Author’s Note: This chapter is best viewed with Night Mode off.
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Up and up, higher and higher. The propulsion of her own magic sent Sunset Shimmer flying upward, beyond heights that she had never previously thought possible. And as she continued to rise, the orange light of the sun poured across the curvature of the earth, painting the land a brilliant orange even as the atmosphere thinned around her.
In any other context, the sight of the little blue planet falling into the distance below her would have been breathtaking. But now, she couldn’t even stop to think how strange it all was. It was almost like a dream, a circumstance so driven from desperation that it didn’t even seem real.
But it was real, and it was the last chance she had.
She didn’t know how long she had been flying for, but it had seemed like hours. Eventually, the last traces of blue faded from the sky, giving way to the dark expanses of space as she passed through the ionosphere. It wouldn’t be long now before she found what she came here for. She kept her eyes trained forward, into the vast expanses of space and the glittering stars beyond.
Her stomach clenched, as she realized she didn’t see her target anywhere. For a brief moment, she wondered if she had missed her chance. But sure enough, it soon began to drift into her field of vision: a small satellite, orbiting in the distance, its solar cells glistening a bright, mechanical blue.
Briefly she looked down, or whatever approximation of “down” she could manage in such little gravity. Tied to her neck was the amulet containing the Sirens’ song, untouched by the powerful G-forces of her ascent. Whatever Twilight had built it the string from, it was vastly more durable than it looked.
But soon her eye caught something else. A bright trail streaking like a comet through the atmosphere, except moving in the opposite direction. Moving straight towards her.
Sunset let out a yelp, unsure she’d even made a sound or not. She had to keep moving. She had to push forward, closer to the satellite, closer to her goal, closer to salvation. But no matter how far she went, the icy, creeping dread only intensified, slithering up and down her spine.
Unable to focus herself any further, Sunset let the propulsive blasts on her hands relax, lowing their thrust just to allow herself to turn around. What she saw was a beast of rage and porcelain steel, a demon flying on wings that propelled on rockets of oily black soot. Its teeth bared in the void of space, dripping with oil, as it launched towards her as fast as her eye could follow.
“No!” Sunset let a muffled cry into her helmet. “Stay away!” She attempted to fire a blast of plasma, but the sudden burst of magic from her palm sent her veering of wildly to the side.
In the end, she did not even manage to find the time to right herself. Sunset could only watch as the monster barreled towards her, claws brandished. She closed her eyes, and her heartbeat slowed to a crawl as its razor-tipped fingers aimed straight for her midsection.
Her eyes were forced open once again by an excruciating pain, and she could the face of the monster before her, close enough to see every last chip and scratch on its bleached white exoskeleton, every fleck of spit and oil dripping from its teeth. And in the corner of her eye, she could see Twilight’s amulet, now severed from its string, floating off into the distance. Her visor had cracked, and she could already feel the air draining from the inside of her helmet.
“N...N-no...”
“Oh, yes,” the monster crowed. Its swarm of voices — all of them Starlight’s voice — cut through the vacuum of space, carried as if by magic. “You understand now, don’t you? This is all your fault. You could have joined us in the symphony of flesh. You could have been free of dissonance, free of conflict, free of the tyranny of the self. You could have been us. We could have been harmony.”
“Har...mony?”
“But instead you spurned us,” Starlight snarled. “You chose to be nothing. So you will die as nothing.”
As the monster’s grating hiss scraped against Sunset’s eardrums, she felt something flicker within her chest, something that she couldn’t quite place.
Sunset’s entire body grew numb and cold, and pain in her stomach faded. Yet still, the flickering in her chest remained.
The universe around her went darker, and Sunset’s eyes began to roll back into her head. Yet the flicker still remained, expanding, growing.
The innermost voices in Sunset’s mind went quiet. Her heart beat one more time, then stopped. At last, there was nothing, not even darkness.
And then, just like that, something that lay deep within Sunset’s chest awakened.
