Our Obligatory Thor’s Hammer Joke
[Long, drawn-out exhausted sigh]
Look, you clicked on this article. You knew what you were getting into. They spoiled Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor and it turns out that any creature is “worthy” if it’s legendary, white and/or red, and not a Villain.
We all drew straws to see who’d have to write this boringly obvious piece and I ended up being the unlucky gal, so let’s just get this stupid thing over with, yeah?
Wow, look at that. Wait, putting it on Hidetsugu is kinda messed-up, actually, I guess it just… kills the whole table. Huh. Looks like monored players now have a two-card murder/suicide vest.
Anyways yeah, Elesh Norn, one of the most famous Magic villains of all time and a genocidal maniac can pick up Thor’s hammer. New Norin, whose literal creature type is “Coward,” can also do it. There is humor in the fact that these creatures count as “worthy” because their appearances and actions suggest they would not be considered “worthy” of a magical hammer that judges the soul of its wielder, but they are, because game mechanics and playability have to take precedence over story cohesion sometimes, even in ways that seem ridiculous out of context. Wow, how amazingly funny this is.
Oh, I guess there’s also this thing:
Because as it turns out, this isn’t even the first “Mjölnir” to be made into a Magic card. Because Thor, the god of thunder, is a mythological figure from various Norse regions (and whose tales were carried all over by ancient Viking cultures since they, famously, sailed all over the place), that mythological figure (or in this case his hammer) has been put into a bunch of different pieces of media over the years, and we now have Universes Beyond sets of two of those properties: Marvel and Assassin’s Creed. You probably didn’t remember the AssCreed one because it’s an extremely okay card from an extremely mediocre set based on an extremely tired franchise that nobody really gets super hype about these days. Like, I’m sure people play the games, still, or they wouldn’t be making them, but I haven’t heard someone talk about Assassin’s Creed in probably five full years.
Hey, so, is anyone getting fucking tired of this shit yet?
I know it’s not exactly a crazy take from me, the bitch who has hated Universes Beyond since the Walking Dead days and has liked at most five cards from any given UB set, but doesn’t this feel like, I dunno, an indicator of the death of culture? The fact that there’s now two Magic: The Gathering cards explicitly referencing Mjölnir, the hammer that belongs to Thor the Norse god, and neither of them are from Kaldheim, the in-universe Norse mythology plane, isn’t that, like… worrying? I’m sure for some people this is probably just a funny coincidence and look haha I can give Thor’s hammer to Atraxa but aren’t any of you fucking sick of this? Is anyone else fucking tired?
They did do a direct parallel in Kaldheim, by the way. We have three fucking Thor hammers in Magic now. I’m sure they’ll do some stupid Secret Lair where Thor’s hammer is a reskinned Colossus Hammer, too.
Forget the fact that Spider-Man had five hundred dudes in spandex, forget that Ninja Turtles had six fucking versions of Leonardo that were all monowhite just to make sure you can’t tell them apart. We now have an overlap of the same mythological object across three different sets, two of them UB, because two of them are referencing references to a mythological object and the other is just a more direct reference to that same mythological object.
Like, what the fuck are we doing here? Not to knock Thor or Norse mythology, but there comes a certain point where maybe this all feels like we’re just going in circles, doomed to reference the same cultural touchstones over and over and over again until someday we die.
But, I guess, don’t worry–you can still put Thor’s hammer (the new one) onto Thoralf.
And also Nicol Bolas.
Oh, and you can also skip the “worthy” bullshit altogether and just cheat the hammer onto an unworthy creature with any of the many free-attach effects in the game, like Hammer of Nazahn which is another fucking hammer or even the humble Brass Squire.
Chris Hemsworth’s Thor didn’t need to go through all that nonsense like “character development” in the first Thor movie that came out I think fifty years ago. He could’ve just asked a little brass robot to hand it to him! Why didn’t he think of that? Is he stupid???
I’m so fucking tired, dude.
