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.
Of course, that's never going to happen. Sigh...
What are your thoughts?
The issue with War of the Spark is that the company is run by a group of stockholders who want profit, and that need overrides any kind of critical thinking skills on the part of the people who are working on the sets. The reason that planeswalkers are being pushed is because they sell sets and Dominaria proved to the stockholders that the idea is plausible, so just like two years ago when they went on the Lotto card extravaganza, the next big thing is planeswalkers and blown up full art special edition cards. Once this gets run into the ground, they will find the next best thing to throw in.
To put it bluntly, playing standard at all is a really bad idea, and Arena is just reinforcing this fact with the paper rock scissors aspect of running into a Wilderness Reclamation deck while building to deal with red aggro. Wizards of the Coast has made it clear they will compromise the playability of standard on the basis of sales, and will not listen to people bellyaching until the sales start to dip. This is completely independent of any kind of causation: people complaining does not mean that they have ceased buying magic and in fact they are probably complaining because they are buying magic. The complaining just gives more free advertising and momentarily boosts sales.
So I'm totally with you on not liking how the game is a big grind-fest with walkers and control decks, just like I was with people when the game was all about red rush. The game stops being fun when one person at the table is not playing Magic the Gathering, and this happens when aggro and control are the top archetypes.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
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, the 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.
(fixed card link)
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon is actually a depiction of Ugin from before the Mending, as Fate Reforged takes place prior to that event. (Though it must be noted that Sarkhan, despite being in the past, remained at a much lower power level.)
But keep in mind that planeswalkers like Bolas, Ugin, Karn, Sorin, Nahiri, and Liliana, all of whom had their sparks ignite pre-Mending (and didn't have their sparks altered like Venser and Radha--though I can't recall if Venser's ignited before or after Jeska initiated the Mending), had a long time (well, maybe not so much for Liliana) to learn magic, accrue power, and so on, and retained much of that even after the Mending. (Though a major motivating factor for Bolas is, I believe, that he can no longer remember all the magic he learned in his twenty thousand years of being a planeswalker pre-Mending.)
Plus, again, with planeswalker cards, you get what you pay for. If you summon Karn by spending seven mana (Karn Liberated) you're going to get more power than if you only spend four (Karn, Scion of Urza). Similarly spending eight mana to summon a planeswalker (Ugin, the Spirit Dragon) is going to get you more power than spending four (for Serra).
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Rules Advisor (as of the last time they offered that certification).
Quote from "William Lyon Mackenzie King" »
There are few men in this Parliament for whom I have greater respect than the leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. I admire him in my heart, because time and again he has had the courage to say what lays on his conscience, regardless of what the world might think of him. A man of that calibre is an ornament to any Parliament.
I don't play decks. I solve optimization problems.
Currently solving:
Standard: Too poor for this format.
Modern: GW Auras, Living End, WB TurboFog, UB Mill, UR Storm
Legacy: R Burn, GU Infect, RG Lands, B Contamination
UBRGrixis Shard: Grixis believes in a bold and impassioned search for satisfaction, perfection, and self expression. Those of Grixis colors have an eagerness to break the status quo and remake things in their own image. They disregard tradition and conventional approval, seeing them as unnecessary to achieve their goals, the well behaved rarely make history. Blue wants perfection. Black wants power. Red wants freedom.
But keep in mind that planeswalkers like Bolas, Ugin, Karn, Sorin, Nahiri, and Liliana, all of whom had their sparks ignite pre-Mending (and didn't have their sparks altered like Venser and Radha
Bolas' spark being a neowalker spark now instead of an oldwalker spark is his actual motivation for doing what he does. He lost his old powers and wants them back. They could easily have just done "big evil dragon with zero stated motivation because he's a *****ty, generic, unmemorable villain anyway" but they hung a fig leaf on the story so that's his motivation.
He should've stayed dead after Tetsuo Umezawa killed him. Tetsuo Umezawa being a regular person with a fancy magic meteor spell, not an oldwalker or even a neowalker. And he still killed Bolas, at least temporarily. The whole "oldwalkers are too powerful" thing really is obvious as the thinnest bull***** imaginable the moment you actually look at the old storylines but Wizards is banking hard on current players not doing that.
