Wizards of the Coast has launched Dragons of Tarkir, the next expansion to the world's greatest CCG Magic: The Gathering into stores today. The new set brings to a close the next chapter of the saga of Sarkhan Val and his attempts to reconfigure the timeline of the plane of Tarkir.
All You Need To Know About Dragons Of Tarkir, The Short Version
The folks over at Loading Ready Run have compiled another video in their expanding repertoire of Friday Nights, their Magic: The Gathering based series.. This time, our...heroes? Debate which is stronger, dragons or khans (spoiler: it's dragons) and the finer points of altering the timeline. Other spoiler: bad puns abound.
There is a lot of backstory involved, including a trade for the legendary (but inefficient) card Time Walk, which in the Friday Nights series can actually alter the timeline. Now, in order to affect change in the course of time, we must make the following assumption: that time is a river (or, if you will, flat circle) and it moves in a single direction along one single path, with no divergences.
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This means that you will only ever travel backward and forward along the same line, and as such, things have already happened and will happen again. However, when Sarkhan went back in time, he prevented the slaying of Ugin and we now flash forward 1000 years (to roughly the date equivalent of when Sarkhan first went back in time) and find things irrevocably altered. The five dragons rule over the vast armies of Tarkir, where before they had been hunted down and murdered.
This is a paradox along the first time stream. If Sarkhan were to go back in time, he would fail because he always went back in time, and since there were no dragons around then, there would never be dragons. Fate would be set. However, since Sarkhan was successful and the timeline has changed, this implies that the Magic multiverse relies on the infinite web theory of time, wherein an infinite number of divergent points occur every single moment and are affected by our every thought or action.
In this timeline, our actions decide our destiny and the world is changed because we decided to go left. There exists another timeline, one we are not aware of, in which we went right and that creates its own set of multiverses for every action thereon in, with a whole new universe being made and remade every microsecond of every day.
Perhaps only a Planeswalker can see the many disparate paths that stem from a single thought or action.
Which is all to say, check out the latest Friday Nights video and be sure to pick Dragons of Tarkir to see how the story ends at your local game shop today.
