Does anybody actually like the plot and lore of Magic?
>>94501676Ajani getting so mad he punted Nicol Bolas off of his planet was pretty funny.
>>94501676no, amonkhet being a literal army breeding ground was a neat idea, and into war of the spark seemed decent, that all came undone because Nikki B was retarded enough and never thought he would be double crossed... like what the fuck did you expect bringing a magical undead army around another necromancer that has proven she cannot be trusted in any manner outside her own personal goals...
I hate the planeswalkers. It's just not interesting how these guys go between the different planes like literal gods. When the story is focused at a smaller scale it's more interesting and some of the planes are cool with interesting worldbuilding but unfortunately WOTC is obsessed with making Avengerslop
I stopped following it in mercadian masks.
>>94501676Not since Weatherlight ended.
>>94501676The only thing really interesting about MtG is the visuals and creative ideas behind some of the planes. It's a shame its tied to the waist by a system like D&D.
>>94503699Why do oldfags get nostalgic over Weatherlight when it was hated by everyone while it was going on?
>>94503720Selective Nostalgia.
>>94503720>>94503728That's just how it is, everyone hated Kamigawa then but in 2024 it was a big event when it came back. Everyone hated Mirrodin too but now it's one of the mainstay planes.
>>94503720Same reason newfags liked Jace before he was plapping Vraska and got character development. I started around Urza's so I liked the weatherlight crew, and it was a serious upset in art/direction of the lore.>>94501676I like it. With anything you don't own you learn to ignore or get over anything shit in something you like.
>>94503759Man, I loved Kamigawa and all the short stories as they were coming out.Also really dug Invasion and the Weatherlight crew.Guess being a teen and not being on the internet to join the group think has its pluses.
>>94501676I remember only liking Kamigawa and whatever Phyrexian related lore there was.
>>94501676I know an autistic guy who's obsessed with it. And I don't mean "autistic" in the slangy way that most of us are, I mean *really* autistic.
>>94503384the part that caught him off guard was the one moment of her acting AGAINST her own personal goals (for which she suffered no consequences because gideon ex machina).
>>94503759I'm aware. It's literally a thing for most franchises that have existed for a long time. At some point people are going to do the mental dance of saying the past thing they hated was actually great because the new thing sucks for them until they do the dance sometime later.I actually like most of the planes unironically even though Kaladesh is rather bland in spite of the cool visuals.
>>94503759People hated Kamigawa the set but liked Kamigawa the planeEveryone liked Mirrodin the plane but fucking hated how busted Mirrodin was
>>94503759>Everyone hated Mirrodin too but now it's one of the mainstay planes.Glissa being a green-skinned barefoot elf slut with fat tits who barely wore clothes redeemed Mirrodin for me. Sadly when they Phyrexianized her she became ugly and started wearing shoes.
>>94503759Everybody loved kamigawaThe reason everyone hated mirrodin was because of how it played, has nothing to do with the lore. We all liked the plane.
>>94503720I liked it went it was running. it only go dumb around the everybody dies shit. But Tempest was a pretty fun set and story and then the whole prepping for invasion.
>>94504126Seconding this. I hated that they went for that "subvert expectations" shit so everyone just died stupid pointless deaths for shock value.
>>94501676I like some of the older planes, back when WotC did a decent job at selling the idea of a fantasy world. The plot has almost always been hit or miss. Though it and the planes/lore have had a lot more misses lately.
>>94501676The Brother's War and the Weatherlight Saga, including the old phyexians where the peak of Magic, despite it's writing flaws, it had a great concept. But anything before War of the Spark can be considered acceptable but I do also miss the mistery that 90's Magic had in their lore, some characters were only mentioned in flavortext but rarely seen on cards, what ever happened to Shauku Endbringer? Where did Baron Sengir go after entering a portal with an army of undeads and vampires and what are even people on Mercadia or Ulgrotha doing which we only saw a bit in March of the Machines?I also prepare Yawgmoth over Bolas as MTG's biggest villain, just cause a doctor that turned into a machinegod who's not always seen on cards is much interesting then a planeswalker dragon.
>>94501676I did until a few years ago, but they've really been trying their damnedest to push me away with shit like Thunder Junction, Duskmourn, and now a goddamn racetrack.
>>94501676>plot and lore of Magic
>>94506586>Magic the Gathering is an Traditional Game?
>>94504679Thunder Junction is the most disappointed I have ever been with a new plane. And I love Westerns. They just didn't give it anything truly unique to itself.
>>94512515The problem with Thunder Junction is that it did not commit to the bit. It doesn't actually go full into a western plot and engage with any western tropes or concepts, so it's just Recognizable Magic IP Characters on holiday playing fancy dress. Same thing with MKM, it couldn't decide what kind of detective story it wanted to be and so ended up being none thanks to a fundamental lack of specific creative vision
I liked Neon Kamigawa's story. Kaldheim too. In general the "Phyrexian Praetors sent to planes to perform special missions" did a great job selling Phyrexia as a threat. My gripes with the following invasion was how absurdly compressed it was (even if All Will Be One had top tier design direction) and that Slobad and Glissa did not meet or interact even once.Seriously what the fuck was up with that. Why bother bringing Slobad back if he's not going to do anything at all. Where the fuck is the Mirari.
>>94512722MKM is also a casualty of the fact... you just can't do Ravnica in one set. It felt like it bled over into OTJ almost out of necessity (except not nearly as seamlessly as WAR did) - one set's just not big enough to hit all 10 guilds appreciably. 2 is dubious. As much as I love Ravnica, OTJ being after MKM kind of killed its chances at being a unique plane in its own right.