Remember, Venser's spark mutated, but all existing planeswalkers had their sparks become neowalker sparks after the Mending.
To properly cost pre-mending planeswalkers they would need to start at 7 or 8 mana.
They'd cost more like five or six mana or so (those being existing pre-mending planeswalker cards), and still be weaker than the actual strongest planeswalkercards. To say nothing of how trivially easily they could just do like in Fate Reforged and say "you exist post-Mending so any oldwalkers you summon across that point in time are going to be weakened."
For game balance purposes, 2UU gets you something stronger than they'll ever make for oldwalkers, especially given that oldwalker cards aren't any different from neowalker cards.
Yep! It was a cosmic retcon. (The big reason for my DC reference.) It's not that the spark itself changed, but the laws of the multiverse changed around what that meant.
Urza was a hero for the 90s, a time when we were all looking for someone less Superman and more Übermensch. These days, they understand that 90s antiheroes are boring.
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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!
There's a reason I mostly checked out of the story pretty heavily after Innistrad. Some of the blocks were alright after that, at least flavor-wise, but I am just not fond the direction the plot or game itself has been going lately. They even managed to screw up the return to Innistrad because of it.
Bolas doesn't die here. I think we will see Bolas around in some capacity until a member of Clan Umezawa finishes him off. If they kill off any of the Gatewatch, it's because they have created more likeable walkers thru market research to replace them.
FYI pre-mending walkers do not even have the ability to be represented by cards. The whole change to the spark post mending was to set up the whole concept of planeswalker cards.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I personally started to find Bolas boring pretty fast.
After his resurrection in Time spiral, we had 14 blocks and 3 sets (not counting the core sets) and we either had Bolas himself or his machinations and results of said machinations in 9 of those blocks and every single set after WotC decided to scrap blocks.
I'm fed up of having Bolas looming menacingly over everything. I would prefer much better having a web of loosely related stories with the occasional returning character rather than having the same identical villain behind everything that happens.
Not even the Urza Vs. Phyrexia saga (from 1994 with antiquities to 2001 with apocalypse, that's 7 years) lasted that long. If we take Alara as the first "Bolas is the main villain" set it is 11 years we are having this "Bolas is behind everything" storyline and they managed to make me so fed up with the gatewatch and Bolas that I'm only hoping for them all to die...
Just... Stop... Kill Bolas and let the gatewatch rot on Ravnica or wherever they want to go and let's follow new characters in new parts of the multiverse with new stories and new villains for a change.
You are experiencing with the Gatewatch what players felt with the Weatherlight story: It dragged on too long and the characters became less than lovable in any capacity. Only in future referencing did people get that fuzzy feeling of nostalgia after their near-relentless *****ing about the same characters a decade or so sooner.
Like you, I started around the 4th Edition/Ice Age block and lived through the story to present day, even experiencing the same angst and fatigue towards Gerrard and his crew as we are towards Jace and everyone else.
In defence of the Weatherlight crew was that the characters were more relatable and, ultimately, human. The villains had a more reasonable storyline dynamics to relate to and weren't some all-powerful dragon-esque being that could virtually go unstoppable unless you were upper-tier mage or even PW calibre, which most "hero(in)es" are these days. The storyline(s) were more human. This time it's a bit far fetched even for a fantasy setting. There's an air of ruin in the delivery of the story as pretty much every hook we've had since the inception of the Gatewatch has been to witness new locales get devastated other than for the sake of doing so. Maybe that's attributed to the attention span of the player base to date, who knows.
I'd love to see more storylines or segments of storylines to include more:
- politics
- human condition dynamics
- Worlds which offer a diverse geological, demographic and geographic environment to warrant stationary visits (like Dominaria II) rather than a concentrated culture on an isolated world.
In fairness, the last few chapters of the story up to Guilds of Ravnica featured some of the most intense character development I have ever witnessed in a Magic storyline that deserved to be followed intensely. I applaud them for doing that and am curious to see how this pans out. It IS different than the original Weatherlight story arc in that the central characters are powerful beings that can do so much more than a non-PW cast but outside of that, not by much.
But they've set the bar so high now that anything less might hurt them.
