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Honka Honka Burning Love said:
I have an even simpler answer.

They are literally just retarded, in the Recap of Episode 1 the Marketing Thots straight up do not mention that Teysa is the Orzhov Guild Leader now and still think Tomek is in charge. WOTC is filled with people who seem to actually be fucking illiterate.
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A recurring thing I've noticed since suffering through the War of the Spark novel is that the cards often paint the picture of a much cooler story than the actual story. Going by the set, it was going to be this balls-to-the-wall crisis crossover with Bolas/Tezzeret/Liliana and their zombie apocalypse, opposed by the Guilds and their planeswalker allies. Instead half the guilds don't even show up, Tez and Liliana both basically take a dive, Bolas does pretty much nothing after the trap is sprung, and the whole thing focuses on ancillary characters who don't even have cards.

Duskmourn is a good example of this. Horror is a rich vein for magic to tap (they've been doing it since Homelands, it predates most other genre entries in the game) but Duskmourn could have been Victorian horror without missing a beat. Some of the cards are nice and visceral, to wit:
dsk-197-say-its-name.jpg
dsk-203-under-the-skin.jpg
Body horror, creepy crawlies, insanity- juicy stuff. It didn't need hairspray and fucking 8-tracks.

Likewise, the poignant stuff lands:
dsk-171-cathartic-parting.jpg
The flavor is two sentences, less than twenty words with no ancillary text, but you combine it with the art and it tells the story. Needless to say, the actual dialog in the official Duskmorn story is nowhere near this concise, with Tamiyo's shade wittering on for paragraphs about "her story" and referring to Nashi as "love," which is very odd given that they're mother and son. I'm pretty sure that the writer 1) doesn't know much about Tamiyo beyond her "story" gimmick and 2) doesn't have kids because no parent talks like this.
 
Krokodil Overdose said:
A recurring thing I've noticed since suffering through the War of the Spark novel is that the cards often paint the picture of a much cooler story than the actual story. Going by the set, it was going to be this balls-to-the-wall crisis crossover with Bolas/Tezzeret/Liliana and their zombie apocalypse, opposed by the Guilds and their planeswalker allies. Instead half the guilds don't even show up, Tez and Liliana both basically take a dive, Bolas does pretty much nothing after the trap is sprung, and the whole thing focuses on ancillary characters who don't even have cards.
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The biggest thing i attribute to this is the lack of Blocks, 3 set blocks allowed for a good tempo of story, having to do a full story every set makes things go at a rocket speed, while the lack of a real overall plot makes it feel like nothing ever happens
 
I mean honestly it does really seem like it's a matter of R&d just not bothering to actually playtest and preemptively ban shit that they know can bust other formats.
Along with to much EDH focus (coming from a EDH player)
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
The biggest thing i attribute to this is the lack of Blocks, 3 set blocks allowed for a good tempo of story, having to do a full story every set makes things go at a rocket speed, while the lack of a real overall plot makes it feel like nothing ever happens
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Ehhh, I'm of two minds about this. The original Ravnica block would have worked better as one (very large) book, because the way the block was structured (different guilds introduced in different sets) the novels had to keep jumping around and refocusing on new characters/guilds and made the thru line very wobbly. It mostly resolves this by focusing on smaller stories within the larger plot (Kos's one last job, Teysa's uncle's murder, Jarrod looking for his son) but it's still very meandering. OTOH, Shards of Alara absolutely needed three books (which is hilarious because that was their first break from the "one book per set model") because it encompassed a huge amount of territory and events that were all happening in concert with each other. On the other, other hand, smaller stories like Duskmourn or Strixhaven absolutely don't need more than one book to fully set up and resolve. I think it's more of a matter of material and the medium (if that makes sense), getting decent writers instead of whatever DIE tranny drew the story straw, and actually communicating with those writers about what's going to be in the set so you don't keep getting these lore mismatches.
 