>>94512753Slobad retcon still bothers me. He became an oldwalker, gave that up selflessly as the most noble goblin ever. Then is killed by other stupid goblins. This would all have been at least 200 years ago.
>>94512753All of it is too compressed now. Has been arguably since they abandoned blocks. 2 was a good place to leave it - you introduce the plane and story, then you conclude in the second set. Give people time to read and chew on the lore rather than bombarding them with a whole new setting every few months. 1 set in between UB sets is going to be so fucking miserable for lore. I hate it.I'd even not mind 3 UB sets a year nearly as much (from a lore perspective - keeping track of standard is going to become nearly impossible very soon regardless) if the Magic IP sets were in a 2-set block cadence. 1 set is just not enough for a good story.
>>94501676During the entirety of the Weatherlight Saga the lore and stories were fucking BALLIN'. They weren't high literature but they were entertaining enough and tied in to the card lore and so on.
>>94503720Barring a handful of cards the whole block was bad, but the books were fun and people acknowledged that back then.
Is it worth reading the Mirrodin books?
>>94513320They're not high literature by any means but they're a fun read if you're into MTG and it's a nice look into the way Mirrodin was that doesn't really come with a lore summary
>TQYeah picrel was fun back in the day. Steep drop-off in quality after that
>>94513386Oh and this one was great. Garth One-Eye was a tough act to follow.
Good MTG Lore:>old dominaria lore up until the capeshit of Weatherlight saga>Alara lore>Lorwyn/Shadowmoor lore>Mirrodin Lore up until New Phyrexia>original Innistrad lore (Eldritch moon was okay)That's it desu the rest is trash.
>>94501676early magic was pretty original, and i appreciate what it was attempting. Ravnica's original books were pretty awesome, and that remains my favorite setting. I liked the planeswalkers more, even if it has an avengers vibe, it's taking the cool parts of that sort of thing and was pretty cool. After war of the spark (which had an absolutely shit novel and cool cinematic trailers) i lost interest and it's really gone down the tubes with its recent settings and universes beyond shit. haven't given WOTC a penny since 2021 on any front, and i don't regret it. Maybe a certain billionaire will buy them out soon and force a change, but till something like that happens i'll just appreciate what it was.
Everything went to shit the moment Jace became a main character.
>>94513571Buddy if he buys them out he's gonna leave Crispy Cocks there, and Crispy Cocks is most of what's wrong with current Hasbro congealed into the vague shape of a human.
>>94501676Some of it is really interesting and good. Some of it is not.
>>94513498>didn't include original Ravnica loreISHYGDDT
>>94501676Magic's lore is only good when you're getting small glimpses into its worlds through card art and flavor text. That's where it really grabs your imagination with the possibilities and wonder. The moment you actually read into it, you'll quickly realize it can't possibly live up to what you had imagined and is 90% mediocre slop.
>>94501676No
>>94512753>Why bother bringing Slobad back if he's not going to do anything at all.Bringing back old characters to immediately fuck with them (Ajani killing Jaya, Slobad being compleated) is a particularly lame-ass way to show that stakes are really really high.>>94503627The biggest problem with 'Walkers is that they remove agency from denizens of the world. Wouldn't it be infinitely better if dying Melira used her powers to cure Glissa and Slobad instead of Ajani and Nissa?
>>94516609Melira got done so dirty.>Bringing back old characters to immediately fuck with themPart of it is turnover - the people who dredge up these characters had little to nothing to do with their creation, and MTG lore coherency has been particularly messy post-WAR. Very compartmentalized it seems, not much communication, and a loss of the people who originally created and cared about the characters.New people come in, they want to tell THEIR story with THEIR characters, but rather than create a story with new, good characters that's meaningful on its own, they grab random bits of lore they think people have forgotten and do a nostalgia bait-and-switch in the delusional hope watching old favorites die for nothing will make people like their new OCs. It's using a marketing tool to write for you, and it's a recipe for characters people only remember if they're particularly clumsily written.It's incredible how lucky Vraska has been in that context, but it's largely because she's vital to Jace's current characterization (I remember pre-Ixalan Jace; he was barely a character at all, more like a neckbeard's 'super brain mastermind' blank-slate fantasy self-insert - basically what the most narcissistic control player you know thinks he would be in-universe).But for every Vraska there's dozens of examples like Nahiri, who WotC seemingly only pulls into narratives to torment. Yes she (for some inexplicable reason) kicked that lady off a fucking cliff (???) in the incomprehensible narrative mess that was Zendikar Rising, but the poor woman is clearly mentally unwell and every time we see her the story seems to delight in giving her more reasons to be....Actually, now that I think about it, bringing Nahiri back just to kill her next time might just be merciful. She's a particularly egregious example of this, and she was AN OLDWALKER (until her latest round of narrative torture, that is). Funnily enough she likely now agrees with you about planeswalkers.
>>94513983My mistake. OG Ravnica was good as well.
>>94503627Walkers were great in the olden days when they were more mad divinity/sentient natural disaster and storylines were more focused around how the people of a plane had to respond to the machinations of a Walker or how someone with that kind of power becomes detached from their humanity and thinks in a different dimension.But then they Marvelized them and now they're just your retarded friend's 10th level CN wizard from your DND campaign.