'buster
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'buster
HR Analyst. Gamer. Activist | Fearless, and forthright | Aggro-control is a mindset. Elspeth and Jhoira rock my world.
FYI pre-mending walkers do not even have the ability to be represented by cards.
Wrong. Freyalise, Teferi, and Serra have all been represented by cards. The "oldwalkers can't be on cards" lie is just something Wizards told in order to make the Mending seem more palatable.
I'd love to see more storylines or segments of storylines to include more:
- politics
- human condition dynamics
- Worlds which offer a diverse geological, demographic and geographic environment to warrant stationary visits (like Dominaria II) rather than a concentrated culture on an isolated world.
Of those, I don't trust any large corporation to handle a political plot because it'd either be Nonpartisan Tom Clancy Lite, PG-Rated Game Of Thrones, or would piss off the kinds of people who don't like the idea of media having analogues to real politics in it despite that media has been doing that as long as media has existed. The first two wouldn't be worth it, and the last one would be... well if you've seen how incendiary real-life politics gets, and how there's already so much political controversy in certain circles over Wizards' existing decisions (like having more women and people of colour depicted on cards), it'd only get uglier from there.
Human condition dynamics would be amazing but they'd need characters with more than two dimensions to pull it off. Wizards seems to think Bolas is Ozymandias when in reality he's more like the Jared Leto... I don't even want to call that character the Joker, and this indicates that their writers are probably very constrained on what they're allowed to do.
Maro's already stated that worlds with multiple environments is something they're opposed to doing. They even specifically cut out a lot of the fun in Dominaria (the plane, not the set) so they wouldn't have to deal with the fact that Jamuraa feels a lot different from Urborg feels a lot different from Otaria feels a lot different from Tolaria and so on and so forth.
Tetsuo Umezawa being a regular person with a fancy magic meteor spell, not an oldwalker or even a neowalker. And he still killed Bolas, at least temporarily.
I mean, we're talking about a class of being that gets slightly annoyed at being decapitated. To expect Joe Everyman to be able to permanently kill one is just fooling yourself.
The moment a world has just one environment, I am not interested in its stories.
Lazy, bottom of the barrel writing will inevitably follow the creation of such a "world". WOTC need to showcase their story a little less, their showcasing is the artistic equivalent of asking if people want to see something cool and then when they say yes bending over and showing everybody your hemorrhoids.
If you try and run a game by market research, don't be surprised when the audience does not like what it says it would like.
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People with belligerent signatures are trying to compensate for something....
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, the 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.
(fixed card link)
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon is actually a depiction of Ugin from before the Mending, as Fate Reforged takes place prior to that event. (Though it must be noted that Sarkhan, despite being in the past, remained at a much lower power level.)
Plus, again, with planeswalker cards, you get what you pay for. If you summon Karn by spending seven mana (Karn Liberated) you're going to get more power than if you only spend four (Karn, Scion of Urza). Similarly spending eight mana to summon a planeswalker (Ugin, the Spirit Dragon) is going to get you more power than spending four (for Serra).
Ok, that's a reasonable enough explanation. And thanks for informing me that Ugin is depicted in his pre-mending power level.
There's an air of ruin in the delivery of the story as pretty much every hook we've had since the inception of the Gatewatch has been to witness new locales get devastated other than for the sake of doing so. Maybe that's attributed to the attention span of the player base to date, who knows.
I'd love to see more storylines or segments of storylines to include more:
- politics
- human condition dynamics
- Worlds which offer a diverse geological, demographic and geographic environment to warrant stationary visits (like Dominaria II) rather than a concentrated culture on an isolated world.
Maybe we don't see these because they are short on storytelling time, since WoTC moved from 3-set blocks to 2-set blocks?
Or maybe they thought things blowing up stops people from getting bored?
As for storytelling quality. Just my opinion.. some stories are really good. That story about the Gitrog Monster.. I showed it to a friend who does not know about mtg, and she enjoyed that story as a stand alone.
If you try and run a game by market research, don't be surprised when the audience does not like what it says it would like.
