Magic The Gathering

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Yeah, I'm not sold on "Creative has been dropping the ball on world building" as an actual lesson learned. It's been incredibly noticeable since Throne of Eldraine released in 2019 and has only been getting worse. I guess if you want to optimistic about it, you can say that it might not be possible to go much lower than OTJ or MKM without outright committing copyright infringement.

But also, creative work just sucks in general these days, across the entertainment industry. The ubiquity of social media and the need to engage with an online audience to hawk your work has led to the rise of The Fan as a central element of story creation. In general, The Fan is less interested in good story than he is in being pandered to; he will happily consume utter slop as long as it has sick references and his favorite characters get awesome moments. It also doesn't help that you have a big influx of Millennials and diversity hires into creative positions now and these people cannot write well and do not seem especially interested in doing so anyway. That means that Magic's story will continue to be derivative garbage even if they dial back how on the nose they are with everything (a thing that won't happen for at least the next year because of the lead time in getting sets developed and released).
 
Maratus volans said:
It's been incredibly noticeable since Throne of Eldraine released in 2019 and has only been getting worse
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>Eldraine

You mean fucking Theros, Name one plane that has come out since Mirrodin that isn't "X real world thing but IN MAGIC THE GATHERING!"

Kamigawa is Japan
Innistrad is Horror Tropes
Theros is Greece
Tarkir is China
Kaladesh is India
Amonket is Egypt
Eldraine is Grim's Fairy Tales
Strixhaven is Harry Potter
Ixalan is South America
BloomBurrow is Furry Grim's Fairy Tales
Capenna is 1920s
Ravnica is Eastern European

The only Plane that is original is Zendikar and that got fucked in the ass by the Eldrazi crap and trying to mimic DnD with the Party Bullshit.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
>Eldraine

You mean fucking Theros, Name one plane that has come out since Mirrodin that isn't "X real world thing but IN MAGIC THE GATHERING!"

Kamigawa is Japan
Innistrad is Horror Tropes
Theros is Greece
Tarkir is China
Kaladesh is India
Amonket is Egypt
Eldraine is Grim's Fairy Tales
Strixhaven is Harry Potter
Ixalan is South America
BloomBurrow is Furry Grim's Fairy Tales
Capenna is 1920s
Ravnica is Eastern European

The only Plane that is original is Zendikar and that got fucked in the ass by the Eldrazi crap and trying to mimic DnD with the Party Bullshit.
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I think there is a distinct difference between taking inspiration on an idea vs relying on it. The first and second innistrad blocks were good examples of this, as the Church of Avacyn's(Later order of Traft) battle against the undead and the eldrazi took center stage. Both of which were original.
The same goes for Ixalan where they took South America and the High Seas while the Spanish were conquering. The addition of Dinosaurs and Mermaids completely changes the setting.
What I find sad is that these two planes have completely regressed to their base premise in the recent sets. Just vampires, warewolves and zombies, or Aztec and Spanish people fighting over El Dorado.
 
Yeah, Kamigawa is an interesting one because it's the perfect example of the decay of their creative chops.

OG Kamigawa was clearly inspired by feudal Japan and shintoism but was not a one-to-one recreation of it. The kami designs were weird and appropriately otherworldly, the setting lacked the standard Japanese monsters (yokai), and the theme - a war between heaven and earth - is not really Japanese. WotC could have made a setting closer to real life if they'd wanted - they'd produced Legend of the Five Rings until they sold it in 2001 to AEG - but they chose to make something more unique. The soratami, for example, have rabbit ears to reference the Japanese belief in the rabbit on the moon (instead of the man on the moon), but they aren't really pointing to any pop culture or traditional reference aside from that. They are trying to be their own thing.

Neon Dynasty is a completely different beast. It abandons most of what made Kamigawa interesting in favor of being a mashup of Cyberpunk 2077 and mecha anime. Gone are the attempts to make unique and interesting concepts; instead, we get cards like You Are Already Dead that are just blatant references to pop culture and exist to provide fan service and to generate hype on social media. About the most original thing they did in the reboot was to make all the mechs look inspired by origami, which is...fine, I guess. It's not especially creative, but at least they aren't generic Gundams.

And that's the difference. The first set took a source material and Magic-ified it to make something familiar but also different. The second set took a source material and sucked its cock while making eye contact with the players and winking. People who self-describe as nerds on social media love the second set because it shows them things they already know, which lets them soyface and yell, "Oh my heckin gosh, they did the thing!"
 
Maratus volans said:
Yeah, I'm not sold on "Creative has been dropping the ball on world building" as an actual lesson learned. It's been incredibly noticeable since Throne of Eldraine released in 2019 and has only been getting worse. I guess if you want to optimistic about it, you can say that it might not be possible to go much lower than OTJ or MKM without outright committing copyright infringement.

But also, creative work just sucks in general these days, across the entertainment industry. The ubiquity of social media and the need to engage with an online audience to hawk your work has led to the rise of The Fan as a central element of story creation. In general, The Fan is less interested in good story than he is in being pandered to; he will happily consume utter slop as long as it has sick references and his favorite characters get awesome moments. It also doesn't help that you have a big influx of Millennials and diversity hires into creative positions now and these people cannot write well and do not seem especially interested in doing so anyway. That means that Magic's story will continue to be derivative garbage even if they dial back how on the nose they are with everything (a thing that won't happen for at least the next year because of the lead time in getting sets developed and released).
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There was a meme/quote going around once about telling a story vs pandering. Maybe it was about democratizing stories. Which of course now I can't find and it will be impossible to search and locate, but it was kind of like the raising kids point. Kids want to eat ice cream all day every day for each meal - but if you're a parent, you've got to feed them more than that.