Krokodil Overdose said:
The original Ravnica block would have worked better as one (very large) book, because the way the block was structured (different guilds introduced in different sets) the novels had to keep jumping around and refocusing on new characters/guilds and made the thru line very wobbly. It mostly resolves this by focusing on smaller stories within the larger plot (Kos's one last job, Teysa's uncle's murder, Jarrod looking for his son) but it's still very meandering.
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Well the Throughline of Ravnica 1 was Kos...being Ravnica John McClaine, he kept ending up in situations where a Normal Copman shouldn't be the deciding factor but he typically was, I think the first two books of Ravnica 1 were two of the better MTG Novels, The Third completely lost the fucking plot though because they had to end the block with a Giant Kaiju Fight for some reason.

I will say Kos dying in book 2 and coming back as a Guardian Spirit in Book 3 because he signed a deal to guard the senate as a ghost when he was 20 for 1% extra pay (he lived to be about 200) and completely forgot about it.
 
Kos was the best part of Ravnica and it was a nice touch having him be the through line of the books. And... it was darkly humorous him being employed after death. It kind of told you everything you needed to know about Ravnica AND it was a nice subversion of the usual cop tropes like "3 days from retirement."

Nope! Not even in death do you get to retire!
 
Morethanabitfoolish said:
Which says so much about how all of Ranica works, not just the "eeeeevil" guilds.
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The First and Second Books showed off the Golgari and Orzhov being not at all evil.

Savara was "Evil" because she overthrew the Lich Lord, but he had overthrown the Gorgons. When Jarad got in charge he generally seemed okay until Ravnica 2..fucked the entire plane's setting (aside from fixing Rakdos to have an actual purpose)

The Orzhov aside from Creepy Uncle was shown to be rather..pleasant to work with. Teysa was on par with Kos for Cool status, Her cucking the Izzet faggot with the Truth Telling Circle twice was awesome.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
aside from fixing Rakdos to have an actual purpose
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The original Rakdos did have a purpose, though, and they fucking ruined that guild when they went back to the plane.

OG Rakdos went something like this: imagine you have a giant, charismatic, virtually unkillable demon. This demon draws in a steady stream of cultists and worshippers just by existing. You can't get rid of the demon, but because of that you also can't get rid of his cult, and his cult is extremely dangerous and causes tons of problems. You are now writing the Guildpact. What do you do about Rakdos?

Well, you could try banning the cult: this would commit at least one guild to playing whack-a-mole with murderous demon worshippers in perpetuity. You could try imprisoning Rakdos: besides being extremely dangerous to attempt (and likely to fail at great cost), this doesn't really solve the issue of his cult, it just kind of drives it underground.

What Azor came up with was a brilliant solution: instead of trying to 'solve' the cult by getting rid of it, he would coopt it and make it serve a useful function. The original purpose of the Guild of Rakdos was to do all the mining, smelting, heavy industry, etc., the sort of highly dangerous jobs that needed to be done but would also shorten their practitioners' life spans by a lot. The guild could continue to exist, but you could limit its growth because its members would continuously get maimed or killed by either their jobs or their demon master.

It was an inspired bit of lore and did a great job of explaining why Ravnica would have a demon cult in its constitutional document, and why people would tolerate the guild despite all the murder and mayhem it causes. Then they went back and decided that the original guild looked kind of goofy and the lore wasn't super exciting so they turned them into a literal insane clown posse and gave some lore explanation about how they started out as hospitality workers and entertainers and this apparently made them important enough to get chosen as one of the ten guilds for 10,000 years. It was dumb, the new look was stupid, there was almost no lore reason why the other guilds would have tolerated Cult of Rakdos 2.0 for as long as they did, nor why they wouldn't move to immediately exterminate it once the Guildpact was broken.
 
PonderosaPete said:
How do they keep fucking this up? I'm pretty sure this is the fourth time they failed to make a show/movie get off the ground.

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There are some things that you can't make into a movie. Magic at its best is a bunch of portraits with a quote or two at the bottom. That's the format of the medium and it really should stay that way. I'm not knocking the novelists or writers who worked on the old stuff though, because it seems like they actually cared about what they put on paper. Even today, I regard "Loran's smile" as one of the best examples of world building which I've ever read.
 
I truly think that if anything prior to the gatewatch era was turned into a mini series or a show it would do numbers. The biggest problem with that is that they would need to be adopted exactly as written, and they won’t do that in current day without making DEI changes. I was excited the first time they announced a Magic tv show, but nothing WOTC announces will get me as hype as 2015 era magic could.
 
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