The MTG manga series (Destroy All Humans, They cant be regenerated) is quite good, especially if you played MTG during the 90s. Notably though, it mainly uses the card game as a plot device, it is not about the actual MTG universe. Good MTG media can be done.
As someone that half got into Magic because of this manga, yes, Destroy All Humans is the best and kinda only example of tie-in media MTG has, and that's damnation within praise I know more about LOL, Yugioh, and Warhammer through cutural osmosis, and the only time i learned more about MTG than the stereotypes of the playerbase (the incel stereotype, not the types of players on the un-set cards) was through a weird fan-translated manga that i didnt realise was about a real card game until i was already hooked
See this sounds cool. I need to read that at some point, but it also seems to prove my point. Even a manga that's not even really about the game I imagine will attract a lot of new players
There are a few options, depending on how long the runtime would be (and what is meant by anthology-every episode, or just every season?). The Brothers’ War, March of the Machine (but properly paced), the Kami War, the history of Ravnica.
it frustrates me to no end that the Shandalar game is such a beloved game and yet they can't even be bothered to remaster that. that being said, there ARE relavent Tie-in products to Magic: The Gathering that you have failed to mention because they exist in the same ecosystem as Magic; Tabletop games. There are Dungeons and Dragons books about Ravnica and arcavios. there's the seemingly Settlers of Catan-like Explorers of Ixalan or Cluedo: Ravnica Edition.
Oh man I did forget about a Magic board game, you're right. And I love that game! I EVEN USED AN IMAGE OF THE JACE MINI FROM IT IN THE VIDEO. How did I not connect those dots?
Warhammer has kind of a shotgun approach to licensing, which actually works surprisingly well. If you licence out 200 video games and 190 of them are mid to dogshit, nobody's gonna care if you have those ten amazing games everyone loves. Most people are nebulously aware that most Warhammer games are bad, but functionally the only thing that does is get people hyped up way more if one of them turns out to be good.
Only something you can do when you have a very strong IP like 40k though, it makes people very tolerant of the misfires while also getting bigger studios interested. MTG is a weak IP, most people who know about it don't care about it, even most MTG players. Big studios won't buy it and too many bad games too early would tank the whole licensing idea.
I think the main difference between magic and Pokémon/ Yugioh is that magic started as a card game while for the latter two the card game is technically a tie in on its own. Pokémon is a franchise and so is Yugioh while magic is really only a card game.
I'd argue Yugioh is a pretty good analogy, because while it did start as a variety manga it hit its stride with the card game and in the popular zeitgeist everyone knows it as only the card game.
@@argothyst i'd disagree, even red bobcat knows of the anime and duel disks toys. recently it even got a mcdonalds toy with hello kitty. most people when asked usually say they know of the card game, the tv shows and maybe some merch.
@@yurisbest2892 That's true, but the anime is essentially all about the card game. I still think yugioh is a pretty good although far from perfect comparison.
@@argothyst It's chicken and egg. I'd argue that Yugioh is an anime about a card game, but not really an anime about the yugioh card game, given that the cards seen in the anime don't exist in the card game until a few months later, and the fact that everyone knows what a blue-eyes white dragon is but no one knows what a Chaos Emperor Dragon is, despite the latter being significantly more influential within the game.
Hardcore Pokèmon fan here, it didn't start as a manga- it actually started with the games, the manga you showed onscreen came after the games but before the anime. Can't exactly remember where the tcg fits in there
Games came first, then anime/manga, then cards i reckon. Iirc the pokemon tcg hit america right around 1999 which was 1 year past red and blue's us debut. Nintendo were smart to make sure their us media assets were all lined up beforehand.
I think one problem with magic stories in other media, is again the current release speed. So far this year we have had a murder mystery set on a fantasy world, a wild west heist, a quick visit to pseudo real world history (basically all of it) in assassins creed, surprise eldrazi! And whatever the lore for Nadu actually is, then small burrowing animals, and 80’s horror. If someone could write a tie-in story that could keep up with the whiplash from that release schedule, and make it even vaguely coherent they should be given a Nobel prize in literature.
Even if some could keep up with making tie in material, not every one is intrested in every setting equally or every character hell even every color, creating the issue that, lets say a show about thunder junction, there will be a sizeable part of consumers that Just dont care about x product
True, but then I think they should focus on one aspect at a time. Do the Marvel thing of Military Science, then Norse Myth, then WW2 setting and only once people are invested then cross them all over
Yugioh actually has the opposite problem with it's tie in, it kind of relies on it too hard. The yugioh cultural zeitgeist boils down to 1: Cards are too long and 2: Show was cool. It took until Master Duel (online version akin to Arena) for the marketing to not completely rely on the anime. And even then issue 2 rose up because people who only knew the show walked into ranked and got blasted for essentially going to a meta commander table with a starter deck. I think magic could benefit from a tie in show that shows how the game is actually played or at the least features characters based on actual decks. That'd also be a good way to really grab people interested, "Oh you like the show? Well buy this and you can recreate your favorite scenes on the table!"
I also respect that. They have SO MANY games to choose from for so many different experiences. And the lore connected to the show and the game has a no nonsense straightforwardness in its depth, That doesn’t require the novels worth of explaining, Like each plane and set in MTG has. As an mtg who doesn’t really care so much about the lore, because of how daunting it is, Im kinda jealous of that. Like if you wanna know what the story is of a new set of MTG its a bloody 600+ page novel you have to commit to reading and learning about, just to know the motives of the people on your cards…. Yeah I don’t care what they do now, i just wanna see if they look cool
@@RedBobcatGames not quite, but it does have a bit of relation to magic in that way. Think of each of these games like a different Alchemy format. They exist in video game form.
@RedBobcatGames early on in Yugioh's life Konami was trying to take advantage of the popularity of the manga while designing the card game itself. They didn't yet know how to turn the game they were playing in the story into something actually playable (if you can just play a 3000 attack monster from your hand for free, why would you ever bother playing an 800 attack monster?). They couldn't wait for the card game designers to finish working out the kinks and salvaging a playable game so they made video games with whatever rules and limitations were needed to make it reminiscent of the show and playable. They have a lot of the same cards and stats, ripped straight from the manga, but there's a lot of wild experimentation with mechanics balanced by only throwing AI opponents at you. They also occasionally drew from other games that were depicted in the manga like Capsule Monsters, and Dungeon Dice Monsters, and experimented with things like Destiny Board Travelers, a Monopoly Clone where you summon monsters to claim spaces as you run around the board. A lot of people miss this creative era of Yugioh, which has kind of become a relic since 2010.
I really miss the planeswalker novels and with the addition of the omenpaths there's a missed opportunity to get an author to describe a story from the perspective of pretty much any character needing to traverse the multiverse
The reason magic cant crossover into Warhammer the way Warhammer did to magic is two fold first WOTC wouldn't pay for it and second GW takes its IP too seriously to do that. They have spent decades putting out New York Times best seller after New York Times best seller they are absolutely not going to let someone else come in and use that sandbox.
An Arcane style show about Chandra awakening and learning to planeswalk with Ajani (and probably Jace) sounds so awesome its no wonder that won't be what they do. And a meta cartoon about kids who play magic would be awesome. The game "Cardfight Vanguard!!" is one i havent played in a few years, but the recent revitalizing of the game had an anime made by Clamp. And the cartoons are REALLY good at learning the game. Like my friends just recommended people watch the first 3ish episodes of the original series to fully learn the game. I'd say it's more analogous to the Yu-Gi-Oh cartoon than Pokemon, literally teaching kids and new players about cards, tournaments and different formats.
funnily enough there's a perfectly good manga that they could adapt for said animated show about kids playing the game in "Destroy all humans, they can't be regenerated"
on note about space marine 2, ive liked warhammer lore for a few years now. but the space marine game got me into the tabletop, putting together minis while I watch this very video! they got me!
SEE! I'm right! I honestly think we'd have so many more people play Magic if they focused on the lore! Good luck with your minis. I don't know a huge amount about Warhammer but... may you have blood for the blood god(?)
One thing about yugioh is that the manga predates the card game, in the manga Duel Monsters was just meant to be a MTG parody for one arc but it was so popular that the entire series pivoted to it
@@dac314 there was an anime of yugioh made by toei that adapted that part of the story before it gets overtaken by Duel Monsters which has been called season 0, it was never released in English tho
@@dac314 it was a game of the week style story. Every chapter was a unique game. In volume 2 and 5 Yugi plays two games of Duel Monsters, both against Kaiba and both were smushed into the first episode of the anime that you knew (absolutely butchering both of the stories as a result. Like how Kaiba tears up the Blue Eyes because it cost him the game the first time, and how he got the other 3 between the first and second game, killing a man to get one of them). He plays a form of adversarial D&D against Bakura, a collectible figure chess game against Mokuba, a digital pet game, an arcade fighting game, and a whole assortment of makeshift games primarily designed by Yami Yugi. For that matter, most Shadow Games were initiated by Yami Yugi in these makeshift games.
@@cherry9787 or vampires, or werewolves, or Eldrazi. I'm not fussy about who or what I get to stab, so long as the Cathar I control is screaming about Avacyn/Sigarda's light. Also I really like Innistradi Gryffs.
Warhammer books are actually really damn good a lot of the time. Even if you don't really know anything about the setting I recommend reading some of them. The authors I'd currently recommend most are propably Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Robert Rath, Nate Crowley and Mike Brooks. Almost everything they write is absolutely peak
Took an hour ride with a friend who was listening to the Nightlords Omnibus audiobook. When we got to where we were going, we drove around the block several times to allow the chapter to wrap up.
Great video! I love the lore of MtG and it’s definitely a shame they’ve had so much trouble making proper adaptations. I’d call the original Planeswalker novels (agents of artifice, purifying fire, test of metal) as well as the planeswalker comics tie-ins. They weren’t really part of a specific set release like the older books were from what I remember.
They released a crappy, rushed novel that was rightfully bashed for many reasons, and their takeaway from it was that people just don't like novels. This is one of the core issues. They learn the wrong lessons from things. They seem to think that Magic is this pure, sacred thing that can do no wrong, and when something DOES go wrong, it's not because of anything to do with Magic itself, no, it's the surrounding circumstance that's the issue. It doesn't help that the story, quite frankly, sucks, and has for a decade now at the VERY least. Hard to create a quality product based on lore that isn't itself much quality.
