Magic The Gathering

[Morethanabitfoolish]

Kamigawa, original Innistrad, and first-set Tarkir are the kinds of hopping around to thematic planes which I can enjoy, though. Kamigawa taking a huge note from Japanese mythos and shinto makes it have a truly unique and otherworldly atmosphere, Innistrad is the right amount of camp that doesn't take itself too seriously, and Tarkir draws from Mongols, Byzantines, Persians, Tibetians, Khmer, and Siberians. It's not as much of a deep-dive into different civilizations and cultures as the original Dominaria, sure, but there's enough in these places that they're unique and fun.

Theros was boring and fucking sucks, though. The Innistrad re-tread was boring. Fate reforged and Dragons of Tarkir sucked.

It would also be better if the game felt more 'centered' rather than constantly touring around. It seems like they've slowly drifted back to telling vignette stories on planes rather than trying to tie everything together into some big, dumb, overarching story... but those vignettes are boring and uninteresting because the planes they're used on are shallow. I kindof like how Ikoria's main story was centered around someone who was essentially an eco-terrorist, but the plane itself is fucking boring and doesn't even remotely make sense. I don't even know what happens on Kaldheim and nothing about zendikar rising has stuck in my mind, much less reminded me of the original block.

I don't think they'll ever go back to having a 'central' plane and only at times looking elsewhere. And, yeah - they make a cool, unique setting and they either drive it into the ground or blow it up to the point where they're now thinking 'hmmm harry potter and dnd planes, sounds like a great idea'

Kind of agree with most of that. I enjoyed the Kamigawa plot, not in terms of it being great literature but having enough interesting little plot things that the stories worth a read, with Hidetsuga and his eventual ending being particular fun.

As far as I can tell much of the problems in comparison to say the Dominaria plotline is easily summarised with "fucking planeswalkers." Once it became near as damn required to have these characters bouncing between them the planes themselves start feeling of less significance, especially when a lot of them seem to end up upended by the planeswalkers making it seem like minimal people on the planes can get anything meaningful done in contrast to the tourists.

 

[Picnic_Boy]

Kind of agree with most of that. I enjoyed the Kamigawa plot, not in terms of it being great literature but having enough interesting little plot things that the stories worth a read, with Hidetsuga and his eventual ending being particular fun.

As far as I can tell much of the problems in comparison to say the Dominaria plotline is easily summarised with "fucking planeswalkers." Once it became near as damn required to have these characters bouncing between them the planes themselves start feeling of less significance, especially when a lot of them seem to end up upended by the planeswalkers making it seem like minimal people on the planes can get anything meaningful done in contrast to the tourists.

Planeswalkers in general helped to ruin the setting for me. Back in the day, I always thought of Planeswalkers as nigh-omnipotent, inscrutable, almost alien intelligences, not just regular people who hug their mom in card art.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Planeswalkers in general helped to ruin the setting for me. Back in the day, I always thought of Planeswalkers as nigh-omnipotent, inscrutable, almost alien intelligences, not just regular people who hug their mom in card art.

They used to be Nigh-Omnipotent, Inscrutable, Almost Alien (once they got old enough to start warping the shit out of their morality)..then they got made Mortal during timespiral because WOTC (reasonably in away) wanted characters of reasonable power to be their headlining set of characters. It is just that they sort of fucked themselves by removing the books almost instantly after doing that so that they couldn't be actual characters that grow and learn at reasonable paces because the storyline has to go at hyper speed due to having to fit everything into 10 short stories per set.

This got even worse as they tried to create a "bigger storyline" with the Gatewatch..and then hacked blocks into 2 sets instead of 3 so we have even less time to. You know Develop characters.

 

[Flexo]

They used to be Nigh-Omnipotent, Inscrutable, Almost Alien (once they got old enough to start warping the shit out of their morality)..then they got made Mortal during timespiral because WOTC (reasonably in away) wanted characters of reasonable power to be their headlining set of characters. It is just that they sort of fucked themselves by removing the books almost instantly after doing that so that they couldn't be actual characters that grow and learn at reasonable paces because the storyline has to go at hyper speed due to having to fit everything into 10 short stories per set.

This got even worse as they tried to create a "bigger storyline" with the Gatewatch..and then hacked blocks into 2 sets instead of 3 so we have even less time to. You know Develop characters.

It was ironic that right after time spiral which made the neo-walkers was Lorwyn... which had no planeswalkers in it and was a plane-contained story.

