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littjara-compleated-sage · 1 day

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what are the other praetors like in terms of statblock?

Note that every praetor's stat block is in progress, and the supplement is also constantly being developed and changed. That said, these are some main points of what I have had and largely used in my own campaign:

Praetors are the ancient dragons of the setting. Their power level reflects this. No praetor (or Atraxa) has a CR lower than 21.

Three of the praetors, Norn, Jin, and Sheoldred, have class types. Cleric, Wizard, and Bard respectively. These three are also the ones with full spellcasting abilities and prepared spell lists. I know that in recent publications D&D has started to move away from this, but the praetors were created long before that change and I prefer the flexibility of them anyway.

All praetors have 3 legendary saves, 3 legendary action options, and 3 lair action options.

Norn

Very strong and very resilient. Not very fast. Doesn't move in combat a huge amount, focuses more on commanding allies and putting down AoE. Unless she wants to hit something really hard with her sword.

Many mechanics focus on mass ally buffs or summoning; she'll probably also have a passive aura of some kind that benefits allies, reminiscent of her +2/+2 / -2/-2 original card

Incorporates the abilities we saw her use in A Garden of Flesh, so she has an aura of shards that do slashing damage that she can dismiss to merge the shards into a very, very large sword.

In general, lots of area effects whether that's auras, buffs, or AoE

Jin

Jin's statblock is a nightmare. His legacy version has Portent (which he never used in PC encounters), but I highly suspect I'll have to cut that for the final version because it's so obnoxious to play against.

So many counterspells.

Similar to Niv-Mizzet in flexibility with spells and ability to regain spell slots as a legendary action.

Surprisingly good mobility, with psychic teleports and the like. His first card did have flash!

A lot of spell control, psychic spells, save control.

Sheoldred

Her mechanic for mounting other creatures is very weird but interesting to design. They combine HP but largely use Sheoldred's own stats (except probably physicals) and any damage goes to the mount's HP first.

Has a reanimation aura, passively raising corpses that die near her into ghouls in 1d4 rounds

She is so incredibly bard.

She can turn into spiders and it's great

Urabrask

I really hate the D&D alignment system. That said, he is Chaotic Good.

Very fast, agile, and good at hiding.

A lot of draconic features, like Frightful Presence and a breath weapon. I've always really enjoyed the dragon parallels Urabrask has.

To be honest he is currently more or less an unusually stealthy Ancient Red Dragon without wings, but I do intend to make him more unique than that.

Thinking of adding minimal spellcasting, since we've seen that he is at least capable of ichor scrying and runic magic, as well as artifice. Probably "innate spells" style instead of the full lists Norn, Jin, and Sheoldred have.

Vorinclex

Very heavy on sheer strength and pure physical damage by hitting things and running over them very hard.

Powerful regeneration, can regain HP a bunch of different ways including digesting enemies. Relatively easy to hit but hard to kill.

Being grappled by him is very dangerous and immediately starts absorbing you.

Of note is that none of the praetors' attacks really deal a significant amount of necrotic damage (with the exception of some of Jin's needles or whatever). This is partly because core-born Phyrexians resist necrotic, and the praetors spend a good amount of time beating up their own people. Also, if you're fighting Elesh Norn, you have bigger problems than phyresis.

#mtg #magic the gathering #dnd #dnd 5e #dnd homebrew #plane shift new phyrexia #elesh norn #jin-gitaxias #sheoldred #urabrask #vorinclex #new phyrexia #phyrexian

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look-how-they-massacred-them · 4 months

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Urabrask

Submission reason:

after years of buildup for him to be leading a revolution, his contribution to the story's climax was... throwing someone at a tree, and then dying slowly and painfully

Okay so for a bit of back lore to set the stage. A long time ago in the mtg canon a doctor by the name of Yawgmoth schemed and backstabbed his way into a new world in order to develop a cure for a disease that had been plaguing the people of his continent. There stuff happens and he ends up developing a process to replace flesh with metal by way of a pseudomagical oil, and thus creating what would come to be known as Phyrexians. More stuff happens and he is defeated thousands of years later. However in this process some of the oil, phyrexian oil, he developed wound up on other worlds. One such world was Mirrodin. Eventually the oil takes roots and as it spread five Phyrexians rose above the rest, one in each of magics five colors: Elesh Norn, white, wants to unify everything under her rule (literally and metaphorically) to achieve perfection; Jin Gitaxias, blue, thinks he can science himself and everything into perfection; Sheoldred, black, and uh I honestly don’t remember lmao?; Vorinclex, green, he thought you could darwin yourself into perfection… and then theres our boy Urabrask, for the color red, for passion, ingenuity, the arts. Urabrask starts his story by immediately fucking off from the other four because he just wants to build shit and be left alone and not be involved in their scheming. So much, in fact, that when the other preators start spreading the oil further and converting the locals he orders all the phyrexians in his faction to allow refugees into their territory and to not mess with them. However this tolerance was built out of wanting to focus on and throw himself entirely to his Great Work, not some kind of moral code or kindness. He even ends up sealing his territory entirely later on, even to refugees. Later down the story they decide to change this. Presumably due to Elesh Norn’s rise as the main power in Mirrodin, now New Phyrexia, and her unwillingness to compromise, Urabrask is now reimagined as a revolutionary (which you know good on him right? Miles better than before and he was already the best among the five). Elesh Norn is at this point planning to extend her reach beyond New Phyrexia and to simultaneously invade every other world and infect/conquer them. urabrask, then, decides to revolt against Elesh Norn, but like… working and not working along side any one else? Like he’s supposedly doing his own thing along with Sheoldred but hes also constantly helping the main force? Anyways this ends up with him at best dismembered by Elesh Norn and now lost along with the rest of New Phyrexia in a pocket dimension. So what’s particularly weird is that he is a Phyrexian through and through. He wasn’t some goodguy tm. Yes he allowed refugees to seek shelter from the rest, but he was still trying to find a form of perfection through the oil. It makes some sense he would fight against Elesh Norn because shes imperialistic and she would push up against his territory. But the alliance of Everyone Else was out to completely destroy New Phyrexia, Phyrexians, and the phyrexian oil to a) defend themselves and b) because it literally just takes one drop. So Urabrask himself was on the chopping block… obviously selflessly fighting against an evil even when knowing you will probably end up dead as well is commendable, depending on circumstances, that’s just not how he was depicted on his original appearance at all. In his first appearances he’s just a dude trying to do his thing, being nice only by virtue of utter indifference, and years later when we see him again he’s now a gung-ho revolutionary setting up all the needed pieces for a fight that will end in his own death either by the hand of those he’s fighting against or those he is fighting with. I love him in both forms, but goddamn at least do more build up to it. As far as I’ve been able to find he has no plan for himself or his faction post defeating Elesh Norn and just got turned into a plot device to give the alliance a leg up and be able to win an otherwise impossible and mediocrity-ly written war.