I think the problem is that WotC doesn't trully sees the human value to the IP The MTG Diablo-like had core issues, but it was clear that the director had little idea of MtG and only wanted some "aesthetic" so fans would be happy. For magic books, I feel like they only see it as the promotional thing of the event (or author), they dont care the writer is mediocre at best and has half readed magic lore, they want and need a book for War of The Spark and it's future and call it a day. ((Also it feels pretty clear they wanted to cut down on writers for the weekly narratives attached to sets)) Let's look at some other nerdy IP, let's see, oh what's that? Games Workshop famous IP Warhammer 40K Let me see ¿Do you have book tie ins? What? A lot? Like a full division only to manage writers for books, rulebooks and all plots? With one of the largest (if not THE largest) sci fi saga of The Horus Heresy ? Where you seek famous authors interested in the IP and let inside workers alike try out books for your IP? That there's a big part of the community that only reads the books and even then they promote the IP like butter? And that you got motherfucking Henry Cavill helping GW get a deal with Amazon TV? Welp that's something With the videogames, I feel WotC only sees value in the "let's make players give us 5 to 15 bucks a month with the happy whales" rather than "make them pay 30$ once" Like even if you want to keep it in the card system, PLEASE WOTC GIVE ME A ROGUE LIKE WHERE I DRAFT A DECK AND PLAY GAMES AGAIN AI What I find criminal, is that there's a Magic The Gathering manga that it took it ITS WHOLE RUN to gain the interest of WotC, with some infimal marketing and promotional cards with the official english translation. MAKE A MANGA OUT OF IT And just to be clear, the manga is "two teenagers play magic, anime slice of life shenanigans happens, nothing out of this world, not big bads, no shadow dimension, only teenagers deciding that a magic duel is the best way to decide who proposses to the girl
Also I forgot to comment, but Wizards FUCK IT UP hard with Brandon Sanderson (Acording to rumors, neither WotC nor Brandon seem to have put a clear statement) Wizards approached Brandon to write a book for them, and he agreed with the condition that they would make the book available for free on their website. A few years after he wrote it, Wizards were preparing to release a physical version of the book so they took down the free electronic version from their website. And if you live under a rock, let me tell you, Brandon Sanderson is one of the most famous writers of today's time, I feel like movies/TV adaptations of his books are a matter of time. And to be clear BRANDON IS A HUGE MTG FAN AND PLAYER, motherfucker has its own Cube Draft, which was used in a Command Zone episode you can watch. While I doubt he would be open to write a giant saga of MTG books ((he's already full time writing 4 books a year)) I bet he would be willing to help write some novellas to introduce the multiverse, and even some of the already existing characters for newer people, while putting his little ideas in canon. And a MTG x Cosmere set would've sold like butter, but WotC seems unnable to not fuck it up
I was unaware of the Manga, that's something I'll have to check out. And the idea of a rogue like! YES PLEASE! I've never played one, but I know Magic put out those special decks designed to played against solo. I'd love to give that a go at some point
In terms of video games, there's also Shadalar. Which you could argue is a reproduction of the card game, has a more RPG like aspect to it like many of the mid 2000's Yu-gi-oh video games like Stairway to the Destined Duel, Reshef of Destruction, Sacred Cards, est. Having you go around, fight short games of magic against enemies, venture into dungeons to battle the antagonists and get busted cards like Mishra's Workshop, Black Lotus, and Time Walk, go to towns to pick up side quests to gain more cards and special abilities to use in world. Now you're probably wondering why you've never heard of this game. Well that's because it came out in 1997, twenty-seven years ago; older then a majority of the player base. And in all that time, they've not made a single digital game that comes even close to it.
If I remember correctly, WOTC did have a mildly successful cartoon for one of its other games back in 2002: Duel Masters. It was a tie-in cartoon for a card game that was like magic but a little different. It made use of "shields" instead of life points (the shields being face down cards from your deck). Whenever a creature hit you, you added one of your shields to your hand, turning the attack into card advantage to help you turn things around. It was a pretty neat little system. It was silly, but I enjoyed it enough to buy two starter decks way back when. Shame that Magic's story these days is so terrible that it may a well not exist. Duskmourn as random horror themed cards is way better than Duskmourn as a story.
The game is still alive and well, and in fact more popular than Magic in Japan. Aside from the original Duel Masters, they tried re-inreoducing it as Kaijudo which also failed in the West.
Duel Masters wasn't really a WOTC thing though, they only purchased English localisation rights. It was already a successful media project in Japan before then, as these things always are. There are 880-ish total episodes of various Duel Masters anime in Japan, and WOTC dropped its involvement after 2 years and about 100 episodes.
@@yurisei6732 Absolutely not. WOTC was (and still is) indeed the developer of both Duel Masters and Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters. It is the opposite of what you are saying. The distribution in Japan is handled by Takara Tomy.
I know this will probably get me hate, especially for someone whose only experience is pokemon Unite, but this franchise would be set up perfectly if it wanted to enter the MOBA scene. The “champions”, items, maps, and lore are already there. Planeswalkers can be the champions and you can incorporate a card system where you can only use cards that matches your Planeswalkers color. I think it would be more expensive and less unique to go the 3D route Smite, Predecessor, and Deadlock went. Just do a top down MOBA like League or DOTA. Worse case scenario it’s a blatant cash grab with bare minimum mechanics like Unite. If League and DOTA can make a card game….why can’t Magic have a MOBA?
I think this proves your point as well: They did release planeswalker action figures, but didn't promote them at all. I have a Chandra Nalaar I bought off the closeout rack at a discount store. I just happened to see it because I was working the store for my job as a potato chip distributor. As you pointed out, as soon as I saw it, I wanted it just for the novelty, because I know about the game and its characters (at least up until 4-5 years ago when I tuned out). But the fact that a Chandra Nalaar figure had made it all the way to the discount store closeout table before I even heard they existed says they just weren't trying.
The Black Library has many stories about skaven and other people that punch their ratty little noses in and that is definitely the biggest selling point. Someone else a long while back mentioned that lorekeeping and set-tie-in stories should be part of the marketing budget, and what you’ve spelled out in the latter part of the video really proves that point, I think.
@@RedBobcatGames i think they're different beasts. Duels of the planes walkers is a decent campaign with a bit of multiplayer with a curated card pool, which could be fun if it came out yearly, or every two years. Arena is supposed to bridge the gap between standard players and MTGO... Or the other way round, and it fails at both. It wouldn't be hard to bring out new duels of the planes walker games like new FIFA games, or better yet, as yearly DLC seasons added. Arena has a lot of work to do, of it's to become MTGO but pretty and stylish.
I will say I have never touched the 40K game but at one point I was so into the Magic Phyrexian Lore that I wanted more, and there wasn't any more, so I asked people for books with similar vibes and many 40K books were suggested, and I read 1 or 2 and they were great but then life lifed and I haven't picked them back up but I will at some point. Still no plans to play the game but I will read more of their Lore. (this was before our latest Phyrexian set)
Also as to communication from company's be glad we get explanations, even full articles, about bannings. Because in Yu-Gi-Oh you don't get a word of their thoughts or reasoning about the bans. They just release the list. (as far as I know)
I think the lack of Magic Tie-ins, at least recently, is in part a result of being part of Hasbro. Hasbro has over decades much success with tie-ins, but that has changed lately. Many of their properties lately have profit wise stalled, likely do to recessions and people buying less toys when you have the internet(and related products) as kids entertainment. Many of the tie-ins alone are made at a loss, as you want to sell the toy, not the show. Magic on the other hand is still very profitable maybe because less money is used to create tie-ins(or that it's printed cardboard in a plastic booster and it's value is arbitrary/prone to speculative forces). Now Games Workshop has a different tie-in strategy. It only directly finances the books, comics and some of the merch, as their own animated shows(of witch you have most likely never heard thanks to being only on GWs own streaming platform and not really making a splash outside of the controversy of threating to sue fan animators if they produce free advertisement for their products). The video games aren't getting money from GW, instead they offer the license for little to nothing and only provide mandatory brand oversite and veto rights. It makes for cheap advertising and strengthens the brand(if the tie-in product is good that is. GW has had some bad experiences in the past with low afford games). I'm not sure where I going with this but I hope it's informative. Also Black Library book quality is wonky. Some are really good, but a lot of them are just meh. You can only sit thru so many generic Space Marine fight scenes before you get tired and the barrier to entry is high with all the specialized language and terms.
Magic Legends was a bad idea from a start. Why make a Diablo clone when you can remake Shandalar. Imagine a pokemon style game where you play games of MtG instead of Pokemon battles to aquire new cards. Like you encounter a minotaur and they play a red minotaur themed aggro deck, defeat him and you get him as a card. Add elements of exploration, towns where you can trade for new cards, other wizards and Planeswalkers to challenge you. Make the decks 40 cards and vintage legality, and single player only, so that it doesn't compete with Magic Arena. Would be great
I'll defend Magic Legends only so far as what it COULD have been. I rememebr being unimpressed by what it actually was though. But I think the idea is solid enough
Is that the board game? I have played one, and somehow both included an image of the Jace mini from it in this video, but also forgot to mention it at all anywhere else
@@RedBobcatGames nope. It's a fighting style duels game where you cast from a limited set of spells. It's actually pretty good. Still have the CD-ROM. Worth it to search for a video of it some day I think.
A JRPG would be cool in the Magic world. A linear character-based story that would make the player well acquainted with its main characters and explore all the different planes, and spells and monsters from the cards, that you acquire exploring these planes. I think the over-the-top style of JRPGs are well in tune with modern Magic.
i dont need a tv show about my card game, i dont need cards depicting non magic stuff. im so fucking tired of this all encompassing "everything has to be everything" shit that is the current sphere of pop culture. please let magic be magic.
I agree, and the current direction of the IP makes me sad. For years i said "When they do freaking Marvel or StarWars cards, im out for good"... But the flipside is that there needs to be an inflow of new players to keep the game alive. And since WotC has shown that they cant make interesting enough things to do that without tie-ins and references, and the playerbase isnt doing it from the grassroots either - IP keyjaingling is sadly the best we have
1.) "manga first"? No no no; Pokemon was a *video game* before it was anything else, and even then, any proper narrative in a manga came after the anime exploded. Its greater appeal is certainly derived from the anime's long-term viability, but trying to divorce Pokemon from video games is like trying to divorce burn from monored. 2.) "Yugioh had a cartoon" These statements with regards to mythoi that reinvent themselves on the regular pain me. "Had A"? It's presently on its 8TH! More than that, depending on definition!
There was an mtg spinoff game called magic spellslingers that you missed. Not surprised you missed it though since it came out in 2020 and had absolutely no marketing surrounding it. I only found out about it in 2022 myself and it shut down just this year.