That's a problem corporate media has in general. You get so afraid of alienating literally any group that you become unwilling to take any kind of artistic stand. You wind up becoming less focused on the "telling a story" aspect of it because you care more about the "create [inoffensive] entertainment" aspect of it. But you run into problems like the inability for your heroes to stand for anything other than a vague "heroism" or like the inability for your villains to do anything truly evil because the villainy must be kept to things that exist only in fiction (evil businesspeople, for instance, would look more like a Captain Planet villain than the CEO of a real oil company). You wind up trying to please everyone, only to be confused when you discover that being a milquetoast means you're more likely to piss people off—you can't go far enough in any one direction to please any but the most easily entertained before you're forced to double back. You wind up eschewing greatness and embracing mediocrity because you don't understand that merely casting the bigger net to keep people around until they get bored isn't going to be better if a smaller net would establish a loyal core audience that stays with you through thick and thin.
Think about it like this: When we study literature, we study the ones that actually have a point to make. Even something like Lord of the Rings manages to have opinions on things ranging from theology (evil cannot create and can only corrupt, hence why Sauron has to turn elves into orcs) to environmentalism (the ents and Isengard). That's the kind of thing you won't really see out of a corporate entity unless it's something very few people would disagree with and, as above, unless it's presented in as general a way possible so readers can project their values onto it. "And do the wizards really have to be angels? That might not play so well in foreign markets. Maybe they should just be special in some nondenominational way." Same thing with Bolas. He's a moustache-twirler because anything that might map onto real life is too "risky" for Wizards to attempt.
It's a problem that won't be solved unless Hasbro ever lets Wizards' creative team loose without corporate "risk management" restrictions, but that has about as much chance of happening as Mana Drain in Standard. Until then, grasping mediocrity will remain the "better" business choice than taking a risk to achieve greatness.
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The issue with War of the Spark is that the company is run by a group of stockholders who want profit, and that need overrides any kind of critical thinking skills on the part of the people who are working on the sets. The reason that planeswalkers are being pushed is because they sell sets and Dominaria proved to the stockholders that the idea is plausible, so just like two years ago when they went on the Lotto card extravaganza, the next big thing is planeswalkers and blown up full art special edition cards. Once this gets run into the ground, they will find the next best thing to throw in.
To put it bluntly, playing standard at all is a really bad idea, and Arena is just reinforcing this fact with the paper rock scissors aspect of running into a Wilderness Reclamation deck while building to deal with red aggro. Wizards of the Coast has made it clear they will compromise the playability of standard on the basis of sales, and will not listen to people bellyaching until the sales start to dip. This is completely independent of any kind of causation: people complaining does not mean that they have ceased buying magic and in fact they are probably complaining because they are buying magic. The complaining just gives more free advertising and momentarily boosts sales.
So I'm totally with you on not liking how the game is a big grind-fest with walkers and control decks, just like I was with people when the game was all about red rush. The game stops being fun when one person at the table is not playing Magic the Gathering, and this happens when aggro and control are the top archetypes.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
(fixed card link)
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon is actually a depiction of Ugin from before the Mending, as Fate Reforged takes place prior to that event. (Though it must be noted that Sarkhan, despite being in the past, remained at a much lower power level.)
But keep in mind that planeswalkers like Bolas, Ugin, Karn, Sorin, Nahiri, and Liliana, all of whom had their sparks ignite pre-Mending (and didn't have their sparks altered like Venser and Radha--though I can't recall if Venser's ignited before or after Jeska initiated the Mending), had a long time (well, maybe not so much for Liliana) to learn magic, accrue power, and so on, and retained much of that even after the Mending. (Though a major motivating factor for Bolas is, I believe, that he can no longer remember all the magic he learned in his twenty thousand years of being a planeswalker pre-Mending.)
Plus, again, with planeswalker cards, you get what you pay for. If you summon Karn by spending seven mana (Karn Liberated) you're going to get more power than if you only spend four (Karn, Scion of Urza). Similarly spending eight mana to summon a planeswalker (Ugin, the Spirit Dragon) is going to get you more power than spending four (for Serra).
I don't play decks. I solve optimization problems.
Currently solving:
Standard: Too poor for this format.