They did make up for it with Alara and each shard getting a walker.

Though it's story was pretty haphazard.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

It was ironic that right after time spiral which made the neo-walkers was Lorwyn... which had no planeswalkers in it and was a plane-contained story.

They did make up for it with Alara and each shard getting a walker.

Though it's story was pretty haphazard.

Yeah, Alara had spots of interesting, but it also had one book that was released after the block was. The MTG Novels were hit and miss (mostly miss.) but Alara was the real start of one of the biggest issues that the lore has.

Spoiler Season completely spoils the story. Now when the books were part of the Fatpacks it was understandable..but as soon as they went to short stories on the website..the fact that the 10 weekly stories were not apart of Spoiler Season is the dumbest decision ever. They should have been releasing the Short Stories in the weeks leading up to the release, not after it.

But WOTC is gonna WOTC and that is why the entire state of the game is a sad mess from top to bottom.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Planeswalkers in general helped to ruin the setting for me. Back in the day, I always thought of Planeswalkers as nigh-omnipotent, inscrutable, almost alien intelligences, not just regular people who hug their mom in card art.

Same here. I also liked it back when they actually had to create new characters to carry their stories, and not every plane was an obvious gimmick.

The Dominaria saga felt interesting to me because there were stakes involved. It wasn't just a random plane we would only see again as player pandering (hi, Innistrad. Your Lovecraftian version sucked) or because the developers had a boner for it (hi, Ravnica. I love you but I know why you exist), it was a place we had seen stories happening and it was an interconnected place. Something going bad in Urborg could eventually affect Jamuraa without some dork with face markings having to open a portal, summon something, or carry some plague over. It felt a little more like a living world and less like a top-down design choice.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

hi, Ravnica. I love you but I know why you exist

Originally They wanted to play with Color Pairings..

Then the Shocklands attacked were printed..and everything changed.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

I generally feel like planeswalkers are mostly boring mechanically and limit the game's design in addition to making the storylines continually forgettable.

It's a part of why I have a soft spot for Domi Rade. I think the original domri is a wonderfully designed planeswalker - the right amount of power, the right amount of risk/reward. And he was only really a background character even on into the war of the spark nonsense, since he was just a dumb anarchist that wanted to knock everything over rather than some annoying motherfucker that we'd have to see over and over and over and over again. He even had the good sense to die!

There's just too many of them, really. When the number of planeswalkers was more limited, it was cool to see them appear in a set and see what they got up to. They're really everywhere now, though, and ironically they feel like they've really made magic lose its unique identity. I don't really have an issue with there being more generic-fantasy settings or one-off things like Innistrad, but you need to spice it up with shit like the Scars block. Wholly distinct art, wholly distinct world, this really strong sense of tone and a smorgasbord of really alien concepts. Kaladesh's art direction was fantastic but it otherwise fell short thanks to the stupid gatewatch shit.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

There's just too many of them, really. When the number of planeswalkers was more limited, it was cool to see them appear in a set and see what they got up to. They're really everywhere now, though, and ironically they feel like they've really made magic lose its unique identity.

You mean like when we had a 3 block structure and could print 1 or 2 in a set and have everyone in the storyline covered? unlike now when we have to print 5 to cover everybody in a story.

 

[Polyboros2]

The Planeswalkers were part of Hasbro pimping out everything they owned to Hollywood, desperate for that Transformers money again.

That isn't speculation, from what I recall of Maro talking about it on his podcasts, that's entirely the reason they depowered Planeswalkers and started printing them on cards. Old school Planeswalkers were too powerful to tell a Hollywood story with (I'm sure this is what they were told by whatever scumsucker exceptional individual Hollywood Executive type Hasbro had to try and get movie contracts).

I believe the Gatewatch was the movie cast. I think it was a year or two before the defunct movie was announced, and I don't know if it was to have a stronger pitch, or they knew more about how close a deal was. Ditch the expensive CGI catman for a regular vaguely ethnic dude, and the oversized muscle man for a vaguely ethnic chick for representation, and shoe horn them in to every plot to try and get at least a trilogy.