There is a videogame from the late 90s titled "Magic: The Gathering", but is commonly called "Shandalar", where the entire game is just walking around and dueling opponents. The game feels a lot like a beta version of MTGO. Even had Sid Meier as a designer for the game. It can be downloaded for free from archive websites since it is abandonware. Some fans even modified the game to include cards printed as recently as 2015. There is also the Duels of the Planeswalkers boardgame, which is somewhat fun to play, at least a couple of times, but the biggest downside of it is you and your friends are actively fighting each other in a free for all deathmatch.
I’ve been wanting novels for years now. Many people don’t know the lore because it’s on a website rather than a book A game as simple as a side scroller or more complicated like an action game (Space Marine 2) would be fun and I think draw in people. But more than likely a hero “shooter” like Overwatch would be more likely More toys and fun stuff like that would have people see and want to be apart of the world
Those YuGiOh Duel Disks will destroy your cards faster than anything. xD I loved YuGiOh when it was the old Egyptian theme, then as soon as the pharaoh was gone man did it die fast... :^) Forbidden Memories, Dark Duel Stories, and The Scared Cards are really good games though. The other games can be pretty rough or boring at times, Reshef of Destruction is for masochists...
god magic legends is a throooow back I played the beta on it and yeah the micro transactions were bonkers. The game used a like booster pack system and all your spells were from these booster packs and simi sorta like commander you could use spells that were within your hero color identity, but how do you get a hero? well extremely rarely from the booster packs ofcourse, like talking 200$ rarely. They then begrudgingly gave you the chance to get it from the battle pass if you finished it, but if you didnt complete the entire battle pass in time? well then 200$ boosters is the only way to play a black/blue hero
To be fair, technically, the yugioh card game, started as a tie-in to the original anime and manga, not the other way around, but obviously, when the card game became as overwhelmingly popular as it did, they shifted focus REAL FAST to the card game, and now it's pretty much the main thing. Also funny how the first episode of duel monsters aired at almost my exact birthdate, except the anime came out 1 year later than me, lol. And yeah, considering that before the TCG, Pokemon was already very well established, first with the release of the games, then the manga, and then the anime, and pokemania was in full force in the 90's, it's no wonder the TCG exploded as it did. I mean Pokemon is literally one of, if not THE SINGLE MOST PROFITABLE FRANCHISE IN THE PLANET! THAT THING PRINTS MONEY!
There is also a long running comic series, however its very apparent that wotc or hasbro puts pretty significant restrictions on the writers which leaves them feeling a little safe
Another example similar to Yu-Gi-Oh would be WOTC's own attempt at cracking the Japanese market, made in collaboration with Takara Tomy: Duel Masters. Concieved as a stepping stone for children to into TCGs (thus, Magic eventually), it was designed as a card game first but also released in par with both a manga and an anime, both of which lasted for more than a decade (and with that, more merchandise that they could sell to children). Duel Masters remains one of Japan's most successful card games ever, only now losing ground to newcommers such as thr One Piece Card Game. (The less we talk about the botched attempt at release the game outside of Japan, the better).
The interesting thing about the big 3 is that Magic is the only one that started as a card game. Pokemon started as a video game. Yugioh started as a manga about high school kids playing all kinds of games with occult elements bleeding in. Yugioh was high-jacked by its card game, the entire story warping around it because it was so popular even though it was only meant to be a bare bones homage to Magic for a single chapter. The card game itself was so bad they effectively needed to add more and more mechanics that completely obliterated the core game and twisted it into something unrecognizable, but at least it's fun now. The thing that sets Magic apart to me is actually the lore. The cards in yugioh started out having very little lore, it was just the game they played in the show. It had whatever they wanted in it. Since archetypes were introduced there's some lore around the individual groups but there's no lore around how they actually all got together. There's no name for the world the monsters are from. It's all nebulous concepts about a story that happens to a particular character on a handful of cards floating off on its own. Pokemon lore is obviously just the game lore. I don't believe the card game bothers to introduce anything unique. So for Magic to have such a rich setting for the cards is a bit of an outlier for successful cards games and I think it really should lean into it now. This show is hopefully a start but there are more so many stories that can be adapted into all sorts of games. Every game seems to try to be its own thing instead of being a way to experience an iconic part of the story. Imagine a Weatherlight JRPG, a Mirrodin Besieged RTS, a western RPG set in Ravnica, a horror game or soulslike in Innistrad. There's a lot of untapped potential.
There's a really good video by Raycevick called "Im jealous of Warhammer" that is tangential to this topic: how GW licenses their IP out to game studios, who flood the market with warhammer games. And even if those games are mostly butts, it doesn't discourage people from the IP at large, but gives them more and more opportunities to find an entry point to the setting. If you put out enough MEDIA, some of that MEDIA will be good, and will earn you new fans. Worth a viewing.
People have mentioned "Destroy All Humans. They Can be Regenerated", and I believe stuff like that it's the way to go. It was originally a one-shot and people liked it so much it turned into a series. One can argue the series isn't really about Magic, but I wholeheartedly disagree. It is about the social aspect of Magic, the friends we make, and how cringy we can be sometimes trying to feel cool. Also about struggling to find combos or fix weaknesses within a deck. A lore series would be cool, but Kinda hard to do if the goal is to keep up with current sets and stuff.
This video couldn't have come at a better time. I've been thinking about the same thing but lack the ability to explain it as well as you could. For me: I enjoyed collecting Pokemon as a kid more than playing it as a TCG; after childhood I grew out of collecting it and playing it. Now I don't even know how to play it. Yugioh was the same, I liked it into young adulthood but lost interest. Now I have coworkers that still play but I have a hard time understanding modern yugioh compared to original old yugioh (gen 1). My history with Magic the Gathering only started recently and it was via other friends playing it. I know little to NOTHING about the lore. I know a lot of MtG hate universes beyond but I like it since I know those IPs and lores better than MtG's own IPs and lore. I've been playing Magic the Gathering for maybe a decade now and still know very little about it outside of EDH/Commander. Which old MtG fans hate because this format has "ruined" (in their opinion) the standard format of MtG.
We won't see planeswalkers in Warhammer since gw still has some respect for the identity of their ip. In Warhammer everyone knows the world sells the toys, the actual game itself is quite bad but magic as a game is really fun so they try to get people to play the game through ip crossovers knowing they'll stay.
Would you say the handful of dnd setting books set in magic the gathering planes would count as tie ins? There's books to help you run games set in Ravnica, Theros and Strixhaven, full of lore and mechanics to enable spells, ancestries and abilities themed to each plane. Idk where the boundaries of crossover and tie-in end but this being a primarily dnd facing product that uses magic IP definitely would help bring dnd players to magic, if only to learn the source material for why silvery barbs is such an obnoxious spell.
Chandra's personality is "every fire-based character you've ever seen in anything ever". Jace's personality is "Whatever the writers decided to do with him this month". Kaya's personality is "Doing things WotC hope you think are cool so that you'll think she's cool". I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
I really want to see a japanese anime style Magic anime. It should follow somewhat to the card game, kinda like yugioh. But perhaps modified slightly for a nice viewing experience. The potential for the over the top VFX and animation is limitless. It can also be an original storyline too.
I do think Magic is kinda backed into a corner in terms of what they can do, because of just how dark aspects of the lore are, *especially* the Phyrexians. It’s going to be *very* difficult to translate what’s basically a mashup between the Cybermen and Cenobites in a way that’s not instantly R rated, and they’re too big a factor in the story to ignore, even if the focus was on something else. This is by no means impossible though, given Warhammer’s lore is also incredibly mature.
i don't really have anything to add (or remove?) to this conversation, but something i want to point out is that pokémon and yugioh as japanese companies they go under the "soft power kawaii" umbrella of what is the japanese government's decisions to make japan what has become today while the usa government spends their money to do more wars
My limited understanding of issues with producing movies and shows is that Hollywood and the greater movie world is a VERY complex world with a lot of private controlling interests. The end result is usually you have to sell your ideas and such to them and them allow them creative control or the film side will pull out entirely, so this screams to me of a power struggle over creative control between WotC and Hollywood. Thus strict knowledge of just Magic's history might not give you a full picture of the actual problem here. The 'cautionary tale' people generally tend to point to is the 'Sheriff of Nottingham' script that turned into another Russel Crowe being a badass vehicle, but the more recent examples are things like the Witcher and Wheel of Time series where the showrunners think they can write a better story than the beloved source material. Personally I think they're clowns and as such I straight up don't watch movies or shows anymore, not through official platforms anyway.
Yes, better lore will make more money in the long term, but that's the problem: the long term, WOTC's focus is on the short term in order to satisfy Hasbro's demands, so long term be damned
A Magic series is at least 5-10 years late. The game is way past its prime, even though it sells well. That's why it relies on other IPs to sell packs.
I bought all the duels of the planeswalkers games when they each came out and now literally none of them work on modern machines. I want my money back.
The fact they're unavailable is rather odd. I can run 2013 and 2014 just fine on my xbox (can't say for PC versions but most likely runs like prepatched Fallout: New Vegas or TESIV: Oblivion, AKA like complete fucking shit)
@@cherry9787 I can install them and run them, but they just stop working. You'll get 2 turns into a game and it just stops progressing, forever locked in, without even being able to quit short of alt+f4.
You'd think after the gas leak year, we'd have learned that if you're having creative differences with the people who wrote for Community, you're the one in the wrong. Tbh I don't see much hope for MTG media tie-ins, cos at the end of the day... who would it be for? MTG's lore is weird and convoluted and very self-referential. A lot of existing, enfranchised MTG players are barely interested in it - According to Rosewater, 75% of players in I think 2022 didn't even know what a planeswalker was. There's a small hyper-interested audience that would definitely watch it, but those people are going to have extremely high standards and will be difficult to please, so there's a good chance tie-in media wouldn't really be for them. Then there's a huge audience of people who don't know what MTG is and aren't inclined to care, who will be difficult to interest because an MTG show kinda has no selling point except being MTG (unless they shift tactics to the Arcane approach where the established lore is only minimally relevant). And then an audience of MTG players who might watch when they remember its existence months after release but won't count down the days to release or go out of their way to watch, which is where I fall. It sort of feels like a Borderlands movie situation, where the target audience wouldn't actually exist; that being people who like MTG enough to be excited to engage just by it being an MTG project, but who simultaneously don't like MTG so much that they'd be bothered by the reinterpretations inevitable in adaptation. As for why there are no planeswalker minis or phyrexians in Warhammer - cos Games Workshop knows that would be disastrous. If there's any playerbase that would rebel against franchise crossovers, it's Warhammer players. This is a group of people who care so much about game-feel that they added a minimum painting skill level required before you're allowed to play in events.
Never trust Rosewater. He'll tell you whatever he needs to to serve his own ends. Maybe 75% don't know what a planeswalker is, but I doubt it. It's likely to get a number like that, you'd have to include as "players" those with only passing familiarity or who played the game casually 15 years ago. And even if it is true, what context is he presenting it in? He's probably trying to downplay interest to cover his ass for the trash-tier lore they've been turning out.
