimately emerges into the Outer Planes, which are the realms of the Gods and tend to be where the spirits of the dead wind up (though there are also relatively ordinary people who are born there too) but we're going to hold off on that, starting from the center.

And that center is the Prime Material Plane. Planes in D&D are like universes, and the Prime Material Plane is the one that most closely resembles our own. It's here where one finds rocky planets that have humans and other humanoid races living on them, though this being D&D, they also tend to have things like Dragons, Giants, Elementals, Beasts (which refers to any non-humanoid animal) and Monstrosities (which refer to creatures that are more unusual than Beasts, but are still fairly animalistic - like Gryphons or Hydras.)

There's really just the main Prime Material Plane, and while there are many different worlds that D&D takes place within, these worlds are all within the same plane. The worlds of D&D sit within a sort of equivalent of outer space, but the way that this version of space works a little differently (it's inspired by medieval notions of how planets and stars work,) with each world sitting at the center of a Crystal Sphere, with its own moons and stars and such. The Spelljammer campaign setting has a sort of magi-tech version of space travel where the eponymous ships are capable of crossing into other Crystal Spheres (for example, the Forgotten Realms world of Toril is in what's referred to as "Realmspace.") But these places are only separated by distance, and so spells that could teleport someone from one city to another on a single world could also work to take a person from one of these worlds to another just as easily.

Most Magic planes would simply be worlds of the Material Plane in D&D.

Just slightly beyond the Prime Material Plane are the Feywild and the Shadowfell. Both of these are reflections of the Material Plane, and if you were to step into either of them, you'd see clearly distinct, yet equivalent features such as cities, mountains, and rivers. However, the tone and feel of these places would be very different. For example, an ordinary mountain in the material plane might have a Feywild equivalent that is some brilliant crystal pyramid, and in the Shadowfell, it might look like a spiky, jagged grey peak with caves that make the face of the mountain look somewhat like a skull.

The Feywild is the land of Faerie, and it's from here that Fey creatures come. The Fey are governed entirely by emotion, and while many are beautiful, their values are distinctly alien from someone from the material plane might expect. While there's a sort of hierarchy among fey that revolves around beauty and physical appearance, there are plenty of dangerous beautiful elf-like Fey as well as dangerous ugly Hags - a race of fey witches that revel in misery and torment. The closest equivalent in Magic would probably be Lorwyn, though the Wilds in Eldraine also fit with the Feywild pretty well.

The Shadowfell is arguably also governed by emotion, but rather than the manic, energetic emotions of the Feywild, the Shadowfell is all about depression, fear, and a sort of numbness. The Shadowfell is filled with the undead, and is also a source of deceptive illusion magic. The gothic horror Ravenloft setting takes place in a group of demiplanes attached to the Shadowfell called the Domains of Dread, though the Shadowfell proper is more like a shadowy, depressing, and undead-filled version of the material plane. While I think Innistrad is more like a Material Plane world that has too close a connection to the Shadowfell than a true Domain of Dread, it's clearly more closely tied to this than any other Magic plane.

Outside of the Material plane, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell, are the Elemental Planes. There's the plane of Fire, of Air, of Water, and of Earth, as well as some border planes that mix these elements. Most inhabitants of these planes are elementals, and the most human-like of the elementals are the Genies, which come in four elemental flavors - Djinn for Air, Marids for Water, Dao for Earth, and Efreet for Fire. The City of Brass (that famous Magic card from back in the day) is actually the Efreet capital city in the Plane of Fire.

Flowing between these aforementioned "Inner" planes is the Ethereal Plane, which is a misty, ghostly realm that also allows passage farther out into the multiverse. While it's useful for phasing through mundane matter, it's also a plane that ghosts partially exist on.

Now, we get to the Outer Planes.

Governing the D&D multiverse in a similar way to how the five colors govern Magic, alignment starts to define things when we get into the Outer Planes.

As realms of the gods as well as the home of things like angels and demons, the Outer Planes are sort of philosophies made manifest. D&D alignment works in a two-axis system. Things can be Good, Neutral, or Evil on the "moral" axis and Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic on the "ethical" axis.

