Hehe, it definately does not help you with game play.
I've read some of them, and I found the writing to be weak in most cases, but a few have been decent. If you enjoy the flavor of a specific magic expansion, chances are you can enjoy one of the books as light reading.
But no, it's not going to be fine lierature. Ever. Consider it the reading equivalent of saturday morning cartoons.
Ah.
I wonder why they don't make them cartoon books (similar to comic strip books or comics, but thicker, full color, & better story lines)? Then they can use some of the same card art or artists, make them fast and easy to read and produce MORE books per set. Like when they go tribal again, you can have one big battle from the prospective of 5 different tribes. Plus, those "cartoon books" are hot sellers in Asia! They eat 'em up! That seems like a better format for the audience, don't you think?
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* Some are good, most are readable, some are simply idiotic.
* Some are written well, most are written okay, some are written idiotic.
* Yes, pretty much.
* You can read the Lorwyn, Morningtide, and Shadowmoor books without any prior knowledge of other books.
* DON'T read the Lorwyn books.
* The majority of the books interact with other storylines in some way.
* It's mainly a book per set, although some sets don't have books (Mirage, Homelands) and the Legends set has a whopping six books.
* Reading certainly isn't going to help your gameplay.
As for the comics route, WotC tried that and it failed spectacularly (though I enjoyed the comics (though they were written poorly)). In fact, the company that produced the comics went out of business.
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Secondly, I agree with everyone else so far. The books are hit or miss. Some of them are really good, others flat out fail. Though I haven't read all of them yet. I would like to even though I could probably skip a few though.
There are some books if you read first, you probably wouldn't get half of what's going on. Like the Time Spiral cycle; it has a lot of references to past books and stuff that it would be a tad bit hard to grasp what's going on quickly.
@Eid: Lol just because you didn't like the Lorwyn cycle doesn't mean you have to go telling other people not to read it.
Edit: It really depends on what you want to get out of a book. If you're looking for something like LotR level, then you'll probably not like most of the m:tg books. But if you just want to have something fun to read, then you might like them, you might not. If you don't really want to buy the books then try to find someone to borrow from.
Come on, give me a break! That was a great read! It didn't make sense after a while, but at the end you catch it.
Also, the legends cycle is EXCELLENT.
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@Eid: Lol just because you didn't like the Lorwyn cycle doesn't mean you have to go telling other people not to read it.
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I think it's more that the company was run badly that caused both the crappy comics and the bankrupcy. After all, ARMADA was part of the Acclaim company that produced the videogames, and probably saw the comics as more of a side thing to promote said games, rather than a proper product in itself.
I'm sure that if WotC where to put out some comics with better writers & better art (Or at least, art of less of an aquired taste), they could actually be quite good.
Yes, but they still didn't sell well. Right now the comics industry is so broken that anything that doesn't have an "X" in the title isn't going to sell very well. If Bendis wrote the MtG comics, they still probably wouldn't get much press. I still miss them, though.
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Come on, give me a break! That was a great read! It didn't make sense after a while, but at the end you catch it.
... What? It (there are three so far) made perfect sense, there just wasn't any depth to the books to get in the first place. The only things I caught from those books were a nasty stomach virus and a deep rooted belief that McGough and Herndon really deserve a vacation.
I still think The Brothers' War stands up as a great indie fantasy book, but, yeah, everyhing else is either "okay" to "WTF am I reading?" I'd like to see a crossover betwen MtG and ASoIaF. Tyrion Lannister would pwn Nicol Bolas in every conceivable way.
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Yes, but they still didn't sell well. Right now the comics industry is so broken that anything that doesn't have an "X" in the title isn't going to sell very well. If Bendis wrote the MtG comics, they still probably wouldn't get much press. I still miss them, though.
The "X" is true for traditional comic books, but I guess I'm referring to "graphic novels". A magic comic book would suck and never would sale, but the graphic novels are big hits all around the world (they are everywhere in Asia) and are starting to become more popular in the US. I don't get them because I can't read Chinese and don't care for anime, but a MTG graphic novel, I'd probably buy. Especially it the art was as good as the cards! I think that is KEY. I'd love to see those characters interact and create a real storyline vs the weird thing Wizards has going now.
