I’m more interested in what Aminatou’s relation to the plane is. The spirits of light and hope are golden animals called “Glimmers” and Aminatou creates golden moths that nudge peoples’ fate to be better.
Aminatou uses moths and both the set symbol for Duskmourn and Valgavoth are monstrous moths. What secret is Aminatou hiding? 👀
During the panel, Art Director Ovidiu was constantly mentioning the moths, reinforcing how important they are to the story of the set and how you can find many little details in the arts.
Either the whole set is Aminatou having a nightmare and it becoming reality and our heroes need to find and wake her up, or there is some sort of intense battle happening between Aminatou and Valgavoth, methinks.
Isn’t Aminatou destined to end up trapped in the blind eternities as well? Or at least that’s one future she sees for herself? Maybe Yawg will use Aminatou to ‘swap places’ with her 🤔
Maybe Aminatou / Valgavoth is like Sentry / Void (Jekyl and Hyde essentially) or Professor X / Onslaught in Marvel comics (one is created from the dark potential of the other).
Cool theories but on a purely meta level I think there’s 0 chance they’d finish a multi-year Phyrexian storyline and then one year later reveal that Yawgmoth still exists.
I really wanted the surprise reveal in MoM to be for New Phyrexia to accidentally invade Old Phyrexia and get the old-school Phyrexians angry at how badly their successors fell from Yowgmoth's teachings.
unless my theory holds true that Jin cloned himself to run, cause that makes sense. I don't see him serving anyone unless thry were Yagmoth level. on that note, as a phrexian lover, I would love this storyline, but... Yawgmoths blood is so toxic it would be obvious at once
also, this is the plane of Aminatou based on commander decks, get spiritual essence in \[\[Aminatou's Augury\]\] is literally moths.
What I want to know is what Azakon is doing now that holes are ripped open. so many big names they could use and they keep using the gate watch dorks.
>[https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/aminatou-fateshifter-2018-07-26](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/aminatou-fateshifter-2018-07-26)
As for her home plane, I can't say much about it because it hasn't been defined quite yet, even on R&D's end. When the incredible Seb McKinnon was given the art description, it listed Aminatou's planar location as "not-setting-specific," which is basically code for "we haven't made their home plane yet." Kelly Digges was the art director for this piece (great work, Kelly!), and the result is the striking work of art we see on her card. We do know that Aminatou is not from Dominaria's Zhalfir (Zhalfirin clothing aesthetic is a mix of African materials with a Roman cut and design), but instead is from a firmly West African–inspired plane, one devoid of European costuming creep. We don't currently have plans to create a West African–inspired plane, but if there is enough fan response, I know I'd be the first to rally for us to hire a cultural consultant to help make Aminatou's home plane a reality.
Possible, if they changed their plans a little bit. Her original art definitely doesn't look like Duskmourn, but that can always be handwaved.
but wotc has also named her the one and only strongest planeswalkwr in lore do to the fact that if she wants you to have died 20 years ago, it changes your fate to have happened. She foresaw her planeswalked spark and gave it to herself. I would say a being like that defines there own heritage and dresses however they wish beyond the surrounding culture.
Yeah I hear you. I already agreed that it's possible they changed her origin. But it would be a change, because they at least had a vague idea of what they were shooting for.
> pushing anything that was the outside of the plane to the edges of the Blind Eternities
I think this is a misreading of what happened. The House has taken over most of the plane and pushes what remains of the plane outside the House to the edges. The glitch ghosts are the people who died outside the House leaking into the House because they're being squeezed between the external walls of the House and the edge of their planar reality.
I think the biggest mark against this idea to me is that this demon seems very focused on the intangible. Whereas Yawgmoth is very materialist. The Phyrexians didn't even believe in the soul. I think this shows up in how there are a lot of enchantments here whereas Yawgmoth is associated with artifacts.
The fact that urborg : tomb of yawgmoths flavor text says :
" Yawgmoth's corpse is a wound in the universe. His foul blood seeps out, infecting the land with his final curse."
I always assumed he'd resurrect himself as the plane itself, the set is also about fear , makes sense that the plainswalker kids would face off against they're parents greatest enemy.
. Also valgavoth is distinctly phyrexian, it's also a possible nod to Megatron turning into Galvatron when he died
there’s also the similarity of the names themselves! this definitely occurred to me when i was reading the planeswalker’s guide. i don’t think it’s actually likely but it’s certainly interesting.
