Remember Basri Ket? Even if you do, I bet you couldn’t tell me very much about him. This white-aligned Magic: The Gathering planeswalker only appeared on two cards, five years ago, then promptly disappeared, as if swallowed up by the Blind Eternities. But now he’s back in Aetherdrift, showing up as an important character for the very first time.
An MTG planeswalker from the Egyptian-themed plane of Amonkhet, Basri Ket’s only cards were printed in Core Set 2021. He did some fairly generic white planeswalker stuff: buffing creatures, creating tokens, or creating tokens and then buffing them. The character had some lore, but since he debuted in a Core Set, this was only communicated to the fanbase through an interview piece on the Magic website.
Now, we’re finally getting a proper look at Basri Ket: his name appears 59 times in the first side story article published for Aetherdrift. In this tale, Basri is on a quest to resurrect another character, Temmet. On the way, he encounters a big wyrm, some zombies, and the birth of a brand new cat god, using his sand powers (bet you didn’t recall he had sand powers) to help his group out.
When Basri’s first card was printed back in 2020, it seemed like Wizards of the Coast might be trying out a new character as a possible replacement for Gideon, the Gatewatch member who was one of the only casualties of the surprisingly bloodless War of the Spark a year before.
One possible reason why this went nowhere is that, earlier in 2020, Theros Beyond Death brought back Elspeth. The two may have been competing to be the new face of mono-white, in which case, ultimately, it was no contest.
Though she hadn’t had a new card since Shards of Alara (2008), Elspeth had the advantages of an existing place in the narrative and connections to other characters – plus she was less similar to Gideon. Later on, Wizards was also able to find a unique design space for her, tying her to angels. Basri was stuck back on the shelf, to await our first revisit to his home plane.
Technically we already knew Basri Ket was going to be in Aetherdrift, as he is briefly mentioned in the planeswalker’s guide article. But now we’ve learned more about his role in the plot and seen the art that will presumably feature on his card.
That card will be a creature, as Ket is confirmed to be one of the many planeswalkers to have lost their sparks post-March of the Machine. By the looks of the art, he’s creating cats out of sand, which will probably be reflected mechanically with tokens.
Basri Ket is not the only long-absent planeswalker appearing in Aetherdrift. We’ve already seen signs that wayward green ‘walker Garruk is showing up on Muraganda. But while his ‘desparkening’ is not yet confirmed, if Wizards sticks to its ‘one per set’ rule for planeswalker cards, it seems certain that a new Chandra will be the Planeswalker card for Aetherdrift.
We’ll have to wait for Aetherdrift spoiler season next week to know for sure, however. You can check out the MTG release schedule to see when the rest of the year’s sets come out too, or check out our guide to any and all remaining MTG Arena codes.
Source: Wargamer