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There were the Kev Walker intro comics. They're somewhere in this forum, if you care to look around. But I rather read books than graphic or comic books.
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I think you mean manga. Graphic novels come in all shapes and sizes in Western comics, too. If Magic ever goes manga, you can count me out. The art style just doesn't agree with me.
And, yeah, they pretty much had the thing you're describing with the Kev Walker comics. They were nice, but I just don't think they fit very well. Walker's a great, great artist, but his comic work just didn't seem to have any kind of cohesiveness in the comic medium. His paintings are great, but they just didn't click with me as far as telling a story through continuous pictures.
But I agree with Thorns in that books are the way to go, perhaps with comics as supplements, not replacements. What we need right now is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make the wheel round again. Right now it's kind of a hexagon.
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I would suggest reading the Brother's War which was great book.
If you like it, read the rest of the Artifacts Cycle.
If you still want more, read Rath and Storm, the Masquerade Cycle, and finally the Invasion Cycle.
They're great...the rest are not up to par. I find the book closest to 2000-2002 are best written while the latest MTG novels are horrible.
The Colors of Magic - C+ The Myths of Magic - C- The Dragons of Magic - D- The Secrets of Magic - B The Monsters of Magic - F
Weatherlight Saga: The Thran - A The Brothers' War - A+ Planeswalker - C Time Streams - B- Bloodlines - B+ Rath and Storm - C Mercadian Masques - C+ Nemesis - B+ Prophecy - F Invasion - C- Planeshift - C- Apocalypse - C-
Ice Age Cycle: The Gathering Dark - A The Eternal Ice - B+ The Shattered Alliance - B-
Magic Legends Cycle: Johan - F Jedit - D- Hazezon - D+
Magic Legends II Cycle: Assassin's Blade - B Emperor's Fist - B+ Champion's Trial - D-
Otaria Crapfest: Odyssey - F Chainer's Torment - B+ Judgment - C+ Onslaught - D+ Legions - F Scourge - F
Mirrodin Cycle: The Moons of Mirrodin - D- The Darksteel Eye - F The Fifth Dawn - C
Kamigawa Cycle: Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa - B Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa - B Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa - B
Ravnica Cycle: Ravnica, City of Guilds - B+ Guildpact - B Dissension - C+
Time Spiral Cycle: Time Spiral - F Planar Chaos - F Future Sight - F
Lorwyn Cycle Lorwyn - F Morningtide - F
Shadowmoor - C
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The Colors of Magic - C+ The Myths of Magic - C- The Dragons of Magic - D- The Secrets of Magic - B The Monsters of Magic - F
Weatherlight Saga: The Thran - A The Brothers' War - A+ Planeswalker - C Time Streams - B- Bloodlines - B+ Rath and Storm - C Mercadian Masques - C+ Nemesis - B+ Prophecy - F Invasion - C- Planeshift - C- Apocalypse - C-
Ice Age Cycle: The Gathering Dark - A The Eternal Ice - B+ The Shattered Alliance - B-
Magic Legends Cycle: Johan - F Jedit - D- Hazezon - D+
Magic Legends II Cycle: Assassin's Blade - B Emperor's Fist - B+ Champion's Trial - D-
Otaria Crapfest: Odyssey - F Chainer's Torment - B+ Judgment - C+ Onslaught - D+ Legions - F Scourge - F
Mirrodin Cycle: The Moons of Mirrodin - D- The Darksteel Eye - F The Fifth Dawn - C
Kamigawa Cycle: Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa - B Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa - B Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa - B
Ravnica Cycle: Ravnica, City of Guilds - B+ Guildpact - B Dissension - C+
Time Spiral Cycle: Time Spiral - F Planar Chaos - F Future Sight - F
Lorwyn Cycle Lorwyn - F Morningtide - F
Shadowmoor - C
i agree with those ratings almost entirely. except i would've been more harsh on the newer books.
