Okay, everyone. Today I would like to talk about the storytelling in MtG in general.
I do not doubt that in terms of mechanics, MtG is a fantastic (albeit imperfect) game. However, even to this day, MtG seems to struggle to produce decent stories: I used to read the weekly stories, but not anymore because the writings are, as many have pointed out, less than ideal. I have lately heard about the War of the Spark novel. WoS's trailer was very well-liked on Youtube, but the novel ends up... less than stellar. The review scores were at best mediocre. Based on the above, my impression is that WotC is trying to make good MtG stories. This is certainly a laudable sentiment, but they seem to struggle in achieving this goal. In fact, MtG's storytelling seems unusually bad compared to most other major gaming franchise. This led me to ponder over the question: why are MtG stories not good? As someone who has dabbled in creative writing, here are some problems I notice with MtG's storytelling in general:
1. Mismatch between story and mechanic - a game's story needs to align with its gameplay mechanics. E.g., a shooter video game will most likely have a story based around war or other armed conflicts, in order to create the rationale of "why these people are shooting at each other". However, there seems to be a mismatch between MtG stories and its mechanics: MtG stories tend to resemble Harry Potter - with the characters mainly using spells against their enemies. On the contrary, when actually playing a game of MtG, we player are primary sending some sort of (often magical) creatures to fight our opponents, which brings to mind a story about large-scale war or political conflict, a la Game of Thrones - in actual MtG gameplay, we players rely primarily on creatures, not spells. This likely creates a mismatch between MtG's story and its gameplay. I think WoTC should seriously consider changing the kind of stories they tell with MtG.
2. No sense of scale - MtG's writers seem to have very little sense of scale, both in terms of time and space. In the Tarkir block, for instance, Sarkhan went back in time 1,200 years... and there was little changes in clothing styles, languages, and architecture between Khans and Fate Reforged. Anyone who has studied the least bit of history would know how implausible this is. This isn't an isolated case, either: similar things happened with the other planes, somehow, things remained mostly unchanged on Ravnica for 10,000 years; there was surprisingly little technological advancement in Dominaria across millennia, etc..
On the space side, I don't think it sounds very realistic to conquer a planet-sized world within a matter of years (as happened in Scars of Mirrodin, Amonkhet, and Ravnica), e.g., now, how logistically realistic is this, a city-sized place (Amonkhet) producing an army large enough to conquer a planet-sized world (Ravnica) within just a few decades? The entirely of Scars of Mirrodin seemed to happen over a few months (Elspeth barely aged). For your reference, the Mongol Empire, the largest empire in human history, took several decades to build, and it barely covered most of Eurasia, let alone the whole planet. IMO, good stories do not up their scales endlessly, e.g., Game of Thrones took place in a continent-sized setting, Harry Potter took place in a country-sized one. A good writer chooses a scale that fits the needs of their story, while endless upping the scale to the point of implausibility sounds more like 13-year-olds who are desperately trying to sound cool.
3. Overly simplistic philosophy - while their attempt at a color wheel philosophy is laudable, I don't think it does a very good job of capturing human behaviors. I am doing a PhD in behavioral science, and when I read the stuffs in color wheel philosophy, I find myself repeatedly screaming "mind and behaviors don't work like that". E.g., red is supposedly the "empathy color", but it is also supposedly associated with sensation seeking. In reality, these two don't go well together. If anything, people who are highly sensation-seeking tends to be so *because* they lack emotions, they don't feel fear or anxiety, making them unusually bold. In fact, they are often mildly sociopathic; Meanwhile, ivory tower academics and sly merchants are both supposed to be the domain of blue, but it is obvious that the two are less than compatible.
I think the problem here is that they are trying to cram too many things into just 5 boxes, resulting in each boxes containing things that have at best symbolic associations with each other. Human mind and behavior have much more variations than what just 5 boxes can encompass. It is also jarring to see how all red characters seem to behave in a particular way, all black characters seem to behave in certain other ways, etc. I would say that there are many different reasons a person may become a pyromancer: maybe they are sensation-seeker borderline pyromaniac, maybe they actually a cold personality but born with fire power, etc. The simplistic way MtG's color-wheel views human mind and behaviors, I strongly suspect, might have contributed to many of MtG's characters being unrelatable.
This likely stems partly from the fact that MtG's staff consists mainly of mathematicians rather than psychologists.
Conclusion:
These are some of my thoughts. I am not a professional writer, so I might be wrong. What are your thoughts? Why does MtG fail to produce good stories? Please discuss.
2. No sense of scale - MtG's writers seem to have very little sense of scale, both in terms of time and space. In the Tarkir block, for instance, Sarkhan went back in time 1,200 years... and there was little changes in clothing styles, languages, and architecture between Khans and Fate Reforged. Anyone who has studied the least bit of history would know how implausible this is. This isn't an isolated case, either: similar things happened with the other planes, somehow, things remained mostly unchanged on Ravnica for 10,000 years; there was surprisingly little technological advancement in Dominaria across millennia, etc..
On the space side, I don't think it sounds very realistic to conquer a planet-sized world within a matter of years (as happened in Scars of Mirrodin, Amonkhet, and Ravnica), e.g., now, how logistically realistic is this, a city-sized place (Amonkhet) producing an army large enough to conquer a planet-sized world (Ravnica) within just a few decades? The entirely of Scars of Mirrodin seemed to happen over a few months (Elspeth barely aged). For your reference, the Mongol Empire, the largest empire in human history, took several decades to build, and it barely covered most of Eurasia, let alone the whole planet. IMO, good stories do not up their scales endlessly, e.g., Game of Thrones took place in a continent-sized setting, Harry Potter took place in a country-sized one. A good writer chooses a scale that fits the needs of their story, while endless upping the scale to the point of implausibility sounds more like 13-year-olds who are desperately trying to sound cool.
