Magic The Gathering

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Logistical Nightmare said:
-morph but better, with disguise giving your 2/2 for 3 ‘ward 2’.
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Not just that but "manifest" is back with "cloak" now. Same as above.

Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
It'd be worth looking at, because I assure you it has merit.
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Found it.

And you're right. It is a really neat and rich place. All of the world is. (I look forward to all the books I'll read once all humans are dead.) That's the other frustrating part is that so many of these WotC types just want to do a "mcdonalds" version of Africa or India or Asia and never really dig into the complex and rich history - both good and bad.

LillWeeb said:
Delney art looks like the FB messenger ai art when it makes something look cartoony
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Geez could that flavor text be ANY MORE TUMBLR?
 
A skinny fat man said:
I think that this set was never supposed to be on Capenna, but it is trying to shove a quite modern trope set (murder mystery) into a world that typically has aesthetics inspired by a much older time period and that creates a bit of an aesthetic clash.
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There are gothic horror novels from the 19th century that capture a sense of mystery around death - not to mention Sherlock Holmes coming at us from the late 19th. There's plenty of more antiquated examples of capers to draw from - and they expressly, explicitly chose to avoid those and settle instead with a stupid, ridiculous 1920s-noire theming that makes zero sense for the setting.

Particularly since every character has become buddy-buddy wisecracking whedonites that don't reflect basically at-all any of their previous characterization, it really really feels like the late-development reset they slapped on LCI wasn't just limited to LCI.
Flexo said:
a "mcdonalds" version of Africa
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Oh, they're scared shitless of that. Egypt gets a pass because it's not-really-africa, but if they were to explore any of the cultures that have existed on the continent in any real regard, they would be savaged by a bunch of morons without any familiarity with the African kingdoms, or the northern continent's various wars with various meditteranean powers. I assume they intentionally are avoiding ever treading on the ground of Visions again, because today's "anti-racist" crowd definitely doesn't want to be even remotely acquainted with authentic African history or culture.
 
MaRo posted his article.
Let's begin with the first mystery, the theme of mystery itself. How did we end up with it? Well, the story goes all the way back to 1997. Michael Ryan and I felt that Magic should have an ongoing story, so we pitched what is now known as the Weatherlight Saga. As part of that pitch, we laid out plans for a three-year arc that would take place across three different blocks, each on its own plane. While the Weatherlight Saga happened, it deviated a bit from the three-year story we first pitched. Most of the first year remained, as did parts of the second year (although it was pushed back to year three). It's the second-year part that's relevant.​
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The first year was set on Rath and the second year on Mercadia (again, the second year was pushed back a year so that we could go into the past and tell the Urza's Saga portion of the story). Volrath had snuck aboard the Weatherlight and killed Starke while in Mercadia. Michael and I had the cool idea of turning Starke's murder into a murder mystery. The idea was to have Starke killed in the beginning of the story and the mystery of his murderer woven throughout the set.​
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We had this elaborate plan where the murder occurred in a castle and different pieces of art would help you figure out the layout of the castle, which would be key to solving the murder. The murderer of our story was Tahngarth, but not the actual Tahngarth, as he had been replaced by Volrath.​
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A little behind-the-scenes trivia: We made Volrath a shapeshifter to set up the murder mystery. The Weatherlight Saga changed much along the way, including Michael and I being far less involved in it, so the idea of the murder mystery set never happened, but it was always an idea near and dear to my heart.​
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Flash forward many years to the original Innistrad release. It had been a big success, and it made me realize the power of top-down design based on fictional genres. I ended up making a list of genres that blend well with fantasy. Fairy tales were at the top, which would lead to Throne of Eldraine, but murder mystery was also on my list. It had a lot of juicy tropes that would make good cards, and I still loved the idea of a Magic set with a puzzle built into it. (Next week, I will talk more about the puzzles that are embedded in Murders at Karlov Manor.)​
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He also answers the theories.
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Note, I said murder mystery plane. The initial idea was for it was to be a brand-new plane optimized to play into all the tropes the genre wanted us to hit. Usually, when we did a top-down plane, we created something brand new so we could adapt it however we needed to optimize the set. But then we made Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. That set started as a top-down Japanese pop culture-inspired set. Instead of making a new plane, we repurposed a plane we already had that seemed like a good fit. This would eventually lead us to change The Lost Caverns of Ixalan from a new underground plane to Ixalan.​
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In the middle of vision design, the Worldbuilding and Vision Design teams both realized that the plane we were building felt a lot like Ravnica. The trope space demanded a city complete with efficient law enforcement (New Capenna was a bit light on the latter), and we didn't feel a need to reinvent the wheel. If the plane felt like Ravnica, why not make it Ravnica? There was discussion about some players being upset that we returned to Ravnica and didn't have guild-themed play, but Ravnica Remastered was coming out a month before it, so we felt that would give access to players who wanted it.​
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
There are gothic horror novels from the 19th century that capture a sense of mystery around death - not to mention Sherlock Holmes coming at us from the late 19th. There's plenty of more antiquated examples of capers to draw from - and they expressly, explicitly chose to avoid those and settle instead with a stupid, ridiculous 1920s-noire theming that makes zero sense for the setting.
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Because they're going with lowest common denominator 'nerd' settings. There's obviously a very conscious attempt during worldbuilding to figure out what tropes/settings/characters an average 20-something person would be familiar with and then to just make those the setting and the cards. Here, it was very obvious that they were looking at L.A. Noire and derivatives and not bothering to go back any farther.