i stopped playing the game after apocalypse, and kept up with the story instead for a time. the majority of the books after apocalypse i at least read, i didn't like them, but i could get through them (ravnica was the best of the new lot by far).
for some reason i keep picking up the books when they come out. i keep trying to read them. i get about five pages in, then end up skipping ahead to see if it improves any. they don't. completely unreadable. after the ravnica cycle everything took a major turn for the worse. (though everything between apocalypse and ravnica was pretty bad too)
i've read a lot of bad books, but these have become worse than trash. the storylines are convoluted and poorly written. nothing is explored. nothing is explained. we move from one pointless fight to another with very little in the way of actual plot or dialogue. its a quick buck, and an easy way out of actually having to produce quality and depth to a game that had more than any other, because that takes effort.
anyway, that all being said, i absolutely loved the older books, i end up rereading brothers war, the gathering dark, and the thran at least once a year. then die a little inside when i have to put them back on the shelf next to such trash as the mirrodin, otraria, time spiral, and lorwyn cycles.
...anyway, that all being said, i absolutely loved the older books, i end up rereading brothers war, the gathering dark, and the thran at least once a year. then die a little inside when i have to put them back on the shelf next to such trash as the mirrodin, otraria, time spiral, and lorwyn cycles.
Yeah. Pretty much agree with you on this. It crashed after the Invasion Cycle though I must say that I found the Kamigawa Cycle better than the Ravnica Cycle and I thought Legends II wasn't too horrible--but I may need to re-read them in order to re-formulate a better opinion.
...actually, now that I think about it, I'd rather not read them again. They definitely weren't up-to-par with the old deal books (especially Artifacts and Invasion Cycles), but that's just my opinion.
I think you mean manga. Graphic novels come in all shapes and sizes in Western comics, too. If Magic ever goes manga, you can count me out. The art style just doesn't agree with me.
And, yeah, they pretty much had the thing you're describing with the Kev Walker comics. They were nice, but I just don't think they fit very well. Walker's a great, great artist, but his comic work just didn't seem to have any kind of cohesiveness in the comic medium. His paintings are great, but they just didn't click with me as far as telling a story through continuous pictures.
But I agree with Thorns in that books are the way to go, perhaps with comics as supplements, not replacements. What we need right now is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make the wheel round again. Right now it's kind of a hexagon.
Yes. Manga.
I was in Borders yesterday and I saw a whole section devoted to it. I thumbed through them and they weren't as thick as I would have liked, but that is the style I'm referring to (minus the anime).
When I first saw Manga in Thialand, the books that those kids were reading were much thicker than the ones produced now. I think people don't like Manga because they are light on content which mtg seems to need a lot of to make any sense at all.
That being said, I still think it would be a fun medium to explore, but I'd like to see actual color card art in that style. I can see how this would suck if not monitored closely, but they don't have to take the entire world to Manga. They could just produce a small series out of 1 battle (from 5 different perspectives). They could make it a lot of fun & interesting.
I have mixed emotions about it. I just know that the books are NOTHING compared to others I'm reading, so I'm not even going to pick one up.
Maybe they should scrap the whole thing and start over? How do they change it when the foundation has been written poorly?
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I'm a re-n00b.
Pay no attention to views expressed in posts prior to 2013. I didn't know.
Xcric, yeah, I have to agree with you. Looking back, the biggest revelation in Bloodlines was when
Barrin found out that Urza had hand-picked the woman he loves in the hope of producing a child genius that he could use for his plans
. That's definitely a "holy ****" moment. The biggest revelation in Lorwyn was probably a talking tree.
So, WotC, if you're watching (which Brady says you are):
1 - You used to put effort into the books. They were good. People were happy. Very happy. We used to have month-long discussions about single topics.
2 - You stopped doing that. If you take a look around, your fanbase is dwindling and the only ones that are left are people who are happy as long as "teh cardz in teh bookz lol" or screaming "remember the good old days" dotards like myself.
