Yay! Time for a bump. Let me quote the storyline first, from the wikia.
The first slivers shown in the storyline lived in Rath. It's unknown from where they originally came. Volrath is said to have genetically modified them, but to what extent is also unknown.
Already, we're dealing with non-pure Silvers, although it's hard to know what the pure slivers are. This begs the question of knowing if even the Queen is some pure entity or not. That said, due to Volrath's limited ability to creature his own sliver, it's likely that whatever he managed to change to them would be minor.
Not insignificant, but minor nonetheless.
It's worth mentioning, though, that Volrath could control
flowstone, which is described as being made of billions of nanorobots.
This is an odd thing, but I suppose that it represents the core amount of initial flowstone Volrath uses, because billions of bots at the nanorange is ought to represent a ludicrously small volume of matter in the end, even if we were to claim close to trillions of those machines.
However, no source is given for this information, and would logically come from an expanded universe source, since no flavour text provides this information.
It is acceptable to understand the sentence as billions of nanobots, themselves perhaps part of flowstone, produce
more flowstone in the furnace. They'd duplicate themselves, maybe.
Cards like
Flowstone Flood and
Skyshroud Claim might remotely imply that the flowstone can increase its own mass.
Skyshroud Claim wrote:
The forest's constant struggle is to keep the spreading flowstone at bay.
A card like
Flowstone Sculpture could ehlp us a bit:
Flowstone Sculpture wrote:{2}, Discard a card: Put a +1/+1 counter on Flowstone Sculpture or Flowstone Sculpture gains flying, first strike, or trample. (This effect lasts indefinitely.)
The sculptor, weary of his work, created art that would finish itself.
Although the flavour text could be understood as the artifact only having the ability to shape itself with a given fixed mass, the gameplay part of it clearly supports the idea that it can grow in mass, especially thanks to the Trample attribute. Or it could imply, because of the sacrifice cost, that it can assimilate any kind of matter and turn it into flowstone. An interpretation that verges on the needless complication.
However, without this gameplay element, the flavour text is useless.
But it turns out that this matter recycling ability may not be as far fetched as one may think.
From
Lowland Basilisk
Lowland Basilisk wrote:
Unlike their cousins, Rathi basilisks turn their victims into puddles of flowstone.
Basilisks generally tend to be deadly poisonous creatures. Those found from the latest editions immediately got the Deathtouch attribute.
It seems that the Lowland Basilisk injects a flowstone poison that begins to transfer the mass of the victim. It can also apply to artifacts.
Besides, these nanobots are controlled by magic.
It allows to produce a variety of things such as armor, some buff for a group of creatures, and spread over a given land to the point it renders the land dead in terms of mana.
This last ability falls in line with the intended goal of sosrt of phasing Rath, an artificial plane, into Dominaria, by increasing the mass of Rath. The lands of
Rath were made out of flowstone apparently.
That said, we have a clear example of a clash between extrapolated abilities from a card's name and what it does. The Flowstone Armor actually adds +1 to the offense, but -1 to the defense. Yet it's called armor. Meaning that in game, many creatures, mostly humans and other humanoids or less, will be destroyed.
This both implies a rapid effect and somehow a recycling process. Only creatures with more life (meat? mass?) could handle being partly used?
This essentially makes any biological creature a sort of cyborg.
Now, out of this disgression and back to our slivers.
He attempted to create artificial slivers, but these were a poor approximation of the real thing and had no innate abilities to share with the hive.
The
Metallic Sliver has no abilities, but the fluff says that it's a clever counterfeit which increased Volrath's influence over the Slivers.
It's possible it's made out of flowstone although there's no evidence of that. That's speculation due to the fact that the sliver is metallic. Note that slivers don't become metallic.
In game, it's considered an artifact creature. Artifacts are crafted objects, or/and machines, and animated machines often become creatures.
What this reveals is that an individual, once human, who at some point became able to control magic to the point of managing nanorobots and also held the knowledge to fiddle with genetics, was capable of creating an artificial sliver that got accepted by the hive, and that's important to understand, because it implies that any civilization capable of manipulating nanotech and genetics could produce a sliver specimen that would act as a trojan to the species itself.
And surprisingly enough, there
is a "negative" sliver that proves that point. But we'll come back to that later on.
Volrath used the hive to guard the Legacy and to attack Weatherlight and her crew on their quest to retake those artifacts and their captain, Sisay. Thanks to Hanna, who realized how the slivers' hive mind worked, the crew defeated them in the Furnace of Rath and Karn was able to convince the Sliver Queen to release the Legacy to him, arguing that the artifacts were as much a part of him as the slivers were a part of her.
The
Skyship Weatherlight is a kind of magical artifact in itself, the most powerful of the
Legacy.
As we read, the Legacy is a collection of artifacts. The Skyship is one of them,
Gerrard, of the Capashen, was another, by virtue of being part of some of Urza's project working on an enhanced bloodline to produce a perfect human hero.
For some odd reason, Sisay, captain of the Weatherlight, although being born of another one of Urza's tinkered bloodlines, is not part of the Legacy.
Gerrard was actually chosen to be part of the Legacy, as a human element was deemed necessary. So the enhanced bloodline projects certainly helped find the right human, but didn't automatically produce Legacy-humans.
Karn, a silver golem, was another artifact of the Legacy.
Several artifacts were recollected before the attack on Volrath's fortress. But the Weatherlight's crew didn't have them all.
Before looking at the other artifacts, let's look at the Skyship Weatherlight itself and her crew.
