This has been bugging me for a while now about the state of the story and the future of the game. I'd appreciate some of the communities thoughts on this.
First let me say a couple things about my perspective. I'm a kitchen table player. Period. I've been playing for a good stretch of years (Started in Mirage block). I participated in the Champions of Kamigawa pre-release, and that was both my debut and my retirement from playing outside my friends basements and rec rooms.
I've rolled with a lot of changes to the game over the years and for the most part they've been positive for my little kitchen ecosystem. Planeswalkers, however have been a mixed bag. Sure, they're fun to play with and they're exciting to build around, but just the nature of basically being "an enchantment you can attack" means that people tend to build slower, grindier, defensive decks so they can keep planeswalkers on the board. And while it makes you feel powerful to control the board while you slowly tick up your Venser so you can go ultimate and exile your opponents permanents at will, it's not super fun for a table to know that the game is basically over five turns before it ends.
So I'm not a huge fan. But, this isn't a "planeswalkers stink" post. I just had to set up my feelings before I got to my point:
Now we come to War of the Spark. We have a couple of different ways that the War of the Spark can go technically. But, we all kind of know which way it's actually going to play out. There's going to be a struggle between The Gatewatch and Bolas. The Gatewatch will be victorious, but at a great cost (of probably some b level planeswalkers they'd like to replace with more interesting ones). This, in my opinion, just STINKS. So then Bolas (the most interesting personality in mtg, lets be real), either a) dies or b) gets imprisoned/neutralized or c) escapes to some secret plane to lick his wounds. We follow up this set with a few sets on new planes with some depressed and lightly beat-up gatewatch members. "Jace with an Eyepatch" "Ajani Peg Leg" "Chandra the Mildly Concussed" "Vivian, but Sorta Itchy".
The most interesting and engaging possibility, in my opinion, by far, with no close second, is a hands down win by Nicol Bolas. Hear me out. What actually happens if Bolas wins? Lots of planeswalkers die. Probably not all of them, that's marketing suicide. Some more resilient walkers will escape to far corners of the multiverse. But hey, wouldn't the newly ascended Bolas God hunt them down with his infinite power? Actually, probably not.
The thing about being omniscient and all powerful is that suddenly, the concerns of the lowly citizens of the planes tends to fade far in the background. Think of it this way: there's a couple visions of godhood in literature. There's the cackling demigod who sits on throne on top of a pyramid and demands constant sacrifices from his followers. This kind of god may be very powerful, but is physically and mentally attached to the world and what happens in it. Think of Aku from Samurai Jack.
The other kind is less of a physical presence in the world, more of a psychological and mythical "energy" that menaces the citizens and directs their actions and moods but doesn't necessarily directly interact with them. A good example of this is Sauron from LotR. You could even say that Emrakul played this role on Innistrad before her reveal.
I think this is the most interesting place the story AND the game could go with War of the Spark. Most of the current planeswalkers are killed. Bolas ascends to godhood, he begins to indirectly menace the remaining few. Cults pop up all over the multiverse worshiping "The Great Dragon". Those who get too close to the dragon-god are driven mad or enthralled. Planeswalkers are rarer than before. Maybe a planeswalker every two sets for a little while. I don't know, but a return to planeswalkers being unique and special cards that you're thrilled to open and play with would be good for everybody.
Honestly I don't care for the story at all. I am fed up with Planeswalkers doing the same basic thing, making the game combat heavy etc. The Sagas were a much better idea, and I hope we can lock the entire Bolas/Gatewatch up until 2050, because they have spent too much time thinking about showing the story on the cards and not enough time designing the game well, hence the ridiculous Standard bans these past few years.
I guess the only way we can dump the whole lot is if the entire pile of PWs, Bolas included as I find him spectacularly dull, ended up flame grilled.
I would like some new worlds, no planeswalkers and definitely no dragons, scheming or otherwise. I won't get this anymore than you will get what you want.......
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I still think that Ixalan and Dominaria was pretty good. I liked the Vraska and Jace romance pirate thing, the pragmatism which connects Gideon and Lilli. Those were all good character driven stories.
Bolas is unfortunately utterly boring. Because he is so powerful and clever most of his "plans" actually read more like series of really convenient events. I am therefore actually quite happy that he will get canned for a while. (I assume they somehow can transfer him with the Immortal Sun to the meditation realm and he gets stuck there until they decide to get him out of his prison again.
In fact he might be even more interesting when he is stuck there and can not interfere directly with things but somehow has to work through less competent henchmen and actually has to take failure into account.
