Only because all of these things were done with exactly zero fucking effort.
Exactly. You only have to look at say.... OG Innistrad to see how things could have been when they "do [trope] thing with a MTG twist."
I think the fundamental fuck up of the setting/theme is that it's not one place. A good M:tG setting puts you in a place and tells you the bones of the setting's history through lore blurbs on commons and has just enough story told through the cards to give you the illusion that it was well thought out. Instead EoE has random scifi tropes slung together where Flash Gordon rejects and Fischer Price Mass Effect soldiers duke it out with H. R. Geiger space monsters and Illithids in a wide variety of places that are unrelated to each other.
This is sort of what Mirrodin was before it got Phyrexianized. They could have been more explicitly sci-fi with it, but it had a good balance of traditional fantasy with technology.
If only there was some kind of structure Wizards could use with multiple sets that focused on a single setting within the multiverse while exploring the different characters, stories, and mechanics that could emerge from such a place in detail. Like a few sets neatly grouped together. A... block, you might say.
They got super fucking salty about one of the sets in a block selling like shit. Why do you think they dropped core sets?
I'm well aware, but their abandonment seems to have pretty inarguably had a negative effect on the quality of the game's worldbuilding, narrative, and exploration of mechanics.
I have legitimately come to hate OG Innistrad as a set and the entire plane.
MaRo has talked in part and in depth on the rise and falls of blocks.
Well the issue with Innistrad is that it's not just the vampires, but everybody else. I don't recall the details of Ulgrotha (or wherever Sengir is from) but I don't remember there being quite the same issue of monsters preying on humans. So yeah, they're able to kind of keep control. On Innistrad, it's not just the vampires but werewolves and zombies and ghosts and demons and devils....
IIRC Edgar was trying to cure some disease that Sorin had and whatever the Serum was had the effect of turning Sorin into a Vampire (and igniting Sorin's spark) so Edgar decided "Fuck it I am gonna drink it too"
I imagine they kept retrying it even after blocks were officially abolished because they were trying to see if they could adjust the figurative knobs and hit whatever goal or metric they wanted. With UB this is probably a dead dream because the constant stream of "I KNOW WHAT THAT IS" would disrupt the story.
Within the original Innistrad block at least one of the big four families had already realized that mindlessly culling humans was a bad long-term strategy. This idea is revisited in Midnight Hunt with one of Olivia's nephews offering patronage to villages of humans in exchange for nonlethal doses of blood. The former was forgotten by the time of Shadows Over Innistrad, the latter didn't get any development because Wizards no longer tells stories.
It was to survive a famine ravaging Stensia. A high-ranking demon had corrupted the fields, then came to Edgar Markov with a solution to the problem he'd created.
I can’t believe that this is the least deranged magic aids has sounded in years.
Here's my question to the destruction of Magic with UB. If your options are a tight game dominated by whiney troons or making slop to please the masses who don't even know you exist, which would you choose?
I think we got both of those though, anecdotally it seems like no one that bought in for UB actually plays the game.
We ain't had either for more than a decade lol, at least Vivi has only broken standard.
Entomb was effectively a One mana instant speed Tutor for the deck so I can see why it happened.
It's the same as the "Survival of the Fittest vs. Vengevine" ban arguments from many years ago: the problem is that WotC is not going to stop printing one-card win condition creatures anytime soon, so do you want to keep the nostalgic old card in the format knowing that it will never stop being a problem, or do you axe it so that Sneak-n-Show becomes the default "cheat idiotic Commander fodder into play" deck?
It's easy to believe if you consider that they've probably sold most of their FF stock and that they might not have Square's permission to print more. Of course this is purely speculation on my part but I can't see an UB deal last indefinitely.