The "Great Wheel" refers to the sixteen planes that exist with various levels of emphasis on these values. There's actually a seventeenth outer plane called the Outlands, which is the True Neutral plane, and is the main setting for the Planescape campaign setting. The other planes, starting with the Neutral Good plane of Elysium at "12 o'clock" then go: The Beastlands, Arboria, Ysgard, Limbo as the Chaotic Neutral Plane, Pandemonium, The Abyss as the Chaotic Evil plane, Carceri, Hades, Gehenna, The Nine Hells - the Lawful Evil plane - Acheron, Mechanus (the lawful neutral plane,) Arcadia, Mount Celestia, and Bytopia.

The "outsiders" of these planes are generally divided between Celestials and Fiends, with Constructs being common in Mechanus and Aberrations pretty common in Limbo. Celestials are usually good-aligned outsiders, like angels, and come from the "upper planes," (Arcadia through Ysgard.) Fiends, on the other hand, tend to come from the evil, lower planes (Pandemonium through Acheron.) Fiends include, most famously, Devils and Demons. In D&D, Devils are the lawful evil inhabitants of the Nine Hells, always seeking to bind mortal souls with contracts, while Demons are chaotic evil fiends who are less likely to make a deal and more likely to just tear you apart for the fun of it.

I make note of it because it's practically the opposite in Magic, where Devils are Red-aligned, chaotic creatures.

The Outer Planes are connected, somewhat in the same way the Inner Planes are connected by the Ethereal Plane, by the Astral Plane, sometimes referred to as the Astral Sea. This is a featureless expanse in which the bodies of dead gods drift eternally and people can move with their minds. The Astral Sea is a common method of traveling between these planes.

Outside of everything, though, is the Far Realm. The Far Realm is the most alien of alien places, totally outside of reality, and is where cosmic horror creatures tend to come from. The Eldrazi, for example, would likely be beings of the Far Realm if they were native to D&D.

In a typical D&D campaign, you'll never hit all of these - a lot of campaigns are limited to the Prime Material Plane, though at later levels, when spellcasters get some really powerful stuff to work with, most campaigns will at least touch on some stuff outside the material plane.

No Core Set 2022 - Forgotten Realms to Fill that Gap?

 One of the most shocking announcements today with the first previews of Zendikar Rising is that next year we're going to be getting a Magic: the Gathering set that takes place in the Forgotten Realms, which has been the primary D&D setting (I think with the exception of 4th Edition) for the past thirty years or so.

While not all Magic settings are based around mechanics (Innistrad and Eldraine are both "top down" places, where the flavor and lore leads to the mechanics, rather than the other way around) most Magic worlds are pretty high-concept in order to translate into mechanical themes for the card game.

The Forgotten Realms (aka the planet Toril, and most often the continent of Faerun) are, on the other hand, a giant kitchen sink style of fantasy world, where nearly anything you can imagine can be found, because it's meant to serve for all sorts of D&D tones. In 5th Edition, every published adventure book with the exception of Curse of Strahd (which, to be fair, can start in the Forgotten Realms) and Ghosts of Saltmarsh (which is more of an anthology set in Greyhawk) is set in or at least starts in the Forgotten Realms (Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus starts in the famous FR city before sending you to the Nine Hells.)

Given that, though, it actually makes a lot of sense for them to use the Forgotten Realms for a Core Set-style card set. Core Sets generally don't have a story, and will often have cards set in multiple planes, though they frequently use this to allow for cards that depict things on Dominaria or Shandalar. Dominaria, of course, being the original MTG setting (though still younger than Forgotten Realms, which was first created in the 80s, I believe) has a bit too much history to have one specific mechanical identity (though the recent return there in the Dominaria set introduced the idea that all that complex history was its mechanical identity) and Shandalar was literally adopted as a common setting because of its generic-ness given how idiosyncratic Dominaria had gotten.

