Pattern Recognition #147 - The Kor

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 April 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Today I will be stepping back from mechanics for a bit and instead talking about some of the flavour for the game, one of the creature types that I think can use a bit more love and respect. And with the Return to the Return to Zendikar coming sooner rather than later, I think I'll be getting my wish!

The Kor are an interesting aspect in Magic's History. Firs appearing in the Rath cycle, we see them through the eyes of the crew of the Weatherlight as they tack down the kidnapped Captain Sisay from the villainous Volrath the Fallen.

During the course of their adventures, they came across one of the tribes of people that had been taken into Rath by the Phyrexians as a workforce. There, they were divided like the Dal peoples into those who served Volrath and those who did not through the use of the en prefix for those who rejected the Phyrexians and the il prefix for those who worked with them.

The en-Kor are the group most associated with the name from the time the story took place on Rath, and so before I get to them, I will talk about the il-Kor.

The il-Kor, as a faction, resided with the other servants of Volrath in the City of Traitors. There, they turned their skills as hunters and trackers to the service of being thieves and hunters, infiltrators against the en-Kor and the like. In fact, the only mono- Kor in the game is Cat Burgler, a poor representation of this group of people. Not because of what it does, but rather because it is one of the scant few looks we have into the culture and people of the il-Kor.

Yes. I know about Kor Dirge. It's colour shifted. It doesn't count.

Alas, during the Planer Overlay of the Invasion, the ik-Kor were taken with the Stronghold to Dominaria, where the faulty nature of the attack meant that the il-Kor were trapped in the Shadow realm, between reality and not. They did not die, instead adapting to their new situation and keeping to their old duties but with new skills, suck as with Looter il-Kor, the only Kor in the game, and that is the last we have seen of them.

The en-Kor on the other hand, got a bit more development. Which was only natural as they were the faction of the Rath cycle - and that made them heroic by default. Because this was early Magic. And such things was the way things were done back then.

As a group, the en-Kor lived or rather had a something of a home in the Kor Haven, a place built into the Flowstone of Rath to serve as a meeting place for the various wandering nomad tribes. This home of sorts was where the heroes met the en-Kor for various plot exposition purposes and is basically backdrop to the dialog and moving the action forward.

But what we see from that time, and on the cards, showed a culture that was very communal in nature. The en-Kor were not a culture or a people out for themselves, but rather they took the axiom of "We're all in this together" to heart.

Mechanically, this commonality was represented by the signature ability of the Kor in this set, a supposedly "fixed" version of Banding of all things that did so by taking one section of the ability and making it its own thing. To whit, the ability they had read:

: The next 1 damage that would be dealt to $CARDNAME this turn is dealt to target creature you control instead.

When I talked about Banding many years ago, I pointed out that one of the advantages to that ability, aside from confusing everyone to the point where you could just Befuddleyour way into whatever you want, was how it allowed you as the controlling player, to take control of the decision as to how damage was dealt to your creatures, preventing any of them from dying. Well, this is that ability, turned into a literally cost activated ability that let you spread around damage as you would. And when combined with Task Force, a card that is remarkably combo friendly, you can pretty much not take damage at all. Ever.

This spiritualism of the Kor wasn't the focus of the set, the cards or the books at all, but what we saw was a people who were interested in being free, in not being bound to any one place at any time. This is how they expressed their inherent nature, the freedom to roam as they would.

But other than that, we don't see much. They spent a lot of time interacting with the Dal, but there's not much I can say about them except that they were in the same boat (metaphorically) as the Kor.

The Kor survived the Planeshift of Rath onto Dominaria, and while they helped defend the latter from the Phyrexians, most of them were killed in the Invasion, the survivors slowly migrating across Dominaria but they never really regained their numbers or strength by the time of the Time Spiral or the set Dominaria.

The Kor were described in lore and in art as being white, off-white, grey and blue skinned in nature. They are human sized and shape, and this all lead to people thinking in-universe and out that they were related to the Metathran somehow. For those of you who didn't read my article about Phyrexia, the Thran were the predecessors to the Phyrexians, and it was in researching them that Urza created the Metathran to be his mass-produced troops against the impending Phyrexian Invasion.