3. Overly simplistic philosophy - while their attempt at a color wheel philosophy is laudable, I don't think it does a very good job of capturing human behaviors. I am doing a PhD in behavioral science, and when I read the stuffs in color wheel philosophy, I find myself repeatedly screaming "mind and behaviors don't work like that". E.g., red is supposedly the "empathy color", but it is also supposedly associated with sensation seeking. In reality, these two don't go well together. If anything, people who are highly sensation-seeking tends to be so *because* they lack emotions, they don't feel fear or anxiety, making them unusually bold. In fact, they are often mildly sociopathic; Meanwhile, ivory tower academics and sly merchants are both supposed to be the domain of blue, but it is obvious that the two are less than compatible.
I think the problem here is that they are trying to cram too many things into just 5 boxes, resulting in each boxes containing things that have at best symbolic associations with each other. Human mind and behavior have much more variations than what just 5 boxes can encompass. It is also jarring to see how all red characters seem to behave in a particular way, all black characters seem to behave in certain other ways, etc. I would say that there are many different reasons a person may become a pyromancer: maybe they are sensation-seeker borderline pyromaniac, maybe they actually a cold personality but born with fire power, etc. The simplistic way MtG's color-wheel views human mind and behaviors, I strongly suspect, might have contributed to many of MtG's characters being unrelatable.
These are both problems on your end rather than their end.
While you are right on the whole time scale about cultures evolving you completely missed on the area scale. Scars of Mirrodin is the only event that you mentioned that takes place across an entire plane, the only other event MTG has really done this on is Zendikar. The events of the Scars block take place over many years, they never really say but the hints dropped lead you to believe at least decades. The planeswalkers show up for just a few weeks at the very end after the entire war is over. Amonkhet was already devastated to being just a single city when we were introduced, we have no reference at all to who it became like this so trying to say it becoming like this was unrealistically done is at best grasping at straws. At no point was invading all of Ravnica the plan. Bolas invaded a single district in Ravnica, something along the size of a major US city like Chicago or New York. The plan also was never to conquer and hold the place but to merely create a crisis in which to enact the rest of his plan.
And you have completely missed on the color philosophy. When someone is a color that doesn't' mean they are every aspect of that color, it means they are an aspect of that color. As for characters of the same color acting the same way, again you are so far off I have to question if you actually know any of the story. Few characters are mono-color and even the few that are act very differently. The Color Wheel is one of the most complex lenses to view behavior and thoughts that for you to believe it's simple reflects your lack of understanding of it.
Though you do have some points about why their stories fail. A significant factor is that they are telling the story in different places, at different times and they can't seem to sync up. Though I questions which other gaming franchises are doing this right? This is a legitimate question about which ones you think are doing well because I don't know of any.
'Bout time this kind of thread appeared. And boy, do I have an f-ton of things to say.
First, I want to recognize that Nicky Drayden's writing was Fan-f***ing-tastic. In conjunction with Brandon Sanderson (of whom I'm an unashamed fan-boy), WOTC had some stories that gave me hope for the first time in years that their characterization, plot synchronicity, and pacing would be incredible. I'm devastated to see that these writers are the exception, rather thn the future. I respect Weisman as an author, but someone in the WAR thread indicated that the story read like an outline with names filled in after he had received the information and I agree, after reading the book. Sorry that you had terrible information to work with, Weisman.
I think my biggest concerns about WOTC story-telling capabilities are these:
Emotional Impact. Quite simply, this is something that writers struggle with generally but I find Wizards to be particularly guilty of omitting, invalidating, or otherwise simply being mediocre with.
For example, Vivien Reid's backstory was literarily flamboyant, seeming to be jammed with as many erudite and esoteric words as possible (seriously, how many times can you read the word 'cloying' without feeling like the story itself is cloying? bleh), but more importantly it didn't really seem to matter. As a reader, having just finished the well-executed Ixalan block story with its awesome adventure/treasure quest and the Jace/Vraska romance (which I totally supported), Vivien's story just doesn't really matter to me anymore. Ixalan is done, tied off, concluded, and in a satisfactory way too. The Vivien gets captured and saves a dying dinosaur in her backstory, that they wrote 3 articles for, and her saving a dinosaur on a plane that already had its major storyline seems to be useless/fluff/irrelevant, an unwarranted and undesired extension of the Ixalan plane that I'm already happy parting with as a reader. What would have been MORE interesting is understanding Vivien's true origin story; why the hell did Nicol Bolas devastate her world, how did he do it, how did Vivien survive, etc. THESE kind of questions are narratively compelling while also building emotional weight towards the event set, War of the Spark. Any scene that featured Vivien Reid would have been more engaging and impactful because we understand her absolutely valid and emotionally charged reasons for hating Bolas and wanting to eradicate him. But no, Wizards missed this. Instead, Vivien's an eco-terrorist(?) who's out for revenge against Bolas because he slaughtered her plane for unspecified reasons... which he's already done before, presumably to countless other worlds. This example falls flat, at least from my perspective, and was a waste of words and time as a reader.
As another example, Wizards also completely invalidated the truly emotionally significant characterization and growth of both Jace and Vraska at the end of the Ixalan block storyline with their War of the Spark novel. Jace went from an emotionally stunted and vulnerable boy (for all intents and purposes) to becoming a young man who had finally learned to accept his true history via head trauma. His acceptance of that history, and the ugly side of him that it implies, was great characterization and growth that reflects the human journey that we ALL engage in outside of that fiction. And to see Vraska opening up her own vulnerability to Jace and to see her begin to trust others again was, honestly, a beautiful thing to see; this kind of healing that she experiences is massively emotional, especially for anyone who knows/is a trauma victim.