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Bolas is unfortunately utterly boring. Because he is so powerful and clever most of his "plans" actually read more like series of really convenient events.
It's a combination of two things that spawns something like that.
First is the fact that the writers are trying to write someone more intelligent than themselves. While this isn't actually a bad thing, it does mean you need to take a lot more time plotting out exactly what needs to happen in order for things to look like Bolas was actually in control instead of getting lucky with a Rube Goldberg-style pileup of coincidences. This is a fairly hard thing for a writer to pull off, and even I don't find it particularly easy (the fact that it tends to be easiest to start from the end and work backwards, well, see below). Essentially you can take all the time in the world that you need, as a writer, to come up with something that the character will plan and execute in a much shorter time frame. The problem with this comes from...
There's no gentle way to put it but mass-market writing where you need to play it "safe" and write by committee is almost never going to be engaging. It's the problem that something like Star Trek Voyager has and it's a problem Magic has. A character like Bolas really needs his chickens in a row years in advance, but a managerial directive could totally change everything at a moment's notice. Other writers might wind up disagreeing with a good plot idea (too many chefs spoil the soup). And due to this and also due to the fact that writing by committee tends to underestimate the audience, it's easy to wind up with "I'm somehow on top of this chaos through nothing more than getting lucky" instead of "I engineered a master plan." To say nothing of the "I meant to fail" mentality a lot of big bad evil villains have where it's never going to be clear, even after the story's over, how the antagonist actually benefits from any of it. Or the fact that Bolas can't actually do anything truly evil because Hasbro isn't going to want to have real evil on display in a children's card game.
I have no doubt in my mind that when originally conceived, Bolas' plans made a fair bit of sense and were fairly complete. I also don't doubt that as other creative changes came down the pipe, little to no effort went into updating Bolas' plans to continue to make sense. The frustrating part is they had a very good example of a sit-back-and-let-the-underlings-carry-out-your-plans villain with Yawgmoth, and when he actually went to the battlefield himself in Apocalypse, it felt massive. Bolas fighting the Jacetice League by himself on Amonkhet didn't have even a fraction of the impact, and it's exactly because of some manager saying something to the effect of "we can't afford to take any serious risks in storytelling anymore so we have to play it safe." That's how you get a generic cardboard cutout of a villain instead of the dark demigod he was clearly envisioned as.
Magic is primarily a game. The story will always be secondary - a means to market to/gain investment from a certain psychological demographic. My interest in the story waxes and wanes based on how interesting I find it, but it has very little bearing on the cards I play or the decks I build. Whether Bolas dies, gets imprisoned, or wins, I just want fun cards to play with.
I have no doubt in my mind that when originally conceived, Bolas' plans made a fair bit of sense and were fairly complete. I also don't doubt that as other creative changes came down the pipe, little to no effort went into updating Bolas' plans to continue to make sense. The frustrating part is they had a very good example of a sit-back-and-let-the-underlings-carry-out-your-plans villain with Yawgmoth, and when he actually went to the battlefield himself in Apocalypse, it felt massive. Bolas fighting the Jacetice League by himself on Amonkhet didn't have even a fraction of the impact, and it's exactly because of some manager saying something to the effect of "we can't afford to take any serious risks in storytelling anymore so we have to play it safe." That's how you get a generic cardboard cutout of a villain instead of the dark demigod he was clearly envisioned as.
It's a very forgettable card because while it does evoke the whole "vengeance" theme very nicely, it just doesn't feel like a kami who's canonically as strong as an oldwalker. More a fill-in-the-blanks kind of "get it done so people stop asking for it" design than a way to encapsulate the character beyond one superficial mechanic.
How strong should an oldwalker card supposed to be? Serra now has a walker card, but it isn't really that strong.
Anyway, still satisfied me for the lore... O-Kagachi's creature card and Final Judgment spell can kill Konda, Lord of Eiganjo because indestructible creature can still be exiled.
It's a very forgettable card because while it does evoke the whole "vengeance" theme very nicely, it just doesn't feel like a kami who's canonically as strong as an oldwalker. More a fill-in-the-blanks kind of "get it done so people stop asking for it" design than a way to encapsulate the character beyond one superficial mechanic.
Well, technically, he was weaker when That Which Was Taken was taken from him.
But yes, it was missed opportunity to include some reference to storyline, like adding something like "As long as O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami has a divinity counter on it, it gets +6/+6 and has lifelink."