Modern: GW Auras, Living End, WB TurboFog, UB Mill, UR Storm
Legacy: R Burn, GU Infect, RG Lands, B Contamination
Best MTG colour test ever: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8905d5/what_kind_of_mage_would_you_be_test_your_colors/
UBR Grixis Shard: Grixis believes in a bold and impassioned search for satisfaction, perfection, and self expression. Those of Grixis colors have an eagerness to break the status quo and remake things in their own image. They disregard tradition and conventional approval, seeing them as unnecessary to achieve their goals, the well behaved rarely make history. Blue wants perfection. Black wants power. Red wants freedom.
Bolas' spark being a neowalker spark now instead of an oldwalker spark is his actual motivation for doing what he does. He lost his old powers and wants them back. They could easily have just done "big evil dragon with zero stated motivation because he's a *****ty, generic, unmemorable villain anyway" but they hung a fig leaf on the story so that's his motivation.
He should've stayed dead after Tetsuo Umezawa killed him. Tetsuo Umezawa being a regular person with a fancy magic meteor spell, not an oldwalker or even a neowalker. And he still killed Bolas, at least temporarily. The whole "oldwalkers are too powerful" thing really is obvious as the thinnest bull***** imaginable the moment you actually look at the old storylines but Wizards is banking hard on current players not doing that.
Remember, Venser's spark mutated, but all existing planeswalkers had their sparks become neowalker sparks after the Mending.
They'd cost more like five or six mana or so (those being existing pre-mending planeswalker cards), and still be weaker than the actual strongest planeswalker cards. To say nothing of how trivially easily they could just do like in Fate Reforged and say "you exist post-Mending so any oldwalkers you summon across that point in time are going to be weakened."
For game balance purposes, 2UU gets you something stronger than they'll ever make for oldwalkers, especially given that oldwalker cards aren't any different from neowalker cards.
Urza was a hero for the 90s, a time when we were all looking for someone less Superman and more Übermensch. These days, they understand that 90s antiheroes are boring.
On phasing:
UBBreya's Toybox (Competitive, Combo)WR
RGodzilla, King of the MonstersG
-Retired Decks-
UBLazav, Dimir Mastermind (Competitive, UB Voltron/Control)UB
"Knowledge is such a burden. Release it. Release all your fears to me."
—Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
After his resurrection in Time spiral, we had 14 blocks and 3 sets (not counting the core sets) and we either had Bolas himself or his machinations and results of said machinations in 9 of those blocks and every single set after WotC decided to scrap blocks.
I'm fed up of having Bolas looming menacingly over everything. I would prefer much better having a web of loosely related stories with the occasional returning character rather than having the same identical villain behind everything that happens.
Not even the Urza Vs. Phyrexia saga (from 1994 with antiquities to 2001 with apocalypse, that's 7 years) lasted that long. If we take Alara as the first "Bolas is the main villain" set it is 11 years we are having this "Bolas is behind everything" storyline and they managed to make me so fed up with the gatewatch and Bolas that I'm only hoping for them all to die...
Just... Stop... Kill Bolas and let the gatewatch rot on Ravnica or wherever they want to go and let's follow new characters in new parts of the multiverse with new stories and new villains for a change.
Like you, I started around the 4th Edition/Ice Age block and lived through the story to present day, even experiencing the same angst and fatigue towards Gerrard and his crew as we are towards Jace and everyone else.
In defence of the Weatherlight crew was that the characters were more relatable and, ultimately, human. The villains had a more reasonable storyline dynamics to relate to and weren't some all-powerful dragon-esque being that could virtually go unstoppable unless you were upper-tier mage or even PW calibre, which most "hero(in)es" are these days. The storyline(s) were more human. This time it's a bit far fetched even for a fantasy setting. There's an air of ruin in the delivery of the story as pretty much every hook we've had since the inception of the Gatewatch has been to witness new locales get devastated other than for the sake of doing so. Maybe that's attributed to the attention span of the player base to date, who knows.
I'd love to see more storylines or segments of storylines to include more:
- politics
- human condition dynamics
- Worlds which offer a diverse geological, demographic and geographic environment to warrant stationary visits (like Dominaria II) rather than a concentrated culture on an isolated world.
In fairness, the last few chapters of the story up to Guilds of Ravnica featured some of the most intense character development I have ever witnessed in a Magic storyline that deserved to be followed intensely. I applaud them for doing that and am curious to see how this pans out. It IS different than the original Weatherlight story arc in that the central characters are powerful beings that can do so much more than a non-PW cast but outside of that, not by much.