Now, if we look at the general storyline, from Shadows Over Innsitrad onwards, the writing and stories were actively building towards their event set, War of the Spark. Kaladesh was an interesting storyline with emotional resonance because of the Chandra characterization and growth that we saw there; it also was a clever feint by Tezzeret to take the Planar bridge tech for Bolas' plan. Amonkhet was about Bolas's army factory and the Gatewatch getting pwoned by Bolas, which of necessity was emotionally resonant; add in the Hour of Devastation events and it's EASY to see why the Gatewatch HATES Bolas and has a personal vendetta against him. The slaughter and mystery of the Amonkhet storyline was rather well done as well(except the actual history of Bolas's changing of the plane, nut that's a minor point), adding to the emotional vibrancy of that sotryline. Dominaria was a great throwback storyline that, by weight of the history and the sheer amount of familiarity that most veteran players of MTG have with Dominaria as a plane, made it emotionally resonant but also showed Liliana overcoming her own past with Gideon's help. Bolas's coercion and betrayal of Liliana was executed at a meh level (seriously, there's maybe a paragraph or two depicting Liliana's horror and despair after learning that her Pacts defaulted to Bolas), but at least we could understand Liliana's rationale and emotional reasons for betraying Bolas in War of the Spark. The Core set storyline was not terribly emotionally impactful to me, personally, but it did give context to the history of Bolas and Ugin which was satisfying enough. The Ravnica stories were, in my opinion, freaking awesome first person stories that captured more of Ravnica's culture than the original Ravnica storyline. It helped to give context to Bolas's invasion of Ravnica and COULD have shown how massively devastating it was when he did invade. My point being is that there were several storylines and characters that had significant emotional impact built up for War of the Spark that was simply invalidated (Jace and Vraska), minimized (most of the Gatewatch and the other Planeswalkers featured in WAR), or ommitted (Vivien's backstory, Teferi's reasons for fighting Bolas, Samut's hatred of Bolas, Ajani's fear/hatred of Bolas, the list goes on).
Continuity. Hot damn, but I think this is now just a generally accepted point by the fans of MTG lore. WOTC has a seemingly really hard time in keeping their stories straight. I don't think I need to provide any examples beyond the Test of Metal debacle.
Stakes. I found the WAR novel to be absolutely disappointing in describing or following through with the stakes of Bolas's scheme. I... can't even put words into how many times Wizards has raised the stakes for a plot point and then hand-waved it away.
Kozilek and Ulamog (eternal, PLANE-DEVOURING AND TIME-ALTERING entities that are more akin to forces of nature which operate mostly in the Blind Eternities with just a physical extension being projected to a specific plane) got you down? Call in your your teenage pyromancer and leyline them to cinders (I still get frustrated about this!!).
Bolas about to successfully become as powerful as an old-Walker and thus become an evil Overlord over the entire Multi-Verse? Have a SUBJUGATED and MIND-CONTROLLED crocodile bite him and somehow desparkone of the MOST POWERFUL Planeswalkers of the current storyline. And them put HIM in timeout in his room for good measure!
I can't adequately express how much the WAR novel devastated me personally as a reader and fan of the MTG storyline. Any new story that they decide to release is one that I'm only mildly interested in now; after all, why bother getting emotionally invested in the storyline if they're just gonna f*^& it up anyways?
I think you're right about this, but it goes even deeper than that on a more fundamental level. During the time from original Mirrodin to Tarkir (and in a way pre Mirrodin era as well) the planes were the actors. We were following the fates and drama surrounding planes. The conflict in most (all?) cases affected all inhabitants of a plane. Planeswalkers were agents of change, but not the core of the conflict. However, with the advent of the gatewatch, the camera was increasingly focused on the planeswalkers, single characters. It wasn't "An entire plane wages war against the spirit realm", it was "the Gatewatch is confronting Bolas" etc. at least premise-wise. What Magic forgot to do however was to adjust the stakes. We focused on individual characters but the conflict in the background was still often large scale. There is a sharp disconnect between what we are supposed to care about and what we are shown. Magic still wants to have their cake and eat it too, but it just breaks the stories on a fundamental level. If they want planeswalkers to be the focus, not only narratively but also emotionally, then they should do that. Planes have turned from actors to props and props shouldn't distract from what the actors are doing.
I honestly think this has always been a problem and, quite frankly, it's probably unavoidable when you're dealing with a multiverse. Even fiction that takes place on a single planet often gets scales absurdly wrong. If people can excuse Star Wars for doing this Magic should get a pass too. In fact, compared to Star Wars, Magic is actually handling it really well.
I have to agree with User here. The colour philosophy is not as rigid as you make it sound. I personally like to think as the colours of a person being about what they care about and not (necessarily) what behaviours they exhibit, but then again you have Maro, who is like the official curator of the colour philosophies, say that Sarkhan is blue because he stepped into a time portal so I dunno. Looks like not even Magic is 100% sure what the colours are supposed to indicate. What Magic could do better however, would be to assign colours to characters after creating them, not build characters around colours. This is especially bad with the gatewatch, where they wanted the core members to be the "basic expressions" of the colour pie, but the characters ended up kinda bland and cliche.
There's another thing where I think Magic fails on a more fundamental level: Magic does not understand how or why other fiction is successful. They simply copy it and expect it to work in the framework that Magic provides. To name one thing, Magic has (proudly) adopted the retcon policy of superhero comics, which does not suit Magic, because its stories are too interconnected. What happened in Ixalan had importance in Ravnica, or should have, but didn't. Having a continuous storyline makes the story vulnerable to blatant retcons. You can do them when you have a more or less contained narrative, as is the case with comic books (largely at least). Imagine a story where the objects being talked about change after each sentence. At first the protagonist has a cat. In the next it's a dog. Then the protagonist suddenly is supposed to always have had a different job. That's how Magic reads.
It seems like Wizards is trying to copy the success of other franchises without trying to understand why they are successful. It's like a robot mindlessly copying human behaviour without understanding the underlying contexts.