The possible relation was a thread that was dropped as a mystery that didn't need to be solved. They were yet another group of people victimized by the Phyreixians, another tick mark on their checklist of villainy. What more was needed? They were, essentially, a footnote.

Then came Zendikar.

With the revelation that the Kor were native to Zendikar, half the playerbase went "Huh?" while the people like me had a smile on their faces as we realized where those people had called home from so long ago.

The Kor of Zendikar was an amazing example of how to incorporate the past versions of the lore and make it new at the same time.

On Zendikar, the Kor were explorers, always moving with the changing landscape that defined the Roil of Zendikar. They, like their Rath brethren, were nomads in their own ways. Both had to make due to a landscape that wasn't solid - be it Flowstone or Roil, and they both effectively thrived in the circumstances.

The Kor of Zendikar were not as openly mystic as those on Rath, though whether this was the result of the change in location or over time, I could not tell. Instead, they placed value in action, in movement and in the journey of their lives. The Kor carried as little as they could, depending on their ability to scavenge off the land, their ropes and their Grappling Hook serve as the only transport that most of them need.

OK, some apparently use flying creatures as mounts, and they are called Kor Skyfisher. Or they use other equipment like a Kitesail.

What I'm saying is that unlike the Rath Kor, the Zendikar Kor had no problems with flying around between pieces of land that didn't happen to be connected to any other land.

But when the Eldrazi finally made their move, it was the Kor who stood up to fight first and foremost. Their ability to traverse the world became more and more paramount as the Titans reshaped the terrain around them. This, combined with their natural -ness made them the core of the effort to defeat the extra-dimensional invaders.

As the world of Exploration - and I'm hoping we get a proper return to that sort of thing with the new Zendikar - the Kor are the people who can find their way anywhere given enough time. Which is odd as getting new lands and revealing them, to Explore is a mechanic, not a one. In fact, low mana acceleration is one of 's weaknesses! I mean, yes, I know that Kor Cartographer exists, but can look for Plains under certain circumstances.

Rather, the Kor are really Equipment focused, from their Planeswalker, Nahiri, the Lithomancer, and the possibly-broken-in-Modern Stoneforge Mystic. And Kor Duelist. And Kitesail Apprentice and Akiri, Line-Slinger. And you get the point by now, I hope?

But right now I'm just spinning my wheels. Sure, I'm talking about what the Kor are, despite the information we have about them being pretty sparse on the ground. But there is a point I want to make with all of this.

You see, from what I'm seeing, if for some reason, humans were to be removed from the game, the position of the Characteristic Race for would open up, and the Kor would have the best shot of taking it. Yes, I know that Humans are never going away, and the one experiment to create a humanless plane, Lorwyn, didn't work out as well as Wizards had hoped, and so Humans were here to stay. I mean, it's not like Human Soldier is probably the most common creature Race and Class combination in the game or something like that.

Here's the thing, unlike the second most likely options, the Soltari or the Kithkin, the Kor have the advantage of being more prevalent in the minds of games with their multiple appearances. They are more human-like, being essentially humans with alternate skin. I mean, you look at Nahiri, the Harbinger without knowing about the Kor, and you would probably guess that she was a human with some form of albinism.

That's what makes the Kor the hidden backup for a non-human Humanity in the game. They are human enough to pass for them - for us - at first glance, but different enough that they don't have to fall into the same designs and generalism that Humans do.

I know it's never going to happen, but hey, that's what I get when I name an article series for the psychological capacity of people to derive order from chaos. I know I'm wrong, but that doesn't stop me from seeing what I see!

I mean, it's not like every time we see the Kor, I know that it's an encore of their first appearance, right?

RIGHT?

Oh, I'll show myself out now, you people with no sense of humor. ;)

So, join me next time when I talk about something. Not sure what yet, but I'll see what I cook up in the meantime.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!