Might I recommend a fix?
---
Ray, I realize that manga appeals to a lot of people, so if they wanted to supplement (not replace) the novel line with a manga book every now and then, I'd be all for it. But as for starting all over, they've pretty much tried that with the Time Spiral Cycle. And, yeah, that didn't go over so well. In fact, one of the people that Future Sight was dedicated to is no longer buying the books after finding them not worth the time or money. That's not just shocking, it's indicative of a product line whose days are numbered.
But, anyway, we have a rich and wonderful history with the MtG books. I don't want to see them just retcon it all away and start from scratch. Marvel tried that with the "Heroes Reborn" crap and it didn't exactly work well.
... Of course WotC's equivalent is just to kill off the X-Men and replace them with new ones nobody cares about. Go TEAM!
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rather than simply focus on characters that weren't planewalkers ala brothers war/the thran/the gathering dark, they were destroyed and reinvented. ok, sure, fine, ridiculous, but it could be workable.
the major problem is that, while they might be fairly interesting on the cards. where are the stories? the novels should be focusing on them. there was no point in changing the nature of planeswalkers to make it easier to write about, and then not writing about them. where is the logic to that? potentially beautiful characters were created, and then not explored. at all. in favor of alternative characters.
so why not have just left things alone and gone the way the new storylines went? why revamp everything and then forget about it?
my biggest gripe is changing it at all. i hate to continually use the same novels as examples, but, the brothers war had no planeswalker protagonist nor a planeswalking antagonist, nor a planeswalker coming and being like 'no' and changing the entire story like is so often referenced by the staff. neither did the gathering dark, nor the thran. even the books dedicated to urza didn't do this. so why is this constantly referenced as a reason why the entire system was changed?
why are the few books that did have planeswalkers showing off the true extent of their power the standard instead of the exception? aren't planeswalkers supposed to be incredibly rare throughout the multiverse? why would they even care what was going on anyway (except in the case of the invasion which effected everything) why is the focus on them at all? behind the scenes players is fine (the way it once was), afterall thats part of what made just about all the storylines prior to invasion pretty satisfying, focusing on a major character that was still fallible in mortal ways. why was that changed, then abandoned for being too difficult in the first place?
give me a reason to care about the story. make it about the bradywalkers if thats the thing thats being touted. this is honestly as silly as say (to use references that geeks might get), creating the enterprise and its crew, then focusing on some unknown alien species on a planet unrelated to the federation. or creating the x-men and instead writing stories about normal humans and only vaguely referencing mutants. what was the point. change for the sake of change is almost never a good thing, and it makes clear that money was the true motivator in this decision.
further more the cards and stories need to have greater cohesion, or none at all. its an all or nothing or it doesn't work. just like an abundance of places and people in the cards, that don't exist in the story, in favor of characters that don't exist in the card game is counter-productive and creates a conflict of ideas which in turn makes the stories very boring. part of the draw is to see elements of the game in action and not leave everyone with questions of 'what is this things part in it all why does it have a card and not a story, why does it have a story and not a card'. by creating stories about the cards the player is immersed even further in the game or yet further into the story, because its easier to relate to. to compare it to the world of warcraft ccg, theres a card game that borrows almost all of its elements from the video game, and it serves a dual purpose to draw in anyone familiar with either. of course by the same token i shouldn't have to play the game to understand the story, so optimally the novels should be treated as independent devices with elements from the card game meant simply to further the story, which is something that was originally captured fantastically well, when we again use the brothers war, the gathering dark, and the thran as examples.
so having said all of that in favor of greater cohesion, if we make the books and cards have no cohesion, we can treat the novels as novels without a single element from the cards other than taking place in the same universe. this leaves quite a bit of area to explore. this also allows them to be treated as true novels, as legitimate works of literature rather than a quick way to make a dollar and simply set them in the magic universe. for instance use the examples of the original core set of alpha/beta. all about the gameplay. no story. with stories set in the universe when the time for novelization came. however the problem at that time was lack of consistency between the novels, and the cards, at all. what went on in one story made no sense with another, made no sense with anything going happening in the universe by way of the cards, and just made it all generally overly confusing. hence the original retcon and shift. personally, i feel this is the direction that should not be taken with the storylines or game, ever again.