Bolas is incredibly overplayed. He needs to twirl his mustache for the last time and exit stage right. It is time we move on past the evil genius dragon and move on to newer, better, more interesting adversaries.
How strong should an oldwalker card supposed to be? Serra now has a walker card, but it isn't really that strong.
Oldwalker cards are more or less as strong, lore-wise, as neowalker cards. Serra, Freyalise, Teferi, etc prove that the "we needed to depower planeswalkers in order to make cards of them" argument in Time Spiral block was bull*****. The flavour of loyalty counters is that they don't die when they hit 0 so much as they say "screw you guys, I'm going home" so the argument would have to be that an oldwalker's loyalty abilities would be too powerful or something... and then they went and made multiple oldwalker cards anyway.
How strong should an oldwalker card supposed to be? Serra now has a walker card, but it isn't really that strong.
Oldwalker cards are more or less as strong, lore-wise, as neowalker cards. Serra, Freyalise, Teferi, etc prove that the "we needed to depower planeswalkers in order to make cards of them" argument in Time Spiral block was bull*****. The flavour of loyalty counters is that they don't die when they hit 0 so much as they say "screw you guys, I'm going home" so the argument would have to be that an oldwalker's loyalty abilities would be too powerful or something... and then they went and made multiple oldwalker cards anyway.
I think the flavour on cards depicting pre-Mending planeswalkers is "you get what you pay for". They'll only do the really powerful stuff if you cast a sufficiently powerful spell to attract their attention. (And, of course, right now the cards literally don't exist for that. Also, don't forget Ugin from Fate Reforged.)
As far as I know, Creative had the Mending in the works for a while, maybe even before Design wanted to make Planeswalker cards.
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I have no doubt in my mind that when originally conceived, Bolas' plans made a fair bit of sense and were fairly complete. I also don't doubt that as other creative changes came down the pipe, little to no effort went into updating Bolas' plans to continue to make sense. The frustrating part is they had a very good example of a sit-back-and-let-the-underlings-carry-out-your-plans villain with Yawgmoth, and when he actually went to the battlefield himself in Apocalypse, it felt massive.
I mean depends on what time frame your talking about. Its pretty clear the creative team at the time of Zendikar/Mirrodin didn't have Bolas plan together. Since its only been the last 4 years with Liliana Origin story and Kaladesh to Ravnica 3.
Bolas fighting the Jacetice League by himself on Amonkhet didn't have even a fraction of the impact, and it's exactly because of some manager saying something to the effect of "we can't afford to take any serious risks in storytelling anymore so we have to play it safe." That's how you get a generic cardboard cutout of a villain instead of the dark demigod he was clearly envisioned as.
I mean we also have a story reason for him leaving them alive, Liliana for her contract and the other 4 for whatever he has planned with all the walkers for Ravnica.
How strong should an oldwalker card supposed to be? Serra now has a walker card, but it isn't really that strong.
Oldwalker cards are more or less as strong, lore-wise, as neowalker cards. Serra, Freyalise, Teferi, etc prove that the "we needed to depower planeswalkers in order to make cards of them" argument in Time Spiral block was bull*****. The flavour of loyalty counters is that they don't die when they hit 0 so much as they say "screw you guys, I'm going home" so the argument would have to be that an oldwalker's loyalty abilities would be too powerful or something... and then they went and made multiple oldwalker cards anyway.
Your time frame is off. Originally the thought was old walker where too powerful to show their powers on cards and thus the depower in lore. Creative then realized after Time Spiral that they could re-flavored the walker cards to be snap shots of the character at the given points or only coming with certain spells at the ready (or what spells they can do with the mana you give them). Ajani Vengeance is Ajani during the Alara storyline when he is pissed over his brother death for example. Then they realized the snap-shot idea meant they could show old walkers when they were old walkers since they didn't have to show the full power of the character since the flavor is now thats what they are willing to share with you at that time (or what spells you could afford with the mana you used to cast them).
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How strong should an oldwalker card supposed to be? Serra now has a walker card, but it isn't really that strong.
Oldwalker cards are more or less as strong, lore-wise, as neowalker cards. Serra, Freyalise, Teferi, etc prove that the "we needed to depower planeswalkers in order to make cards of them" argument in Time Spiral block was bull*****. The flavour of loyalty counters is that they don't die when they hit 0 so much as they say "screw you guys, I'm going home" so the argument would have to be that an oldwalker's loyalty abilities would be too powerful or something... and then they went and made multiple oldwalker cards anyway.