I'll confess that I'm not a huge fan of the Forgotten Realms specifically because it has this kind of broad catch-all sensibility (I don't dislike it, but I'm not going to get excited for a sourcebook for it like I would for something like Ravenloft, Eberron, or Planescape.)

Already, just dividing the existing Forgotten Realms setting into Magic's color identities is going to be an interesting exercise, and while I could imagine that some of Zendikar's RPG-like mechanics (like the new "party" system in Rising) could also make their way into this, I suspect that Forgotten Realms will wind up giving us basically our generic core set equivalent this year - which I believe is also what sets like Magic: Origins did in years past.

I also suspect they're not going to work too hard to fit the canons of MTG and D&D together - the cosmos of D&D (in official settings that aren't from Magic, I should say - your homebrew world has whatever cosmos you want it to have) is very clearly delineated, with other planes based on the various alignments, for instance. Planeswalkers, in a sense, exist there, but only in the sense that a powerful enough wizard could just cast the Plane Shift spell (and most "mundane" worlds are actually considered on the same plane - if you want to go from the Forgotten Realms to Greyhawk, normal spatial teleportation is all you need.)

Still, it'll be fun, and I'm excited to see if things like Gelatinous Cubes, Beholders, and Mind Flayers potentially show up in MTG.

Zendikar Rising Previews Begin, Plus The 2021 Slate, Including a D&D Crossover, But the Other Way This Time!

 The previews for Zendikar Rising have begun.

In addition to mechanics like Parties (encouraging you to have a Cleric, Rogue, Warrior, and Wizard on the battlefield,) two-faced cards (including the most straightforward dual lands since the Alpha originals - just pick a side when you play it and it gives you that color of mana) and some cool lore about ancient Kor Skyclaves rising up into the air now that the Eldrazi are gone (which is giving me some amazing ideas for when my Ravnica D&D party gets to Zendikar) we also got previews of the sets to come over the next year.

These are, to be clear, just names. But there's stuff we can glean from them.

First off, finally, we're going to Kaldheim. This Norse-themed world has been hinted at since Planechase came out in like 2009, I think, and has been theorized as Garruk's homeworld. Given the icy-blue logo and the fact that its name literally means "Cold Home," I'm guessing we might have a frigid setting, possibly bringing in some Ice Age block mechanics like Snow permanents. Either way, I'd expect Sagas, Trolls, and other Viking-themed stuff.

Next is Strixhaven: School of Mages. Other than having a vaguely Hogwartsian feel (too bad the author who created said setting has revealed herself to be such a hateful person) I don't really have much to go on here. I'd assume Strixhaven is a plane in and of itself, but is the plane considered a school for mages (which would be weird, as only planeswalkers would be able to travel to said school) or, might we get a set where we have a particular location on a plane that the set focuses on, like how Ghirapur is central to the Kaladesh setting?

The next Standard-Legal set in the list is a doozy: Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. I guess after Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros, it makes sense that they'd flip the script and have a D&D setting featured in a Magic set. I'll be curious to see how various elements break down into the five colors, and what they'll be doing mechanically (though the introduction of parties in Zendikar Rising would be an obvious fit for Forgotten Realms.) For those of you less familiar with D&D than MTG, the Forgotten Realms has been the "default" D&D setting in 5th Edition (and I think possibly also 2nd and 3rd edition - the setting has been around since the 1980s,) and features a vast breadth of locations and famous characters.

We're also going to be getting a Modern Horizons 2, as well as Time Spiral Remastered - essentially the Amonkhet treatment but for a much older block (though it doesn't feel so old to me as that's the last block I played in before this year.)

Finally, we've got two sets that are very sparse on details for, but which I'm intrigued by: Innistrad: Vampires and Innistrad: Werewolves. I don't exactly know how these will fit in rotationally (and given the color identities of those creatures on Innistrad, I wonder where White and Blue will come in) and whether they'll be standard-legal, but we shall see (they're coming in late 2021, so no rush.)

Anyway, a pretty exciting amount of information out there. For Arena, Zendikar Rising comes out on the 17th (so a little over two weeks from today.)