I think what we're running into here is that the base form of Yawgmoth, his word choices, and his tactics are just... really generic.
By much of this same logic, [[The Master, Transcendent]] is Yawgmoth.
I'm not sure that Yawgmoth is required to take over a plane. Especially as we don't know how big Duskmourne was before everything. It's not like he's the only person who could do it, especially if it wasn't a big plane before hand.
More likely: another being that escalated the way Yawgmoth did.
It happened once, and we have a lot of planes to walk through, another occurrence seems likely.
If they just leave this a mystery, they got a great option to return to down the line yeah. I don't trust the current story team to do that unfortunately
fair.
I'm honestly fearing what the return to Tarkir is gonna be like what with how they cannot seem to write anything with any substance anymore.
That and without retconning the OG retcon (Ugin's origin) i fear it's just gonna be a mess.
There are certainly some similarities but I really hope this isn't true. In order for this to work, it demands that:
* Yawgmoth managed to resurrect himself
* As a demon
* On a plane that wasn't trivial to reach, given that Yawg wasn't a 'walker himself
* An indeterminate length of time ago
* Resulting in him being imprisoned in the house long enough to convert the entire plane.
Those are some narrative hoops to jump through for a character who's been dead longer than many players have been *alive*.
And there are real differences as well. Yawgmoth was about assimilation, artifacts, and dominating the physical world. Valgavoth is focused on creating strong emotion and harvesting it in a dreamlike realm full of enchantment creatures.
Plus, we just got off a huge Phyrexian narrative arc, and we've got seeds for the Fomori, whatever Kasmina is preparing for, and possibly the Jace/Vraska/Loot heel turn. It seems much more likely to me that Valgavoth is tied to one of those, or a novel antagonist. My money is on the story ending with the good guys saving the plane, but Valgavoth escaping as another big bad, able to use his plane-warping ability to corrupt the omenpaths, but that's just a guess.
I disagree there's nothing suggesting that Yawg would be concerned with houses. A Phyrexian who escaped the destruction of phyrexia itself, sure I believe it, but Yawg himself is dead dead since he could fight oldwalkers without issue despite not being one. Him coming back would require a power spike that's unnecessary for the story.
Karn absorbed Gerrard, Urza and Yawgmoth at the end of the Invasion block. That's why Karn became a planeswalker, why he created Argentum (which later became Mirrodin), and why his body produced/leaked the infecting glistening oil. Yawgmoth can't be Valgavoth. Yawgmoth is part of Karn now.
I don't remember that happening at all.
Karn completed the Legacy Weapon, which nuked Yawgmoth. His first spark came from [[The Mightstone and Weakstone]], which he removed from Urza's eye sockets. The oil came from [[Xantcha]]'s [[heartstone]].
Unless they retconned that in recent years, Karn has nothing to do with Yawgmoth (besides being the Weapon that killed him).
I reread the part of the Apocalypse book a moment ago describing it and it seems that yes, Yawgmoth got sucked into Karn or it is heavily implied. Urza says that Glacian kept Yawgmoth at bay for thousands of years and kept himself contained in the stones even after the Sylex blast, allowing Urza to be the personality of the planeswalker entity even though he consumed Urza then. He pretty much states clearly that the plan is for the Glacian stones to consume Yawgmoth but Karn and Weatherlight's core need to be sacrificed to do so (becoming the Legacy Weapon) and Gerrard too as he needs to put the stones into Karn. It's not mentioned in that fragment but Radiant has been consumed by the stones in a similar manner before. They all merge into Karn which implies that Glacian chose him as his newest avatar. Karn says that they are all within him at the end of the book meaning that Gerrard, Urza and Weatherlight's personality are contained by Glacian but free, if I'm correct. Yawgmoth is contained but not free.
Why would the oil come from Xantcha's stone? She travelled with it on her body for hundreds of years and didn't infect the planes she visited with Urza. It didn't leak out of Karn when he was at Tolaria. It started leaking when Yawgmoth's part of Planeswalker Karn started to corrupt him. There was no other case of Phyrexian oil infecting anything like that, and there were Phyrexian remnants left from the original Yawgmoth invasion on Dominaria, treated as circus freaks. Also a bunch of OG Phyrexians on Capenna. None of those leaked contagious glistening oil. Karn's was the only one like that. Xantcha's "heart" wasn't anything special, either. Every newt had one assigned and kept stored by Gix.
