Home Orb of Insight: Equipment – 0

Welcome to the first day of previews here for the “new set!” Hmm.. let’s see, it’s going to be awkward calling it the new set all the time, isn’t it? Well, why don’t we just unveil the set name? That sounds fair enough, you’ve waited and here it is! (scroll down)

Wastelands

Sorry, that was the only way I could think to achieve the effect of a surprise!

“Welcome to the Waste, it is an inhospitable place, traveler. The best thing you’ll find here is a way out. I don’t know what brought you to this corner of the multiverse, but I suggest that you do your business quickly and leave. The locals are either scum or scoundrels, and the lord of this place embraces the emptiness it embodies. Some are desperate enough to be useful, but you’re still better off doing your trading and dealing in Mercadia. You’ll find that, in time, your powers will fade and perhaps even a ‘walker such as yourself will be helpless. This place is cut off from the source and it will sap any mana on you like it wicks away stray moisture. The Wastes are hungry and the powerful become food for its grumblings.”

You’d be lucky if that was the warning you received upon entering the Wastelands. The Wastelands is a plane that magic has forgotten. Some dark dealings long ago turned this place into a hollow shell that no longer has any mana of its own. The days are scorching hot and the night brings the emptiness of the vacuum’s cold. It’s inhabitants survive only on the dealings and tradings with extraplanar travelers and the little that they salvaged from the catastrophe that ruined them. Every city is eventually brought under and every hope is eventually crushed by the weight of falling sand.

The plane hovers over the void, slowly moving towards it, inching nearer every day. The basic matter of the Wastes is its grey sand, which can support no life and consumes anything of value it comes in contact with and eventually converts it into just more sand. The grayer and more lifeless the sand becomes, the hungrier it is to consume anything of value, anything alive, anything glowing with magic.

So how does anything survive in this place? Well, to be sure, not much does. But there are the few guarded relics and places that have been vigilantly tended to that predate the cataclysm that everyone on the plane has forgotten; the cataclysm that made the Wastelands what it is. But those relics and places are too few and too decayed to make much difference. The only real saving grace for the Wastelands is the powerful influences of the heavens. The celestial bodies that fill the sky impose their influence on the voidlands below them. But this influence is not gentle. Without any power of its own, the Wastes are torn and rended by the gravity of the spheres. The fates that the sun, moon, stars, and the emptiness of space bring determine the lives of the people of the Wastes. It is said that the only chance you have in the Wastelands is to try to align yourself with some power of the heavens and follow the fate that they call out for you. So the people, from the lowliest rogue to the lord of the Wastes himself, search the sky for a way to survive. And even though the powers of the heavenly spheres are completely mindless and give no thought to the ruined place they circle, the people of the Wastes have no other hope but to try to see the future in them.

Here we have one of the mindless forces that asserts itself on the Wastes. I’ll have a chance to go into this later in more detail, but this card was revealed not just because it expresses the empty mood of the Wastelands. It also represents the set’s main mechanic. Just as the people of the Wastes survive on the hopes of reading the powerful heavenly bodies to know what’s coming next, so does the set ask you to know the top card of your library. Not to worry, though. I know that sounds like it would be frustrating, and it may be. How are you going to know what card is next? How can you plan on that? Well, the people of the Wastes have had very little to go on. They have had deals with outsiders (and the first of those ruined their plane.) They have the little of what is left from that cataclysm (pitiful by any standard.) And they have the hope of knowing the future. This alone has kept them alive and trust me when I say it: The wastelands will provide you with what you need to know the future.

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