I think the flavour on cards depicting pre-Mending planeswalkers is "you get what you pay for". They'll only do the really powerful stuff if you cast a sufficiently powerful spell to attract their attention. (And, of course, right now the cards literally don't exist for that. Also, don't forget Ugin from Fate Reforged.)
As far as I know, Creative had the Mending in the works for a while, maybe even before Design wanted to make Planeswalker cards.
The power level of walker cards are a bit confusing to me... Serra is an oldwalker, so maybe her card Serra, the Benevolent should do stronger things than Karn Liberated and Ugin Spirit Dragon who are supposed to be weakened by the mending? Both Ugin and Karn are so strong, they are win cons in modern tron decks.
As far as I know, Creative had the Mending in the works for a while, maybe even before Design wanted to make Planeswalker cards.
Oh, make no mistake, the Mending was very much a case of one of two things, perhaps some in combination:
1) When a new writer takes over for an old one, there can sometimes be a bit of "**** the last people, I'm going to do my own thing" leading to compromising creative integrity in the name of pushing your thing while downplaying others. In the case of the Mending, there was clearly some difficulty writing oldwalkers because the people who wrote Time Spiral didn't quite grok what made the old stories work and figured they wanted to take an opportunity.
2) Marketing. Wizards wants to ride the Marvel superhero fad, so instead of focusing the stories around the actual people of the plane, we're stuck with a bunch of "go here, meet a few people, have some fights, repeat" that might make for individually interesting stories but wind up being stale after a while (which isn't actually a problem given that such creative efforts actually assume consumer turnover, so the target market is assumed not to be around long enough to mind before new customers show up).
Regardless, the pretense of caring about narrative integrity is kind of insulting when you know what makes for good stories versus what makes for bad-but-entertaining stories and they've intentionally gone from the former to the latter over the years.
I think of the Mending as like Crisis on Infinite Earths in the DCU. They both had a point: Make planeswalkers suddenly have "rules" to follow, retcon 50 years of DC canon into something that makes sense. They both united the entirety of their respective universes into one time-compressed space: The past, alternate realities, and possible futures all mix up with the present. (In the case of the DCU, this meant both the canonical past, e.g., Anthro, and the franchise's actual past, e.g., a universe where it's still the Golden Age and still World War II, called Earth-X.)
And a lot of characters died. (There's a reason I compare Invasion, Time Spiral, and WAR to event comics a lot.) Actually, I want to one of these days make a meme with Thanos saying "I killed half the universe" and the Anti-Monitor saying "That's cute" The cool thing is, Crisis was planned so far in advance, you can actually see, e.g., Flash canon winding down: Zoom dies, Barry's on trial for Zoom's murder, and Wally's dying and going through a lot of mental issues related to Raven. (Considering Barry dies in Crisis and stayed dead for over 20 years, yeah.)
For DC, this meant that (until Infinite Crisis undid everything, wow, I'd say the aughts didn't like Marv Wolfman, but there's still the Teen Titans cartoon, where all the arc villains, plus Thunder and Lightning, were Wolfman's creations) they couldn't just use the "alternate universe" excuse. For WotC, it meant that planeswalkers were no longer nigh-omnipotent.
From a more gameplay perspective, my biggest concern is what having a planeswalker in every pack will mean for limited. Planeswalkers are complicated cards. It's more than just one modal spell or a saga, it's a modal spell where you can pick a different mode every turn, and it has its own life total.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
I think of the Mending as like Crisis on Infinite Earths in the DCU.
If that's the case, then the modern storyline is like the New 52.
For people who don't follow comics, New 52 sucked for the most part. Poor Starfire.
For WotC, it meant that planeswalkers were no longer nigh-omnipotent.
The problem was never planeswalkers' power level per se. The problem was that the creative staff never figured out to write them like the Greco-Roman gods or the Norse pantheon, where the gods themselves are frankly the backdrop to the actual heroes of the story (Heracles, Hector, Achilles, Paris, etc). I mean nobody complains about Greek mythology because "why don't the gods just solve everything with their god powers?"
The idea that all oldwalkers could do things like create entire planes just because some of them can do it is extremely lazy writing.
I think of the Mending as like Crisis on Infinite Earths in the DCU.
If that's the case, then the modern storyline is like the New 52.
For people who don't follow comics, New 52 sucked for the most part. Poor Starfire.