I'm also fairly certain Magic has become a victim of branding/marketing "infiltrating" the actual production. If you follow the behind the scenes articles, it's fairly obvious from between the lines reading (and sometimes not so much from between the lines) that the planeswalkers are handled like products or brands.
In the end, Magic is a game first and foremost and the story will always take a backseat to the game itself. (Which is why a plane-based narrative tends to work better, as it creates an environmental storytelling which suits the gameplay better.) But the Magic story does not have to be as shallow as it is.
Continuity. Hot damn, but I think this is now just a generally accepted point by the fans of MTG lore. WOTC has a seemingly really hard time in keeping their stories straight. I don't think I need to provide any examples beyond the Test of Metal debacle.
This game should be called really "Retcon: the Gathering", for all the things they ignore / changes / add / each time they try to glue together the past of Magic lore with the current lore just for plot convenience (aka poor writing). (for example I really hate that we have gorgons everywhere since we returned in Ravnica, when in the first Ravnica set they really put the enfasis of how the Sisters of Stone Deeath were the last ravnican gorgons, and Ludmilla was ddomed to be the only one of her species in the plane in the end). Or the elfish suprematist Nissa that loves to experiment with black magic. Or the Gideon that clearly was born in Bant when he was first introduced in a magic trailer. And I could go on for long....This game is actually a real nightmare for true vorthos purists. And I love this game. But internal story consistency is, definitely, not one of his strongest features.
The timescale problem happens pretty much everywhere. Given the level of technology in the Silmarillion, Sauron should just get nuked from orbit in LoTR. It all boils down to creating a cohesive and recognisable world even across long timescales - if you take realistic technological development into account, you might as well be creating a different setting altogether. Similarly, if past Tarkir was radically different from present, it might as well not be called Tarkir at all.
This likely stems partly from the fact that MtG's staff consists mainly of mathematicians rather than psychologists.
From what I gathered most of these guys have a liberal arts degree, or something along the line. Surprisingly enough game design has not much to do with mathematics, so I would be surprised if they were a lot of them in R&D or the story department in particular.
Also give us mathematicians a bit more credit, especially since you should be well aware that a good chuck of psychology is deeply rooted in mathematics (aka statistics). In fact I was always positively surprised how many psychologist are able to follow into the more abstract spheres of mathematics when discussion study design.
But now that I have my pet peeve out of the way... you are mostly right with your assessment.
Mismatch between story and mechanic - This is really something that bothers me, a lot. Summon spells should be an essential part of the story, but they are rarely used for anything. (Usually only of the writer remembers that the character have this ability.)
No sense of scale is unfortunately a really common issue in fantasy literature. Since you usually want to stay in the genre the world has to experience a complete lack of progress.
Overly simplistic philosophy is also true... I actually never understood why red is both about empathy and burning people alive... I mean if you have 5 colors, you could match them up with the Big 5 for example.
* White - Conscientiousness
* Blue - Openness
* Black - Agreeableness (or rather the lack thereof, so Disagreeableness)
* Red - Extraversion
* Green - Neuroticism (again the lack thereof, so Emotional Stability)
Also what others said:
Continuity - I honestly can't remember that Sisay possessed immunity to Magic... and neither she nor Shanna have Hexproof, so it also does not reflect at the cards. Also the constant redcons really make it hard to get invested into characters.
Stakes is also a real issue because Magic essentially needs the plot structure of tele-novellas to keep going ad infinitum. That being said. Most tele-novellas manage their stakes better.
For me Ixalan was really one of the best stories ever told in Magic, and they essentially discarded all of that in WAR... Also the WAR novel is atrocious.
Continuity. Hot damn, but I think this is now just a generally accepted point by the fans of MTG lore. WOTC has a seemingly really hard time in keeping their stories straight. I don't think I need to provide any examples beyond the Test of Metal debacle.
This game should be called really "Retcon: the Gathering", for all the things they ignore / changes / add / each time they try to glue together the past of Magic lore with the current lore just for plot convenience (aka poor writing). (for example I really hate that we have gorgons everywhere since we returned in Ravnica, when in the first Ravnica set they really put the enfasis of how the Sisters of Stone Deeath were the last ravnican gorgons, and Ludmilla was ddomed to be the only one of her species in the plane in the end). Or the elfish suprematist Nissa that loves to experiment with black magic. Or the Gideon that clearly was born in Bant when he was first introduced in a magic trailer. And I could go on for long....This game is actually a real nightmare for true vorthos purists. And I love this game. But internal story consistency is, definitely, not one of his strongest features.
Just a heads up that was never the case. That trailer was made without consulting with WoTC story team and was always denied by creative as canon since it dropped. Gideon was also introduced first in the purifying fire novel and card form in Rise of the Eldrazi, the trailer came two years after.
Also how much of an elf racist was Nissa in Teeth of Akoum? (I haven't read it since people say it was awful and most of has been considered non-canon) Most of that info came from her duel of the planeswalker deck bio if I remember right.
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I really don't know what they wanted to do with Vivien... When she was introduced, with her vendetta against Bolas, she seemed to would have been a key character in bringing down the dragon. We even got a story for her, but not her origin story, which was basically only in her bio. As others have already said, why showing her on Ixalan? Is she is the only survivor of Skalla, show us Skalla, tell us what happened to it...
This would have probably matter less if her role in WAR would have been major, but she did nothing against Bolas, which we were told was her nemesis.. Why create this character, then? You don't show her origin, and you don't close her storyline...
I'm not even sure she was supposed to be a "good" girl, an antihero, or simply a neutral character. If her portrayal in Unbowed was supposed to show her like an hero, it failed miserably. So, once again... why we had Vivien? She is a little more than another Kasmina.