Portrayed as a rebel against his fascist homeworld, ignored and randomly executed when it was time to actually fight them

They were killed off screen and didnt really get a satisfying ending. There were basicaly side lined in a story that they realistically should have been really important to

They had this whole buildup to him having an arc where he'd lead a Phyrexian revolution against Elesh Norn but instead they had every main character just brush it off as ""infighting"" since they think phyrexians are ontologically evil, and then had him publically drawn and quartered with literally nobody giving even a second thought about him, including Elspeth who was actively helping him before and Koth who at one point called him a friend. None of the official writing painted any of this as a bad thing.

Butchered their story and played them out as an evil when he wanted to free his people from tyranny and create.

FIRST OF ALL! His cards sucked for a very long time and only very recently had there been a non shitty urabrask. Secondly he’s by fAR THE MOST INTERESTING PHYRXIAN AND he just. NEVER GETS MENTIONED????

When Urabrask was originally introduced in the Scars of Mirrodin Block, he and his faction offered something that the other phyrexian factions didn't: empathy of for other beings, and thus, the possibility of nuance for the phyrexians. True, this empathy didn't extend into full-blown compassion, and true, he did not actively oppose the other praetors in killing and converting the native mirrans, but he did command his faction to leave any mirran refugees that entered his domain alone, and at the end of the block it was all but stated that Urabrask was planning to stage a rebellion against Elesh Norn. Come New Capenna and Urabrask has sided with the mirrans to overthrow Elesh Norn and fight against his fellow preators, even using the planar bridge to travel to New Capenna to research halo as a potential weapon even though traveling there destroyed his organic components and just being near halo caused him physical pain. Then in All Will Be One despite being explicitly stated to be fighting with the mirran rebels, Urabrask does not get a POV story, and barely gets a mention in the main story. Not only that, but in one of the side stories Slobad, one of Urabrask minions, is shown coercing mirran survivors into ""willing"" become compleated, and all of a sudden, the extra lore written about him talked about how he may prefer willing coverts to phyrexia, he was still more than willing to kill or forcefully compleate people to further his goals. Finally, midway through March of the Machines, Urabrask is executed by Elesh Norn without any meaningful resolution to his story.

-Absolutely downplayed his rebellion against phyrexia to a footnote in the story of other characters despite being a symbol for opposing everything the phyrexian invasion stood for while also *being* phyrexian. -Writers contradicted earlier in-canon explicit statements about his opinions on freedom and choice with later interviews and supplementary material out-of-canon seemingly to justify continuing to downplay him in-canon. -Finally had him captured off-screen just to be dismembered on-screen and then forgotten by the plot.

Set up to be a pivotal character in the resistance against Phyrexia. The set up to show there are sympathetic phyrexians against Elesh Norns cult-like society was being laid alongside Urabrask, but all of this is completely squandered. He's consistently devalued, his input is minimized, and depicted the layout that he's a powerful leader woth many forces behind him he is immediately undermined by only a few rogue underlings and immediately captured, tortured and implied killed offscreen. His death is not even mourned or regarded as anything. His actions should have helped but despite his resistance against phyrexia he's deemed as just another dead monster. Not a single ally he did have gives a shit that he died trying to help.

Urabrask is the most important good member of his species. It was necessary for him to have cooperative story moments with those who bunch him in with the rest of the aliens the ""heroes"" were going to genocide. Urabrask was supposed to be the symbol of co-existence and free will. Instead, he had almost no story whatsoever, with a completely unrelated scene showing him captured and dissected. He was discarded under the rug, when it should have been *him* to lead the resistance to victory against their oppressors.

Propaganda:

I will bite you if my baby doesn’t get in the poll also his wife is very petty look up Ayala furnace queen

Metal Dad deserved better

Vorinclex also deserved better

Praetors of new phyrexia (leader figures of the alien species) were mistreated and mischaracterized in the grand Phyrexia storyarch in general. It started great, but then they were killed off unceremoniously by writers that did not have the time or care to respect them.

Who else here got butchered into becoming selfless good guys? Vote for the artist turned revolutionary, a win for him is a win for tumblr.

him face :3

Urabrask is super cool. He is the first person in a race of evil alien people bent on infecting / killing / taking over people to go “hmmm maybe we should like ask them first” he is a king and was taken from us too soon

This submission also somewhat represents Phyrexians as a whole who were built up to make sure the audience has every reason to see them as people only to have the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly all phyrexians are treated as evil no matter what

#look how they massacred them poll #look how they massacred my boy #urabrask #magic the gathering #mtg urabrask #propaganda post

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