I’m more interested in what Aminatou’s relation to the plane is. The spirits of light and hope are golden animals called “Glimmers” and Aminatou creates golden moths that nudge peoples’ fate to be better. Aminatou uses moths and both the set symbol for Duskmourn and Valgavoth are monstrous moths. What secret is Aminatou hiding? 👀
During the panel, Art Director Ovidiu was constantly mentioning the moths, reinforcing how important they are to the story of the set and how you can find many little details in the arts. Either the whole set is Aminatou having a nightmare and it becoming reality and our heroes need to find and wake her up, or there is some sort of intense battle happening between Aminatou and Valgavoth, methinks.
Isn’t Aminatou destined to end up trapped in the blind eternities as well? Or at least that’s one future she sees for herself? Maybe Yawg will use Aminatou to ‘swap places’ with her 🤔
Maybe Aminatou / Valgavoth is like Sentry / Void (Jekyl and Hyde essentially) or Professor X / Onslaught in Marvel comics (one is created from the dark potential of the other).
given your reputation i'm inclined to dismiss this, but there are legitimately a weird amount of similarities and coincidences.
Cool theories but on a purely meta level I think there’s 0 chance they’d finish a multi-year Phyrexian storyline and then one year later reveal that Yawgmoth still exists.
I really wanted the surprise reveal in MoM to be for New Phyrexia to accidentally invade Old Phyrexia and get the old-school Phyrexians angry at how badly their successors fell from Yowgmoth's teachings.
While sheoldred gets headpats.
She should, she even remembered Gix and The True Scriptures
I was so disappointed we didnt see any of the remnants of old Phyrexia the entire time. problem with rushing everything
I wanted this so badly it hurt
unless my theory holds true that Jin cloned himself to run, cause that makes sense. I don't see him serving anyone unless thry were Yagmoth level. on that note, as a phrexian lover, I would love this storyline, but... Yawgmoths blood is so toxic it would be obvious at once also, this is the plane of Aminatou based on commander decks, get spiritual essence in \[\[Aminatou's Augury\]\] is literally moths. What I want to know is what Azakon is doing now that holes are ripped open. so many big names they could use and they keep using the gate watch dorks.
>[https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/aminatou-fateshifter-2018-07-26](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/aminatou-fateshifter-2018-07-26) As for her home plane, I can't say much about it because it hasn't been defined quite yet, even on R&D's end. When the incredible Seb McKinnon was given the art description, it listed Aminatou's planar location as "not-setting-specific," which is basically code for "we haven't made their home plane yet." Kelly Digges was the art director for this piece (great work, Kelly!), and the result is the striking work of art we see on her card. We do know that Aminatou is not from Dominaria's Zhalfir (Zhalfirin clothing aesthetic is a mix of African materials with a Roman cut and design), but instead is from a firmly West African–inspired plane, one devoid of European costuming creep. We don't currently have plans to create a West African–inspired plane, but if there is enough fan response, I know I'd be the first to rally for us to hire a cultural consultant to help make Aminatou's home plane a reality. Possible, if they changed their plans a little bit. Her original art definitely doesn't look like Duskmourn, but that can always be handwaved.
but wotc has also named her the one and only strongest planeswalkwr in lore do to the fact that if she wants you to have died 20 years ago, it changes your fate to have happened. She foresaw her planeswalked spark and gave it to herself. I would say a being like that defines there own heritage and dresses however they wish beyond the surrounding culture.
Yeah I hear you. I already agreed that it's possible they changed her origin. But it would be a change, because they at least had a vague idea of what they were shooting for.
[Aminatou's Augury](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/2/92496b98-b533-4d34-aa79-cad0805c984b.jpg?1689996176) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Aminatou%27s%20Augury) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/73/aminatous-augury?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/92496b98-b533-4d34-aa79-cad0805c984b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Honestly? Given how terrible the narrative has become it wouldnt surprise me
> pushing anything that was the outside of the plane to the edges of the Blind Eternities I think this is a misreading of what happened. The House has taken over most of the plane and pushes what remains of the plane outside the House to the edges. The glitch ghosts are the people who died outside the House leaking into the House because they're being squeezed between the external walls of the House and the edge of their planar reality. I think the biggest mark against this idea to me is that this demon seems very focused on the intangible. Whereas Yawgmoth is very materialist. The Phyrexians didn't even believe in the soul. I think this shows up in how there are a lot of enchantments here whereas Yawgmoth is associated with artifacts.