@@yurisei6732 But you used it as evidence that the market for tie-ins is niche and not an attractive audience. I think you're working from bad data by someone who has to cover for the incompetence of his team. I think it would be incredibly easy to churn out concepts for MTG stories and the fact that they don't speaks to a lack of imagination, not interest.
So, in my opinion, the reason why Magic IP crossovers are one way (besides all the obvious corporate greed reasons) really boils down to this: Yes, Magic has had really interesting and high quality lore and narratives tied to it, but it was never really defined by them. Something like Warhammer, or you also expressed this idea for Doctor Who in a previous video, has its own story to tell with its own lore, and therefore doesn't really have any room for Jace or Urza or a Phyrexian to show up, or for the Doctor to travel to Amonkhet. That happening would break with the narrative flow of their own lore, and would muddy the waters. But, I don't think the inverse is true. Don't get me wrong, I don't love Universes Beyond and I'm mostly in the camp that Magic should just be Magic and we as a culture shouldn't be so aggressively addicted to IP crossovers- BUT. Magic was always more defined by the ability to create a story with cards than it was by the specific story being created. So I think among both Magic fans and fans of other IPs there's just inherently more interest in seeing how the Doctor would work as a card than there is in seeing what the Doctor would think about Amonkhet. And I say this as someone who is a huge fan Doctor Who's narrative AND of Magic's narrative. I can't see a Magic crossover episode of Doctor Who working, like at all, but I enjoyed the Dr. Who commander decks. (Which, by the way, if UB is going to exist it needs to be exclusive to Commander decks and MAYBE Secret Lairs. The LotR and Assassin's Creed sets were a travesty and make no sense as a product for anyone who's a fan of any of the involved franchises.)
Sorry, I want to see the little animated red cat, so I don't listen to the audio only version. I'm a big transformer fan, but I like ghostbusters too, both from the animated tv show in the 80's... so no surprise I bought the ecto-one transformer. But when I started magic back in the 90's, they had comics and books all over but even the really good comic disappeared without a word as far as I know. It seems to be a problem, for D&D is struggling right now because WOTC want all the money without any efforts, and you can't find people like those who did Baldur's gate for cheap each time... I mean, they hired the people from Dragonlance to relaunch the universe, and they didn't want to pay them !
One mtg game cross over was with SMITE. They had skins for a couple planeswalkers plus atraxa. Incredibly disappointing. SMITE is an awful game and deserves nobodies attention. As far as mobas go its as if someone tried to recreate one in ROBLOX from 2010. I sincerely doubt it drew any new fans into magic as SMITE does colabs all the time with literally anyone and none of it carries any weight. Would you beleive me if i told you they did a Slipknot colab? or stranger things? or vshojo? or rwby? My appologies for the rant but SMITE sucks and it makes zero sense for anyone to be wanting to colab with them to make these skins.
I don’t know why they don’t try to focus on the lore better there is a precedent here like I bought the books and well war of the spark was not great but I went out and bought the book like if the good stories online were published I would have bought them like the older days I have the shadowmore and eve tide books and trying to locate more why aren’t they capitalizing this again
I think the Warhammer show and MTG has the same problem with adaptation: where do you start and whos point of view is it from? "Where do we start?" : Should the magic show start with Urza and Mishra? The Weatherlight? Should the 40k show start with the Necrontyr? The Horus heresy? Or do we plop down 'in medias res' and focus on our main blue boys Jace or Titus. "Point of view?": Since these are games where you pick a character, faction or color and make it yours, making a broad audience jumping on point will most likely depict the "default" point of view: The gatewatch and the Ultramarines. In the game itself you can make them your general/commander but we will probably have to wait a long while before we see Tibalt or Kaptin Badrukk as a main protagonist characters in their own show. Yugioh is a meta show about playing the cardgame, even if the first season of the show completely made up its own rules. Whenever they do cross over its often only to make really over or under powered cards that references events in the show. What this means is that it avoids the issue above, since the characters in the show are building THEIR favorite decks, just like you should when you start playing. Same with Pokemon; Ash got a Pikachu but you can catch whatever you like. And the show enforces that each trainer has a theme or strategy they have chosen. With an in-universe adaptation (MTG and 40k would have to be because of all the lore), it might be a good story but wont inform the new people about the actual game. I have seen so many youtubers grimace when they realize 40k is a tabletop game after getting hooked with SM2 or reading the books/lore.
I think I disagree. A story wouldn't have to inform people about the game to still get them interested. Sure, some people won't want to play after learning about the lore, but many others will. And those will be people that won't have played otherwise so I think it's worth it. (In a sense that more players = better game). As to your first questions, I'd answer, we start where ever the author is interested in starting, and have multiple authors working on multiple projects to cover every aspect of the lore. And for "Point of view?" Yeah, if that works. If not, then no. Do a bit of everything, you know?
I'm not excited in the slightest for the netflix show, because i know it will be another politics first, story second slop we're used to seeing. I'd be very, very shocked if it turns out to be good genuine storytelling (or adaptation) rather than corporate box-checking for master blackrock.
Good lore? There hasn't been good lore for, I dunno, like 20 years? When was the first Ravnica?* You might as well ask know-nothing modern urbanites to reconstruct the great monuments of their culture. The Weatherlight saga must seem like ancient pre-cursor technology to the simpletons currently working at WotC. The worst part is they think they're doing fine. They literally don't know how bad it is until the audience starts shit-talking it. You gotta wonder who they're focus-testing, or if they do focus tests at all. *Yeah, yeah, the first Innistrad block was kinda cool. Too bad it was sandwiched between nihilism and repugnant nostalgia-bait.
The aftermarket has a huge influence on how the Magic society behaves. If something makes the aftermarket money, people are brainwashed into believing it's an amazing product, and vice versa. The moment MTG branches out to other areas, you have other markets to compete with. Those that don't care what the MTG market thinks. They'll continue to sell the product cheaper than the MTG market does, meaning no sales on the aftermarket's side. This leads people to believe that the product is terrible, just because the aftermarket can't sell it for egregious mark-up.
The reason why there is no mtg anime is because the story sucks balls. You could maybe do a weatherlight saga or brothers war tv show but anything from the newer sets is just bad. The problem with old stuff is that they white males as leads and in 2024 you can't have that.
I agree that Magic story is, in a word, crap, but let's not pretend like the reason for that is that it has gay people in it now. Duskmourn sucked because there was no tension, the setting was a mess, and it was heavily focused on the general rambling incoherence of the omenpath/desparking era. Bloomburrow sucked because the characters were completely lacking in both agency and purpose. The Gatewatch saga sucked because it focused on a group of random idiots with no investment in the conflict at the expense of those who did, the Bolas arc sucked because he was an incompetent dishcloth of a villain, and the Phyrexia arc sucked because they wrote themselves into a corner and could only escape it with stupidity and contrivance. None of this would be fixed by having all the characters be straight white dudes.
I dunno. These days a Magic series would just be Pride pandering. Every character would be an extra-dimensional lesbian... Stories would revolve around feelings. We'd wanna see like some actually cool magic and lore, but the stuff we like would be censored and replaced with The Agenda. It's better this series doesn't happen right now. Give it 10 years when Hasbro are finally bankrupt and maybe The Agenda has been forced to peel back
The MTG manga series (Destroy All Humans, They cant be regenerated) is quite good, especially if you played MTG during the 90s. Notably though, it mainly uses the card game as a plot device, it is not about the actual MTG universe. Good MTG media can be done.
That series is great. Viz has gotten the rights to localize it into English in May and have already released the first volume.
As long as wizards isn't involved in making it.
As someone that half got into Magic because of this manga, yes, Destroy All Humans is the best and kinda only example of tie-in media MTG has, and that's damnation within praise
I know more about LOL, Yugioh, and Warhammer through cutural osmosis, and the only time i learned more about MTG than the stereotypes of the playerbase (the incel stereotype, not the types of players on the un-set cards) was through a weird fan-translated manga that i didnt realise was about a real card game until i was already hooked
See this sounds cool. I need to read that at some point, but it also seems to prove my point. Even a manga that's not even really about the game I imagine will attract a lot of new players
I honestly don’t see how you can make a Magic show that isn’t an anthology series.
No planeswalkers whatsoever, just a straight adaptation of the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor storyline.
There are a few options, depending on how long the runtime would be (and what is meant by anthology-every episode, or just every season?). The Brothers’ War, March of the Machine (but properly paced), the Kami War, the history of Ravnica.
A whole multiverse to pick from and you can't imagine any stories within them that could stand on their own as a series?
@@nmr7203 …yeah, exactly.
It could be a monster-of-the-week show starring the Gatewatch set between Eldritch Moon and Kaladesh.
I physically cannot hold myself back from writing this- THE POKÉMON VIDEO GAMES CAME FIIIIIIIRST
Yeah, but they created the animated series to sell the game
it frustrates me to no end that the Shandalar game is such a beloved game and yet they can't even be bothered to remaster that.
that being said, there ARE relavent Tie-in products to Magic: The Gathering that you have failed to mention because they exist in the same ecosystem as Magic; Tabletop games.
There are Dungeons and Dragons books about Ravnica and arcavios. there's the seemingly Settlers of Catan-like Explorers of Ixalan or Cluedo: Ravnica Edition.
There's a fan project called "forge" for android and PC, they took shandalar, modernised it a bit and added every card.
Oh man I did forget about a Magic board game, you're right. And I love that game! I EVEN USED AN IMAGE OF THE JACE MINI FROM IT IN THE VIDEO. How did I not connect those dots?
Warhammer has kind of a shotgun approach to licensing, which actually works surprisingly well. If you licence out 200 video games and 190 of them are mid to dogshit, nobody's gonna care if you have those ten amazing games everyone loves. Most people are nebulously aware that most Warhammer games are bad, but functionally the only thing that does is get people hyped up way more if one of them turns out to be good.
Yes! The channel "Raycevick" said exactly this in a video, i wouldn't be surprised if you had seen it already.
Only something you can do when you have a very strong IP like 40k though, it makes people very tolerant of the misfires while also getting bigger studios interested. MTG is a weak IP, most people who know about it don't care about it, even most MTG players. Big studios won't buy it and too many bad games too early would tank the whole licensing idea.
I think the main difference between magic and Pokémon/ Yugioh is that magic started as a card game while for the latter two the card game is technically a tie in on its own. Pokémon is a franchise and so is Yugioh while magic is really only a card game.
I'd argue Yugioh is a pretty good analogy, because while it did start as a variety manga it hit its stride with the card game and in the popular zeitgeist everyone knows it as only the card game.