It's sort of like how LCI was inspired by Minecraft. I'd sort of thought it was inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Jules Verne is apparently too forgotten now so instead it's fucking Minecraft, because of course it is.

Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
So they make them more and more complicated, with more and more words, because they somehow think this will let them sneak their way into a good mechanic. The basics are beyond them.
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They've clearly shifted to what I call "high-concept mechanics" over the past five years, which are mechanics that are trying to tell a story or create an experience. A low-concept mechanic, like cycling, doesn't really have any flavor and basically just exists to solve certain gameplay problems; a high-concept mechanic, meanwhile, starts from the premise of, "I want players to feel as if they're really doing [x]". Flying would probably be the simplest high-concept mechanic you can make.

Mutate was the first recent-ish mechanic where it was clear they were trying to evoke a certain feeling that couldn't be cleanly translated into Magic's rules, but they were hellbent on doing it anyway and so settled with something clunky and unintuitive. Since then there's been more and more mechanics like this, where the idea seems to be that telling a good story will compensate for any gameplay deficiencies: the dungeon mechanics, Tempt, Craft, Roles, Prototype, and so on. You also end up with a lot of really derivative mechanics, like disguise versus morph, or toxic versus poisonous.
 
Maratus volans said:
Mutate was the first recent-ish mechanic where it was clear they were trying to evoke a certain feeling that couldn't be cleanly translated into Magic's rules, but they were hellbent on doing it anyway and so settled with something clunky and unintuitive. Since then there's been more and more mechanics like this, where the idea seems to be that telling a good story will compensate for any gameplay deficiencies: the dungeon mechanics, Tempt, Craft, Roles, Prototype, and so on. You also end up with a lot of really derivative mechanics, like disguise versus morph, or toxic versus poisonous.
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Some of those would be fine every once in awhile, but every freakin' set having one???

If it were up to me, I would limit WotC to only be allowed to do one of those for a year. (aka 1 every 4 sets)

So much of this stuff is just begging memory issues. "That card doesn't have disguise." "Oh it was cloaked!" "Are you sure you solved that case? I thought it was that other one you solved."

At this point I assume they have just completely abandoned high level tournaments because this stuff is going to make it easier to cheat at that level.
 
Maratus volans said:
It's sort of like how LCI was inspired by Minecraft. I'd sort of thought it was inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Jules Verne is apparently too forgotten now so instead it's fucking Minecraft, because of course it is.
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I disagree with this partly. Like, obviously there was a solid amount of Minecraft inspiration, but there's also a ton of Journey to the Center of the Earth stuff. Including that they literally do go to the center of the earth. Of course, Magic sets don't just take inspiration(or steal ideas if you want to be uncharitable) from a single source so saying it's inspired by both is kinda pointless, but getting mad about it being Minecraft the set is really only looking at one face of it. I'd say that there's about as much Indiana Jones inspiration as there is Minecraft in the set.
 
Flexo said:
The Weatherlight Saga changed much along the way, including Michael and I being far less involved in it, so the idea of the murder mystery set never happened, but it was always an idea near and dear to my heart.
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Ahhh, there's the explanation. I really should've suspected this: Maro had an idea he really thought was awesome (just like Companions!), and he was asspained that most of the things he's pushed hard for have been extreme flops with at-face obvious design flaws, whereas players have really gelled onto things he can't really take credit for, like Ravnica.

His little explanation as to why it's Ravnica and not New Capenna is retarded, and clearly cooked up. Half of the "strong law enforcement" cards are random members of random guilds with "detective" slapped onto them. If Detectives were actually limited to Azorius or maybe Boros, the excuse would almost fly; but instead, Izoni is now a detective, because because, and you see - center of the web! It's a pun! It's a pun!
Maratus volans said:
Since then there's been more and more mechanics like this, where the idea seems to be that telling a good story will compensate for any gameplay deficiencies: the dungeon mechanics, Tempt, Craft, Roles, Prototype, and so on.
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In defense of Tempt, it did make limited phenomenal. Once you understand how it works, in that limited format it turned out to be a really fun and engaging mechanic that offered up a lot of gameplay decisions (tradeoff: "pick green" was removed as a decision during the drafting phase unless you opened, like, rare-Sam or the Brown wizard).

Everything else though, absolutely. Roles would not bother me if the role cards all explained what they did; but maybe half of them don't. And it becomes a stupid mechanic whose only real point is to work around the bargain mechanic - which itself is kindof interesting, but the way that it was designed, its strongest synergy wasn't even with Roles but rather was with the "when this enchantment goes to the grave, you get a thing" cards that had strong ETBs.

