Planar Chaos

Planar Chaos is an expansion set, codenamed "Crackle," from the trading card game Magic: The Gathering. It is scheduled for release on February 2, 2007. The pre-release events will take place on January 20th and 21st, 2007.

Planar Chaos

File:Planar Chaos expansion symbol.jpg
Released	February 2 2007
Size	165 cards (60 common, 55 uncommon, 50 rare)
Keywords	Vanishing
Mechanics	To be announced
Development code	Crackle
Expansion code	Unknown
Second set in the Time Spiral Block block
Time Spiral Planar Chaos Future Sight
← Time Spiral Future Sight →

Storyline

The temporal stresses being applied to Dominaria have expanded, causing multiple parallel universes (versions of Dominaria where history played out differently) to merge into the already colliding past-present-future of current events.

Set details

Planar Chaos contains 165 cards. The designers of this set are Bill Rose (lead designer), Matt Place, Mark Rosewater, and Paul Sottosanti.

The set will have 45 "Timeshifted" cards as confirmed by Mark Rosewater. Unlike Time Spiral, the Timeshifted cards will not be reprints of older Magic cards, will have normal rarity symbols as opposed to purple, and will be considered a part of the expansion, not a separate sub-set, the new Timeshifted cards instead of being timeshifted will be colorshifted such as a black version of Wrath of God called Damnation. These timeshifted cards are exact reprints of older cards, with three differences - they are in a different colour, have a different name, and if the original card referred to a colour or basic land type, the timeshifted version is altered to maintain the same "feel" of that (for example, the black Funeral Charm gave swampwalk to a creature, while the blue timeshifted version Piracy Charm gives islandwalk; the original green Whirling Dervish had protection from black and the black timeshifted Dunerider Outlaw has protection from green.) In each pack, three common cards will be of the Timeshifted variety, and an uncommon will be replaced with either a Timeshifted rare or uncommon. Foil cards, instead of replacing a card of the same rarity, will replace a common card. It is possible to receive a booster with up to three rare cards (similar to Time Spiral) - one normal, one foil, and one timeshifted. . The uncommon timeshifted cards show up in a 3:1 ratio to the rare timeshifted cards, so the average out of 4 boosters is 3 uncommon and 1 rare timeshifted card.

In a magicthegathering.com Arcana update for Thursday, October 26th, the set symbol for Planar Chaos, along with a new card art and logo banner, was revealed.

The booster packaging was revealed on Thursday, January 4th.

Speculation

There will be at least 5 dragons in Planar Chaos, which, according to Matt Cavotta, might have the best dragon art of any Magic card.

The Orb of Insight confirms that the word Sliver is found 24 times in card names and text boxes in Planar Chaos, indicating that there will be yet another wave of Sliver creatures to complement those found in previous sets. Also, The words "Split" and "Second" are each found only twice, showing that Planar Chaos will have a more limited number of split-second spells.

A French promotional poster of the Planar Chaos prerelease featured art of a female angel with similar armor to Akroma and the caption "What if you went to a prerelease and everything had changed?" Because of this red "Akroma", many had dubbed her "Akroma, Angel of Fury", in reference to red being a destructive color, and it has been confirmed that this is in fact correct. The speculated card was confirmed in an article on the Magic: The Gathering website, and used to highlight the "alternate reality" theme of the set.

The Unraveling Mind preconstructed deck features an image of a cat warrior dressed identically to the character Mirri in the artwork for the card Mirri, Cat Warrior. This 'evil' Mirri has been confirmed as "Mirri the Cursed" .

In the second installment of information for the planar chaos minisite, in the flavor section, a Blue aligned version of the Legend Braids (the cabal summoner and antagonist in parts of both Odyssey and Onslaught blocks) was hinted at and art for it released. The Text says "An Otarian wizard devotes her life to arcane study rather than yielding to the corruption of dementia."

Speculations about a picture that was shown in both the mini-site flavor and story accompanied by a sentences saying "Some will seek redemption", and seeing as it appered in a story about Mirri, many beleive that a white Crovax's will appear.