The question being, were the Skyship and its crew capable of fending off the slivers.
First, the Skyship.
Alas, there isn't much direct information on this vessel. It's built out of Thran metal and powerful wood (see Multani's wikia pge) and around a Weatherseed. There's not much info I can gather at the moment about the later, but there could be several notes about the Thran technology in the
Thran book.
It's powered by a powerstone, a Thran device that emits radiations that generate some very specific ills similar to tuberculosis (see
here).
This page on Urza's Legacy Backstory implies that a powerstone may provide a long lasting power supply.
An example of a powerstone is the one that once split into two stones the size of a human's eyes, were capable of either granting power to all creatures or weakening them. This device could also open portals between planes. All in all, it's hard to say how powerful it is. The Mightstone is said in the wikia to be able to activate artifacts, while the Weakstone deactivates them.
The
Thran are an extinct empire which had advanced knowledge.
The Skyship was built with the help of the
Mana Rig.
If nothing can be obtained that way, we still know that at some point, the Weatherlight and the
Predator fought two battles. The former was more of a boarding operation. The second is interesting as it mentions that both ships damaged each other. The Predator had apparently more armor and potent weapons, but it was slower and had a less capable crew.
The Predator has beam weapons with an obvious major thermal component that allows them to torch large areas. There's at least a battery of four pieces on the portside, but could be five, it's hard to tell. We can only presume there's just as many on the starboard side.
A quick guess would seem to point to some napalmish high kilowatt/low megawatt weaponry, topping at mid megawatts eventually (the flames and fireballs are easily several men high). There also seems to be thunder guns or something similar, although it's not sure if those aren't related to the maneuvering of the ship close to the ground.
With the card
Cataclysm, we can compare the sizes of both Skyships.
On the card
Hesitation, we spot a cannon on the open forward tier, but which seems significantly smaller than the piece seen on the card above (Cataclysm). It seems to be a large grappling hook, as seen in the Cataclysm card. Whether this is an inconsistency or a different weapon is unknown.
Considering the structural differences between the models featured on other cards and the one seen on Cataclysm, including the entire shape of the fins (very Orkish), it could be possible that the ship was retrofitted at some point. But I think the other cards refer to events that both precede and follow what we see in Cataclysm, so it's more likely a mistake.
Hull Breach shows the Predator crashing into the
Stronghold's Citadel.
We now have a better idea of what the Weatherlight could do. Since it's less powerful than the Predator, it's ought to have less potent weapons or fewer of them, perhaps both. How this could be of use against what essentially is a swarm of slivers is hard to tell. I'm not sure we could picture the Weatherlight with any kind of point defense system.
EDIT: According to
Captain's Maneuver, the Weatherlight seems to have nothing on the offensive side, counting on sections of its mirrored hull to deviate beams of energy.
Ertai's Meddling also strongly implies that Ertai could cast a barrier that would at least block a direct shot from one of the Predator's broadside weapons. The card is used once, so I wouldn't really say that it would be a continuous barrier at all.
Napalm couldn't be deflected so we're clearly looking at beams of thermal energy here, for the Predator's weapons.
Restrain gives an idea of the Weatherlight deck's size. Based on all other pictures featuring the Skyship, I'd say it's about 30~40 meters long.
Now, the
Weatherlight's crew.
Of said crew, the most impressive members shall be those with magical capabilities. Gerrard seems to be capable of activating some machines with skills in artifice, so he reanimated Karn.
Other than that, he just seems to be some character with higher combat aptitudes and a fair dose of character shields I guess, just like many other brute force characters on board.
Karn may be powerful, but he has vowed not to kill again after some disaster that occurred while he protected the young Gerrard. Besides, it doesn't matter, since he was captured and stuck inside a horrible torture room in the fortress, forced to endlessly trample on goblins thrown into said room that kept tumbling.
Aside from some knowledge, Sisay is nothing special. She had a
ring that could give her mana though (2 colourless manas in game).
Orim is a healer, but the fluff is rather scant with information. All we have that's remotely useful is from
Havoc, which shows that Orim could cast a shield that isolated her from the heat of the
Furnace of Rath.
The overall impression we get from the cards related to Orim is that she can prevent damage to other individuals, but it's generally limited to a few hit points on one particular creature. Clearly, she's be totally overwhelmed against a group of slivers.
Then we move to
Multani, Maro-Sorcerer. The game mechanics have him being as powerful as the number of cards held by players, but fluff wise, there's little of use.
Gaea's Might implies a considerable force.
Most of all, the cards clearly imply that Multani's powers are great when he operates from within a mighty forest. Which obviously would be lacking in the Stronghold.
Franly there's not much to see here.
So we move to
Ertai. See the edit above about the Skyship Weatherlight. There's not much else to get. At best he looks like good at opening portals only and countering some spells.
So much for the crew.
So we need to look at the other artifacts.
Some of them were added later when the ship returned to Mercadia.
But from those which we could safely guess to have been used during the assault of Rath, the
Null Rod, likely the one planted by Orim, seems to be of very limited use against organic being such as slivers.
The other artifacts are small wonders, either affecting other artifacts with limited effects, or providing some minor amounts of colourless mana.
And that is all. To be honest, there's nothing here that suggests that magic or the crew would be very effective at fending off the swarm of slivers, especially if you consider how powerful the slivers are imagined to be once they pile up.
This actually doesn't bode very well for the slivers, and an explanation to the Weatherlight's survival must be found elsewhere.
So let's continue with citing the wikia's history.
We'll advance further into the future.
Another age, another breed of slivers...