Likewise with an audience, there's what they think they want (like the hero always winning), but it's not the healthiest or best story.
 
Flexo said:
There was a meme/quote going around once about telling a story vs pandering. Maybe it was about democratizing stories. Which of course now I can't find and it will be impossible to search and locate, but it was kind of like the raising kids point. Kids want to eat ice cream all day every day for each meal - but if you're a parent, you've got to feed them more than that.

Likewise with an audience, there's what they think they want (like the hero always winning), but it's not the healthiest or best story.
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It's an Andy Griffith Show quote.
 
Oh, normally I post a little blurb about the limited for the sets.

Yeah, so, skip Bloomburrow. Art's awesome, and I love that they seem to have an initiative to cut back on complexity creep, but this format fucking sucks. Boring to draft, almost as bad as ONE for win-the-die-roll-win-the-round, and the degree to which pivoting mid-draft fucks you over is really catastrophic. I didn't really do much of MH3 so I couldn't speak to it, beyond that whoever made crysalis a common was probably the same diversity hire that designed OG Oko. "Wait... you mean people will sac their spawn just to win combat?!"
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
>Eldraine

You mean fucking Theros, Name one plane that has come out since Mirrodin that isn't "X real world thing but IN MAGIC THE GATHERING!"

Kamigawa is Japan
Innistrad is Horror Tropes
Theros is Greece
Tarkir is China
Kaladesh is India
Amonket is Egypt
Eldraine is Grim's Fairy Tales
Strixhaven is Harry Potter
Ixalan is South America
BloomBurrow is Furry Grim's Fairy Tales
Capenna is 1920s
Ravnica is Eastern European

The only Plane that is original is Zendikar and that got fucked in the ass by the Eldrazi crap and trying to mimic DnD with the Party Bullshit.
Click to expand...
I agree with you, but I'd say Ravnica is probably unique with the exception of the latest revisit where it's Clue. Also, Tarkir is more Mongolia than China but yes.

Alara might be unique as well, and Zendikar was ok. I'd say original Innistrad was the hard cutoff of where everything became a reference.
 
Retink Retunk said:
Tarkir is more Mongolia than China
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Tarkir is in the middle of the region.
Jeskai - classical chinese martial arts monastery.
Mardu - mongols, but they only raid and not herd sheep or horses.
Abzan - middle-easterners with ottoman and mesopotamian elements.
Sultai - decadent Cambodia with necromancy and two types of furries.
Temur - amalgamation of north-asian and siberian hunter-gatherer societies.
 
AnotherPleb said:
That's my cutoff point as well and it's not hard to see why because of how popular Innistrad was at the time. The problem was that they ran it into the fucking ground. For fucks sake they even turned Zhalfir into MTG's version of Wakanda.
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Original Innistrad didn't feel as bad as it wasn't as common to have themed sets back then but it also felt like Magic's take on those tropes. Modern Innistrad feels like a lazy rip off of classic monsters, it's sad how lazy things have become.
 
So what's everyone's thoughts on the rumored plans?
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Bonesjones said:
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That's the bit on raising kids - which is what I was using a metaphor. But the quote on writing and not catering to the readers' whims didn't mention that. I'm the one that combined the two.

Retink Retunk said:
Original Innistrad didn't feel as bad as it wasn't as common to have themed sets back then but it also felt like Magic's take on those tropes. Modern Innistrad feels like a lazy rip off of classic monsters, it's sad how lazy things have become.
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Yeah, original Innistrad hit that sweet spot of feeling familiar, yet unique - like you could identify the core of the ideas, but there was a new spin on them. Heck the idea that Sorin essentially created Catholicism on the plane in order to keep it from self-destructing was pretty neat.

Even later making it the lovecraftian references in the sequel set worked mostly, and there was a neat idea in the undead of the plane being suited for fighting back against the Eldrazi, but I think it fell flat because it was more like people doing a tribute to Lovecraft based upon the pop culture version of Lovecraft, not the original source. So it in essence became a copy of a copy.
 
Retink Retunk said:
I agree with you, but I'd say Ravnica is probably unique with the exception of the latest revisit where it's Clue. Also, Tarkir is more Mongolia than China but yes.

Alara might be unique as well, and Zendikar was ok. I'd say original Innistrad was the hard cutoff of where everything became a reference.
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I liked Ixalan because it was so ridiculously gonzo it was. If you gave a seven-year-old boy a triple espresso, showed him The Conquest of Paradise, and told him to design a Magic set, you'd pretty much get OG Ixalan.

One of the things that made Innistrad pop was that it was sort of anti-Lorwyn- a plane centered entirely on humans and things derived from them. Combined with the Hammer Horror vibe it represented that sweet spot where game mechanics and story/theme blended perfectly.
 
Flexo said:
So what's everyone's thoughts on the rumored plans?
Click to expand...
Final Fantasy being a single set instead of like a year long thing is bullshit.

They are gonna ride FF7Remake and FF14's dick and ignore all the cool shit they could do like a DFC for characters like Rydia, Terra and Cecil.
 
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