I must admit, I wouldn't have bought Red Hood and the Outlaws if not for the controversy. I took one look at the cover and knew it wasn't for me. (And it's 2011, why the **** are you still doing 90s antiheroes, DC? You were the company mostly spared from that nonsense, but then you killed Lian Harper, and ever since...)
To be fair, there is no reason she should remember the Titans, pardon the pun, since they didn't exist yet in the New 52 timeline. What the hell is Arsenal talking about?
But the worst part is, having spirited online discussions with idiots who insist she was always, quote, "a ****" (That's a whole other discussion, but she was loyal to Dick and even got jealous that time Mirage raped him.) and that I, having every Titans comic since the Wolfman-Perez run, and my first comic book I ever picked up was Batman, am "only familiar with the cartoon".
The idea that all oldwalkers could do things like create entire planes just because some of them can do it is extremely lazy writing.
They did try to have specialties: Urza's basically the mad scientist (emphasis on "mad"), Freyalise is the druid, Jaya starts fires, Serra has her angels, Teferi messes with time...The problem is, when you basically have "can create worlds" on your power list, the specialization doesn't really feel special.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
That's exactly the thing though. "Can create planes" was more of a feat, less of a class feature. Sure, Serra created a plane, but Feroz died to create Feroz's Ban. Acting like all oldwalkers could create planes is similar to acting like all superheroes have the power of flight.
The problem was never planeswalkers' power level per se. The problem was that the creative staff never figured out to write them like the Greco-Roman gods or the Norse pantheon, where the gods themselves are frankly the backdrop to the actual heroes of the story (Heracles, Hector, Achilles, Paris, etc). I mean nobody complains about Greek mythology because "why don't the gods just solve everything with their god powers?"
You hit the nail on head with this comment in my opinion. Take Urza, for example. Urza was ultimately a "force for good" but he did a lot of things that were questionable at best, and horribly amoral at worst. As a whole, he's a compelling character, but not a good hero for a story. Compared to him, and others from that era of Magic story telling, the Gatewatch seem like a group of incompetent goodie-two-shoes.
I actually try to follow the Magic story line, but the recent stories revolving around the Gatewatch and Bolas have felt bland (for reasons people have already mentioned. I think everyone here is more-or-less correct about the reasons).
My favorite Magic stories come from Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, but most of the stories from that plane are unrelated to each other.(with some exceptions)
If I was in charge, I would take a similar approach to each plane.
Ixalan, for example. I'm with all the people who liked the romance story between Jace and Vraska, but yet still I would have preferred they focused on the short stories that told us more about the world and the unique characters who lived there. A story about the leader of the pirates looking for legendary treasure and the merfolk people trying to stop them. The dinosaurs and their worshipers fighting off an invading army of vampires. That sort of thing. (in fairness, I didn't read all of the Ixalan stories so maybe there were a few like that, but my point is that they should focus more on those kinds of stories) As it has been, I feel all the more interesting stores are happening in the background of the boring stuff with the planeswalkers. There's just something about many of the new planeswalkers that seem un-relatable, I think.
Also... I agree that it would be waaay more interesting if Bolas won the war of the spark, and became a looming presence in every set, except for the fact that I'm kinda sick of him too. Part of me wonders if Bolas and Ugin are gonna fuse together somehow and become a new character.
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First let me say a couple things about my perspective. I'm a kitchen table player. Period. I've been playing for a good stretch of years (Started in Mirage block). I participated in the Champions of Kamigawa pre-release, and that was both my debut and my retirement from playing outside my friends basements and rec rooms.
I've rolled with a lot of changes to the game over the years and for the most part they've been positive for my little kitchen ecosystem. Planeswalkers, however have been a mixed bag. Sure, they're fun to play with and they're exciting to build around, but just the nature of basically being "an enchantment you can attack" means that people tend to build slower, grindier, defensive decks so they can keep planeswalkers on the board. And while it makes you feel powerful to control the board while you slowly tick up your Venser so you can go ultimate and exile your opponents permanents at will, it's not super fun for a table to know that the game is basically over five turns before it ends.
So I'm not a huge fan. But, this isn't a "planeswalkers stink" post. I just had to set up my feelings before I got to my point:
Now we come to War of the Spark. We have a couple of different ways that the War of the Spark can go technically. But, we all kind of know which way it's actually going to play out. There's going to be a struggle between The Gatewatch and Bolas. The Gatewatch will be victorious, but at a great cost (of probably some b level planeswalkers they'd like to replace with more interesting ones). This, in my opinion, just STINKS. So then Bolas (the most interesting personality in mtg, lets be real), either a) dies or b) gets imprisoned/neutralized or c) escapes to some secret plane to lick his wounds. We follow up this set with a few sets on new planes with some depressed and lightly beat-up gatewatch members. "Jace with an Eyepatch" "Ajani Peg Leg" "Chandra the Mildly Concussed" "Vivian, but Sorta Itchy".