@@argothyst i'd disagree, even red bobcat knows of the anime and duel disks toys. recently it even got a mcdonalds toy with hello kitty. most people when asked usually say they know of the card game, the tv shows and maybe some merch.
@@yurisbest2892 That's true, but the anime is essentially all about the card game. I still think yugioh is a pretty good although far from perfect comparison.
@@argothyst It's chicken and egg. I'd argue that Yugioh is an anime about a card game, but not really an anime about the yugioh card game, given that the cards seen in the anime don't exist in the card game until a few months later, and the fact that everyone knows what a blue-eyes white dragon is but no one knows what a Chaos Emperor Dragon is, despite the latter being significantly more influential within the game.
I had 100% assumed with Yu-gi-oh the card game came first. This was interesting to read, thank you all
Hardcore Pokèmon fan here, it didn't start as a manga- it actually started with the games, the manga you showed onscreen came after the games but before the anime. Can't exactly remember where the tcg fits in there
Games came first, then anime/manga, then cards i reckon. Iirc the pokemon tcg hit america right around 1999 which was 1 year past red and blue's us debut. Nintendo were smart to make sure their us media assets were all lined up beforehand.
@@THE_BATLORD I think the TCG was before the anime, but only by a few months
I think one problem with magic stories in other media, is again the current release speed. So far this year we have had a murder mystery set on a fantasy world, a wild west heist, a quick visit to pseudo real world history (basically all of it) in assassins creed, surprise eldrazi! And whatever the lore for Nadu actually is, then small burrowing animals, and 80’s horror. If someone could write a tie-in story that could keep up with the whiplash from that release schedule, and make it even vaguely coherent they should be given a Nobel prize in literature.
Even if some could keep up with making tie in material, not every one is intrested in every setting equally or every character hell even every color, creating the issue that, lets say a show about thunder junction, there will be a sizeable part of consumers that Just dont care about x product
True, but then I think they should focus on one aspect at a time. Do the Marvel thing of Military Science, then Norse Myth, then WW2 setting and only once people are invested then cross them all over
Yugioh actually has the opposite problem with it's tie in, it kind of relies on it too hard. The yugioh cultural zeitgeist boils down to 1: Cards are too long and 2: Show was cool. It took until Master Duel (online version akin to Arena) for the marketing to not completely rely on the anime. And even then issue 2 rose up because people who only knew the show walked into ranked and got blasted for essentially going to a meta commander table with a starter deck. I think magic could benefit from a tie in show that shows how the game is actually played or at the least features characters based on actual decks. That'd also be a good way to really grab people interested, "Oh you like the show? Well buy this and you can recreate your favorite scenes on the table!"
I think Pokémon have that balance pretty right, so it is at least possible it seems
What I respected about Yugioh is all the wild spin off games the series got. Duelist of the Roses is goated.
I also respect that.
They have SO MANY games to choose from for so many different experiences.
And the lore connected to the show and the game has a no nonsense straightforwardness in its depth,
That doesn’t require the novels worth of explaining,
Like each plane and set in MTG has.
As an mtg who doesn’t really care so much about the lore, because of how daunting it is,
Im kinda jealous of that.
Like if you wanna know what the story is of a new set of MTG its a bloody 600+ page novel you have to commit to reading and learning about, just to know the motives of the people on your cards…. Yeah I don’t care what they do now, i just wanna see if they look cool
I didn't know it had spin off games. Is it like how Magic has different formats?
@@RedBobcatGames not quite, but it does have a bit of relation to magic in that way.
Think of each of these games like a different Alchemy format.
They exist in video game form.
@RedBobcatGames early on in Yugioh's life Konami was trying to take advantage of the popularity of the manga while designing the card game itself. They didn't yet know how to turn the game they were playing in the story into something actually playable (if you can just play a 3000 attack monster from your hand for free, why would you ever bother playing an 800 attack monster?).
They couldn't wait for the card game designers to finish working out the kinks and salvaging a playable game so they made video games with whatever rules and limitations were needed to make it reminiscent of the show and playable. They have a lot of the same cards and stats, ripped straight from the manga, but there's a lot of wild experimentation with mechanics balanced by only throwing AI opponents at you.
They also occasionally drew from other games that were depicted in the manga like Capsule Monsters, and Dungeon Dice Monsters, and experimented with things like Destiny Board Travelers, a Monopoly Clone where you summon monsters to claim spaces as you run around the board.
A lot of people miss this creative era of Yugioh, which has kind of become a relic since 2010.
I really miss the planeswalker novels and with the addition of the omenpaths there's a missed opportunity to get an author to describe a story from the perspective of pretty much any character needing to traverse the multiverse
Yeah, agreed
The reason magic cant crossover into Warhammer the way Warhammer did to magic is two fold first WOTC wouldn't pay for it and second GW takes its IP too seriously to do that. They have spent decades putting out New York Times best seller after New York Times best seller they are absolutely not going to let someone else come in and use that sandbox.
True, but that could be us! You know?
It should either be an anthology of the individual stories of various planes or a retelling of the story of Nicol Bolas and the gatewatch.
An Arcane style show about Chandra awakening and learning to planeswalk with Ajani (and probably Jace) sounds so awesome its no wonder that won't be what they do.
And a meta cartoon about kids who play magic would be awesome. The game "Cardfight Vanguard!!" is one i havent played in a few years, but the recent revitalizing of the game had an anime made by Clamp. And the cartoons are REALLY good at learning the game. Like my friends just recommended people watch the first 3ish episodes of the original series to fully learn the game. I'd say it's more analogous to the Yu-Gi-Oh cartoon than Pokemon, literally teaching kids and new players about cards, tournaments and different formats.
funnily enough there's a perfectly good manga that they could adapt for said animated show about kids playing the game in "Destroy all humans, they can't be regenerated"
@@alterist64 Thought of that one too
Embarrassed to say I forgot about any comic book / manga of magic when making this. That's the issue when you do it off the top of your head haha
on note about space marine 2, ive liked warhammer lore for a few years now. but the space marine game got me into the tabletop, putting together minis while I watch this very video! they got me!
SEE! I'm right! I honestly think we'd have so many more people play Magic if they focused on the lore! Good luck with your minis. I don't know a huge amount about Warhammer but... may you have blood for the blood god(?)
One thing about yugioh is that the manga predates the card game, in the manga Duel Monsters was just meant to be a MTG parody for one arc but it was so popular that the entire series pivoted to it
What was the Manga about before they pivoted to Duel Monsters?
@@dac314 various games like chess, poker and even video games
@DeathofHeavens lol that's weird af. Imagine if the cartoon show had an entire first arc where they played checkers instead
@@dac314 there was an anime of yugioh made by toei that adapted that part of the story before it gets overtaken by Duel Monsters which has been called season 0, it was never released in English tho
@@dac314 it was a game of the week style story. Every chapter was a unique game. In volume 2 and 5 Yugi plays two games of Duel Monsters, both against Kaiba and both were smushed into the first episode of the anime that you knew (absolutely butchering both of the stories as a result. Like how Kaiba tears up the Blue Eyes because it cost him the game the first time, and how he got the other 3 between the first and second game, killing a man to get one of them).
He plays a form of adversarial D&D against Bakura, a collectible figure chess game against Mokuba, a digital pet game, an arcade fighting game, and a whole assortment of makeshift games primarily designed by Yami Yugi. For that matter, most Shadow Games were initiated by Yami Yugi in these makeshift games.
Man all I want is a horde shooter type game set on Innistrad, how has no one at wizards managed to put two and two together and started on this yet.
Basically Warhammer: Vermintide but zombies is what that sounds like
Playable characters: cathar, werewolf, vampire, stitcher, ghoul-caller. Action is taken place during Travails.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this! Yes, sign me up. Inject it into my veins!
@@cherry9787 or vampires, or werewolves, or Eldrazi. I'm not fussy about who or what I get to stab, so long as the Cathar I control is screaming about Avacyn/Sigarda's light. Also I really like Innistradi Gryffs.
Warhammer books are actually really damn good a lot of the time. Even if you don't really know anything about the setting I recommend reading some of them.
The authors I'd currently recommend most are propably Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Robert Rath, Nate Crowley and Mike Brooks. Almost everything they write is absolutely peak
Took an hour ride with a friend who was listening to the Nightlords Omnibus audiobook. When we got to where we were going, we drove around the block several times to allow the chapter to wrap up.
I need to get into them. I hear they're really good
Great video! I love the lore of MtG and it’s definitely a shame they’ve had so much trouble making proper adaptations.
I’d call the original Planeswalker novels (agents of artifice, purifying fire, test of metal) as well as the planeswalker comics tie-ins. They weren’t really part of a specific set release like the older books were from what I remember.
It was only after this went up that I remember the comics existed. Which is such an annoyance to forget something like that haha
They released a crappy, rushed novel that was rightfully bashed for many reasons, and their takeaway from it was that people just don't like novels.
This is one of the core issues. They learn the wrong lessons from things. They seem to think that Magic is this pure, sacred thing that can do no wrong, and when something DOES go wrong, it's not because of anything to do with Magic itself, no, it's the surrounding circumstance that's the issue.
It doesn't help that the story, quite frankly, sucks, and has for a decade now at the VERY least. Hard to create a quality product based on lore that isn't itself much quality.
I think the problem is that WotC doesn't trully sees the human value to the IP
The MTG Diablo-like had core issues, but it was clear that the director had little idea of MtG and only wanted some "aesthetic" so fans would be happy.
For magic books, I feel like they only see it as the promotional thing of the event (or author), they dont care the writer is mediocre at best and has half readed magic lore, they want and need a book for War of The Spark and it's future and call it a day. ((Also it feels pretty clear they wanted to cut down on writers for the weekly narratives attached to sets))
Let's look at some other nerdy IP, let's see, oh what's that? Games Workshop famous IP Warhammer 40K
Let me see ¿Do you have book tie ins? What? A lot? Like a full division only to manage writers for books, rulebooks and all plots? With one of the largest (if not THE largest) sci fi saga of The Horus Heresy ? Where you seek famous authors interested in the IP and let inside workers alike try out books for your IP? That there's a big part of the community that only reads the books and even then they promote the IP like butter? And that you got motherfucking Henry Cavill helping GW get a deal with Amazon TV? Welp that's something
With the videogames, I feel WotC only sees value in the "let's make players give us 5 to 15 bucks a month with the happy whales" rather than "make them pay 30$ once"
Like even if you want to keep it in the card system, PLEASE WOTC GIVE ME A ROGUE LIKE WHERE I DRAFT A DECK AND PLAY GAMES AGAIN AI
What I find criminal, is that there's a Magic The Gathering manga that it took it ITS WHOLE RUN to gain the interest of WotC, with some infimal marketing and promotional cards with the official english translation. MAKE A MANGA OUT OF IT
And just to be clear, the manga is "two teenagers play magic, anime slice of life shenanigans happens, nothing out of this world, not big bads, no shadow dimension, only teenagers deciding that a magic duel is the best way to decide who proposses to the girl
Also I forgot to comment, but Wizards FUCK IT UP hard with Brandon Sanderson (Acording to rumors, neither WotC nor Brandon seem to have put a clear statement)
Wizards approached Brandon to write a book for them, and he agreed with the condition that they would make the book available for free on their website. A few years after he wrote it, Wizards were preparing to release a physical version of the book so they took down the free electronic version from their website.