regardless, things need to be explained at least a little. why did this event happen, why did this character act this way. piecing it together from flavor texts (which are also very poorly written and overly cliche) and novels and rumor on the internet defeats the point of the novel. if it can even be explained by those means. typical trends show that the majority of things can't be. a great many plot devices just don't work and make no logical sense. the original books left things open to interpretation, but in ways that sparked discussion in terms of potentiality, rather than simply wtf? which is so often the case with these new stories.
that brings up another point. the flavor text. the old style of flavor text helped explain the story and the world. it let the player know what was going on without reading the book, and it gave a basis to go on for the novels as well. the general trend in flavor text recently, explains nothing. they are simply cliche quips, or independent events that have no bearing on the next. this is the wrong kind of flavor, as in it has none. its tasteless and unmemorable. not everything needs to be super descriptive, sure, but there still should be a greater degree of this going on.
in short, think for a minute about the people playing the game and reading the stories rather than about the almighty dollar, or the game will continue to dwindle on into nothing. ending up in the end as nothing more than another failed ccg.
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I've read some of them, and I found the writing to be weak in most cases, but a few have been decent. If you enjoy the flavor of a specific magic expansion, chances are you can enjoy one of the books as light reading.
But no, it's not going to be fine lierature. Ever. Consider it the reading equivalent of saturday morning cartoons.
I wonder why they don't make them cartoon books (similar to comic strip books or comics, but thicker, full color, & better story lines)? Then they can use some of the same card art or artists, make them fast and easy to read and produce MORE books per set. Like when they go tribal again, you can have one big battle from the prospective of 5 different tribes. Plus, those "cartoon books" are hot sellers in Asia! They eat 'em up! That seems like a better format for the audience, don't you think?
Pay no attention to views expressed in posts prior to 2013. I didn't know.
* Some are written well, most are written okay, some are written idiotic.
* Yes, pretty much.
* You can read the Lorwyn, Morningtide, and Shadowmoor books without any prior knowledge of other books.
* DON'T read the Lorwyn books.
* The majority of the books interact with other storylines in some way.
* It's mainly a book per set, although some sets don't have books (Mirage, Homelands) and the Legends set has a whopping six books.
* Reading certainly isn't going to help your gameplay.
As for the comics route, WotC tried that and it failed spectacularly (though I enjoyed the comics (though they were written poorly)). In fact, the company that produced the comics went out of business.
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Secondly, I agree with everyone else so far. The books are hit or miss. Some of them are really good, others flat out fail. Though I haven't read all of them yet. I would like to even though I could probably skip a few though.
There are some books if you read first, you probably wouldn't get half of what's going on. Like the Time Spiral cycle; it has a lot of references to past books and stuff that it would be a tad bit hard to grasp what's going on quickly.
@Eid: Lol just because you didn't like the Lorwyn cycle doesn't mean you have to go telling other people not to read it.
Edit: It really depends on what you want to get out of a book. If you're looking for something like LotR level, then you'll probably not like most of the m:tg books. But if you just want to have something fun to read, then you might like them, you might not. If you don't really want to buy the books then try to find someone to borrow from.
Come on, give me a break! That was a great read! It didn't make sense after a while, but at the end you catch it.
Also, the legends cycle is EXCELLENT.
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Yes, but they still didn't sell well. Right now the comics industry is so broken that anything that doesn't have an "X" in the title isn't going to sell very well. If Bendis wrote the MtG comics, they still probably wouldn't get much press. I still miss them, though.
... What? It (there are three so far) made perfect sense, there just wasn't any depth to the books to get in the first place. The only things I caught from those books were a nasty stomach virus and a deep rooted belief that McGough and Herndon really deserve a vacation.
