Eleven-year-old Chandra Nalaar climbed through a shower of sparks. One or both of her parents were welding somewhere up the mine shaft from her and she grinned as the little flecks of fire bounced off her red hair. She climbed hand-over-hand up the web of scaffolding that clung to the walls of the tunnel. Today was finally the day. Her parents were inventors, her grandparents had been inventors, ancestors throughout Chandra’s family had been inventors. Today was the day she would finally embrace what had always been her chosen destiny: to become a deliverer of canisters.
Inventing had never been her strong point.
It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate devices. Her world was full of wondrous inventions and marvels of clicking, gear-driven artificial life. It was just that somehow her patience seemed to end sometime before her projects did. And somehow, sometime during the construction phase, her fist almost invariably wound up colliding with the face of someone who deserved it.
It was a personal failing. She accepted it.
This is the very first few paragraphs from Chandra Nalaar’s origin story. It is made clear that she has no affinity to artifice, and unlike her parents and their parents before her, she is not adept with the use of artifacts. In fact, she grew up so rambunctious and feisty that she would usually sock someone out of frustration, rather than learn her parent’s craft, a craft so widespread on her plane that it took place of most magic there.
Moments later, she would be confronted by consulate guards, and rather than just rely on fists and fiery temper, she manifests her pyromancy for the first time, and what she realizes stuns her:
There was no sign of the self-immolating craziness from moments before. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen magic before; inventors regularly built creations that defied explanation, made even more wondrous by the power of Æther. But conjuring fire without the use of a device—that was new to her.
Aether is a commonality in her world, but manifesting magic without it was not! She had none of the talents to use artifacts to harness aether, but all the innate talents to use magic without it!
Featured here is a freshly reprinted card, “Negate,” which will be reappearing in Aether Revolt, the soon to be newest magic expansion, and the second expansion in the Kaladesh block. The flavour text in this new reprint has Jace stating:
“It is fascinating to see how the people of this plane replicate magical techniques without a natural gift. Also frustrating.”
So here, we can see that there is a distinct difference between the average artifice using aether powered citizens of Kaladesh, and the limited few like Chandra who can use magic without technology. In fact, later in her origin story, her mother, Pia Nalaar explains to her:
“Listen to me,” her mother said. Her eyes were intense. “This is a gift. You have something special, something that’s not been seen in many years.”
Chandra heard this, but the words didn’t latch onto anything in her mind. She searched her mother’s face for some clue.
“I don’t understand.”
“Your fire,” her mother said. “It’s a form of magic. A special kind. But it’s something that intimidates them. If it’s something you can do without machines, without the need for Æther…you do it your own way, you see? And they hate that.”
What’s so special about Chandra’s magic isn’t even that it’s tricky to perform fantastical feats on Kaladesh, but the fact that she does so without aether! But this isn’t a minor or pedantic bit of detail, it is one of the main tenets to Chandra’s origin story!
“Your parents’ crimes are many, but your crimes are far worse, pyromancer. You’re an instrument of chaos and death."
Because of Chandra’s rare talent, Baral, a Consulate ajudicator, hunted her down, framed her for arson. Framing her for these crimes, he captured her for the purposes of a grand execution; Baral, a sadist, seemed to take pride in exterminating mages with talents - out of envy, or an inferiority complex, it is not clear.
In a slow instant, the blade arced down through the air toward her neck. Chandra felt the prickling sensation wash over her like a wave of coals. Her vision flickered at the edges, blurring out Baral and the announcer and everything around her. The arena and the crowd warped in a molten haze. She felt the sputtering steam from her vent pack turn to white-hot liquid, barely aware that the pack had melted into slag, and was dripping down her leg and burning through the stone dais.
The smoke cleared enough for her to see the people who approached her. They didn’t look like consuls’ enforcers, or like anyone she had ever known: tall and noble, robed like monks, with ash streaked on their faces like ornate masks. Behind them rose a hilltop of roughly sculpted rock, with stairs leading up to a monumental archway leading into the mountain. Craggy stone architecture bloomed from the mountain, lit by brazierless trails of fire, and the air smelled of hot gases and baking earth.
The arena was nowhere to be found. The entire city, her entire world had abandoned her—or she had abandoned it.
In a last ditch attempt, she used every ounce of power to resist Baral’s devices, which were suppressing her pyromancy for her execution, and in doing so also ignited her planeswalker spark.
The result ended up with Baral’s face being hideously disfigured, and a grudge being placed on Chandra.
When she awoke, she had planeswalked to the Plane of Regatha, where she was surrounded by the Monks of Keral Keep, who trained and honed her pyromancy.
You could say the fact that she did not use aether (or energy), was the whole reason her planeswalker spark lit up to begin with.
Chandra is no artificer, in fact, if she had been slightly better at using them, or the aether that powers them, she wouldn’t be impulsive red planeswalker we know now at all. She wouldn’t have been persecuted by Baral, and her father, Kiran Nalaar, would still be alive. What Chandra uses is mana, and pointedly not aether.
As I mentioned in my post about Saheeli, I understand the urge to make planeswalkers that correspond with a particular magic set incorporate the key words of new sets, however, in this case, it’s like ripping up a stack full of Chandra Planeswalker cards, and then scattering them over her father’s grave with a hefty helping of piss from a nondisclosed species of animal.
It’s ridiculous to use Magic IP like this. I don’t always think that orthodox adherence to plot is super necessary, but literally building Chandra Torch of Defiance’s abilities around the /one/ thing that she literally never could do, at the crux of her origin story’s conflict, is just a joke.
I really, REALLY hope that you fine folks at D3GO will consider these concerns, because I am a huge fan of the game, AND of Chandra, and it is a real darn shame that you took her in this direction 