But they've set the bar so high now that anything less might hurt them.
'buster
HR Analyst. Gamer. Activist | Fearless, and forthright | Aggro-control is a mindset.
Elspeth and Jhoira rock my world.
Wrong. Freyalise, Teferi, and Serra have all been represented by cards. The "oldwalkers can't be on cards" lie is just something Wizards told in order to make the Mending seem more palatable.
Of those, I don't trust any large corporation to handle a political plot because it'd either be Nonpartisan Tom Clancy Lite, PG-Rated Game Of Thrones, or would piss off the kinds of people who don't like the idea of media having analogues to real politics in it despite that media has been doing that as long as media has existed. The first two wouldn't be worth it, and the last one would be... well if you've seen how incendiary real-life politics gets, and how there's already so much political controversy in certain circles over Wizards' existing decisions (like having more women and people of colour depicted on cards), it'd only get uglier from there.
Human condition dynamics would be amazing but they'd need characters with more than two dimensions to pull it off. Wizards seems to think Bolas is Ozymandias when in reality he's more like the Jared Leto... I don't even want to call that character the Joker, and this indicates that their writers are probably very constrained on what they're allowed to do.
Maro's already stated that worlds with multiple environments is something they're opposed to doing. They even specifically cut out a lot of the fun in Dominaria (the plane, not the set) so they wouldn't have to deal with the fact that Jamuraa feels a lot different from Urborg feels a lot different from Otaria feels a lot different from Tolaria and so on and so forth.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
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Lazy, bottom of the barrel writing will inevitably follow the creation of such a "world". WOTC need to showcase their story a little less, their showcasing is the artistic equivalent of asking if people want to see something cool and then when they say yes bending over and showing everybody your hemorrhoids.
If you try and run a game by market research, don't be surprised when the audience does not like what it says it would like.
Ok, that's a reasonable enough explanation. And thanks for informing me that Ugin is depicted in his pre-mending power level.
Maybe we don't see these because they are short on storytelling time, since WoTC moved from 3-set blocks to 2-set blocks?
Or maybe they thought things blowing up stops people from getting bored?
As for storytelling quality. Just my opinion.. some stories are really good. That story about the Gitrog Monster.. I showed it to a friend who does not know about mtg, and she enjoyed that story as a stand alone.
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That's a problem corporate media has in general. You get so afraid of alienating literally any group that you become unwilling to take any kind of artistic stand. You wind up becoming less focused on the "telling a story" aspect of it because you care more about the "create [inoffensive] entertainment" aspect of it. But you run into problems like the inability for your heroes to stand for anything other than a vague "heroism" or like the inability for your villains to do anything truly evil because the villainy must be kept to things that exist only in fiction (evil businesspeople, for instance, would look more like a Captain Planet villain than the CEO of a real oil company). You wind up trying to please everyone, only to be confused when you discover that being a milquetoast means you're more likely to piss people off—you can't go far enough in any one direction to please any but the most easily entertained before you're forced to double back. You wind up eschewing greatness and embracing mediocrity because you don't understand that merely casting the bigger net to keep people around until they get bored isn't going to be better if a smaller net would establish a loyal core audience that stays with you through thick and thin.
Think about it like this: When we study literature, we study the ones that actually have a point to make. Even something like Lord of the Rings manages to have opinions on things ranging from theology (evil cannot create and can only corrupt, hence why Sauron has to turn elves into orcs) to environmentalism (the ents and Isengard). That's the kind of thing you won't really see out of a corporate entity unless it's something very few people would disagree with and, as above, unless it's presented in as general a way possible so readers can project their values onto it. "And do the wizards really have to be angels? That might not play so well in foreign markets. Maybe they should just be special in some nondenominational way." Same thing with Bolas. He's a moustache-twirler because anything that might map onto real life is too "risky" for Wizards to attempt.
It's a problem that won't be solved unless Hasbro ever lets Wizards' creative team loose without corporate "risk management" restrictions, but that has about as much chance of happening as Mana Drain in Standard. Until then, grasping mediocrity will remain the "better" business choice than taking a risk to achieve greatness.