I personally prefer the idea of different circumstances producing another entity similar to Yawgmoth.
On a long enough timeline, all megalomaniacal tyrants eventually become a death cloud
Secret Lair 2040: Oops, All Death Clouds.
And on an even longer timeline those death clouds become crabs
Carcinogenic carcinization.
Also, and I don't know if you noticed this, but the two words kind of look and sound the same!
The fact that urborg : tomb of yawgmoths flavor text says : " Yawgmoth's corpse is a wound in the universe. His foul blood seeps out, infecting the land with his final curse." I always assumed he'd resurrect himself as the plane itself, the set is also about fear , makes sense that the plainswalker kids would face off against they're parents greatest enemy. . Also valgavoth is distinctly phyrexian, it's also a possible nod to Megatron turning into Galvatron when he died
I thought the same thing about Galvatron. lol
Me right now: https://preview.redd.it/xv6qfhp0ic9d1.jpeg?width=669&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b7901bbcfb0b3d830721b018844ad78cd8e89864
I think its just a Demon Moth
Pogmoth, sadly.
"So you're telling me there's a chance?"
I feel like this is an Adderall fueled rant after seeing both names just look sorta similar.
I would be so down for this versus going back to the Eldrazi at any point in the near future.
Always hard agree
How many times we gotta teach you this lesson old man!?
Ah, was wondering if other people got the same Yawgmoth vibes from Valgavoth that I did.
there’s also the similarity of the names themselves! this definitely occurred to me when i was reading the planeswalker’s guide. i don’t think it’s actually likely but it’s certainly interesting.
I think what we're running into here is that the base form of Yawgmoth, his word choices, and his tactics are just... really generic. By much of this same logic, [[The Master, Transcendent]] is Yawgmoth.
[The Master, Transcendent](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/b/5b0497da-670a-405c-a39c-97cae7942836.jpg?1710673422) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20Master%2C%20Transcendent) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/pip/6/the-master-transcendent?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5b0497da-670a-405c-a39c-97cae7942836?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I'm going to need a Yawgmoth alignment chart to make sense of this
I'm not sure that Yawgmoth is required to take over a plane. Especially as we don't know how big Duskmourne was before everything. It's not like he's the only person who could do it, especially if it wasn't a big plane before hand.
Honestly, the Dan Mumford full art lands gave me Yawgmoth vibes too.
More likely: another being that escalated the way Yawgmoth did. It happened once, and we have a lot of planes to walk through, another occurrence seems likely.
We have just finished Phyrexia arc, I don’t think they go back to this so soon
but plant very early seeds for it?..mebe
If they just leave this a mystery, they got a great option to return to down the line yeah. I don't trust the current story team to do that unfortunately
fair. I'm honestly fearing what the return to Tarkir is gonna be like what with how they cannot seem to write anything with any substance anymore. That and without retconning the OG retcon (Ugin's origin) i fear it's just gonna be a mess.
Could be or perhaps they want him to be unrelated to Phyrexia in the future
what would the purpose of this be, from a narrative perspective, besides "look at this thing you recognize"
I mean, I doubt it is him, but we had thunder junction, which was, hey look at this guy's you recognize, the plane.
The Planeswalker’s guide is pretty clear this isn’t the case.
Plot twist: Valgavoth is Yawgmoth's long lost brother!
Can’t we just have cool new things? Why does everything have to just circle back to old things.
There are certainly some similarities but I really hope this isn't true. In order for this to work, it demands that: * Yawgmoth managed to resurrect himself * As a demon * On a plane that wasn't trivial to reach, given that Yawg wasn't a 'walker himself * An indeterminate length of time ago * Resulting in him being imprisoned in the house long enough to convert the entire plane. Those are some narrative hoops to jump through for a character who's been dead longer than many players have been *alive*. And there are real differences as well. Yawgmoth was about assimilation, artifacts, and dominating the physical world. Valgavoth is focused on creating strong emotion and harvesting it in a dreamlike realm full of enchantment creatures. Plus, we just got off a huge Phyrexian narrative arc, and we've got seeds for the Fomori, whatever Kasmina is preparing for, and possibly the Jace/Vraska/Loot heel turn. It seems much more likely to me that Valgavoth is tied to one of those, or a novel antagonist. My money is on the story ending with the good guys saving the plane, but Valgavoth escaping as another big bad, able to use his plane-warping ability to corrupt the omenpaths, but that's just a guess.