I still think The Brothers' War stands up as a great indie fantasy book, but, yeah, everyhing else is either "okay" to "WTF am I reading?" I'd like to see a crossover betwen MtG and ASoIaF. Tyrion Lannister would pwn Nicol Bolas in every conceivable way.
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The "X" is true for traditional comic books, but I guess I'm referring to "graphic novels". A magic comic book would suck and never would sale, but the graphic novels are big hits all around the world (they are everywhere in Asia) and are starting to become more popular in the US. I don't get them because I can't read Chinese and don't care for anime, but a MTG graphic novel, I'd probably buy. Especially it the art was as good as the cards! I think that is KEY. I'd love to see those characters interact and create a real storyline vs the weird thing Wizards has going now.
Pay no attention to views expressed in posts prior to 2013. I didn't know.
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And, yeah, they pretty much had the thing you're describing with the Kev Walker comics. They were nice, but I just don't think they fit very well. Walker's a great, great artist, but his comic work just didn't seem to have any kind of cohesiveness in the comic medium. His paintings are great, but they just didn't click with me as far as telling a story through continuous pictures.
But I agree with Thorns in that books are the way to go, perhaps with comics as supplements, not replacements. What we need right now is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make the wheel round again. Right now it's kind of a hexagon.
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If you like it, read the rest of the Artifacts Cycle.
If you still want more, read Rath and Storm, the Masquerade Cycle, and finally the Invasion Cycle.
They're great...the rest are not up to par. I find the book closest to 2000-2002 are best written while the latest MTG novels are horrible.
According to this study I should be deaf by now.
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It shouldn't be "dies"
It shouldn't be "is put into the graveyard from the battlefield"
It should be "is put into the graveyard from play"
The Colors of Magic - C+
The Myths of Magic - C-
The Dragons of Magic - D-
The Secrets of Magic - B
The Monsters of Magic - F
Weatherlight Saga:
The Thran - A
The Brothers' War - A+
Planeswalker - C
Time Streams - B-
Bloodlines - B+
Rath and Storm - C
Mercadian Masques - C+
Nemesis - B+
Prophecy - F
Invasion - C-
Planeshift - C-
Apocalypse - C-
Ice Age Cycle:
The Gathering Dark - A
The Eternal Ice - B+
The Shattered Alliance - B-
Magic Legends Cycle:
Johan - F
Jedit - D-
Hazezon - D+
Magic Legends II Cycle:
Assassin's Blade - B
Emperor's Fist - B+
Champion's Trial - D-
Otaria Crapfest:
Odyssey - F
Chainer's Torment - B+
Judgment - C+
Onslaught - D+
Legions - F
Scourge - F
Mirrodin Cycle:
The Moons of Mirrodin - D-
The Darksteel Eye - F
The Fifth Dawn - C
Kamigawa Cycle:
Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa - B
Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa - B
Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa - B
Ravnica Cycle:
Ravnica, City of Guilds - B+
Guildpact - B
Dissension - C+
Time Spiral Cycle:
Time Spiral - F
Planar Chaos - F
Future Sight - F
Lorwyn Cycle
Lorwyn - F
Morningtide - F
Shadowmoor - C
Xbox Live - eidtelnvil
PlayStation Network - eidtelnvil
Currently reading It by Stephen King
Currently playing Persona 4
exceptions:
Invasion Cycle:
Invasion - A-
Planeshift - A
Apocalypse - A-
Magic Legends Cycle:
Johan - A-
Jedit - B+
Hazezon - B-
Otaria Awesomeness:
Odyssey - A
Chainer's Torment - A-
Judgment - B
Onslaught - B+
Legions - C-
Scourge - C-
i agree with those ratings almost entirely. except i would've been more harsh on the newer books.
i stopped playing the game after apocalypse, and kept up with the story instead for a time. the majority of the books after apocalypse i at least read, i didn't like them, but i could get through them (ravnica was the best of the new lot by far).