I've stated that I think Hasbro/Wizards is burning Magic to the ground. I don't think it'll die, but I think it's going to shrink back a lot after a lot of people stop buying. At this point, I'd almost want the absurdity of what poison that movie would of been to the game. Cards with pictures of actors instead of art. Black Chandra due to the casting world's gingercide and they change her art in the game and say the art was never an accurate depiction of the world and she was always black.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

That isn't speculation, from what I recall of Maro talking about it on his podcasts, that's entirely the reason they depowered Planeswalkers and started printing them on cards. Old school Planeswalkers were too powerful to tell a Hollywood story with (I'm sure this is what they were told by whatever scumsucker exceptional individual Hollywood Executive type Hasbro had to try and get movie contracts).

They Kind of Aren't Wrong there.

Urza was the only Old Walker that really had a "Story" that didn't revolve around Dick-Measuring with other Old Walkers (I am not gonna count Bolas in Legends 2 here he had very minimal screen time) and the vast majority of it was him durdling around in Tolaria trying to set up things for the Invasion. He was a main character in The Brothers war but then he himself became a side character in Planeswalker (Xantcha was the main POV character) and Time Spiral where the POV shifted but much of Urza's POV was him being captured, scolded by Barrin for being a douche from what I remember.

Like you guys can bitch about planeswalkers all you want, but them existing isn't the problem. The Current Design arc is still going to be shit without planeswalkers, You will still have shit like Omnath, Uro, EmberCleave, Hendge, Fires of Invention, Hydroid Krasis, Hogaak, Golos.

Hell the two worst Mechanics printed from a Design Perspective had Nothing to do with Planeswalkers. Adventure and Companion. Yes Oko was a pile of dumb, but so was Hogaak and Hogaak wasn't a Planeswalker.

And as for Neo-walkers and the Gatewatch fucking up the "Writing" The writing has always treaded the line of shit, and the writing team from Origins onwards couldn't make Weatherlight saga good, and certainly can't do it with 10 "short stories" You can scream about "Muh Walkers" and "Hasboro" all you want..but WOTC would be shitting the bed even without them because Maro doesn't know what the fuck he is doing and changes his mind about what he is doing every other year.

Of course none of this matters because now they have (Insert IP HERE) Secret Lairs and will get CONSOOOOOMers buying Product in perpetuity so they don't need Magic to be good anymore.

 

[Maratus volans]

They could change Chandra to be Indian pretty painlessly. Ever since Origins, it's been weird to me that her parents are obviously Indian but she's some generic white redhead.

I don't think modern planeswalkers are that bad for the game, story-wise. Early Magic story ran the gamut from decent pulp fantasy (the Brother's War) to hot garbage (the entire Onslaught storyline). Even the Weatherlight storyline ranged from the Tempest anthology at the high end to the conclusion of the story arc having Yawgmoth turn into a giant black mana cloud and reanimate all of the topsoil in the entire world as zombie soldiers on the low end.

Most of the stories since then could be politely described as "good enough". Most of them were way too long because the novels were being stretched to cover three sets when there wasn't really three books worth of plot, and then the novels went away almost entirely and the story just faded into the background and it didn't really make much of a difference to the game. Hell, a lot of the most egregious retcons - stuff like what the Eldrazi are and where they come from, changed between Rise of the Eldrazi and Battle for Zendikar, or undoing the ending to the original Ravnica block - had nothing to do with 'walkers.

Even if they took all of the planeswalkers away and reverted to all the stories being isolated to one plane and disconnected from each other, there would still be a lot of quality issues. For one thing, the huge pile of legends WotC prints every set to placate Commander players would fuck the story sideways if you tried to include more than a handful of them into the narrative, and with identity politics being what it is there are a vocal group of players who would be *very, very mad* if WotC left out the token kweer/Black/trans/whatever character. Hell, look at how many people made a big deal about Alesha, a character who was almost totally inconsequential to the Khans-block story line, but who was ~trans~.

So in that sense, I don't think planeswalkers are any worse for the story than the people in charge of writing the story. Recurring characters was an inevitability once capeshit became big.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

Like you guys can bitch about planeswalkers all you want, but them existing isn't the problem.

I disagree with this - what's a planeswalker, fundamentally? It's a modal card. Those have always existed before in shit like the charms, yeah, but modal permanents have been more rare - and they were usually cautious with them. Companions are... one of the most retarded "I saw it on hearthstone" ideas that I've ever seen, yeah, completely unrelated to wotc's problem of modality, but I otherwise think a ton of issues are coming from the fact that they're being fucking lazy with design by printing modal things - and I point the finger at planeswalkers for it.