Sunset’s eyes snapped open in an instant, burning so brightly that their glare forced Starlight to recoil, quickly retracting the claw from Sunset’s abdomen.
“Harmony!? Harmony!? You call this HARMONY!?”
The gaping wound in her abdomen all but vanished as her body literally flared to life, shining with an intensity that grew exponentially with each passing moment. Her voice thundered, not with sound, but with a power that echoed through the fabric of space itself.
“Harmony doesn’t mean that everyone’s the same! You can’t erase the things that make us who we are and pretend you’ve brought us together! Our friendships are valuable because each of us has something that no one else can bring! Phyrexia doesn’t have that! You’ve destroyed the very thing that makes friendships possible in the first place! Don’t you speak to me of harmony, you fiend!“
The light that filled Sunset’s body intensified, growing brighter, growing more vibrant. The Colors filled her eyes, imprinting every inch of her soul — white, blue, black, red, green, and everything above, beyond and in between. It was everything and nothing, equal parts beautiful and terrifying. There was no air, and yet she breathed them in, the Colors filling her, saturating her becoming her. Visions of her life, of many lives, flashed across her mind, overwhelming it with sensory input, until at last something within her mind clicked.
It all made sense now, at that moment. This was her purpose, her calling. If only for a moment, to be something infinitely greater.
Starlight shielded her eyes and recoiled, the light of the Colors singing the edges of her exoskeleton. Her voice trembled with a fear that was entirely uncharacteristic of Phyrexia. “W-what.... what are you?”
And as Sunset spoke, the world buckled beneath the weight of her voice.
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The words sent a shock through Starlight’s body, and she convulsed and spasmed, her plated armor flaking off piece by piece. The flecks of oil and blood evaporated as they were exposed to the light emanating from Sunset’s body. Starlight let out one last cry of pain as her body shrank and regressed, metal and porcelain turning to skin, monstrous plates of armor becoming soft, pink flesh.
Sunset raised an arm, and a shining bubble encased Starlight’s body, naked and curled into ball, free from any last trace of Phyrexian contagion. With a wave of Sunset’s arm, it was sent gently floating back to the earth.
Her gaze then turned outwards, towards the satellite that was now speeding away, further into the distance. She pointed a finger, and a shining beam erupted from its tip, thin and straight and pulsing with every color imaginable. The beam struck the satellite, and the satellite responded to its touch in turn, shifting and shuddering as it too began to glow.
A Rainbow of Light erupted from the satellite, a great band of seven colors that fell down to the earth. From its impact, it spread across the surface of the planet, enveloping it more and more, until the entire world was a palette of of colors, a singular pool of prismatic light in the vast expanse of space.
Then, in a flash of light, the colors vanished from the planet’s surface. Great multitudes of rainbow hues once again gave way to blues and greens — only now, the world was brighter than before, untained, pristine. The lingering stench of Phyrexia had vanished altogether.
The Colors began to fade from Sunset’s eyes, and her body went limp as it descended, her mind already slipping into unconsciousness. Yet even as she passed out in the vacuum of space, she was unafraid.
The deed was done, and Anthropia was pure once more.
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Sunset, Apotheon 2WUBRG
Legendary Planeswalker — Sunset Harmony
+2: Scry 2, then add three mana in any combination of colors.
-3: Exile target permanent.
-7: Reveal the top seven cards of your library. You may cast any number of nonland cards from among them with total converted mana cost seven or less without paying their mana costs. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
-21: You win the game.
7
21 to win? isn't a bit much?
Uh, pretty sure those bits didn't start as flesh per se...
In any case, I quite appreciate this. Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because this feels genuinely satisfactory. An excellent application of the Patamon Principle. (If the last member of the team receives their big power up long after the others, it will be at least an order of magnitude more powerful.) And I seem to recall a certain blog post about a "Conduit of Harmony."
Now there's just the matter of reentry and the aftermath, for both the Rainbooms and this world...
9740983
Not with a Doubling Season or two.