And if you live under a rock, let me tell you, Brandon Sanderson is one of the most famous writers of today's time, I feel like movies/TV adaptations of his books are a matter of time. And to be clear BRANDON IS A HUGE MTG FAN AND PLAYER, motherfucker has its own Cube Draft, which was used in a Command Zone episode you can watch.
While I doubt he would be open to write a giant saga of MTG books ((he's already full time writing 4 books a year)) I bet he would be willing to help write some novellas to introduce the multiverse, and even some of the already existing characters for newer people, while putting his little ideas in canon. And a MTG x Cosmere set would've sold like butter, but WotC seems unnable to not fuck it up
I was unaware of the Manga, that's something I'll have to check out. And the idea of a rogue like! YES PLEASE! I've never played one, but I know Magic put out those special decks designed to played against solo. I'd love to give that a go at some point
In terms of video games, there's also Shadalar. Which you could argue is a reproduction of the card game, has a more RPG like aspect to it like many of the mid 2000's Yu-gi-oh video games like Stairway to the Destined Duel, Reshef of Destruction, Sacred Cards, est.
Having you go around, fight short games of magic against enemies, venture into dungeons to battle the antagonists and get busted cards like Mishra's Workshop, Black Lotus, and Time Walk, go to towns to pick up side quests to gain more cards and special abilities to use in world.
Now you're probably wondering why you've never heard of this game. Well that's because it came out in 1997, twenty-seven years ago; older then a majority of the player base. And in all that time, they've not made a single digital game that comes even close to it.
Excellent stuff. Even a remaster would be better than nothing then I guess
If I remember correctly, WOTC did have a mildly successful cartoon for one of its other games back in 2002: Duel Masters. It was a tie-in cartoon for a card game that was like magic but a little different. It made use of "shields" instead of life points (the shields being face down cards from your deck). Whenever a creature hit you, you added one of your shields to your hand, turning the attack into card advantage to help you turn things around. It was a pretty neat little system.
It was silly, but I enjoyed it enough to buy two starter decks way back when.
Shame that Magic's story these days is so terrible that it may a well not exist. Duskmourn as random horror themed cards is way better than Duskmourn as a story.
The game is still alive and well, and in fact more popular than Magic in Japan. Aside from the original Duel Masters, they tried re-inreoducing it as Kaijudo which also failed in the West.
Duel Masters wasn't really a WOTC thing though, they only purchased English localisation rights. It was already a successful media project in Japan before then, as these things always are. There are 880-ish total episodes of various Duel Masters anime in Japan, and WOTC dropped its involvement after 2 years and about 100 episodes.
@@yurisei6732 Absolutely not. WOTC was (and still is) indeed the developer of both Duel Masters and Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters. It is the opposite of what you are saying. The distribution in Japan is handled by Takara Tomy.
Yeah, as I understand WotC even intended the games to cross over. That's why Magic cards say "Deckmaster" on the back
I know this will probably get me hate, especially for someone whose only experience is pokemon Unite, but this franchise would be set up perfectly if it wanted to enter the MOBA scene. The “champions”, items, maps, and lore are already there. Planeswalkers can be the champions and you can incorporate a card system where you can only use cards that matches your Planeswalkers color.
I think it would be more expensive and less unique to go the 3D route Smite, Predecessor, and Deadlock went. Just do a top down MOBA like League or DOTA. Worse case scenario it’s a blatant cash grab with bare minimum mechanics like Unite. If League and DOTA can make a card game….why can’t Magic have a MOBA?
I miss Legends
If they ever animate the manga "Destroy all humanity: it can't be regenerated" it's going to be the next big thing.
You did miss Magic the Gathering Puzzle Quest which still exists!
I'm only just learning about that now. Is it good?
I think this proves your point as well: They did release planeswalker action figures, but didn't promote them at all. I have a Chandra Nalaar I bought off the closeout rack at a discount store. I just happened to see it because I was working the store for my job as a potato chip distributor. As you pointed out, as soon as I saw it, I wanted it just for the novelty, because I know about the game and its characters (at least up until 4-5 years ago when I tuned out). But the fact that a Chandra Nalaar figure had made it all the way to the discount store closeout table before I even heard they existed says they just weren't trying.
I agree, theres so much lore for them to work with how hard can it be to make a film or series or a video game
Very hard apparently
The Black Library has many stories about skaven and other people that punch their ratty little noses in and that is definitely the biggest selling point.
Someone else a long while back mentioned that lorekeeping and set-tie-in stories should be part of the marketing budget, and what you’ve spelled out in the latter part of the video really proves that point, I think.
Duels of the Planeswalker could do well by just being allowed back on Steam, it was fantastic fun! 😅
Yeah, I'd much rather an updated version of that than Arena
@@RedBobcatGames i think they're different beasts.
Duels of the planes walkers is a decent campaign with a bit of multiplayer with a curated card pool, which could be fun if it came out yearly, or every two years.
Arena is supposed to bridge the gap between standard players and MTGO... Or the other way round, and it fails at both.
It wouldn't be hard to bring out new duels of the planes walker games like new FIFA games, or better yet, as yearly DLC seasons added.
Arena has a lot of work to do, of it's to become MTGO but pretty and stylish.
I will say I have never touched the 40K game but at one point I was so into the Magic Phyrexian Lore that I wanted more, and there wasn't any more, so I asked people for books with similar vibes and many 40K books were suggested, and I read 1 or 2 and they were great but then life lifed and I haven't picked them back up but I will at some point. Still no plans to play the game but I will read more of their Lore. (this was before our latest Phyrexian set)
Also as to communication from company's be glad we get explanations, even full articles, about bannings. Because in Yu-Gi-Oh you don't get a word of their thoughts or reasoning about the bans. They just release the list. (as far as I know)
I think the lack of Magic Tie-ins, at least recently, is in part a result of being part of Hasbro. Hasbro has over decades much success with tie-ins, but that has changed lately. Many of their properties lately have profit wise stalled, likely do to recessions and people buying less toys when you have the internet(and related products) as kids entertainment. Many of the tie-ins alone are made at a loss, as you want to sell the toy, not the show. Magic on the other hand is still very profitable maybe because less money is used to create tie-ins(or that it's printed cardboard in a plastic booster and it's value is arbitrary/prone to speculative forces). Now Games Workshop has a different tie-in strategy. It only directly finances the books, comics and some of the merch, as their own animated shows(of witch you have most likely never heard thanks to being only on GWs own streaming platform and not really making a splash outside of the controversy of threating to sue fan animators if they produce free advertisement for their products). The video games aren't getting money from GW, instead they offer the license for little to nothing and only provide mandatory brand oversite and veto rights. It makes for cheap advertising and strengthens the brand(if the tie-in product is good that is. GW has had some bad experiences in the past with low afford games). I'm not sure where I going with this but I hope it's informative. Also Black Library book quality is wonky. Some are really good, but a lot of them are just meh. You can only sit thru so many generic Space Marine fight scenes before you get tired and the barrier to entry is high with all the specialized language and terms.
Magic Legends was a bad idea from a start. Why make a Diablo clone when you can remake Shandalar. Imagine a pokemon style game where you play games of MtG instead of Pokemon battles to aquire new cards. Like you encounter a minotaur and they play a red minotaur themed aggro deck, defeat him and you get him as a card. Add elements of exploration, towns where you can trade for new cards, other wizards and Planeswalkers to challenge you. Make the decks 40 cards and vintage legality, and single player only, so that it doesn't compete with Magic Arena.
Would be great
I'll defend Magic Legends only so far as what it COULD have been. I rememebr being unimpressed by what it actually was though. But I think the idea is solid enough
Poor M:tG Battlegrounds gettting forgotten again... Makes me sad.
Preach, that game was really fun.
Is that the board game? I have played one, and somehow both included an image of the Jace mini from it in this video, but also forgot to mention it at all anywhere else
@@RedBobcatGames nope. It's a fighting style duels game where you cast from a limited set of spells. It's actually pretty good. Still have the CD-ROM.
Worth it to search for a video of it some day I think.
A JRPG would be cool in the Magic world. A linear character-based story that would make the player well acquainted with its main characters and explore all the different planes, and spells and monsters from the cards, that you acquire exploring these planes. I think the over-the-top style of JRPGs are well in tune with modern Magic.
Makes me think of the ''Destroy all humans. They can't be regenerated'' manga
I've seen a couple of comments about that. I'll have to check it out. Is it good?
Funnily enough this video awakened a memory of me playing MtG: Tactics which i greatly enjoyed
I'm unfamiliar with it. It sounds like a GBA game
i dont need a tv show about my card game, i dont need cards depicting non magic stuff. im so fucking tired of this all encompassing "everything has to be everything" shit that is the current sphere of pop culture. please let magic be magic.
I agree, and the current direction of the IP makes me sad.
For years i said "When they do freaking Marvel or StarWars cards, im out for good"...
But the flipside is that there needs to be an inflow of new players to keep the game alive.
And since WotC has shown that they cant make interesting enough things to do that without tie-ins and references, and the playerbase isnt doing it from the grassroots either - IP keyjaingling is sadly the best we have
1.) "manga first"? No no no; Pokemon was a *video game* before it was anything else, and even then, any proper narrative in a manga came after the anime exploded. Its greater appeal is certainly derived from the anime's long-term viability, but trying to divorce Pokemon from video games is like trying to divorce burn from monored.
2.) "Yugioh had a cartoon" These statements with regards to mythoi that reinvent themselves on the regular pain me. "Had A"? It's presently on its 8TH! More than that, depending on definition!
Feedback heard and taken on board
There was an mtg spinoff game called magic spellslingers that you missed. Not surprised you missed it though since it came out in 2020 and had absolutely no marketing surrounding it. I only found out about it in 2022 myself and it shut down just this year.
Was that the game with robo-Gideon?
To be fair, Magic Spellslingers was a shit Hearthstone clone >6 years after Hearthstone first appeared. It just wasn't a good idea in the first place.