Though even then, there are ways to do it right, and ways to do it wrong. Like I said, I love OG Domri Rade. I also love OG Koth. When they aren't pushed, when they aren't always good, planeswalkers can be interesting - hell, that Jace that makes copies of himself is a super interesting design to me. The same could be true of adventure cards - if both modes of the card were powered down, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

But here's a 1/1 for 1 and a 5/5 for 3; here's an overcosted shock that stops damage prevention on a 4/3 for 3 with upside. Here's a planeswalker that you just always play, because all the modes are great. No, you don't build around these cards - are you running their colors? You'd may as well include them, no opportunity cost not to. They don't synergize with anything else, really, so much as they just win on their own.

Meanwhile, Sagas get cooked up back in Dominaria - multiple effects, but they're staggered. Almost totally removes the problem - a buff, a boardwipe, and a graveyard wipe all in one? Hell yeah. Their recent fiddling in Kaldheim with just printing two powered-down cards on opposite sides is just as perilous, as one can compare Valki to most of the other gods in the cycle and see a pretty stark difference.

Recurring characters was an inevitability once capeshit became big.

Yeah, I guess that's more what I hate. I really didn't mind the neowalkers quite as much until BFZ/OGW.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

WotC forgot to print the Heliod card for their Valentine's Day Secret Lair, so its going to be shipped a month late with a free Goblin token. Also, everybody who ordered that Secret Lair gets $20 off their next Secret Lair purchase.

How the fuck do you forget to print a card in a product that only contains five cards?

 

[Maratus volans]

WotC forgot to print the Heliod card for their Valentine's Day Secret Lair, so its going to be shipped a month late with a free Goblin token. Also, everybody who ordered that Secret Lair gets $20 off their next Secret Lair purchase.

How the fuck do you forget to print a card in a product that only contains five cards?

Simple, you have WotC-level QC.

Enjoy that free Goblin token, lads!

 

[Oddjob OTP]

I'm an old fag that played kitchen magic mostly 5th Ed through during rath cycle with a very few smatterings here and there (mostly playing Magic [year number here]) and the like and I recently got back into it with Arena.

I mostly don't see a problem with plainswalkers mechanically and I definitely don't see them in every deck. It's more a problem with individual plainswalkers. Some of them are so good in an archetype you'd be stupid to avoid them (like the new red / alternate blue walker from Strixhaven is a no brainer for a r/u caster deck) and some just are good at everything and you should strongly consider them all the time if you have the mana (see: Professor Onyx). 3 quarters of them are nearly unplayable though, I think I'm the only person I've ever seen play the w/u nonbinary Niko and that's just because his shards trigger the fuck out of my Archon of Sun's Grace in my Yorion deck and his +1 lets me bounce Yorion back to my hand.

Adventures again, the concept isn't bad but some cards are too good. Giant Killer, Lovestruck, and the giant are all hilariously overpowered but most of the rest are ok or bad. Nobody is complaining about the 1 drop 1/1 flyer that can be cast as a 2 drop +2/+1 flying sorcery.

Biggest problem I have with current magic is how common hexproof and invulnerable are. Shroud was a less toxic hexproof and I felt better about something not dying from damage when it was a protection from color or they had to spend mana and tap it for regeneration.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

So Modern Horizons 2 is going to be priced like a masters set instead of a premium draft set.

Seems like WotC's policy moving forward is Whales Only.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

So Modern Horizons 2 is going to be priced like a masters set instead of a premium draft set.

I feel bad for people who want to draft it, but I don't really know otherwise. It's going to have fetches, right? So every other card in the set is going to be cheap as dirt, because people will open thousands upon thousands of the things for that reason alone.

 

[Polyboros2]

Black Lotus is back on the menu boys. I'm actually some what surprised they aren't getting greedier than this. I thought for sure there was going to be some ultra premium 1/100 booster boxes Black Lotus token with an ugly ad on the back so as to duck the reserved list, but they confirmed that they have no intentions to print a token version of a normal cards(for now, two quarters in the red and secret lair power nine at $200 a card will pop in an instant).

Also, unrelated lolz, the Magic the Gathering subreddit, /r/MagicTCG, as well as somewhere on Twitch had a problem with the Modern Horizons 2 spoiler of chatTERFang(new legendary Squirrel), due to jannibot word filters.

 

[Maratus volans]

Man, they are digging deep for this set. How many current players even know who this guy is, much less why his card reads like Baby's First Custom Magic Card?