The MTG story has had major issues since the Advent of well "Magic the Gathering Content" and "Spoiler season" where players see the entire set before it is released so the entire story gets spoiled before you can read it and WOTC is so fundamentally bad at the internet they can't create a single product that isn't fucking trash, and that isn't a Magic only thing. You can hate 4E all you want but it is absolutely fucking unacceptable for WOTC to say "We are going to create a subscription service with a character builder, the full set of all the books ect..and even an official version of Maptools for players and DMS to log in together and use" and not fucking keep to that promise. (also the character builder ran on FUCKING SILVERLIGHT)
The magic Story being crunched as fuck kind of predates even The Two Block fuckups because even in Tarkir they would spoil the storyline on cards 3 months before the story where the event on the card happened. I've been saying for years they need to start the story for the next set in time for it to end at the start of spoiler season, and put the "Iconic Story cards" in the stories as teasers for the eventual set release.
Why would spoilers being released affect the story which is usually done by that time? (especially back when books were released in the fat packs, perhaps less so nowadays) You may as well say spoiler season affects alpha block.
To be fair, you had Innistrad and Kamigawa in that which were both very much in the same line of Eldraines "FAIRY TALES BUT MMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAGIIIIIIIIICCCCC THE GAAAATHHHERING!!!!!" horse shit.
Mirrodin, Alara and Ravnica were all really unique but the seeds of what would happen starting with the first Theros block where every new plane is just some fucking "real world" thing with Planeswalkers fucking around and which went to 11 after Origins.
Edit: I normally don't talk about stickers, but I see Stabyouintheback is Still ass blasted that I don't like WOW classic
Also Lorwyn was their first fairytale set and was between Time Spiral & Alara. (also when they first dabbled with a double set block) The first real top-down set was - ok well it was Arabian Nights THE first expansion. But we don't count that because it was a case of Richard needing to make something quick to get product out the door. The first real top-down set was the original Kamigawa block, which followed Mirrodin 1 back in... 2004.
WotC outright admitted that the reception to the set scared them away from top-down flavor design until finally doing Innistrad 1 in 2011. THAT going over so well is what led them to then go on and do Theros in 2013. No really, here's Mark on it:
For years, the concern was that a Greek mythology set wouldn't have enough of an identity because so much of what Richard had built into the game came from Greek mythological roots. And then came Innistrad. Innistrad was about Gothic horror, but what we found was that the majority of what we used were creatures Magic normally uses. Four out of the five tribes in the set, for example, were Magic staples, and even the fifth, Werewolves, had been used in Magic before, if only on a handful of cards.
The lesson of Innistrad was that you can make up a set of things Magic normally does but they can be grouped and flavored to create a feel that is distinct from normal Magic. So I wasn't actually worried that we couldn't make a Greek mythology world have its own feel.
They literally admit Theros wasn't the seed. Innistrad was.
Also you're off in that
Tarkir was a bottom-up set. It was later in development that they added in the "medieval east-asia" flavor onto it. In fact originally they had a 4 faction plan (if you'll notice in the color allontment on that article - this idea was later incorporated into Ixalan) when a 5th was introduced later in the process and the whole thing changed into a wedge set.
Mark even admitted in his state of design that morph was planned for the block from the beginning, then should have been removed:
Khans of Tarkir block had ten clan mechanics. In addition, it had the return of one of the most complex mechanics in Magic's history—morph. But not just morph—it also had two variants on morph, and one of those was extra complex. That was a lot. Design worked hard to make sure all the non-morph mechanics were on the simpler side, and we connected the ten clan mechanics so they played nicely with one another.
How'd we do? I think for the volume of mechanics we juggled, we did well, but we still bit off way more than we were supposed to. Looking back, I question the inclusion of morph and its variants. The block could have just had the ten clan mechanics and been fine. Yes, it would have been different, but I think we could have made a very compelling design. But the entire set was built around morph—so by the time I realized what was going on, it wasn't something we could take out.
Ikoria DEFINITELY was a bottom-up world because it wasn't even complete when they moved it up into production because they suddenly needed a hole filled in the release schedule once Eldraine set #2 was removed. Which is why everyone admits it feels half finished and thought out and even the story ends up contradicting the cards.
Magic's "story" should be background details on cards that players piece together and speculate on, not retarded narratives featuring recurring characters and world-ending events.
In general - sure. Though there are things that even seeing it on the card, I would love to pick up a story to find out the details.
For example, Garruk finally breaking his curse. Yeah I can see that on the card:
But as someone who read the webcomic where he got cursed in the first place, then played the videogame where you had to help him "deal" with it, I'd like to know more of the details of how exactly he resolved this issue.