>>94513498mfw the entire history of feminist magic the trans-gathering is erased with a flick of brush
Yes, when they actually wrote books it was good.I just finished the first book where Jace appears Agents of Artifice. And I recall at the time people saying it wasn't good, and I mean comparing that book to all of literature (Dracula, The Hobbit, Harry potter, Don Quixote, Catch-22) it doesn't compare. However as an enjoyable and cohesive story that is fun to read? Heck yeah, it checks all those boxes.I've been reading and re-reading all of the MtG novels over the last ... year? Alot of the books are dare I say. Actually good. ***>>94503720*** Yeah. Currently reading through this. I finished Mercadian mask, and the Urza blocks. I recall loving it as a kid. It's ... not great. The Urza's blocks have some good moments, and some great ideas, and are kinda important to have as a foundation for the rest of the lore, but oof, that writing sometimes...Gerrard and the Weatherlight stuff? eeeeeh....>>94501676The CURRENT lore and plot?What lore and plot?They fucking show up somewhere, solve and issue, good guys win, bigoted non-relatable bad guys loose, and the heroes fuck off to another world with no impact, no import, and no lasting effects.They hint at a "Big event" and every 5 sets the "big event" happens, but it's basically written the same al all the lead up stories. No impact, no import, and no real lasting effects other then people talk about it sometimes, but nothing has actually changed.
>>94501676I liked the Weatherlight saga. Nu-shit can fuck off.
>>94523458>>94501676The first Ravnica book? I would actually rank it along side "Real books" it's a fantasy detective story and it's really good. Like actually good enough I would recommend it to even people who've never played MtG. No prior knowledge required.The second book is also quite good, not as good as the first, but a good follow up story.Third book kinda drops the ball. It's quite bad. Thankfully all the books are complete stories that just build on the previous. So you can stop at the second book and still have a complete story and full character archs.
>>94503384It all fell apart because WotC are retarded and can't write for shit. If anything, Bolas was completely justified wanting to radically reduce Planeswalker cancer from the game, to the point where even WotC themselves agreed OOC.
>>94523540It was such a letdown that the only named walkers to die in the War of the Spark were Gideon and some cringe anarchist who no one gave a shit about.
>>94505236See the first two? I'm ok with. It introduces her as "Le Fantasma Assassino " in her two relevant sets. That's fine. In fact conspiracy was more bent on how "Cool and smart" Marchesa was. Kaya was just a bit character, hired muscle.Pic #3 is technically Pre-WarSpark. Despite the Cards making her seem like the biggest badass ever, that particular story beat shows how in that moment, Kaya is the biggest and most easy manipulated dummy to ever live. What you think should happen, exactly happens. You take on the Obzedat? You become FUCKED. Your life, your soul, your obligations, what you own, who you are. You are fucked.Wow. Great, great, great setup.Followed by the disastrous War of the spark by a different writer. All those problems we took a half chapter to explain how fucked Kaya is? Yeah, just wave them off in one sentence. No lead up. She just "determines" them away.Pic #4-6. Yeah... yeah... and yeah... It's less an imagine of "how badass she is". More like the rapid decline of a good character concept.I don't think there is an imagine for it but that one scene in dominaria united where teferi literally says he's grooming her to become leader of the Gate Watch... yeah...
>>94505236Pic 4 is hilarious because Vorinclex was fine - she failed completely.It cannot be overstated just how messy the lore suddenly became post-WAR. People blame Cynthia Williams for a lot of this but seem to not realize that Chris Cocks was still WotC CEO until literally a month before Kaldheim released. The changes and damage to the entire process and team writing MTG lore post-WAR were likely something he set in motion and she inherited.
>>94523830I'm >>94523983, meant to reply to you, too.Additional details: all this happens before Goldner resigns abruptly for health reasons in October 2021 and dies the NEXT DAY. It was happening under Cocks' stewardship well before his career path was shaken up by Hasbro's CEO dying (he was still head of WotC until January 2022.) Cocks is first and foremost a tech guy (came to WotC from Microsoft in 2016), so he has an undying fetish for vidya (especially digital transactions) and he's responsible for much of WotC's fumbling nonsense in that regard over the last decade. It cannot be overstated how much of a fluke Arena was.
>>94503384Speaking of bullshit.How the fuck does Nicol Bolas just break the Blackblade? I mean, it's not as if he wouldn't see it coming, but he just sort of snaps his fingers and it snaps.
>>94501676I used to... But Lorwyn was the last good books, everything after that under Beyer has been pure retardation after retardation.
>>945016764channies do because they suck at the game but feel the need to be part of it.
>>94517452It is very mysterious to me why they chose to explicitly cure Nahiri. Like nobody would have batted an eye if she ended up killed after being compleated, it would have fit perfectly with her misery cycle. Poor Tamiyo who barely hurt anybody got to take that stray instead.
I only clicked this thread hoping for more cropped cheesecake but I wasted a tenth of a calorie for nothing.
>>94513754>The writer's barely disguised self-insert.
>>94529744>it would have fit perfectly with her misery cycleDon't you see? The cycle prohibits death. She must always be available in the background so she can be brought forth to suffer again.
>>94529744Tamiyo died cause she was a fan favorite.Nahiri lived because on a whole she's liked enough, and probably the only representation of female villainy in MtG at the moment.
>>94533579Tamiyo was a fan favorite? She barely appeared after her first arc until she got brought back to die.
The artwork was captivating. The lore gave you a peak into the world. Ultimately though, I think the biggest thing is that the game took itself seriously.The Scaled Wurm here is presented as a massive dangerous threat. It's cost may make it untenable to play as a card, but as a creature, a monster, it is deadly. It's not a joke. It's not here to make you go l-o-l and invoke reddit tier jokes. It's not being ironic in the way that so many things these day are. It is serious. It demanded that we take it seriously. So we did take it seriously and we appreciated it because of that.
I always read all the stories.
>>94503627That's what mad eme stop. I enjoyed the old novels for what they were, and that they were about the planes themselves. Now it isn't about the planes and the people who live there, it's about how this small cast of boring cunt planeswalkers can show up and be in the spotlight.The moment planeswalker became a type of card I knew it was all downhill.
