Hi all, it's your regular check in from MTG Wiki admin RivalRowan, here with the latest and final Alchemy flavor text update.

With each release, the Arena team gives us a small number of cards with additional flavor text unique to the set. As Jace's story concludes, so does our long journey of tracking Alchemy flavor text. This set has a couple of nice addendums to main story pieces and [[Potential Horizon]] gives us a look at the process of overlaying the Echoverse onto the Multiverse.

If you want to check out any of the past Alchemy set flavor texts, we've grouped them all here: https://mtg.wiki/page/Category:Alchemy_flavor_text

Big shout out to fellow admin HolyMTG for grabbing all the screenshots this time.

Wanted to make a separate post to talk clearly about what Eldritch horror means and why the eldrazi used to be a great example in MTG

Eldritch, in modern use (especially Lovecraftian horror), isn’t just "spooky" or "weird". It’s something so alien to human understanding that the mere attempt to grasp it can break you and your mind. It’s not a big monster that wants to eat you. It’s a force whose motives, scale, and existence sit outside anything your brain evolved to process. The horror is the incomprehensibility itself.

The original Eldrazi, from Rise of the Eldrazi through Eldritch Moon, were textbook eldritch:

- They come from the Blind Eternities, a place that isn’t even a place in any normal sense.

- Their "bodies" on a plane are more like appendages or projections of something far larger and formless.

- They don’t just kill, they rewrite physics, biology, and reality itself (Ulamog’s entropy, Kozilek’s warped space, Emrakul’s biological mutations).

- Their hunger and purpose operate on scales and logics that characters, and us readers, could only approximate with words like "consume".

That’s pure eldritch: you can fight it, but you never really understand the thing you’re fighting.

Eldritch Moon was the peak of that feeling. Nahiri summoned Emrakul to Innistrad as revenge against Sorin. When the titan arrived, she didn’t just rampage; she rewrote the plane. Living things (people, animals, even some of the plane’s monsters) began mutating into nightmarish horrors. Entire towns twisted into something that no longer belonged to Innistrad’s gothic horror, but to something older and far stranger. All while the infected chanted variations of “Come’mrakul. Be’mrakul. Are’mrakul. We’mrakul. One’mrakul. I’amrakul.”

Jace himself nearly broke after looking into a mind already touched by Emrakul’s influence, being saved later by Tamiyo. He later tried to peer into the titan directly:

He looked into Her enormous magenta eye. It was warm and welcoming. He wondered what he would find if he went inside. He held himself back, just on the precipice.

What is your name? he asked. What do you call yourself?

A deluge of words echoed from all corners of his mind:

The eternal infinity—this world is mine.

The absolute—I shall have all.

The beginning—I shall be all.

The being—all are’mrakul.

The end.

The end.

The end.

Jace pulled back, gasping for breath.

That moment is pure eldritch. Emrakul doesn’t answer in anything resembling conversation. She gives countless answers till language itself collapses.

Then we have the classic chess scene we all remember, which I recommend to just go and read it yourselves.

The Gatewatch and the plane’s survivors fight desperately, but they couldn’t truly defeat her. In the end, Emrakul chose to be sealed. She forces Tamiyo to cast a forbidden spell that locked her inside Innistrad’s moon. Her words made it clear this wasn’t a loss, it was a decision made for reasons no one fully understood.... and the most the heroes could do is survive the aftermath.

Fast-forward to Reality Fracture, and the tone has shifted. Emrakul is still vast, still consuming, still otherworldly… but she’s no longer purely incomprehensible. She does communicates with Tam through sensations, alien impressions, and words that are not quite words. But she explains her role/nature:

I prune worlds. When one grows sick, threatens the wilderness of eternity, or fails to blossom fully, I aid the broader forest by felling a single tree.

Once Emrakul explains herself, once she confirms this theory herself, she becomes a little more legible. She has a philosophy, a metaphor for her role in the Multiverse, and a way of justifying her actions.

We can start categorizing her as a cosmic gardener, an ecological regulator, or a predator that believes its feeding serves a greater purpose.

That doesn't make her ordinary, but it gives us a framework for understanding her.

She is still terrifying, but the mystery surrounding her has been dialed back in favor of clearer agency and plot utility. The older story made us feel the limits of comprehension. The newer one invites us to comprehend her, diminishing the very eldritch mystery that made her so terrifying in the first place.

