The 2 drop vampire lord's flavor text finally pushed me over the edge. I have soured on Ixalan flavor.

I -LOVED- the idea of Vampire conquistadors, but I feel like they are just so "evil in every way" that it completely turns me off. There is only so many ways you can make a dinosaur interesting, and we already got all of them in Ixalan. The Merfolk have always felt stapled on. Pirates are fine, but there aren't many right now and they all just feel so... minor.

I am really missing not having planeswalkers be the story focus because creative will start painting this incredible world, and then go and make sure they hit things on the head overly hard so they don't have to go in detail, just so they can focus on the walkers.

I really hope we see a bunch of Angarth ahead because he seems like the least two dimensional character to come out of Ixalan.

I don't know yet if we'll get a UR today because the new WotC website layout is a confusing mess and I don't know these things until they get posted on Tumblr anymore, but we did get an info-dump about Azor for those that may be interested.

People were talking about new story stuff so I went to the WOTC site, but then I didn't see it, so I just left. Nothing in this world is more frustrating than bad UI.
What's the cliff notes version?

There isn't a new UR yet as far as I can tell. When/if it pops up I'll find it and post it in the thread where it goes. Other than that, I linked to the Azor story bits. Basically:

-Azor was a 'walker.
-Azor has been hiding out on Ixalan for some reason.
-Azor might want his job back as "dude who makes the Guildpact work."

THAT Azor!? AZORIUS Azor? I didn't see that one coming.
It gets Jace out of the Guildpact thing at least. Fight fire with fire, and poor writing choices with questionable ones.

It's been something of a possibility ever since people noticed how similar Ixalan's Binding looks to the Azorious guild symbol. The only reason it would look like that is if Azor was the one who made it, and he was known to be something of a 'Walker pre-Ravnica. From what we have gathered thus far, the Immortal Sun is likely what is left of his Spark, but why he removed it and turned Ixalan into something of a 'Walker prison is still unkown.

It's a pants on head dumb twist.

Saw it coming. Plus knew that Sphinx we saw for the first box preview was Azor! XD

Yeah but it shouldn't have been

I'm curious to hear why the twist "shouldn't have been" Azor. If not him, what should it have been?

I'll mention that Allison Luhrs has said on Twitter that this time around the art book's story section is only sketching things in the "broadest way possible" (in response to complaints that the previous art books spoiled too much of the story). So there is a lot that we don't know about how all of this will unfold over the next month-and-a-half of story chapters. I'm expecting a chapter where Azor explains what he is doing on Ixalan and why he created the Immortal Sun.

Then again, we never really got enough explanation of why Amonkhet Nissa gets to be part blue, so....

For game color balance considerations and as a bit of leftover flavor from her meditative swimming with the Kaladeshi sky whales.

I only come in and out of the stories, typically reading them in batches, but reading the end of Kaladesh, I definitely saw the blue rising in Nissa. It won't dominate her personality and I would not expect to see Nissa blue-aligned with regularity in the future, but Nissa resolving to be more open-minded and to start learning about others is very (green-)blue.

Honestly, I want to know WHY Azor apparently decided that it was worth being eternally imprisoned to keep planeswalkers from getting OUT of Ixalan. As far as we know, there's no reason Planeswalkers should be interested in Ixalan, other than the Immortal Sun that Azor made to keep them from leaving and telling the rest of the Multiverse about Ixalan.

It shouldn't have been anyone. There's shouldn't have been a sphinx at all. There should have just been a very mysterious artifact with no explanation because it's 10000 years old. I also would have been cool with it being Thran or phyrexian because those actually seem like civilizations that could have spread throughout the multiverse in super ancient times and we'd not know about it until way later.

I mean, it could be that Ixalan was made to be something of a trap-plane. We won't know for sure until we get some story about it, but I would not be surprised if Azor had crossed paths with the likes of Bolas or Ob or some other Multiversal threat and decided to set up a prison plane for them to follow him to, but then that never happened for any host of reasons and, if it was Bolas, he figured it out and was too smart to go himself. It certainly won't be the case, but I do wonder how this sort of magic would have worked on the Eldrazi if they had come to Ixalan. Would it have been able to figuratively nail them to the plane?

I love artificial planes or walker controlled planes set up for a purpose but we have that wayyyyyyyyyyyy too often now

Tezzeret can still use a portal to move out, so I think it's strictly planeswalking that is blocked.

I hadn't gotten that far in artbook spoilers yet. I mean, I assumed that Bolas' "agent" was either going to be Tezz or Ral, but I hadn't heard one way or the other yet.

I remembered the character development from Kaladesh, but that was not nearly enough. So it really is just because we had back-to-back Nissa and they couldn't both be mono-Green?

Ugh. I'm all for planeswalker color identity being almost entirely about color balance for competitive play, but ugh.

Disagree. This is great and I love it. (Especially since I think it points to Ravnica III in the fall.)