>>94533773My idea of what a 7/7 creature should be has always been defined by the scale of Pelakka Wurm.
>>94501676They keep killing off my favorite characters so I stopped caringNashi will probably die in the next year to shill some new lgbt character
>>94537979Is Chandra still gay for Nissa?
>>94537979Didn't they kill Tamiyo and make an AI out of her memories? Is that what I'm looking at here?
>>94538762The AI is gone now. Eaten by Valgavoth and all the stories Tamiyo spent her lifetime collecting are gone into its mouth.
>>94538949Oh cool so they also killed her legacy.
>>94538762>>94538949>>94538983What's extra hilarious is the timing makes it look like they made the AI for literally no other reason than to double dip on killing her.
>>94501676I used to read actual M:tG novels and love them. This was back when the setting was Dominaria. Invasion basically marks the end of "M:tG lore I care/think about" for me. While the primary reason I quit was because it became clear that I wasn't willing to spend the amount of money you were increasingly required to drop in order to play the hobby in realspace, the second one was the evolution of planeswalkers. I kind of feel like planeswalkers in Magic suffer from the same thing that primarchs do in 40k. Through a combination story progression and a glut of lore released about them, planeswalkers became more common and less cool. The idea of them just doesn't feel like it used to. I would be willing to admit that that could be nostalgia, though. The decentralization of Dominaria as a setting also makes the lore in general more difficult to care about, because now ALL of the recurring characters have to be planeswalkers if they want to make appearances in multiple sets, and non-planeswlaker characters just sort of make cameos if their plane is ever revisited.
>>94539482>>94538949Yeah IIRC they ended the existence of the AI since it was basically gutted and begged to be put out of its misery. Which is so depressing.
>gets raped by Emrakul>gets raped by Jin>gets raped by Norn>gets raped by Valgavothis Tamiyo's destiny to be raped?
I started with Theros and I loved the setting and art of the plane. I think I enjoyed all the planes until Strixhaven. The writing wasn’t the best but the lore and vibe I enjoyed. After that nothing really appealed to me but Bloomburrow caught my attention again.
>>94539584>it was basically gutted and begged to be put out of its miseryIt was their choice to put it in that position in the first place.>>94539590Between her, Nahiri, and Vraska for a while, I'm starting to suspect WotC just has a fetish for torturing non-human female planeswalkers. Is Kiora like the only one who's generally just having a good time wherever she goes? Maybe the rest should try throwing cephalopods at people.>>94539597I think I agree with this, Strixhaven was a sea change I didn't like - it's not inherent to Strixhaven as a setting, but more like Strixhaven marked the end of the period where the writers tried to make the planes unique to MtG while still referencing things. Strixhaven is literally just "Hogwarts, the Plane." There's not much of an attempt to make it MtG first, reference to Harry Potter second.
>>94540185Wizards only understand how to write superhero stories now and those rely on female characters being tortured. All the sicko readers love it.
>>94503811Real autists are literal retards
>>94539590>is Tamiyo's destiny to be raped?she's a bookish dork from "Japan", her getting hooped up on the oil and subsequent metamorphosis into phyrexia's fuckpet was pretty much inevitable
>>94540230"oil"
>>94505236jesus if I get hired by WoTC I would kill Kaya character in a heart beat and would bring Vivien at the spotlight, bonus points if I could bring Gideon to be her husband.
>>94537979>they will probably kill off <shit nu-lore character> to replace them with <new shit nu-lore character>!Know that I don't hate you anon, just that the mere fact a person like you exists bodes extremely grim for the future of Magic.
>>94501676sauce? yandex pulls up nothing
>>94501676I stop caring years ago. The lore keeps getting changed to fit the current DEI and all that leftist shit. As for the plot, I don't think they can keep a plot going long enough for people to noticed they have one outside basic tumblr story and all. The new Fairy OC main is pretty meh from what I have seen. Hell, I would be shocked if they don't make black people native in the next Kamigawa set cause every plane has to be like CA and all. I wonder if they still try to make a "Black/POC" only plane.
>>94503817People complaining about this dance miss two important things, one discouraging, one less so.1. New people coming into the fandom generally means its not the same people doing the dance - this is the discouraging one.2. Potentially less discouraging - there's ALWAYS a quality floor. An event horizon below which not enough new people are brought in to make up for the numbers they're driving away. Once this is crossed, you see reversals, and sometimes even a return to quality.Most encouragingly: the contrarian retards aren't correct - people in aggregate really DO have a standard. There are real consequences to collapse in quality, they just take a while to manifest for impatient "i dislike current thing" reactionaries (I often also dislike said thing's quality, but I don't have childish expectations for Hasbro to collapse tomorrow because every format is fucked - it'll take at LEAST a couple of years).
>>94540749Deal, only if you get rid of Vivian's sidecut
>>94541637And curse her lesbianism
>>94501676I stopped following after Mirrodin
>>94541102>https://files.catbox.moe/zsm23y.jpghere you go
>>94501676Magic's story has never really been that great, but they used to be good at coming up with cool setpieces and lore details. Unfortunately these days they don't really bother, as most planes these days are just a shallow reference to something else.I think the big change was the abandonment of the block model, since having multiple sets per plane meant even reference-based planes like Innistrad still got decent amount of development. Now that any new planes are over and done in one set, there's no time or point in fleshing them out instead of just making a plane where everybody wears a cowboy hat.
>>94541869Vivian is lesbi?