The article "A Trip to the Library" mentions that Planar Chaos will have another Magus cycle accompanying Time Spiral's Magus cycle. Unlike in Time Spiral, this cycle takes famous lands instead of artifacts and makes creatures that has the exact same abilities as the land they represent (such as Magus of the Library representing Library of Alexandria).

On January 1, 2007, a preview card was posted on magicthegathering.com. It started off as showing the 9th Edition version of Wrath of God, then fading into the preview card, Damnation, which is exactly the same as Wrath of God except for color; Damnation is black, Wrath is white. This has furthered the speculation that the theme of Planar Chaos will be shifting cards into different colors.

Mechanics

The strong blue morph mechanic-theme present in Time Spiral was originally intended for Planar Chaos. Looking for blue's primary identity in the set, Time Spiral's head designer, Brian Schneider, moved the majority of the Planar Chaos morph cards to Time Spiral. The presence of a theme deck named "Ixidor's Legacy" suggests that morph may still have a reasonable presence in blue in Planar Chaos. A card released by Wizards, for stores to give to their players as a preview, shows that there will be Split cards in the set, but a new kind; Same Color Split cards.

So far, the only mechanic purely from Planar Chaos is Vanishing which is a fixed version of an older mechanic, Fading. When a creature with Vanishing comes into play, it comes with a number of time counters. At the beginning of every upkeep, a time counter has to be removed from the creature. When you remove the last time counter, sacrifice the creature. The key difference between Vanishing and Fading occurs is one of timing. With Vanishing, the creature has to be sacrificed when you removed the last time counter, while creatures with Fading only need to be sacrificed when you cannot remove a counter from the creature. So, if you have one creature with Vanishing 3 and another creature with Fading 3, the creature with Vanishing will be sacrificed on the 4th upkeep, while the creature with Fading will be sacrificed on the 5th upkeep.

Also, the original Suspend ability from Time Spiral comes back with a twist on a cycle of creatures. These creatures have */* as their power and toughness, which increases the longer they are 'suspended' out of the game. Each time a time counter is removed, the cards have a trigger.

Theme decks

Four theme decks for Planar Chaos were revealed in the December 14th Magic Arcana post on magicthegathering.com.

• Rituals of Rebirth (Green/White/Black)
• Unraveling Mind (Red/Black)
• Ixidor's Legacy (Blue)
• Endless March (Red/White)

Notable cards

• Damnation - A "timeshifted" black version of Wrath of God.

• Groundbreaker - A "timeshifted" green version of Ball Lightning.

• Akroma, Angel of Fury - A red version of Akroma, Angel of Wrath, but is not considered "timeshifted" because it is not a direct copy of the original card.

• Torchling - A red version of Morphling, but is not considered "timeshifted" because it is not a direct copy of the original card.

• Timbermare - A green variation of Thundermare. Was revealed by former Pro Tour player Jamie Wakefield in his preview article for StarCityGames.com to be a tribute card to his late wife Marilyn "The Lovely Mare" Wakefield, who died of ovarian cancer in May of 2006.

• Brute Force - A "timeshifted" red version of Giant Growth

• Gaea's Anthem - A "timeshifted" green version of Glorious Anthem

• Piracy Charm - A "timeshifted" blue version of Visions' black Funeral Charm
• Magus of the Library - The sixth magus of the five magi with the abilities(s) of past artifacts or lands. It has the abilities of Library of Alexandria, and was almost taken out because it was thought to be too powerful.

• Chronozoa - A 3/3 blue creature with the keyword ability Vanishing. Whenever Chronozoa is put in the graveyard fom play with no time counters on it, it duplicates itself, like a microbe(Chronozoa itself looks like a giant Paramecium. The name is likely a word play on Protozoa replacing Proto with the prefix chrono.)

• Oros, the Avenger - The prerelease promo card, a powerful dragon.

External links

• Planar Chaos Minisite' Magic: The Gathering Official Planar Chaos Minisite
• First famous Planar Chaos Card announced : http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/expansion/planarchaos
• Pre-release Spoiler List Speculation : http://mtgsalvation.com/planar-chaos-spoiler.html