The most interesting and engaging possibility, in my opinion, by far, with no close second, is a hands down win by Nicol Bolas. Hear me out. What actually happens if Bolas wins? Lots of planeswalkers die. Probably not all of them, that's marketing suicide. Some more resilient walkers will escape to far corners of the multiverse. But hey, wouldn't the newly ascended Bolas God hunt them down with his infinite power? Actually, probably not.
The thing about being omniscient and all powerful is that suddenly, the concerns of the lowly citizens of the planes tends to fade far in the background. Think of it this way: there's a couple visions of godhood in literature. There's the cackling demigod who sits on throne on top of a pyramid and demands constant sacrifices from his followers. This kind of god may be very powerful, but is physically and mentally attached to the world and what happens in it. Think of Aku from Samurai Jack.
The other kind is less of a physical presence in the world, more of a psychological and mythical "energy" that menaces the citizens and directs their actions and moods but doesn't necessarily directly interact with them. A good example of this is Sauron from LotR. You could even say that Emrakul played this role on Innistrad before her reveal.
I think this is the most interesting place the story AND the game could go with War of the Spark. Most of the current planeswalkers are killed. Bolas ascends to godhood, he begins to indirectly menace the remaining few. Cults pop up all over the multiverse worshiping "The Great Dragon". Those who get too close to the dragon-god are driven mad or enthralled. Planeswalkers are rarer than before. Maybe a planeswalker every two sets for a little while. I don't know, but a return to planeswalkers being unique and special cards that you're thrilled to open and play with would be good for everybody.
Of course, that's never going to happen. Sigh...
What are your thoughts?
I guess the only way we can dump the whole lot is if the entire pile of PWs, Bolas included as I find him spectacularly dull, ended up flame grilled.
I would like some new worlds, no planeswalkers and definitely no dragons, scheming or otherwise. I won't get this anymore than you will get what you want.......
I still think that Ixalan and Dominaria was pretty good. I liked the Vraska and Jace romance pirate thing, the pragmatism which connects Gideon and Lilli. Those were all good character driven stories.
Bolas is unfortunately utterly boring. Because he is so powerful and clever most of his "plans" actually read more like series of really convenient events. I am therefore actually quite happy that he will get canned for a while. (I assume they somehow can transfer him with the Immortal Sun to the meditation realm and he gets stuck there until they decide to get him out of his prison again.
In fact he might be even more interesting when he is stuck there and can not interfere directly with things but somehow has to work through less competent henchmen and actually has to take failure into account.
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One day those kids will catch Lucky and taste the gritty sugary goodness of his marshmallow snacks. One day.
It's a combination of two things that spawns something like that.
First is the fact that the writers are trying to write someone more intelligent than themselves. While this isn't actually a bad thing, it does mean you need to take a lot more time plotting out exactly what needs to happen in order for things to look like Bolas was actually in control instead of getting lucky with a Rube Goldberg-style pileup of coincidences. This is a fairly hard thing for a writer to pull off, and even I don't find it particularly easy (the fact that it tends to be easiest to start from the end and work backwards, well, see below). Essentially you can take all the time in the world that you need, as a writer, to come up with something that the character will plan and execute in a much shorter time frame. The problem with this comes from...
There's no gentle way to put it but mass-market writing where you need to play it "safe" and write by committee is almost never going to be engaging. It's the problem that something like Star Trek Voyager has and it's a problem Magic has. A character like Bolas really needs his chickens in a row years in advance, but a managerial directive could totally change everything at a moment's notice. Other writers might wind up disagreeing with a good plot idea (too many chefs spoil the soup). And due to this and also due to the fact that writing by committee tends to underestimate the audience, it's easy to wind up with "I'm somehow on top of this chaos through nothing more than getting lucky" instead of "I engineered a master plan." To say nothing of the "I meant to fail" mentality a lot of big bad evil villains have where it's never going to be clear, even after the story's over, how the antagonist actually benefits from any of it. Or the fact that Bolas can't actually do anything truly evil because Hasbro isn't going to want to have real evil on display in a children's card game.