>>94542484everyone is a lesbian until proven otherwise
>>94542484pretty sure one of the novels mentioned her having an ex-girlfriend
>>94542137>abandonment of the block modelNot sure if this was the cause or the symptom, but either way it meant less time on a given set, so it would be harder to write meaningful stories since they had to start churning them out faster w/less time for players to read the stories (if they read them at all). Going back and seeing how many versions/block systems they started using says to me that top-down pressure to increase sales (and so much struggle to find/stick to a good model) would have killed any long-term/cohesive story.-original block model = 3 blocks in a set then a core set-two-block model = 2 blocks per set and no more core sets-three-in-one model = 3 unrelated sets then a core sets (all sets are 1 block from now on)-four model set = 4 unrelated sets in a year-upcoming 7 model set in 2025 (3 magic IP sets and 3 UB sets plus foundations, making UB sets officially a "normal MTG thing™")
>>94542577One, nobody takes the novels seriously. Might as well be non-canon. Two, doesn't mean she's lesbian, could just be bi. Garruk can still hit just fine.
>>94527762The blackblade was a false prophecy planted by Bolas himself, it was engineered to fail against him from the outset
>>94501676It used to be pretty decent a long time ago. I used to read the novels and keep up with lore and fan theories in magazines decades ago. About halfway through the 2010s it became stupid as shit.
>>94544874>The blackblade was a false prophecy planted by Bolas himself, it was engineered to fail against him from the outsetAh, so he planted all that shit on Domineria to distract the Gatewatch.I still don't like the evilest god-forsaken artifact being used in such a callous way, but that makes more sense.
>>94544874When the 'false prophecy' gimmick is used too many times it stops feeling like a feint and starts feeling like an improvised hackjob in the writer's room. At this point more of Bolas' plans have been "oh he meant to fail like that" than ones that worked.
>>94533736>Tamiyo was a fan favorite?Dude... Yes!>She barely appeared after her first arc until she got brought back to die.First arc? She got popular with one friggin' card with No story at all, at the time. If you want me to explain it? I am sorry I can not. I don't understand, I can't not explain other people. I just know there are some VERY passionate weebs out there.
>>94540185>tried to make the planes unique to MtG while still referencing thingsThe things they hint at in Strivenhaven make the wider world (Arcavios) sound SO much more interesting.I honestly think there was serious intent behind the scenes to make it effectively the new dominaria or ravinca, but when sales for the harry-potter knock off failed, they just gave up on those ideas.>"Sir! Sir! The knockout Harry-Potter school didn't turn out to be so popular. Should we expand focus on the plane and look at other aspects the design team made? The brutal nomadic Desert sounds neat! The Crystal Mountains full of buried ruins? Or even the vaguely mentioned paramilitary academy if we wanted to keep a school thing?>"Nope, scrap it all">"Yes sir!">"Also we're firing most of the story team">"Yes sir!"
>>94545095>>94545053>>94544874Of course it's a retcon. The Blackblade comic that established what the "Blackblade" even is was pre-revision and so when they reintroduced Dakkon in the post-revision novels they had to change a lot about it. Bolas was dead forever in pre-revision lore and in the original post-revision one but they had to change everything up to make him not only alive but also the big bad of the multiverse.
>>94501676i think sarkhan, tezzeret, and elspeth are cool
>>94501676Magic has lore?
>>94501676While it wasn't always good, it was still kinda alright until Theros. After that it increasingly became too woky and soulless (too much "returns"). I could write a whole book about what's wrong with the lore. Tarkir is for me a good exemple of what you should NOT do with a story : dragons cease to be amazing if you weaken them and throw them everywhere, on every street corner and behind every rocks, trees and under every beds. Even more so when said dragons are mutated into something so different from the traditional red dragons they could be another race.But most Vorthos were already driven away a long time ago so it doesn't matter. They can make a new plane entirely populated by dwarfs homobears, it really doesn't matter. Also, Bolas was too powerful to be interesting.
>>94517452>pre-Ixalan Jace; he was barely a character at all, more like a neckbeard's 'super brain mastermind' blank-slate fantasy self-insertHe was okay in his novel, the one by Ari Marmell.
Have there actually been any novels since the War of the Spark one? That's the last one I remember reading.
>>94501676Magic has plot and lore?What the fuck?
>>94545305That's probably what's most infuriating about Strixhaven - the set being about Strixhaven and almost forgetting the rest of Arcavios exists in favor of doing a Harry Potter pastiche. That decision would have been made in set design, before they had any popularity data besides those pre-release surveys they do.If anything, it's actually possible the rest of Arcavios was created as a last ditch effort to put Strixhaven in a place that wasn't just... Strixhaven. It almost feels to me like there was a design meeting where somebody asked "Where do these students go after they graduate if they don't become school staff?" and everybody in the room shat their design pants because it's a question Rowling failed to answer for the most part (Rowling's worldbuilding is kinda ass). If you make a whole setting a school, it's a question that doesn't actually have an answer - all the students have no careers to graduate into outside the school, because the entire reality you've created is subsumed by the school.
>>94523327>But then they Marvelized themI take it you're not familiar with the crew of the Weatherlight, from the year of our Lord 1997? WotC has been "Marvelizing" characters since before the first Iron Man movie hit theaters.I love how people think Marvel invented slop fiction. Nah, mate, we've had 'official canon' fiction writing that gets utterly outclassed by some fanfiction works pretty much as long as we've had businesses that produce fiction. It's what writing rooms with high turnover and/or with storytelling as a secondary priority (versus selling more slop faster - or selling toys/cards faster) almost invariably produce.
>>94545305>The things they hint at in Strivenhaven make the wider world (Arcavios) sound SO much more interesting.Barely. But if a set like Strixhaven was made earlier in MtG's history, there actually would be detail to the wider world around Strixhaven. There would probably be more of an indication of where all of these mages were doing after graduation besides just getting jobs at the school.