Wait, that does ring a bell. But when i think about it all I can picture is Mana Strike
There is a videogame from the late 90s titled "Magic: The Gathering", but is commonly called "Shandalar", where the entire game is just walking around and dueling opponents. The game feels a lot like a beta version of MTGO. Even had Sid Meier as a designer for the game. It can be downloaded for free from archive websites since it is abandonware. Some fans even modified the game to include cards printed as recently as 2015.
There is also the Duels of the Planeswalkers boardgame, which is somewhat fun to play, at least a couple of times, but the biggest downside of it is you and your friends are actively fighting each other in a free for all deathmatch.
I’ve been wanting novels for years now. Many people don’t know the lore because it’s on a website rather than a book
A game as simple as a side scroller or more complicated like an action game (Space Marine 2) would be fun and I think draw in people. But more than likely a hero “shooter” like Overwatch would be more likely
More toys and fun stuff like that would have people see and want to be apart of the world
Those YuGiOh Duel Disks will destroy your cards faster than anything. xD I loved YuGiOh when it was the old Egyptian theme, then as soon as the pharaoh was gone man did it die fast... :^)
Forbidden Memories, Dark Duel Stories, and The Scared Cards are really good games though. The other games can be pretty rough or boring at times, Reshef of Destruction is for masochists...
Do they still work if you sleeve the cards? Will that save them?
Manastrike looks like it was supposed to be a Clash Royale clone.
Yeah, it was VERY much a mobile game in every sense of the word
god magic legends is a throooow back I played the beta on it and yeah the micro transactions were bonkers.
The game used a like booster pack system and all your spells were from these booster packs and simi sorta like commander you could use spells that were within your hero color identity, but how do you get a hero? well extremely rarely from the booster packs ofcourse, like talking 200$ rarely. They then begrudgingly gave you the chance to get it from the battle pass if you finished it, but if you didnt complete the entire battle pass in time? well then 200$ boosters is the only way to play a black/blue hero
I only vaugly rememebr playing it, but yeah that does all sound about right. Gross
To be fair, technically, the yugioh card game, started as a tie-in to the original anime and manga, not the other way around, but obviously, when the card game became as overwhelmingly popular as it did, they shifted focus REAL FAST to the card game, and now it's pretty much the main thing.
Also funny how the first episode of duel monsters aired at almost my exact birthdate, except the anime came out 1 year later than me, lol.
And yeah, considering that before the TCG, Pokemon was already very well established, first with the release of the games, then the manga, and then the anime, and pokemania was in full force in the 90's, it's no wonder the TCG exploded as it did. I mean Pokemon is literally one of, if not THE SINGLE MOST PROFITABLE FRANCHISE IN THE PLANET! THAT THING PRINTS MONEY!
There is also a long running comic series, however its very apparent that wotc or hasbro puts pretty significant restrictions on the writers which leaves them feeling a little safe
"Im lazy" *looking at the Serialisation video where you cover several cards and all their printings* "press X to doubt"
Hey Red you left out the mobile game: Magic Puzzle Quest. It's the strange MTG version of Candy Crush...
I've not heard of it, but if I had to guess I'd assume it's both not very good and yet makes millions of dollars. How close am I?
@@RedBobcatGames 🤣 You're too close!!!
Another example similar to Yu-Gi-Oh would be WOTC's own attempt at cracking the Japanese market, made in collaboration with Takara Tomy: Duel Masters. Concieved as a stepping stone for children to into TCGs (thus, Magic eventually), it was designed as a card game first but also released in par with both a manga and an anime, both of which lasted for more than a decade (and with that, more merchandise that they could sell to children). Duel Masters remains one of Japan's most successful card games ever, only now losing ground to newcommers such as thr One Piece Card Game.
(The less we talk about the botched attempt at release the game outside of Japan, the better).
The interesting thing about the big 3 is that Magic is the only one that started as a card game. Pokemon started as a video game. Yugioh started as a manga about high school kids playing all kinds of games with occult elements bleeding in.
Yugioh was high-jacked by its card game, the entire story warping around it because it was so popular even though it was only meant to be a bare bones homage to Magic for a single chapter. The card game itself was so bad they effectively needed to add more and more mechanics that completely obliterated the core game and twisted it into something unrecognizable, but at least it's fun now.
The thing that sets Magic apart to me is actually the lore. The cards in yugioh started out having very little lore, it was just the game they played in the show. It had whatever they wanted in it. Since archetypes were introduced there's some lore around the individual groups but there's no lore around how they actually all got together. There's no name for the world the monsters are from. It's all nebulous concepts about a story that happens to a particular character on a handful of cards floating off on its own. Pokemon lore is obviously just the game lore. I don't believe the card game bothers to introduce anything unique.
So for Magic to have such a rich setting for the cards is a bit of an outlier for successful cards games and I think it really should lean into it now. This show is hopefully a start but there are more so many stories that can be adapted into all sorts of games. Every game seems to try to be its own thing instead of being a way to experience an iconic part of the story. Imagine a Weatherlight JRPG, a Mirrodin Besieged RTS, a western RPG set in Ravnica, a horror game or soulslike in Innistrad. There's a lot of untapped potential.
There's a really good video by Raycevick called "Im jealous of Warhammer" that is tangential to this topic: how GW licenses their IP out to game studios, who flood the market with warhammer games. And even if those games are mostly butts, it doesn't discourage people from the IP at large, but gives them more and more opportunities to find an entry point to the setting.
If you put out enough MEDIA, some of that MEDIA will be good, and will earn you new fans. Worth a viewing.
I'll check it out, thank you
People have mentioned "Destroy All Humans. They Can be Regenerated", and I believe stuff like that it's the way to go. It was originally a one-shot and people liked it so much it turned into a series. One can argue the series isn't really about Magic, but I wholeheartedly disagree. It is about the social aspect of Magic, the friends we make, and how cringy we can be sometimes trying to feel cool. Also about struggling to find combos or fix weaknesses within a deck. A lore series would be cool, but Kinda hard to do if the goal is to keep up with current sets and stuff.
This video couldn't have come at a better time. I've been thinking about the same thing but lack the ability to explain it as well as you could. For me: I enjoyed collecting Pokemon as a kid more than playing it as a TCG; after childhood I grew out of collecting it and playing it. Now I don't even know how to play it. Yugioh was the same, I liked it into young adulthood but lost interest. Now I have coworkers that still play but I have a hard time understanding modern yugioh compared to original old yugioh (gen 1). My history with Magic the Gathering only started recently and it was via other friends playing it. I know little to NOTHING about the lore. I know a lot of MtG hate universes beyond but I like it since I know those IPs and lores better than MtG's own IPs and lore. I've been playing Magic the Gathering for maybe a decade now and still know very little about it outside of EDH/Commander. Which old MtG fans hate because this format has "ruined" (in their opinion) the standard format of MtG.
Pokemon 100% started as a video game, not as a manga. The manga was commissioned as a way to promote the game.
Yeah, I found that out after. This is the risk you run with doing it off the top of your head sometimes
Magic media should be about people playing the card game, not about what the cards depict.
We won't see planeswalkers in Warhammer since gw still has some respect for the identity of their ip. In Warhammer everyone knows the world sells the toys, the actual game itself is quite bad but magic as a game is really fun so they try to get people to play the game through ip crossovers knowing they'll stay.
Still, I'd like to see some more tie in stuff though. Maybe this Netflix show is a start to that
You forgot magic shandalar as far as tie in games go for mtg
Kind of, but it's from so long ago I don't think it can really still be counted. It certainly isn't part of the zeitgeist any more
Would you say the handful of dnd setting books set in magic the gathering planes would count as tie ins? There's books to help you run games set in Ravnica, Theros and Strixhaven, full of lore and mechanics to enable spells, ancestries and abilities themed to each plane. Idk where the boundaries of crossover and tie-in end but this being a primarily dnd facing product that uses magic IP definitely would help bring dnd players to magic, if only to learn the source material for why silvery barbs is such an obnoxious spell.
I couldn't tell you a single aspect of any of the character's personality, and I've been playing for years.
Chandra's personality is "every fire-based character you've ever seen in anything ever".
Jace's personality is "Whatever the writers decided to do with him this month".
Kaya's personality is "Doing things WotC hope you think are cool so that you'll think she's cool".
I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
I really want to see a japanese anime style Magic anime. It should follow somewhat to the card game, kinda like yugioh. But perhaps modified slightly for a nice viewing experience.
The potential for the over the top VFX and animation is limitless. It can also be an original storyline too.
I do think Magic is kinda backed into a corner in terms of what they can do, because of just how dark aspects of the lore are, *especially* the Phyrexians. It’s going to be *very* difficult to translate what’s basically a mashup between the Cybermen and Cenobites in a way that’s not instantly R rated, and they’re too big a factor in the story to ignore, even if the focus was on something else. This is by no means impossible though, given Warhammer’s lore is also incredibly mature.
Mate your videos is just so good.
Thank you very much
i don't really have anything to add (or remove?) to this conversation, but something i want to point out is that pokémon and yugioh as japanese companies they go under the "soft power kawaii" umbrella of what is the japanese government's decisions to make japan what has become today while the usa government spends their money to do more wars
My limited understanding of issues with producing movies and shows is that Hollywood and the greater movie world is a VERY complex world with a lot of private controlling interests. The end result is usually you have to sell your ideas and such to them and them allow them creative control or the film side will pull out entirely, so this screams to me of a power struggle over creative control between WotC and Hollywood. Thus strict knowledge of just Magic's history might not give you a full picture of the actual problem here.
The 'cautionary tale' people generally tend to point to is the 'Sheriff of Nottingham' script that turned into another Russel Crowe being a badass vehicle, but the more recent examples are things like the Witcher and Wheel of Time series where the showrunners think they can write a better story than the beloved source material. Personally I think they're clowns and as such I straight up don't watch movies or shows anymore, not through official platforms anyway.
Yes, better lore will make more money in the long term, but that's the problem: the long term, WOTC's focus is on the short term in order to satisfy Hasbro's demands, so long term be damned
With this modern era of writers, would expect something awful
If they could get Brandon Sanderson back I'd be thrilled
A Magic series is at least 5-10 years late. The game is way past its prime, even though it sells well. That's why it relies on other IPs to sell packs.
A MTG player playing with modern cards, really shouldn't be throwing stones about text length...
I bought all the duels of the planeswalkers games when they each came out and now literally none of them work on modern machines. I want my money back.
The fact they're unavailable is rather odd. I can run 2013 and 2014 just fine on my xbox (can't say for PC versions but most likely runs like prepatched Fallout: New Vegas or TESIV: Oblivion, AKA like complete fucking shit)
@@cherry9787 I can install them and run them, but they just stop working. You'll get 2 turns into a game and it just stops progressing, forever locked in, without even being able to quit short of alt+f4.