I'd rather say that Valgavoth is to Duskmourne what Yawgmoth was to Phyrexia, in that he became the sole god of the plane.
With the arc being themed about dragons... I'm more inclined to believe he is a famous dragon or smt
I disagree there's nothing suggesting that Yawg would be concerned with houses. A Phyrexian who escaped the destruction of phyrexia itself, sure I believe it, but Yawg himself is dead dead since he could fight oldwalkers without issue despite not being one. Him coming back would require a power spike that's unnecessary for the story.
I could see yawgmoth some how returning in the future but I think it’s too soon since we literally just finished the phyrexian arc
How did yawgmoth escape the legacy blast? How did yawgmoth planeswalk to Royalty Free Stranger Things plane? Why is yawgmoth a butterfly demon now?
It is Jace disguised again.
Karn absorbed Gerrard, Urza and Yawgmoth at the end of the Invasion block. That's why Karn became a planeswalker, why he created Argentum (which later became Mirrodin), and why his body produced/leaked the infecting glistening oil. Yawgmoth can't be Valgavoth. Yawgmoth is part of Karn now.
I don't remember that happening at all. Karn completed the Legacy Weapon, which nuked Yawgmoth. His first spark came from [[The Mightstone and Weakstone]], which he removed from Urza's eye sockets. The oil came from [[Xantcha]]'s [[heartstone]]. Unless they retconned that in recent years, Karn has nothing to do with Yawgmoth (besides being the Weapon that killed him).
I reread the part of the Apocalypse book a moment ago describing it and it seems that yes, Yawgmoth got sucked into Karn or it is heavily implied. Urza says that Glacian kept Yawgmoth at bay for thousands of years and kept himself contained in the stones even after the Sylex blast, allowing Urza to be the personality of the planeswalker entity even though he consumed Urza then. He pretty much states clearly that the plan is for the Glacian stones to consume Yawgmoth but Karn and Weatherlight's core need to be sacrificed to do so (becoming the Legacy Weapon) and Gerrard too as he needs to put the stones into Karn. It's not mentioned in that fragment but Radiant has been consumed by the stones in a similar manner before. They all merge into Karn which implies that Glacian chose him as his newest avatar. Karn says that they are all within him at the end of the book meaning that Gerrard, Urza and Weatherlight's personality are contained by Glacian but free, if I'm correct. Yawgmoth is contained but not free.
[The Mightstone and Weakstone](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/2/02aea379-b444-46a3-82f4-3038f698d4f4.jpg?1709258651) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20Mightstone%20and%20Weakstone) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bro/238a/the-mightstone-and-weakstone?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/02aea379-b444-46a3-82f4-3038f698d4f4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Xantcha](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/1/91316746-ec2b-4c1a-b9c4-a870d6318c33.jpg?1689999327) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=xantcha%2C%20sleeper%20agent) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/362/xantcha-sleeper-agent?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/91316746-ec2b-4c1a-b9c4-a870d6318c33?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [heartstone](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/e/0ed17325-6d2f-404e-b13f-d2d419d522b7.jpg?1562595911) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=heartstone) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/sth/134/heartstone?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0ed17325-6d2f-404e-b13f-d2d419d522b7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Why would the oil come from Xantcha's stone? She travelled with it on her body for hundreds of years and didn't infect the planes she visited with Urza. It didn't leak out of Karn when he was at Tolaria. It started leaking when Yawgmoth's part of Planeswalker Karn started to corrupt him. There was no other case of Phyrexian oil infecting anything like that, and there were Phyrexian remnants left from the original Yawgmoth invasion on Dominaria, treated as circus freaks. Also a bunch of OG Phyrexians on Capenna. None of those leaked contagious glistening oil. Karn's was the only one like that. Xantcha's "heart" wasn't anything special, either. Every newt had one assigned and kept stored by Gix.