>>94551759Strixhaven was almost "Duskmourne: the school" because that's what Harry Potter worldbuilding essentially is.The answer to where all the graduates go is "stop thinking about it this is YA slop."
I use too
>>94551641Weatherlight had it's fair share of critique for several generations now, and there was a reason we moved away from said writing. Let's not split hairs and fight over peanuts.
>>94501676Nah, even when i played as much as possible i never read the comics being published at the time even though they would sometimes have 'free' cards at the time. I did read the flavor text but mainly i just pretended i was a wizard.
>>94556165My point is this is a regression to a quality level that we've been at before, and is quite common when management culls and/or turns over their writing teams from lack of pay/respect and the marketing department are closer to what the new hires (and thus writing) actually are than the old writers being pushed out. Marketing nonsense has absolutely infested liberal arts education, so most of these new writers can barely string a story together but can pitch (i.e. market) their surface-level, nostalgia-baiting, shamelessly referential "story" ideas to management in a way that sounds enough like fancy advertising to get greenlit.Discouraging that this has happened, but encouraging that we've been in scenarios like this before and managed to pull out of it. It tends to run in multigenerational cycles in a given medium - slop fills the medium, good stuff rises to the top, the good stuff is diluted and exploited into slop relying on its old quality and popularity by IP owners, and the cycle repeats.
>>94501676OG MTG was cool.Mending era up to Amonkhet was good.Amonkhet-WoS was good to bad.Phyrexia 3.0 was awful.Everything after that is so bad that WoTC should actively decanonize everything happening there to save it.
>>94503384No the Bolas arc dallas apart as soon as you ask yourself why was Bolas coating his zombies in blue ringpop since the mending when the planar bridge that couldn't transport organic material didn't exist until the week his zombie factory project was finished?
>>94556682would have to agree with this poster more or less. Now if you wanted to play a game set in OG Ravnica powered by pathfinder 1e check out my massive homebrew. Home to 45 archetypes, and new Bloodlines, Cavalier orders and Domains for all guilds.Let me know if you have questions or comments. Hell, just say you are downloading it, feels good.
>>94548699>Where do these students goThe simplest explanation would be "Strixhaven is a little pocket dimension and after graduation students come back to their planes".
>>94562367Nah, for all its faults, Strixhaven was at least pre-"the barriers between planes are fucking riddled with holes now and everything is going to be homogenized into indistinct slop with the same characters" Omenpath nonsense.
>>94541081I mean>Venser (dead)>Windgrace (dead)>Kylox (dead)>Ink-Eyes (dead)>Every Praetor like Jin-Gitaxias (dead)>Mirri (dead)>Gideon (dead)>Nicol Bolas (dead and trapped in the spirit realm)I mean I'm fucking lucky they didn't kill Hazoret and she only lost an arm
>>94564533Isn't Ink-Eyes just dead of 'story took place 500 years ago' or did she actively get got
>>94564859She just "died" of old age like everyone in original Kamigawa but still the new age nezumi aren't as good looking as her and despite having necromancy powers she never got a legacy card after her death or anything, just poofed out of existence
i'm grateful wizards is publishing another dogshit set so i can skip it without any regrets
>>94513424Garth is second only to Urza for me. Guy shows up for revenge, gets called out for not considering the collateral damage. Replies that he did consider the collateral damage and ultimately decided "Well, shit happens."
It was fine to ok until they got rid of blocks.
>>94565512Holy crap someone replied to my Garth-posting from over a week ago. Holy crap this thread's still here. And final crap, I happened to be scrolling a week later to catch your reply. Good taste, sir.
>>94565548Hell yeah.
>>94565110This doesn't fits into Magic, is Wizards even trying? Where is my medieval fantasy?
>>94564533Jhoira's still kicking....Somehow.
>>94524065They just want to recapture the market of MTGO except bigger and and with less liberties
>>94564533Venser was reanimated as a Phyrexian, wasn't he?
>>94565653Magic has never been medieval. Even the earliest sets had mechs. I'm not happy about the cars, but that's because their silhouettes don't make sense as a direction for development to take without the specific contexts that our automotive industry has had.
>>94566007I think the car is the team from the Duskmourn plane. If I recall it well the big moth demon wants the prize spark too for Reasons
>>94566007It depends on aesthetic as well, I think how the Weatherlight Saga depicted it's machines and artifacts go pretty well with the universe without looking like something from modern real world unlike >>94565110 does. Technology is alright, it's the aesthetic that bothers me that doesn't fits right into it.
>>94565110>Sharkman chained to car with VHS ghost riding hood.>And ... is that a crab-man on a sky shark?Wonder if we're going to get a cross over with wacky racers secret lair...!Fuck, could they make any more shit I don't care about?In the last 15 sets I bought... Bloomburrow, Karlov Manor, The Brothers' War, and honestly couldn't be arsed to even look at the rest.Wow and Brother war was two years ago now... fuck maybe it's time to exit.
>>94566019Wouldn't Valgavoth have eaten all the cars?
>>94566007It just feels lazy in terms of slapping some glowing bits onto what is otherwise just a real-world muscle car and calling it a day.Even ignoring the fact that all of the planes we've seen cars from either have hovercars (Capenna, Kamigawa) or use metal instead of rubber tires (Kaladesh), it's just such a boring implementation. Like as goofy as they flying boat-shark-hoverbike in the background is, at least it's not just a Cessna with hot-rod flames.
>>94501676what plot? what lore? this is a cartoon for toddlersThat Age 13+ rating has to be an albatross
>>94538717Probably. Didn't she have feelings for Gideon too or am I misremembering?
>>94565110>>94575082This is aiming for the Fortnite zoomers.
>>94575408Loot! You get it?