for some reason i keep picking up the books when they come out. i keep trying to read them. i get about five pages in, then end up skipping ahead to see if it improves any. they don't. completely unreadable. after the ravnica cycle everything took a major turn for the worse. (though everything between apocalypse and ravnica was pretty bad too)
i've read a lot of bad books, but these have become worse than trash. the storylines are convoluted and poorly written. nothing is explored. nothing is explained. we move from one pointless fight to another with very little in the way of actual plot or dialogue. its a quick buck, and an easy way out of actually having to produce quality and depth to a game that had more than any other, because that takes effort.
anyway, that all being said, i absolutely loved the older books, i end up rereading brothers war, the gathering dark, and the thran at least once a year. then die a little inside when i have to put them back on the shelf next to such trash as the mirrodin, otraria, time spiral, and lorwyn cycles.
Yeah. Pretty much agree with you on this. It crashed after the Invasion Cycle though I must say that I found the Kamigawa Cycle better than the Ravnica Cycle and I thought Legends II wasn't too horrible--but I may need to re-read them in order to re-formulate a better opinion.
...actually, now that I think about it, I'd rather not read them again. They definitely weren't up-to-par with the old deal books (especially Artifacts and Invasion Cycles), but that's just my opinion.
Yes. Manga.
I was in Borders yesterday and I saw a whole section devoted to it. I thumbed through them and they weren't as thick as I would have liked, but that is the style I'm referring to (minus the anime).
When I first saw Manga in Thialand, the books that those kids were reading were much thicker than the ones produced now. I think people don't like Manga because they are light on content which mtg seems to need a lot of to make any sense at all.
That being said, I still think it would be a fun medium to explore, but I'd like to see actual color card art in that style. I can see how this would suck if not monitored closely, but they don't have to take the entire world to Manga. They could just produce a small series out of 1 battle (from 5 different perspectives). They could make it a lot of fun & interesting.
I have mixed emotions about it. I just know that the books are NOTHING compared to others I'm reading, so I'm not even going to pick one up.
Maybe they should scrap the whole thing and start over? How do they change it when the foundation has been written poorly?
Pay no attention to views expressed in posts prior to 2013. I didn't know.
So, WotC, if you're watching (which Brady says you are):
1 - You used to put effort into the books. They were good. People were happy. Very happy. We used to have month-long discussions about single topics.
2 - You stopped doing that. If you take a look around, your fanbase is dwindling and the only ones that are left are people who are happy as long as "teh cardz in teh bookz lol" or screaming "remember the good old days" dotards like myself.
Might I recommend a fix?
---
Ray, I realize that manga appeals to a lot of people, so if they wanted to supplement (not replace) the novel line with a manga book every now and then, I'd be all for it. But as for starting all over, they've pretty much tried that with the Time Spiral Cycle. And, yeah, that didn't go over so well. In fact, one of the people that Future Sight was dedicated to is no longer buying the books after finding them not worth the time or money. That's not just shocking, it's indicative of a product line whose days are numbered.
But, anyway, we have a rich and wonderful history with the MtG books. I don't want to see them just retcon it all away and start from scratch. Marvel tried that with the "Heroes Reborn" crap and it didn't exactly work well.
... Of course WotC's equivalent is just to kill off the X-Men and replace them with new ones nobody cares about. Go TEAM!
Xbox Live - eidtelnvil
PlayStation Network - eidtelnvil
Currently reading It by Stephen King
Currently playing Persona 4
rather than simply focus on characters that weren't planewalkers ala brothers war/the thran/the gathering dark, they were destroyed and reinvented. ok, sure, fine, ridiculous, but it could be workable.
the major problem is that, while they might be fairly interesting on the cards. where are the stories? the novels should be focusing on them. there was no point in changing the nature of planeswalkers to make it easier to write about, and then not writing about them. where is the logic to that? potentially beautiful characters were created, and then not explored. at all. in favor of alternative characters.
so why not have just left things alone and gone the way the new storylines went? why revamp everything and then forget about it?