I have no doubt in my mind that when originally conceived, Bolas' plans made a fair bit of sense and were fairly complete. I also don't doubt that as other creative changes came down the pipe, little to no effort went into updating Bolas' plans to continue to make sense. The frustrating part is they had a very good example of a sit-back-and-let-the-underlings-carry-out-your-plans villain with Yawgmoth, and when he actually went to the battlefield himself in Apocalypse, it felt massive. Bolas fighting the Jacetice League by himself on Amonkhet didn't have even a fraction of the impact, and it's exactly because of some manager saying something to the effect of "we can't afford to take any serious risks in storytelling anymore so we have to play it safe." That's how you get a generic cardboard cutout of a villain instead of the dark demigod he was clearly envisioned as.
PS, speaking of gods, remember how there were supposed to be beings as powerful as an oldwalker? Wizards doesn't.
I honestly hope that Elesh Norn will not be that wasted... In fact I hope Mirrodin/New Phyrexia will not be blown to pieces.
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Agreed on what you said about Yawgmoth. And thanks for posting that O-Kagachi already has a card.. I did not know they already made a card for him.
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Anyway, still satisfied me for the lore... O-Kagachi's creature card and Final Judgment spell can kill Konda, Lord of Eiganjo because indestructible creature can still be exiled.
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Well, technically, he was weaker when That Which Was Taken was taken from him.
But yes, it was missed opportunity to include some reference to storyline, like adding something like "As long as O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami has a divinity counter on it, it gets +6/+6 and has lifelink."
Oldwalker cards are more or less as strong, lore-wise, as neowalker cards. Serra, Freyalise, Teferi, etc prove that the "we needed to depower planeswalkers in order to make cards of them" argument in Time Spiral block was bull*****. The flavour of loyalty counters is that they don't die when they hit 0 so much as they say "screw you guys, I'm going home" so the argument would have to be that an oldwalker's loyalty abilities would be too powerful or something... and then they went and made multiple oldwalker cards anyway.
I think the flavour on cards depicting pre-Mending planeswalkers is "you get what you pay for". They'll only do the really powerful stuff if you cast a sufficiently powerful spell to attract their attention. (And, of course, right now the cards literally don't exist for that. Also, don't forget Ugin from Fate Reforged.)
As far as I know, Creative had the Mending in the works for a while, maybe even before Design wanted to make Planeswalker cards.
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I mean depends on what time frame your talking about. Its pretty clear the creative team at the time of Zendikar/Mirrodin didn't have Bolas plan together. Since its only been the last 4 years with Liliana Origin story and Kaladesh to Ravnica 3.
I mean we also have a story reason for him leaving them alive, Liliana for her contract and the other 4 for whatever he has planned with all the walkers for Ravnica.
Your time frame is off. Originally the thought was old walker where too powerful to show their powers on cards and thus the depower in lore. Creative then realized after Time Spiral that they could re-flavored the walker cards to be snap shots of the character at the given points or only coming with certain spells at the ready (or what spells they can do with the mana you give them). Ajani Vengeance is Ajani during the Alara storyline when he is pissed over his brother death for example. Then they realized the snap-shot idea meant they could show old walkers when they were old walkers since they didn't have to show the full power of the character since the flavor is now thats what they are willing to share with you at that time (or what spells you could afford with the mana you used to cast them).
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The power level of walker cards are a bit confusing to me... Serra is an oldwalker, so maybe her card Serra, the Benevolent should do stronger things than Karn Liberated and Ugin Spirit Dragon who are supposed to be weakened by the mending? Both Ugin and Karn are so strong, they are win cons in modern tron decks.
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Though a Planeswalker set don't surprise me. Legends is a Legendary set (as well as first multi-color set)...
Oh, make no mistake, the Mending was very much a case of one of two things, perhaps some in combination:
1) When a new writer takes over for an old one, there can sometimes be a bit of "**** the last people, I'm going to do my own thing" leading to compromising creative integrity in the name of pushing your thing while downplaying others. In the case of the Mending, there was clearly some difficulty writing oldwalkers because the people who wrote Time Spiral didn't quite grok what made the old stories work and figured they wanted to take an opportunity.
2) Marketing. Wizards wants to ride the Marvel superhero fad, so instead of focusing the stories around the actual people of the plane, we're stuck with a bunch of "go here, meet a few people, have some fights, repeat" that might make for individually interesting stories but wind up being stale after a while (which isn't actually a problem given that such creative efforts actually assume consumer turnover, so the target market is assumed not to be around long enough to mind before new customers show up).
