Forum:MTG Minutiae

Opening post
So this is... Weiiiiiirrrrrddddddddd. Since we've decided that non-narrative sources can be valid, we should probably talk about this one. There's no, like, intentional lore additions that we need to add to the wiki - Gavin Verhey has talked about how he tried to coordinate with The BBC to avoid giving the Weeping Angels "flying" since they don't fly according to internal policy. But things have still fallen through the cracks that we should talk about. Firstly, "Lupari" now seems to be both the singular and the plural. Astrid Peth is apparently now a human, as is Idris. And Nyssa is human as well as a trakenite. (Does this imply all trakenites are actually human? - Edit: Similar situation with Adric exists that I didn't catch.) (Note here that it's not the case that every humanoid alien in this set that's not a Time Lord is just referred to as a human. The Sisterhood of Karn has no racial creature type, nor does Vislor.) Also River Song has been declared explicitly to be both Human and Time Lord, solving a longstanding disagreement on this wiki.

But these are pieces of text that are present, in part, for game mechanical reasons. So while there's ramifications for our pages, we might not want to actually place these things on the relevant pages, we might consider this to be not fictive content at all. idk.

In addition, regardless of what we decide, I'd like to bring up a suggestion I made on Talk:Universes Beyond: Doctor Who. Instead of having every card art uploaded, it might instead be better to borrow the card template from the mtg wiki which links directly to scryfall and also allows to distinguish between art choices. It would, however, really only be useful for this one page, unless mtg and Doctor Who ever did another collaboration in the future. As stated there the one downside is that it doesn't preview the cards as full images - you have to hover over the links to see them. I'm not sure if this is tweaked on mobile at all (my suspicion is that it's not). Najawin ☎  02:57, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Discussion
Okay, I don't really have an opinion on the card template, but for the other stuff you mentioned, it seems to me like it would just be simple enough to note the discrepancies on their respective pages. It's not as though a single card calling Nyssa human is any more world shattering than the handful of times the First Doctor has referred to himself as such. Time God Eon ☎  03:28, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Although I am altogether unfamiliar with Magic: The Gathering (I will be buying a few packets later though), I don't think information outside of flavour text and illustrations should be taken as "in-universe" information; for example, the MtG card for Sea Devils is titled "Alien Salamander". Doesn't take an expert of Who to know that that title is just wrong.
 * This seems to harken back to the Gameplay/Cutscene principle we established in Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein. However, I could be missing something about MtG that should be valid. 12:35, 13 October 2023 (UTC)