Prototype would almost be easy to understand, except that it fundamentally had to have a lot of "only while it's on the stack/field" slapped onto. It's colored and lower mana-costed while on the field and stack, but anywhere else it is colorless and its full cost. In-concept the idea of Prototype is... also just kicker.

Dungeons and craft are just examples of utter ineptitude. Dungeons were pretty mediocre within their limited format, and broke out into competitive only with Acererak infinite loops. Initiative was really not that interesting in a multiplayer game (more complicated, shittier monarch)... but despite the fact that Monarch had shown itself to be a powerhouse in 1v1 formats when stapled to something cheap, they decided not to learn from that history and printed "monarch, but it directly wins you the game" and were shocked! shocked! When it worked. Craft, by contrast... is just so bland. It's so uninteresting. You do it in limited, and it's... OK-ish, I guess, but it's got no constructed application, and for commander there's... what, the Jewel? Maybe the golem-factory for golem decks? Maybe throne of the pirate guy for absolute madlads? It doesn't feel like "crafting" in the slightest.
Flexo said:
At this point I assume they have just completely abandoned high level tournaments because this stuff is going to make it easier to cheat at that level.
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They abandoned those years ago when they cut basically all support for the pro circuit, reworked a lot of it to favor Arena grinders (which, with how Mythic works, generally just meant that if you put more time in it, you did better), shafted LGSes repeatedly both in direct relation to the competitive scene and also just in general, shat on pro-circuit vendors and companies that provided coverage... They've made a lot of questionable decisions. "E-sports!!!!!" was the rallying cry of the 2010s, and Wizards predictably hopped on that horse long after it expired. But whereas that might be forgiven for companies that lacked a viable competitive scene and just wanted to force one, Wizards already had a competitive scene that they killed off and left to rot so they could chase after a model that had never proven to be profitable unless it was grassroots-driven.
 
Try using Initiative/ Undercity in a multiplayer format( I use Nine-fingers Keene for a gate deck). I find a lot people won't attack you because they don't want the extra headache of keeping track of it. If they do, they often forget about it till I get it back, and by then I one shot them out of spite with commander damage. Best ghostly prison I ever ran.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
Ahhh, there's the explanation. I really should've suspected this: Maro had an idea he really thought was awesome (just like Companions!), and he was asspained that most of the things he's pushed hard for have been extreme flops with at-face obvious design flaws, whereas players have really gelled onto things he can't really take credit for, like Ravnica.

His little explanation as to why it's Ravnica and not New Capenna is retarded, and clearly cooked up. Half of the "strong law enforcement" cards are random members of random guilds with "detective" slapped onto them. If Detectives were actually limited to Azorius or maybe Boros, the excuse would almost fly; but instead, Izoni is now a detective, because because, and you see - center of the web! It's a pun! It's a pun!
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So he should've been stuck writing Rosanne.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
His little explanation as to why it's Ravnica and not New Capenna is retarded, and clearly cooked up. Half of the "strong law enforcement" cards are random members of random guilds with "detective" slapped onto them. If Detectives were actually limited to Azorius or maybe Boros, the excuse would almost fly; but instead, Izoni is now a detective, because because, and you see - center of the web! It's a pun! It's a pun!
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💯

Again, I want to highlight what he said back in SOD 2022 about New Capenna.
The critics of the plane felt that it was a little too much about crime. Where was the law enforcement? Does crime mean anything if it's not done in violation of something?
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So when he says...
The trope space demanded a city complete with efficient law enforcement (New Capenna was a bit light on the latter),
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You know what would have been a good fix for that? PUTTING LAW ENFORCEMENT IN!

The set ended with angels returning - freaking have them set up law enforcement and then this second set/return to the plane ADDS this in. How can a writer not understand that revisiting something is your chance to redo/fix something? Plus I'm not even sure why the set needs "efficient" law enforcement - especially if you are doing private detective tropes, then you actually need weaker law enforcement since the private sector is stepping in.

This whole set (and MaRo's article) doesn't offend me as a player - it offends me as a writer!
 
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DAFAQ? I can believe a lot of things about Ravnica, but not Lazav being a detective. To quote the great documentary Futurama: "but aren't you more on the supply side of crime?"
 
Fellas, I feel like brewing some orthodox mole strategies. The timing of this preview and the tunnel jews from a few weeks back is too close for me to not get sideburns and a rabbi’s hat altered onto this thing.
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Edit: image broke as fuckkk
 
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Flexo said:
This whole set (and MaRo's article) doesn't offend me as a player - it offends me as a writer!
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The obvious reason it's on ravnica over any other plane is the popularity of ravnica makes it easier for maro to shoehorn in his stupid pet mechanics( did we really need another morph+ mechanic?). His excuse also doesn't work as it could have been placed on most planes if all that was needed was a strong law element and this just waters down Ravnica even further than it already had been in past sets. Ravnica has gone from fantasy urban setting to urban fantasy setting, the emphasis of the setting has changed and I don't like it.

I will readily admit I am a hater of most of modern magic
 
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