>>94575197Not really. She was rather infatuated with Beefslab's muscles than Beefslab himself .(I do recall in one story that Chandra destroyed Gideon's punching bag.)
>>94575465loot get!
>>94557568Thank you for the autism fuel, fellow Ravnica guy, this'll be a great help when I get around to my inevitable 3rd long-term Ravnica campaign
>>94575465>>94578212Epic loot drop bro!
>>94501676I did, about 20 years ago. It has all been steeply downhill since about Alara, but before that there's some damn enjoyable genre fiction to be had.
>>94582497so epic and wholesome I LOVE LOOT
>>94575465>Jace>Vraska>both got compleated>somehow they got betterI'm sure WotC gave an answer, but I don't care anymore
>>94501676Not really, i just liked the tone of the early game. I didn't even know there was an overarching story when I played back in Ice Age, Mirage, etc. I always felt like I was supposed to fill in the blanks. When Weatherlight came out and you had these obviously reoccurring characters show up, that kind of died alittle, and today its entirely gone and I'm embarressed I used to even play mtg kek
BFZ was bad, Kaladesh was garbage, SOI was good imo (but Eldritch Moon was not), and everything after was a joke, with the culmination of WAR killing it completely. MTG is dead on every front.
>>94583356>Jace>Vraska>both got compleated>somehow they got betterPity Nahiri got desparked. Imagine New New Phyrexian Triumvirate (Vraska being Gorgon turning people into statues, Nahiri being The Lithomancer animating them, and Jace... looking cool in blue, I guess?)
>>94583458What exactly was so bad about each of those in your opinion?
MTG's color wheel lends itself beautifully to a more esoteric worldbuilding by turning the organizations into gods and goddesses and their temples, "descending" from more primordial, almost Lovecraft-esque chaotic powers.>white is a multifaceted crystalline sun>red is an impossibly burning rock>blue is what seems to be water with a depth greater than its volume allows>green is a carnivorous plant dotted with fake and real eyes, or a slime mold>black is a hole in space and time and, surprisingly, humanoid in shapeFurther down they become more and more acceptable to mortal tastes so three-colored deities are preferable to two-colored because of propinquity.
>>94578212Those socks make me irrationally angry.
>>94592070>it's been over a decade since Khans of Tarkir and I still get Mardu and Abzan backwards>I also still have no idea how I got them switched around in the first place
>>94501676Yes and no. I lost interest around Mirrodin (but quite enjoyed the Urza novels and the other ones from the late 90s), and briefly regained interest for Lorwyn. It's been almost a decade since I played MtG outside of old single-player videogames, and like twenty years since I last attended a FNM. Occasionally I mull over the idea of running a Dominarian TTRPG campaign in GURPS or something, but none of the magic systems for it are a particularly close match for the magic system as presented in the 1990s novels.
>>94503720Because we started in ice age or later as children, and weren't adults who got started with 4th, and we weren't in the tournament scene griping about combo winter, we were playing with random mashups of cards from packs against other ten year olds.
>>94593001Both are white-black with a third wobble color.
>>94582467Believe it or not no autism was used in the making of this document. Just good ol' fashion sense of superiority, spite and a dash of perfectionism.But if you or anyone else who is still lurking the thread has checked it out. I'd love to know your favorite thing about or in the Document.
>>94501676I liked.From Weatherlight until like Future Sight it was a really good low grade fantasy series.After Lorwyn until like Alara was mid.After Zendikar until like the end of Amonkhet It was cool.After Ixalan it became pure trash, now I don't even bother to read recaps from it.
>>94540185>WotC just has a fetish for torturing non-human female planeswalkershttps://www.lby3.com/wir/
>>94545305>The knockout Harry-Potter school didn't turn out to be so popular.Did Strixhaven not do well? I recall it being vaguely popular.
>>94503880She wears boots and leather armor for the entire story.
>>94501676Bumping because I do.
>>94501676Magic's GOATED books:Chainer's TormentThe ThranThe Brothers WarIce Age Cycle (Gathering Dark especially)First Ravnica novel (Guildpact novel is ok too but by Dissension the author is clearly just fucking around)I have a lot of love for a lot of Magic story. Even after they stopped doing books, or the books stopped being good, places like Alara, Lorwyn and Tarkir were excellent in their worldbuilding. Recent sets have shit story AND awful worldbuilding, Thunder Junction and Karlov Manor were back to back garbage on every level.>>94513498Chainer's Torment is a great novel. The whole Otaria saga is very charming if insane at times.>>94523525Agreed.
>>94598962I feel like the drop off was WAR. Ixalan I thought was good - not the best, but a fun and well-realized setting with cool ideas like vampire conquistadors, sirens that actively worked with sailors/pirates, and a civilization of merfolk like the ones from old MtG lore. The Sun Empire was kinda meh to me because an "all human faction with dinosaur pets" didn't seem as cool as the other factions - the dinosaurs were way cooler than their owners.The worst part of Ixalan IMO isn't Ixalan - it's the same thing that subsumed the lore of Amonkhet: the lead up to WAR, which was clunky in the writing department IIRC partly because they were doing huge writing staff shakeups right before their big Bolas narrative climax.Also, people tend to associate storylines unconsciously with the state of the game. WAR was STUPENDOUSLY overpowered with viable superfriends decks in standard and a ton of busted cards (Wilderness Reclamation, for example).WAR also represented something of a sea change in creature balance, IMO, as standard sets now needed creatures to compete directly with PW utility and PW hate was still not where it needed to be (sweepers were almost entirely for creatures, which meant superfriends decks had effectively one-sided boardwipes at every tier of standard play).Some of the hate WAR writing gets is hate that came not from the writing but from the set balance.