my biggest gripe is changing it at all. i hate to continually use the same novels as examples, but, the brothers war had no planeswalker protagonist nor a planeswalking antagonist, nor a planeswalker coming and being like 'no' and changing the entire story like is so often referenced by the staff. neither did the gathering dark, nor the thran. even the books dedicated to urza didn't do this. so why is this constantly referenced as a reason why the entire system was changed?
why are the few books that did have planeswalkers showing off the true extent of their power the standard instead of the exception? aren't planeswalkers supposed to be incredibly rare throughout the multiverse? why would they even care what was going on anyway (except in the case of the invasion which effected everything) why is the focus on them at all? behind the scenes players is fine (the way it once was), afterall thats part of what made just about all the storylines prior to invasion pretty satisfying, focusing on a major character that was still fallible in mortal ways. why was that changed, then abandoned for being too difficult in the first place?
give me a reason to care about the story. make it about the bradywalkers if thats the thing thats being touted. this is honestly as silly as say (to use references that geeks might get), creating the enterprise and its crew, then focusing on some unknown alien species on a planet unrelated to the federation. or creating the x-men and instead writing stories about normal humans and only vaguely referencing mutants. what was the point. change for the sake of change is almost never a good thing, and it makes clear that money was the true motivator in this decision.
further more the cards and stories need to have greater cohesion, or none at all. its an all or nothing or it doesn't work. just like an abundance of places and people in the cards, that don't exist in the story, in favor of characters that don't exist in the card game is counter-productive and creates a conflict of ideas which in turn makes the stories very boring. part of the draw is to see elements of the game in action and not leave everyone with questions of 'what is this things part in it all why does it have a card and not a story, why does it have a story and not a card'. by creating stories about the cards the player is immersed even further in the game or yet further into the story, because its easier to relate to. to compare it to the world of warcraft ccg, theres a card game that borrows almost all of its elements from the video game, and it serves a dual purpose to draw in anyone familiar with either. of course by the same token i shouldn't have to play the game to understand the story, so optimally the novels should be treated as independent devices with elements from the card game meant simply to further the story, which is something that was originally captured fantastically well, when we again use the brothers war, the gathering dark, and the thran as examples.
so having said all of that in favor of greater cohesion, if we make the books and cards have no cohesion, we can treat the novels as novels without a single element from the cards other than taking place in the same universe. this leaves quite a bit of area to explore. this also allows them to be treated as true novels, as legitimate works of literature rather than a quick way to make a dollar and simply set them in the magic universe. for instance use the examples of the original core set of alpha/beta. all about the gameplay. no story. with stories set in the universe when the time for novelization came. however the problem at that time was lack of consistency between the novels, and the cards, at all. what went on in one story made no sense with another, made no sense with anything going happening in the universe by way of the cards, and just made it all generally overly confusing. hence the original retcon and shift. personally, i feel this is the direction that should not be taken with the storylines or game, ever again.
regardless, things need to be explained at least a little. why did this event happen, why did this character act this way. piecing it together from flavor texts (which are also very poorly written and overly cliche) and novels and rumor on the internet defeats the point of the novel. if it can even be explained by those means. typical trends show that the majority of things can't be. a great many plot devices just don't work and make no logical sense. the original books left things open to interpretation, but in ways that sparked discussion in terms of potentiality, rather than simply wtf? which is so often the case with these new stories.
that brings up another point. the flavor text. the old style of flavor text helped explain the story and the world. it let the player know what was going on without reading the book, and it gave a basis to go on for the novels as well. the general trend in flavor text recently, explains nothing. they are simply cliche quips, or independent events that have no bearing on the next. this is the wrong kind of flavor, as in it has none. its tasteless and unmemorable. not everything needs to be super descriptive, sure, but there still should be a greater degree of this going on.
in short, think for a minute about the people playing the game and reading the stories rather than about the almighty dollar, or the game will continue to dwindle on into nothing. ending up in the end as nothing more than another failed ccg.