Regardless, the pretense of caring about narrative integrity is kind of insulting when you know what makes for good stories versus what makes for bad-but-entertaining stories and they've intentionally gone from the former to the latter over the years.
And a lot of characters died. (There's a reason I compare Invasion, Time Spiral, and WAR to event comics a lot.) Actually, I want to one of these days make a meme with Thanos saying "I killed half the universe" and the Anti-Monitor saying "That's cute" The cool thing is, Crisis was planned so far in advance, you can actually see, e.g., Flash canon winding down: Zoom dies, Barry's on trial for Zoom's murder, and Wally's dying and going through a lot of mental issues related to Raven. (Considering Barry dies in Crisis and stayed dead for over 20 years, yeah.)
For DC, this meant that (until Infinite Crisis undid everything, wow, I'd say the aughts didn't like Marv Wolfman, but there's still the Teen Titans cartoon, where all the arc villains, plus Thunder and Lightning, were Wolfman's creations) they couldn't just use the "alternate universe" excuse. For WotC, it meant that planeswalkers were no longer nigh-omnipotent.
From a more gameplay perspective, my biggest concern is what having a planeswalker in every pack will mean for limited. Planeswalkers are complicated cards. It's more than just one modal spell or a saga, it's a modal spell where you can pick a different mode every turn, and it has its own life total.
On phasing:
If that's the case, then the modern storyline is like the New 52.
For people who don't follow comics, New 52 sucked for the most part. Poor Starfire.
The problem was never planeswalkers' power level per se. The problem was that the creative staff never figured out to write them like the Greco-Roman gods or the Norse pantheon, where the gods themselves are frankly the backdrop to the actual heroes of the story (Heracles, Hector, Achilles, Paris, etc). I mean nobody complains about Greek mythology because "why don't the gods just solve everything with their god powers?"
The idea that all oldwalkers could do things like create entire planes just because some of them can do it is extremely lazy writing.
I must admit, I wouldn't have bought Red Hood and the Outlaws if not for the controversy. I took one look at the cover and knew it wasn't for me. (And it's 2011, why the **** are you still doing 90s antiheroes, DC? You were the company mostly spared from that nonsense, but then you killed Lian Harper, and ever since...)
To be fair, there is no reason she should remember the Titans, pardon the pun, since they didn't exist yet in the New 52 timeline. What the hell is Arsenal talking about?
But the worst part is, having spirited online discussions with idiots who insist she was always, quote, "a ****" (That's a whole other discussion, but she was loyal to Dick and even got jealous that time Mirage raped him.) and that I, having every Titans comic since the Wolfman-Perez run, and my first comic book I ever picked up was Batman, am "only familiar with the cartoon".
They did try to have specialties: Urza's basically the mad scientist (emphasis on "mad"), Freyalise is the druid, Jaya starts fires, Serra has her angels, Teferi messes with time...The problem is, when you basically have "can create worlds" on your power list, the specialization doesn't really feel special.
On phasing:
You hit the nail on head with this comment in my opinion. Take Urza, for example. Urza was ultimately a "force for good" but he did a lot of things that were questionable at best, and horribly amoral at worst. As a whole, he's a compelling character, but not a good hero for a story. Compared to him, and others from that era of Magic story telling, the Gatewatch seem like a group of incompetent goodie-two-shoes.
I actually try to follow the Magic story line, but the recent stories revolving around the Gatewatch and Bolas have felt bland (for reasons people have already mentioned. I think everyone here is more-or-less correct about the reasons).
My favorite Magic stories come from Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, but most of the stories from that plane are unrelated to each other.(with some exceptions)
If I was in charge, I would take a similar approach to each plane.
Ixalan, for example. I'm with all the people who liked the romance story between Jace and Vraska, but yet still I would have preferred they focused on the short stories that told us more about the world and the unique characters who lived there. A story about the leader of the pirates looking for legendary treasure and the merfolk people trying to stop them. The dinosaurs and their worshipers fighting off an invading army of vampires. That sort of thing. (in fairness, I didn't read all of the Ixalan stories so maybe there were a few like that, but my point is that they should focus more on those kinds of stories) As it has been, I feel all the more interesting stores are happening in the background of the boring stuff with the planeswalkers. There's just something about many of the new planeswalkers that seem un-relatable, I think.
Also... I agree that it would be waaay more interesting if Bolas won the war of the spark, and became a looming presence in every set, except for the fact that I'm kinda sick of him too. Part of me wonders if Bolas and Ugin are gonna fuse together somehow and become a new character.