The timescale problem happens pretty much everywhere. Given the level of technology in the Silmarillion, Sauron should just get nuked from orbit in LoTR. It all boils down to creating a cohesive and recognisable world even across long timescales - if you take realistic technological development into account, you might as well be creating a different setting altogether. Similarly, if past Tarkir was radically different from present, it might as well not be called Tarkir at all.
I always go with the "magic inhibits technological advancement" argument. Its most directly addressed in the Harry Potter universe so I'll use it as an example. Basically, the existence of magic makes technological advancement much less likely, because people tend to take the easiest path when solving problems, and magic is the easiest path. Magic lets you warp reality to your needs or desires. Sometimes it takes a lot of training, sometimes it relies on innate ability, but either way magic users have an amazing advantage over people trying to solve problems with ingenuity and invention. Because magic is about warping the rules of nature, people don't bother studying the rules of nature, because why learn how the world works when you can change it instead? That's why the wizards in Harry Potter are pretty backwards when it comes to technology despite the muggle world advancing as normal. The problem with magic is that it only solves the immediate problem and you don't learn anything from it. In the real world, knowledge gained from solving a problem helps solve other problems, and technological advancement has a snowball effect. The more we learn, the better equipped we are to learn more. The more we create, the easier it is to create more. So you create a sensing spell to detect enemy wizards, and your left with a sensing spell, but you create radar to detect enemy planes, and you have something that can be further developed and applied across fields.
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The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
I have a lot of problems with modern Magic storytelling, but there's one big one that completely kills it.
I'm typically pretty easy to please when it comes to storytelling. I'm one of those folks who can mostly turn off their brain and just enjoy whatever's being put in front of me - I may indeed notice the flaws, but I can more or less ignore them. The one flaw that I cannot ignore, however, is when the story is boring. I am reading/watching/playing/whatever through the story to be entertained, so if it isn't entertaining, then it has failed at its whole purpose for existing.
That's my biggest gripe with modern Magic storytelling - it's the blandest, most by-the-numbers pile of nothing. But at the same time, it's trying to present itself as this brand new, awesomely epic, wave of the future. It's trying so hard, but it has nothing worth trying hard for.
It's like a badly baked potato. You can complain about all these little problems that it has, which people have mentioned - and yeah, these are definitely problems that should be fixed and could be done a whole lot better - but even if they were fixed, you'd still just be left with a baked potato. It's almost not even worth getting angry at. There's nothing more upsetting than wasted potential, but it just seems like the story, as it stands, has no potential to waste.
Of course, then you have the whole argument of whether it's better to be forgettably bland or memorably bad, but that's a whole other thing.
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I do not doubt that in terms of mechanics, MtG is a fantastic (albeit imperfect) game. However, even to this day, MtG seems to struggle to produce decent stories: I used to read the weekly stories, but not anymore because the writings are, as many have pointed out, less than ideal. I have lately heard about the War of the Spark novel. WoS's trailer was very well-liked on Youtube, but the novel ends up... less than stellar. The review scores were at best mediocre. Based on the above, my impression is that WotC is trying to make good MtG stories. This is certainly a laudable sentiment, but they seem to struggle in achieving this goal. In fact, MtG's storytelling seems unusually bad compared to most other major gaming franchise. This led me to ponder over the question: why are MtG stories not good? As someone who has dabbled in creative writing, here are some problems I notice with MtG's storytelling in general:
1. Mismatch between story and mechanic - a game's story needs to align with its gameplay mechanics. E.g., a shooter video game will most likely have a story based around war or other armed conflicts, in order to create the rationale of "why these people are shooting at each other". However, there seems to be a mismatch between MtG stories and its mechanics: MtG stories tend to resemble Harry Potter - with the characters mainly using spells against their enemies. On the contrary, when actually playing a game of MtG, we player are primary sending some sort of (often magical) creatures to fight our opponents, which brings to mind a story about large-scale war or political conflict, a la Game of Thrones - in actual MtG gameplay, we players rely primarily on creatures, not spells. This likely creates a mismatch between MtG's story and its gameplay. I think WoTC should seriously consider changing the kind of stories they tell with MtG.
2. No sense of scale - MtG's writers seem to have very little sense of scale, both in terms of time and space. In the Tarkir block, for instance, Sarkhan went back in time 1,200 years... and there was little changes in clothing styles, languages, and architecture between Khans and Fate Reforged. Anyone who has studied the least bit of history would know how implausible this is. This isn't an isolated case, either: similar things happened with the other planes, somehow, things remained mostly unchanged on Ravnica for 10,000 years; there was surprisingly little technological advancement in Dominaria across millennia, etc..
On the space side, I don't think it sounds very realistic to conquer a planet-sized world within a matter of years (as happened in Scars of Mirrodin, Amonkhet, and Ravnica), e.g., now, how logistically realistic is this, a city-sized place (Amonkhet) producing an army large enough to conquer a planet-sized world (Ravnica) within just a few decades? The entirely of Scars of Mirrodin seemed to happen over a few months (Elspeth barely aged). For your reference, the Mongol Empire, the largest empire in human history, took several decades to build, and it barely covered most of Eurasia, let alone the whole planet. IMO, good stories do not up their scales endlessly, e.g., Game of Thrones took place in a continent-sized setting, Harry Potter took place in a country-sized one. A good writer chooses a scale that fits the needs of their story, while endless upping the scale to the point of implausibility sounds more like 13-year-olds who are desperately trying to sound cool.
3. Overly simplistic philosophy - while their attempt at a color wheel philosophy is laudable, I don't think it does a very good job of capturing human behaviors. I am doing a PhD in behavioral science, and when I read the stuffs in color wheel philosophy, I find myself repeatedly screaming "mind and behaviors don't work like that". E.g., red is supposedly the "empathy color", but it is also supposedly associated with sensation seeking. In reality, these two don't go well together. If anything, people who are highly sensation-seeking tends to be so *because* they lack emotions, they don't feel fear or anxiety, making them unusually bold. In fact, they are often mildly sociopathic; Meanwhile, ivory tower academics and sly merchants are both supposed to be the domain of blue, but it is obvious that the two are less than compatible.