>>94601908It ended up better-than-middling. People bought it for the Archive/alt art cards from the set. Now that we have tons and tons of sets with more and more Alt arts, most players don't look back at it often.I'm not going to say "No one liked it"- YOU sound like you liked it Anon- but the vast majority did not engage with the core set, or setting.I'd actually say the most engagement Strixhaven ever got was when D&D got it's hands in it, and they got one of the better regarded supplement books out of it.
>>94501676No, it's been gay since the 90s.
>>94501676I actually really like it up through war of the spark, there's tons of potential being wasted now. I know the planeswalkers basically became the avengers by amonkhet, but it was still pretty cool at that point. now it just feels like a theme park with no real direction "this set is western/cyberpunk/80's paranormal(?) / fucking mario kart. it's lame. universes beyond is even more lame and should be its own product line, not involved with mtg.
>>94513571>>94610507holy shit i'm samefagging in the thread from 2+weeks ago. i thought it was a new one, why the fuck is this thread still going?
>>94565110>Story setup for New "Avishkar"Eh. It's pretty "Nothing." It's not 'bad' it's just nothing.>Story setup for New Amonkhet Wow, neat! Why are we not getting more?>Story setup for MuragandaWOW, Neat! I never thought I'd be so intrigued by the shitty concept of 'urh-grunt' caveman plane! But man. I'm liking this!>What we ARE getting.... oh ... wacky races paving over two other actually interesting concepts that we could have had two whole sets about.... fuck wotc... please drop this 2 year plan and listen to your audience happening 'right now'
>>94501676I never thought it was the best thing in the world or went out of my way to read the web stories but it usually kept me marginally interested. Even with the jacetice league running around there was some stuff to hold interest like Shadows over Innistrad's dread and angry Avacyn, or Amonkhet hinting Bolas.My interest plummeted when it went to one set blocks. There's no build up anymore, and it's not worth caring about anything since we move on to another set in 3 months. The dominaria cluster felt better until the piss poor finale and enabling the lowest point it's ever been, shoving random legendaries into different planes to put a new skin on them.
>>94610553It's got an oldwalker spark making it immortal.
>>94605633>Thunder Junction and Karlov Manor were back to back garbage on every level.And Ravnica used to be a plane with a cool concept, now it just feels like fantasy US city. The whole detective plot would have fit better in New Capenna then again you don't need to slap detective references to tell a murder story.
We are never going back boys.What could of been done to avert this and what can be done now?
>>94614355He's muddying the waters by bringing up "enfranchised players," because that's not what the original poster was talking about and he knows it. "Enfranchised [x]" in corporate speak basically just means the people who spend the most money. It has absolutely nothing to do with the people who are invested in something emotionally, except when the business relies on emotional investment to sell.The only way to keep growing once you've driven away your core (note MaRo says nothing about how long "enfranchised players" have been playing) is to pull in FAR more customers than you might expect, because their turnover is going to far outstrip the turnover from your discarded longstanding customer base.Retention is also notoriously poor if crossovers are a substantial proportion of your output. You're drawing in people from new places, yes, but then bombarding them with stuff they don't care about. It's all the problems with rapid customer cycling, compounded with "well this was neat, but the rest is eh so I'll just go to back to the fandom I actually cared about."Doubly compounded with MTG, because standard sets were already littered with one-off "crossovers with an on-the-nose genre pastiche instead of a Magic setting" (e.g. STX, WOE, SNC, MKM, OTJ, DSK - BLB at least had a world that felt lived in). It doesn't bode well for the long-term success of WotC's UB strategy.The sad truth, though? Catering to "enfranchised players" just means catering to speculators now.MTG's current business strategy is basically physical meme coins. The lore AND the game are secondary....Will they realize a speculative market built on disconnected hype about real-world interest in something will collapse without a real, healthy, stable foundation of interest? The entire financial industry hasn't seemed to realize this, despite numerous asset collapses in both physical and digital asset markets (see: comic book crash, video game crash, crypto crash), so... probably not.
>>94612211>>94557568It continues to be funny to me that Karlov Manor was such a massive failure. When it should have been an easy win. A lower stakes character focused story set on "everyone's" favorite plane.Not only that but it was a retread of the first Ravnica which is a mystery/political thriller.They are so deep in the slop they can't even use their non slop as an island any more
>>94616539It wasn't really Ravnica. It was a detective pastiche wearing Ravnica like a hat (and poorly).And then OTJ was just random characters from elsewhere (such as the people from Ravnica they couldn't get to because one set is not enough to do Ravnica - it is, thankfully, still too deep a setting for that, mechanically and thematically) wearing "western aesthetic pastiche without solid western themes" as a hat.They offered nothing to really get invested in. Hell, Teysa dying wasn't even all that impactful - she's the actual top dog of Orzhov (even while Kaya was guildmaster this was still essentially the case), death is practically an upgrade. There was exactly zero chance she wasn't going to end up as a ghost, but it's still quite infuriating that the only Teysa ghost card is a fucking Alchemy card.
>>94618411oh of course, that set was terrible and didn't capture the actual themes of Ravnica. Also any major non planeswalker character leaving Ravnica is such a disservice to the character and the plane. Omnipaths are the stupidest thing they have done in a long time. Why would Rakdos leave Ravnica to be some muscle in a heist on another plane? Why would he even agree. Bro is an demon of crazy power and age. Who is basically worshiped as a god with a whole cast of underlings under him, that the strongest are high powered witches and politically savvy as well. I would love for someone to leak all of WoTC's emails and shit. I think it would be so eyeopening.
>>94614355break your fucking addiction to the game and quit goddamn playing. no one ever has the willpower to go through with it, so this continues. go live your life and let the whales wallow in rot. quit worrying about shit.