9741075
Hm, yeah, didn’t catch that. Fixed.
9740983
That’s the idea, yeah. Planeswalkers are much more than just their ultimate, and you’re probably going to be using Sunset for her other abilities. Her -7 in particular is very powerful and was designed to be the one you’d be most likely to use, though her -3 and +2 have some pretty powerful utility too.
Plus if it wasn’t apparent: twenty-one is also a multiple of seven, and it takes seven turns to get Sunset there normally.
9741091
Nicol Bolas, Dragon God is cheaper and can win in 4 turns normally
9741269
Like any planeswalker, you’re usually not going to have Nicol Bolas, Dragon God out long enough to use his ult. His other abilities are generally going to be more of a utility card than anything else, either gaining you card advantage over your opponent or removing a problem creature/planeswalker. In most circumstances you’ll have him out for 2-3 turns before he’s taken out.
Sunset’s -7 is the sort of ability that can win you the game on the spot.
That said, I do think her + ability could be buffed a bit, so I’ve revised it slightly. (If 9741075 wants to check it out, I’ll ping him too.)
And I am iron man
Forgive me for being so cynical, but what game is going to go long enough to reach turn 14 (the soonest you can hypothetically ult big!Sunset, as I'm going to refer to this iteration of her), and with big!Sunset never being successfully attacked or subjected to the various instants/sorceries that can target planeswalkers? At a TTU of 7, there's
no realisticabsolutely no chance of being able to ult a 7 CMC planeswalker like big!Sunset (compared to the minimal chance as if she were, say, a 4 or 5 CMC planeswalker), essentially making her a troll card IMO9742523
Viewing a planeswalker solely in terms of its ultimate is a mistake I see many players make. In the majority of cases, you’re not even going to get that far, so you need to look at a planeswalker in terms of its other abilities.
Sunset’s +2 effectively reduces her cost to 5 if you do manage to cast her, and offers some great card selection. Her -3 offers some of the most powerful and versatile removal in the game, and can remove at least one problem permanent even before your opponent gets a chance to attack. Finally, her -7 is effectively an even more powerful version of Cascade, and Cascade is already one of the most powerful mechanics in the game.
Sunset’s -21 is designed to be big, flashy and impressive if you pull it off, not necessarily practical. If anything, it’s entirely superfluous when compared to her -7, which will give you a massive amounts of card advantage on the spot, and can be a win condition all on its own.
9742893
Honestly, the only reason I care is because it's not just unlikely; it's impossible. Every ability should have SOME chance of being used, even if it's ~1% in practice. Looking to Rosewater & co. for an example, ever notice that every single planeswalker with some absurd ability is either lower CMC with a higher TTU, or higher CMC with a lower TTU? And the ones with the highest TTU's always seem to have the most useful workhorse +n abilities? Even Nicol Bolas, who someone else mentioned earlier had a somewhat feasible TTU of 4, and you said yourself that the odds are slime to none of him surviving beyond turn 3 after he's cast.
As for viewing planeswalkers only for their ults... no. I'm that guy that ran the M12 version of Sorin in a siphon deck for the sole purpose of using his +n, which was quite literally just "target opponent loses 2 life and you gain 2 life." I didn't give 2 craps about his ult, and never even ulted him when I had the loyalty counters to do so, because controlling my opponent during their next turn wasn't a key to that deck's win condition. There were better mono-black walkers for that deck based on ults alone, but he was never meant to be more than a workhorse for me.
All said, you're right. big!Sunset's -7 IS pretty insane. Good enough that I initially didn't see the -21 before rereading the card, because it could be an ult in and of itself. She could, quite frankly, not have the -21 and still be an INSANE asset in any rainbow deck that can fit her abilities, though for balancing at that point it might be prudent to adjust certain aspects of her design
21 loyalty counters equals alternate win condition?
10012937
There are easier things, like self-mill decks that let you win if you deck yourself, or Battle of Wits (you win if your deck has more than 200 cards- 5-drop)