I think the problem here is that they are trying to cram too many things into just 5 boxes, resulting in each boxes containing things that have at best symbolic associations with each other. Human mind and behavior have much more variations than what just 5 boxes can encompass. It is also jarring to see how all red characters seem to behave in a particular way, all black characters seem to behave in certain other ways, etc. I would say that there are many different reasons a person may become a pyromancer: maybe they are sensation-seeker borderline pyromaniac, maybe they actually a cold personality but born with fire power, etc. The simplistic way MtG's color-wheel views human mind and behaviors, I strongly suspect, might have contributed to many of MtG's characters being unrelatable.
This likely stems partly from the fact that MtG's staff consists mainly of mathematicians rather than psychologists.
Conclusion:
These are some of my thoughts. I am not a professional writer, so I might be wrong. What are your thoughts? Why does MtG fail to produce good stories? Please discuss.
While you are right on the whole time scale about cultures evolving you completely missed on the area scale. Scars of Mirrodin is the only event that you mentioned that takes place across an entire plane, the only other event MTG has really done this on is Zendikar. The events of the Scars block take place over many years, they never really say but the hints dropped lead you to believe at least decades. The planeswalkers show up for just a few weeks at the very end after the entire war is over. Amonkhet was already devastated to being just a single city when we were introduced, we have no reference at all to who it became like this so trying to say it becoming like this was unrealistically done is at best grasping at straws. At no point was invading all of Ravnica the plan. Bolas invaded a single district in Ravnica, something along the size of a major US city like Chicago or New York. The plan also was never to conquer and hold the place but to merely create a crisis in which to enact the rest of his plan.
And you have completely missed on the color philosophy. When someone is a color that doesn't' mean they are every aspect of that color, it means they are an aspect of that color. As for characters of the same color acting the same way, again you are so far off I have to question if you actually know any of the story. Few characters are mono-color and even the few that are act very differently. The Color Wheel is one of the most complex lenses to view behavior and thoughts that for you to believe it's simple reflects your lack of understanding of it.
Though you do have some points about why their stories fail. A significant factor is that they are telling the story in different places, at different times and they can't seem to sync up. Though I questions which other gaming franchises are doing this right? This is a legitimate question about which ones you think are doing well because I don't know of any.
First, I want to recognize that Nicky Drayden's writing was Fan-f***ing-tastic. In conjunction with Brandon Sanderson (of whom I'm an unashamed fan-boy), WOTC had some stories that gave me hope for the first time in years that their characterization, plot synchronicity, and pacing would be incredible. I'm devastated to see that these writers are the exception, rather thn the future. I respect Weisman as an author, but someone in the WAR thread indicated that the story read like an outline with names filled in after he had received the information and I agree, after reading the book. Sorry that you had terrible information to work with, Weisman.
I think my biggest concerns about WOTC story-telling capabilities are these:
For example, Vivien Reid's backstory was literarily flamboyant, seeming to be jammed with as many erudite and esoteric words as possible (seriously, how many times can you read the word 'cloying' without feeling like the story itself is cloying? bleh), but more importantly it didn't really seem to matter. As a reader, having just finished the well-executed Ixalan block story with its awesome adventure/treasure quest and the Jace/Vraska romance (which I totally supported), Vivien's story just doesn't really matter to me anymore. Ixalan is done, tied off, concluded, and in a satisfactory way too. The Vivien gets captured and saves a dying dinosaur in her backstory, that they wrote 3 articles for, and her saving a dinosaur on a plane that already had its major storyline seems to be useless/fluff/irrelevant, an unwarranted and undesired extension of the Ixalan plane that I'm already happy parting with as a reader. What would have been MORE interesting is understanding Vivien's true origin story; why the hell did Nicol Bolas devastate her world, how did he do it, how did Vivien survive, etc. THESE kind of questions are narratively compelling while also building emotional weight towards the event set, War of the Spark. Any scene that featured Vivien Reid would have been more engaging and impactful because we understand her absolutely valid and emotionally charged reasons for hating Bolas and wanting to eradicate him. But no, Wizards missed this. Instead, Vivien's an eco-terrorist(?) who's out for revenge against Bolas because he slaughtered her plane for unspecified reasons... which he's already done before, presumably to countless other worlds. This example falls flat, at least from my perspective, and was a waste of words and time as a reader.
As another example, Wizards also completely invalidated the truly emotionally significant characterization and growth of both Jace and Vraska at the end of the Ixalan block storyline with their War of the Spark novel. Jace went from an emotionally stunted and vulnerable boy (for all intents and purposes) to becoming a young man who had finally learned to accept his true history via head trauma. His acceptance of that history, and the ugly side of him that it implies, was great characterization and growth that reflects the human journey that we ALL engage in outside of that fiction. And to see Vraska opening up her own vulnerability to Jace and to see her begin to trust others again was, honestly, a beautiful thing to see; this kind of healing that she experiences is massively emotional, especially for anyone who knows/is a trauma victim.
