One of the things I feel like is underexplored in Magic fiction is the dynamics of how a turn based card game translates to an actual wizard duel particularly in the context of like… how do you represent a Necropotence deck which exists by just drawing lots and lots of cards in narrative terms? Not a lot is happening, after all it’s just grinding through the deck searching for drain life spells and lands to cast the drain life spells. So what does that actually represent?
And I feel like maybe what that sort of visually looks like is a kind of spell euphoria, a kind of dissociation in which you’re just sort of caught up in the spellcasting and not really noticing what your opponent is doing. There’s already hints of that in places… The Fallen are what happens when mages take too much power without being able to control it and burn out their brains, and Dementia Casters summon by drawing from their own little pocket nightmare hellscapes that they carve out of their psyches… and we have these glimpses of characters using baubles and charms and mnemonic devices to remember spells, so there’s all this established information that suggests that remembering spells is HARD and in narrative terms, just as in the game, being able to remember the right spell at the right time is critical.
So I imagine a Necropotence deck looks, in narrative, like someone basically just kinda standing there and taking whatever hits the enemy is throwing at them and then sort of exploding in a flurry of spells. It would be disorienting for both duelists–disorienting for the opponent because it’s not particularly clear what’s going on until it suddenly really really is, and disorienting for the Necropotence player because they’re basically tunneling down into their mind in order to recall the most fast and efficient way to murder everything within a ten meter radius.
The real power of Necropotence is not so much the ability to access those cards, but the ability to transcend the demands of the flesh or the conscious mind and become deadened to the world while you prepare your mind for casting far more spells than a normal mage would ever attempt to access at once.
I think Necropotence is commonly understood as communing with the dead but I think it’s better interpreted as allowing for the body’s necrotization in order to hone the potency of spellcasting.
You know what I like this enough to reblog it here actually.
I can only imagine what Storm is like. A few moments of careful consideration, then an explosive chain reaction of mana that you eventually just turn into fire.
Yeah Storm might actually be too overpowered to build a narrative around. Though honestly that just kinda makes me want to try more…
Or can you imagine trying to explain in narrative terms what happens when Jimmy The Planeswalker casts Flash targeting Protean Hulk?
End of Watchmen basically.