You got some wires crossed. Pokemon started as a game 100%. The manga, card game, and anime all followed after. Yugioh started as a manga.
You'd think after the gas leak year, we'd have learned that if you're having creative differences with the people who wrote for Community, you're the one in the wrong.
Tbh I don't see much hope for MTG media tie-ins, cos at the end of the day... who would it be for? MTG's lore is weird and convoluted and very self-referential. A lot of existing, enfranchised MTG players are barely interested in it - According to Rosewater, 75% of players in I think 2022 didn't even know what a planeswalker was. There's a small hyper-interested audience that would definitely watch it, but those people are going to have extremely high standards and will be difficult to please, so there's a good chance tie-in media wouldn't really be for them. Then there's a huge audience of people who don't know what MTG is and aren't inclined to care, who will be difficult to interest because an MTG show kinda has no selling point except being MTG (unless they shift tactics to the Arcane approach where the established lore is only minimally relevant). And then an audience of MTG players who might watch when they remember its existence months after release but won't count down the days to release or go out of their way to watch, which is where I fall. It sort of feels like a Borderlands movie situation, where the target audience wouldn't actually exist; that being people who like MTG enough to be excited to engage just by it being an MTG project, but who simultaneously don't like MTG so much that they'd be bothered by the reinterpretations inevitable in adaptation.
As for why there are no planeswalker minis or phyrexians in Warhammer - cos Games Workshop knows that would be disastrous. If there's any playerbase that would rebel against franchise crossovers, it's Warhammer players. This is a group of people who care so much about game-feel that they added a minimum painting skill level required before you're allowed to play in events.
Never trust Rosewater. He'll tell you whatever he needs to to serve his own ends. Maybe 75% don't know what a planeswalker is, but I doubt it. It's likely to get a number like that, you'd have to include as "players" those with only passing familiarity or who played the game casually 15 years ago. And even if it is true, what context is he presenting it in? He's probably trying to downplay interest to cover his ass for the trash-tier lore they've been turning out.
@@MasterDecoy1W That statement was completely unrelated to the TV series.
@@yurisei6732 But you used it as evidence that the market for tie-ins is niche and not an attractive audience. I think you're working from bad data by someone who has to cover for the incompetence of his team. I think it would be incredibly easy to churn out concepts for MTG stories and the fact that they don't speaks to a lack of imagination, not interest.
There was a MTG manga starring young Chandra, but I think that got axed pretty fast...
That's such a shame
So, in my opinion, the reason why Magic IP crossovers are one way (besides all the obvious corporate greed reasons) really boils down to this: Yes, Magic has had really interesting and high quality lore and narratives tied to it, but it was never really defined by them. Something like Warhammer, or you also expressed this idea for Doctor Who in a previous video, has its own story to tell with its own lore, and therefore doesn't really have any room for Jace or Urza or a Phyrexian to show up, or for the Doctor to travel to Amonkhet. That happening would break with the narrative flow of their own lore, and would muddy the waters. But, I don't think the inverse is true. Don't get me wrong, I don't love Universes Beyond and I'm mostly in the camp that Magic should just be Magic and we as a culture shouldn't be so aggressively addicted to IP crossovers- BUT. Magic was always more defined by the ability to create a story with cards than it was by the specific story being created. So I think among both Magic fans and fans of other IPs there's just inherently more interest in seeing how the Doctor would work as a card than there is in seeing what the Doctor would think about Amonkhet. And I say this as someone who is a huge fan Doctor Who's narrative AND of Magic's narrative. I can't see a Magic crossover episode of Doctor Who working, like at all, but I enjoyed the Dr. Who commander decks. (Which, by the way, if UB is going to exist it needs to be exclusive to Commander decks and MAYBE Secret Lairs. The LotR and Assassin's Creed sets were a travesty and make no sense as a product for anyone who's a fan of any of the involved franchises.)
Burning question here. Does Egg Boy, the Particle That Permeates All Existence ever post here? Do you know anything about him?
Sorry, I want to see the little animated red cat, so I don't listen to the audio only version. I'm a big transformer fan, but I like ghostbusters too, both from the animated tv show in the 80's... so no surprise I bought the ecto-one transformer. But when I started magic back in the 90's, they had comics and books all over but even the really good comic disappeared without a word as far as I know. It seems to be a problem, for D&D is struggling right now because WOTC want all the money without any efforts, and you can't find people like those who did Baldur's gate for cheap each time... I mean, they hired the people from Dragonlance to relaunch the universe, and they didn't want to pay them !
Yeah, it's mad. And this mindset they seem to have will ruin the company in the long term, I'm sure of it
One mtg game cross over was with SMITE. They had skins for a couple planeswalkers plus atraxa. Incredibly disappointing. SMITE is an awful game and deserves nobodies attention. As far as mobas go its as if someone tried to recreate one in ROBLOX from 2010. I sincerely doubt it drew any new fans into magic as SMITE does colabs all the time with literally anyone and none of it carries any weight. Would you beleive me if i told you they did a Slipknot colab? or stranger things? or vshojo? or rwby? My appologies for the rant but SMITE sucks and it makes zero sense for anyone to be wanting to colab with them to make these skins.
Yeah, I remember looking into it when they did TMNT skins, but the game didn't look very good at all which was a real shame
I don’t know why they don’t try to focus on the lore better there is a precedent here like I bought the books and well war of the spark was not great but I went out and bought the book like if the good stories online were published I would have bought them like the older days I have the shadowmore and eve tide books and trying to locate more why aren’t they capitalizing this again
Yeah, there's certainly a market for it. They could make money selling good books, so i don't know why they don't
I think the Warhammer show and MTG has the same problem with adaptation: where do you start and whos point of view is it from?
"Where do we start?" :
Should the magic show start with Urza and Mishra? The Weatherlight? Should the 40k show start with the Necrontyr? The Horus heresy? Or do we plop down 'in medias res' and focus on our main blue boys Jace or Titus.
"Point of view?":
Since these are games where you pick a character, faction or color and make it yours, making a broad audience jumping on point will most likely depict the "default" point of view: The gatewatch and the Ultramarines.
In the game itself you can make them your general/commander but we will probably have to wait a long while before we see Tibalt or Kaptin Badrukk as a main protagonist characters in their own show.
Yugioh is a meta show about playing the cardgame, even if the first season of the show completely made up its own rules. Whenever they do cross over its often only to make really over or under powered cards that references events in the show.
What this means is that it avoids the issue above, since the characters in the show are building THEIR favorite decks, just like you should when you start playing.
Same with Pokemon; Ash got a Pikachu but you can catch whatever you like. And the show enforces that each trainer has a theme or strategy they have chosen.
With an in-universe adaptation (MTG and 40k would have to be because of all the lore), it might be a good story but wont inform the new people about the actual game.
I have seen so many youtubers grimace when they realize 40k is a tabletop game after getting hooked with SM2 or reading the books/lore.
I think I disagree. A story wouldn't have to inform people about the game to still get them interested. Sure, some people won't want to play after learning about the lore, but many others will. And those will be people that won't have played otherwise so I think it's worth it. (In a sense that more players = better game). As to your first questions, I'd answer, we start where ever the author is interested in starting, and have multiple authors working on multiple projects to cover every aspect of the lore. And for "Point of view?" Yeah, if that works. If not, then no. Do a bit of everything, you know?
I like all the Red Bobcat's videos
Why thank you very much!
I'm not excited in the slightest for the netflix show, because i know it will be another politics first, story second slop we're used to seeing. I'd be very, very shocked if it turns out to be good genuine storytelling (or adaptation) rather than corporate box-checking for master blackrock.
I have some hope, but yeah the creative team probably will be under the heel of the money men
Is Shandalar a tie-in? You play mtg in it, buuuut.... it also had this rpg aspect on top of it.
I thought about it, but honestly it's so old I don't think I could say it's part of the zeitgeist anymore
Good lore? There hasn't been good lore for, I dunno, like 20 years? When was the first Ravnica?* You might as well ask know-nothing modern urbanites to reconstruct the great monuments of their culture. The Weatherlight saga must seem like ancient pre-cursor technology to the simpletons currently working at WotC. The worst part is they think they're doing fine. They literally don't know how bad it is until the audience starts shit-talking it. You gotta wonder who they're focus-testing, or if they do focus tests at all.
*Yeah, yeah, the first Innistrad block was kinda cool. Too bad it was sandwiched between nihilism and repugnant nostalgia-bait.
there is a successful tie-in in the form of Destroy All Humans. They Can't Be Regenerated, a manga about some 90s teenagers playing MTG.
I've since learned about this, and will have to check it out at some point
The aftermarket has a huge influence on how the Magic society behaves. If something makes the aftermarket money, people are brainwashed into believing it's an amazing product, and vice versa. The moment MTG branches out to other areas, you have other markets to compete with. Those that don't care what the MTG market thinks. They'll continue to sell the product cheaper than the MTG market does, meaning no sales on the aftermarket's side. This leads people to believe that the product is terrible, just because the aftermarket can't sell it for egregious mark-up.
I wonder how other companies manage it then. Maybe it's just a case of putting out something actually good
The reason why there is no mtg anime is because the story sucks balls. You could maybe do a weatherlight saga or brothers war tv show but anything from the newer sets is just bad. The problem with old stuff is that they white males as leads and in 2024 you can't have that.
I agree that Magic story is, in a word, crap, but let's not pretend like the reason for that is that it has gay people in it now.
Duskmourn sucked because there was no tension, the setting was a mess, and it was heavily focused on the general rambling incoherence of the omenpath/desparking era. Bloomburrow sucked because the characters were completely lacking in both agency and purpose. The Gatewatch saga sucked because it focused on a group of random idiots with no investment in the conflict at the expense of those who did, the Bolas arc sucked because he was an incompetent dishcloth of a villain, and the Phyrexia arc sucked because they wrote themselves into a corner and could only escape it with stupidity and contrivance.
None of this would be fixed by having all the characters be straight white dudes.
Good video
Thank you
So, the answer is waifus?
Fine, so long as they're full characters, they represent multiple types of person, and still get to DO things.
This made me picture someone informing Elesh Norn she's now a waifu and... well that's a mental image I won't soon forget
I dunno. These days a Magic series would just be Pride pandering. Every character would be an extra-dimensional lesbian... Stories would revolve around feelings.
We'd wanna see like some actually cool magic and lore, but the stuff we like would be censored and replaced with The Agenda. It's better this series doesn't happen right now. Give it 10 years when Hasbro are finally bankrupt and maybe The Agenda has been forced to peel back