Now, if we look at the general storyline, from Shadows Over Innsitrad onwards, the writing and stories were actively building towards their event set, War of the Spark. Kaladesh was an interesting storyline with emotional resonance because of the Chandra characterization and growth that we saw there; it also was a clever feint by Tezzeret to take the Planar bridge tech for Bolas' plan. Amonkhet was about Bolas's army factory and the Gatewatch getting pwoned by Bolas, which of necessity was emotionally resonant; add in the Hour of Devastation events and it's EASY to see why the Gatewatch HATES Bolas and has a personal vendetta against him. The slaughter and mystery of the Amonkhet storyline was rather well done as well(except the actual history of Bolas's changing of the plane, nut that's a minor point), adding to the emotional vibrancy of that sotryline. Dominaria was a great throwback storyline that, by weight of the history and the sheer amount of familiarity that most veteran players of MTG have with Dominaria as a plane, made it emotionally resonant but also showed Liliana overcoming her own past with Gideon's help. Bolas's coercion and betrayal of Liliana was executed at a meh level (seriously, there's maybe a paragraph or two depicting Liliana's horror and despair after learning that her Pacts defaulted to Bolas), but at least we could understand Liliana's rationale and emotional reasons for betraying Bolas in War of the Spark. The Core set storyline was not terribly emotionally impactful to me, personally, but it did give context to the history of Bolas and Ugin which was satisfying enough. The Ravnica stories were, in my opinion, freaking awesome first person stories that captured more of Ravnica's culture than the original Ravnica storyline. It helped to give context to Bolas's invasion of Ravnica and COULD have shown how massively devastating it was when he did invade. My point being is that there were several storylines and characters that had significant emotional impact built up for War of the Spark that was simply invalidated (Jace and Vraska), minimized (most of the Gatewatch and the other Planeswalkers featured in WAR), or ommitted (Vivien's backstory, Teferi's reasons for fighting Bolas, Samut's hatred of Bolas, Ajani's fear/hatred of Bolas, the list goes on).
Kozilek and Ulamog (eternal, PLANE-DEVOURING AND TIME-ALTERING entities that are more akin to forces of nature which operate mostly in the Blind Eternities with just a physical extension being projected to a specific plane) got you down? Call in your your teenage pyromancer and leyline them to cinders (I still get frustrated about this!!).
Giant, BIOLOGY ALTERING, MIND-CONTROLLING, EVEN-MORE-POWERFUL-THAN-KOZILEK-AND-ULAMOG spaghetti monster trying to alter the fundamental nature of an ENTIRE PLANE problem? lol Emrakul really just wants to take a time-out on the dark-side of the Innistrad moon(huh?). Unstoppably mind-controlling and biologically mutating everything got really tiring so she needed a rest. Thanks for making it possible, Tamiyo!
Bolas about to successfully become as powerful as an old-Walker and thus become an evil Overlord over the entire Multi-Verse? Have a SUBJUGATED and MIND-CONTROLLED crocodile bite him and somehow despark one of the MOST POWERFUL Planeswalkers of the current storyline. And them put HIM in timeout in his room for good measure!
I can't adequately express how much the WAR novel devastated me personally as a reader and fan of the MTG storyline. Any new story that they decide to release is one that I'm only mildly interested in now; after all, why bother getting emotionally invested in the storyline if they're just gonna f*^& it up anyways?
UB Dralnu, Lich Lord
RBW [Primer]-Kaalia of the Vast
BUG [Primer]-Tasigur, the Golden Fang
GWU [Primer]-Arcades, the Strategist
WUB Primer-Aminatou, the Fateshifter
UBR Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
I think you're right about this, but it goes even deeper than that on a more fundamental level. During the time from original Mirrodin to Tarkir (and in a way pre Mirrodin era as well) the planes were the actors. We were following the fates and drama surrounding planes. The conflict in most (all?) cases affected all inhabitants of a plane. Planeswalkers were agents of change, but not the core of the conflict. However, with the advent of the gatewatch, the camera was increasingly focused on the planeswalkers, single characters. It wasn't "An entire plane wages war against the spirit realm", it was "the Gatewatch is confronting Bolas" etc. at least premise-wise. What Magic forgot to do however was to adjust the stakes. We focused on individual characters but the conflict in the background was still often large scale. There is a sharp disconnect between what we are supposed to care about and what we are shown. Magic still wants to have their cake and eat it too, but it just breaks the stories on a fundamental level. If they want planeswalkers to be the focus, not only narratively but also emotionally, then they should do that. Planes have turned from actors to props and props shouldn't distract from what the actors are doing.
I honestly think this has always been a problem and, quite frankly, it's probably unavoidable when you're dealing with a multiverse. Even fiction that takes place on a single planet often gets scales absurdly wrong. If people can excuse Star Wars for doing this Magic should get a pass too. In fact, compared to Star Wars, Magic is actually handling it really well.
I have to agree with User here. The colour philosophy is not as rigid as you make it sound. I personally like to think as the colours of a person being about what they care about and not (necessarily) what behaviours they exhibit, but then again you have Maro, who is like the official curator of the colour philosophies, say that Sarkhan is blue because he stepped into a time portal so I dunno. Looks like not even Magic is 100% sure what the colours are supposed to indicate. What Magic could do better however, would be to assign colours to characters after creating them, not build characters around colours. This is especially bad with the gatewatch, where they wanted the core members to be the "basic expressions" of the colour pie, but the characters ended up kinda bland and cliche.
There's another thing where I think Magic fails on a more fundamental level: Magic does not understand how or why other fiction is successful. They simply copy it and expect it to work in the framework that Magic provides. To name one thing, Magic has (proudly) adopted the retcon policy of superhero comics, which does not suit Magic, because its stories are too interconnected. What happened in Ixalan had importance in Ravnica, or should have, but didn't. Having a continuous storyline makes the story vulnerable to blatant retcons. You can do them when you have a more or less contained narrative, as is the case with comic books (largely at least). Imagine a story where the objects being talked about change after each sentence. At first the protagonist has a cat. In the next it's a dog. Then the protagonist suddenly is supposed to always have had a different job. That's how Magic reads.
It seems like Wizards is trying to copy the success of other franchises without trying to understand why they are successful. It's like a robot mindlessly copying human behaviour without understanding the underlying contexts.
I'm also fairly certain Magic has become a victim of branding/marketing "infiltrating" the actual production. If you follow the behind the scenes articles, it's fairly obvious from between the lines reading (and sometimes not so much from between the lines) that the planeswalkers are handled like products or brands.