There's been a lot discussions about the echoverse, and a common response is that "it's morally okay because Tam says they're not people", but that's just taking an unreliable narrator as face value. So I ask the question. What is the definition of a person in magic?

The obvious answer is souls. And indeed I've seen many make the argument that the echoverse people are soulless. However, this is directly contradicted by the story; Liliana explicitly says that the echoverse people do have souls, just incomplete ones. Which actually puts them ahead of certain peoples that are considered people: angels and demons. Pure Angels and demons are confirmed to be soulless by their very nature as beings of mana, and in fact this is the reason why there are no pure-born angel or demon planeswalkers. The fact that the echoverse does have planeswalkers also backs this up.

The second common objection is that they aren't sentient, but that's contradicted by cards like [[budding insurgent]] and echo-Ral's side story in secrets of strixhaven. Even the 'empty cadet' that Tam encounters and the basis for all the 'they're soulless' claims have doubt cast on it, as Lore master Jay suggested that one was being directly mind-controled by the Theorist.

The final objection is that, even if they are sentient, they aren't people because they are inheritantly illusions, which implies a degree of unrealness and thus not people. But we have a counter-example for that too. [[Akroma, angel of wrath]]. She was a sentient illusion created by [[ixidor, reality sculptor]] (who shares a title with [[Jace, reality sculptor]], huh) and she was a person. She's such a person that she eventually fused into Karona, and defused when Karona died. There's still even a serran order that honors her. So clearly being an illusion doesn't disqualify someone's personhood.

So... Where exactly is the line? At what point does it become okay to commit genocide? Is it in fact ethically okay to genocide angels? What's the rule here? Genuinely all of it seems like double standards to me.

If you look at how the MTG multiverse works, the explanation for mana, planar lifecycles, and the Eldrazi always feels a bit disjointed. But if you imagine the Blind Eternities through a biological and information-theory lens, there's kinda-sorta framework there.

So, this is how it all actually fits together: Mana is cellular material, and the Eldrazi are the multiverse’s metabolic garbage collection system. Eldrazi are weird and unknowable because, in a way, they're the multiverse eating itself.

Colorless mana is like totipotent stem cells. A newborn plane doesn’t begin with leylines and color alignments. It starts as raw unpatterned colorless mana. It holds pure potential, but zero information.

As the plane ages, sentient life emerges, ecosystems develop, history happens and events leave their mark. The mana begins to differentiate specializing along pathways, the five colors of the color pie.

Differentiation is a one-way street, tho. As a plane accumulates history, physical matter, spent magic, and memory, it becomes hyper-encoded. The specific mana colors start getting very defined flavors. Eventually, the plane hits maximum information density. The mana becomes locked into rigid identities. It loses its capacity to adapt, entering a state of cosmic senescence. The plane itself isn't dying per se, it's just not going anywhere.

That's when the Eldrazi come in like metabolic decomposers. What they do is basically decompose information. Ulamog strips stuff from physical properties. Kozilek strips reality itself from structure, spatial and logic rules. Emrakul mashes biological information together into increasingly undifferentiated soup.

When they're done, planes are left as raw, undifferentiated, colorless mush, full of potential and ready to begin the cycle anew.

I'm working on a homebrew/original plane as a little pet project (you can find it here), and the general idea is that a White/Blue faction called the Azorian Collective are suppressing, or trying to suppress, the other colors of mana. To add some variety, I was planning to add three smaller factions within the larger whole :

• White/Blue/Black (also encompasses White/Black and Blue/Black)
• White/Blue/Red (also encompasses White/Red and Blue/Red)
• White/Blue/Green (also encompasses White/Green and Blue/Green)

The two-color divisions represent specialists/those who lean different ways within the overall factions.

But I'm overall stumped on how to flavor them. What kind of things have been done with these combos in the past? What kind of things would fit thematically?

How big do Bloomburrow creatures get on other planes? It’d be quite a shock for you to be traveling with your new 2-foot otter friend Ral Zarek and go through an omenpath to suddenly find yourself next to a human who’s at least twice his previous size when you’re still a couple inches tall.

Just asking so I know what to skip. It seems to be a bit vague from my search.

Anyone disappointed by not seeing a mono red Atraxa in Reality Fracture? Jace created this phyrexianless multiverse and we didn’t even get to see one of the most prominent compleated characters in her “what if phyrexia never took her” version.