In the end, Magic is a game first and foremost and the story will always take a backseat to the game itself. (Which is why a plane-based narrative tends to work better, as it creates an environmental storytelling which suits the gameplay better.) But the Magic story does not have to be as shallow as it is.
This game should be called really "Retcon: the Gathering", for all the things they ignore / changes / add / each time they try to glue together the past of Magic lore with the current lore just for plot convenience (aka poor writing). (for example I really hate that we have gorgons everywhere since we returned in Ravnica, when in the first Ravnica set they really put the enfasis of how the Sisters of Stone Deeath were the last ravnican gorgons, and Ludmilla was ddomed to be the only one of her species in the plane in the end). Or the elfish suprematist Nissa that loves to experiment with black magic. Or the Gideon that clearly was born in Bant when he was first introduced in a magic trailer. And I could go on for long....This game is actually a real nightmare for true vorthos purists. And I love this game. But internal story consistency is, definitely, not one of his strongest features.
From what I gathered most of these guys have a liberal arts degree, or something along the line. Surprisingly enough game design has not much to do with mathematics, so I would be surprised if they were a lot of them in R&D or the story department in particular.
Also give us mathematicians a bit more credit, especially since you should be well aware that a good chuck of psychology is deeply rooted in mathematics (aka statistics). In fact I was always positively surprised how many psychologist are able to follow into the more abstract spheres of mathematics when discussion study design.
But now that I have my pet peeve out of the way... you are mostly right with your assessment.
Mismatch between story and mechanic - This is really something that bothers me, a lot. Summon spells should be an essential part of the story, but they are rarely used for anything. (Usually only of the writer remembers that the character have this ability.)
No sense of scale is unfortunately a really common issue in fantasy literature. Since you usually want to stay in the genre the world has to experience a complete lack of progress.
Overly simplistic philosophy is also true... I actually never understood why red is both about empathy and burning people alive... I mean if you have 5 colors, you could match them up with the Big 5 for example.
* White - Conscientiousness
* Blue - Openness
* Black - Agreeableness (or rather the lack thereof, so Disagreeableness)
* Red - Extraversion
* Green - Neuroticism (again the lack thereof, so Emotional Stability)
Also what others said:
Continuity - I honestly can't remember that Sisay possessed immunity to Magic... and neither she nor Shanna have Hexproof, so it also does not reflect at the cards. Also the constant redcons really make it hard to get invested into characters.
Stakes is also a real issue because Magic essentially needs the plot structure of tele-novellas to keep going ad infinitum. That being said. Most tele-novellas manage their stakes better.
For me Ixalan was really one of the best stories ever told in Magic, and they essentially discarded all of that in WAR... Also the WAR novel is atrocious.
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For the great Miss Y!
Just a heads up that was never the case. That trailer was made without consulting with WoTC story team and was always denied by creative as canon since it dropped. Gideon was also introduced first in the purifying fire novel and card form in Rise of the Eldrazi, the trailer came two years after.
Also how much of an elf racist was Nissa in Teeth of Akoum? (I haven't read it since people say it was awful and most of has been considered non-canon) Most of that info came from her duel of the planeswalker deck bio if I remember right.
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
This would have probably matter less if her role in WAR would have been major, but she did nothing against Bolas, which we were told was her nemesis.. Why create this character, then? You don't show her origin, and you don't close her storyline...
I'm not even sure she was supposed to be a "good" girl, an antihero, or simply a neutral character. If her portrayal in Unbowed was supposed to show her like an hero, it failed miserably. So, once again... why we had Vivien? She is a little more than another Kasmina.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I always go with the "magic inhibits technological advancement" argument. Its most directly addressed in the Harry Potter universe so I'll use it as an example. Basically, the existence of magic makes technological advancement much less likely, because people tend to take the easiest path when solving problems, and magic is the easiest path. Magic lets you warp reality to your needs or desires. Sometimes it takes a lot of training, sometimes it relies on innate ability, but either way magic users have an amazing advantage over people trying to solve problems with ingenuity and invention. Because magic is about warping the rules of nature, people don't bother studying the rules of nature, because why learn how the world works when you can change it instead? That's why the wizards in Harry Potter are pretty backwards when it comes to technology despite the muggle world advancing as normal. The problem with magic is that it only solves the immediate problem and you don't learn anything from it. In the real world, knowledge gained from solving a problem helps solve other problems, and technological advancement has a snowball effect. The more we learn, the better equipped we are to learn more. The more we create, the easier it is to create more. So you create a sensing spell to detect enemy wizards, and your left with a sensing spell, but you create radar to detect enemy planes, and you have something that can be further developed and applied across fields.
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
I'm typically pretty easy to please when it comes to storytelling. I'm one of those folks who can mostly turn off their brain and just enjoy whatever's being put in front of me - I may indeed notice the flaws, but I can more or less ignore them. The one flaw that I cannot ignore, however, is when the story is boring. I am reading/watching/playing/whatever through the story to be entertained, so if it isn't entertaining, then it has failed at its whole purpose for existing.
That's my biggest gripe with modern Magic storytelling - it's the blandest, most by-the-numbers pile of nothing. But at the same time, it's trying to present itself as this brand new, awesomely epic, wave of the future. It's trying so hard, but it has nothing worth trying hard for.
It's like a badly baked potato. You can complain about all these little problems that it has, which people have mentioned - and yeah, these are definitely problems that should be fixed and could be done a whole lot better - but even if they were fixed, you'd still just be left with a baked potato. It's almost not even worth getting angry at. There's nothing more upsetting than wasted potential, but it just seems like the story, as it stands, has no potential to waste.
Of course, then you have the whole argument of whether it's better to be forgettably bland or memorably bad, but that's a whole other thing.