@@sirearlgrey2036 yeah that should be yeast, but in french it is levure - a term probably used in some english speaking areas. Why do I have to learn six lenguages to learn english, now I cannot answer that.
“Brevity is the soul of wit” says one Shakespeare character before babbling on at length. WotC seems to have taken that at face value, only briefly touching on superficial cultural references instead of building a world through genre exploration, as Vince says.
@@Mors I see the post MOM more as Magic presenting an anthology of tales. Like The Dying Earth by Vance. Which fine, every story told can't be the Oddessy.
the "I want it to be more serious" reminds me of a passage from ye olde D&D 3.0 dungeon master guide which stuck with me as a teen. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it's something to the effect of "be careful of adding explicit parody or comedy to your world. the gameplay at the table will already bring many opportunities to joke around and bring levity. but if your players want to engage with your lore it's important that, within it, it takes itself seriously."
Got my 3.5DMG at my desk. "How seriously you take things sets the standard for how seriously the players take things. Jokes and silly remarks can make the game for fun, but they can also detract from the action. If you make funny comments during the game, expect that the players will, too. Likewise, if you design adventures that are lighthearted, create NPCs that are slightly silly, or introduce embarrassing or humorous situations into the game, realize that it changes the tenor of the game... [Passage with an example of such a silly world.] ...Overall, it's recommended that you play things straight. Don't intentionally insert jokes into the game. There'll be enough joshing around at the table already to keep the game fun."
YUUUUUUUUUUUP. People defending this trash aren't old or experienced enough to have seen how this can destroy something and how quickly it does it. I've been a DM for a long time now and a long time ago I banned joke characters and such from my games BECAUSE of this exact thing. Tone is everything and magic has just become... kind of stupid.
Something that's gotten to me about recent sets is that there's a lot less magic. I don't mean MtG, I mean spellcasting and wizards and actual magic. So many spells and creatures these days are just... normal dudes or normal actions. It's so much less fantasy than I remember it being.
yes! its especially egregious to me with Duskmourn! why are they fighting ghosts with weapons and sci-fi guns and not.... MAGIC? it'd be cool to see someone using magic powers to fend off the horrors and stuff but you literally dont see that in a single card
@@mymarshlandsexcept we literally do? We have Zimone creating fractals, The Wandering Emperor using magical weapons, and Aminatou creating magical equipment for the main cast of characters who travelled to Duskmourne. Not only that, Glimmers are quite literally magic, and are one of the main ways Survivors combat the monsters of Duskmourne
@@mymarshlands I'm no real fan of Duskmourne, but to say you literally don't see that in a single card is just false. There are many cards, even ones flavored as things that could be mundane, that show as people casting spells, to say nothing of the things that are completely supernatural or impossible. There's a LOT (indeed, too much for my taste) tech and real-world in the mix, but to say that spellcasting doesn't exist on the cards is misrepresenting it.
After the announcement of some Universes Beyond product, I remember some Magic personality had a Twitter post about it and asked the question, "What universe do you want Magic to collab with next?" I showed that tweet to a friend of mine, and he said, "Dominaria". And I really felt that.
I remember being shown the tweet as well. I made a comparison to MTG as a whole becoming Phyrexian. While the core experience of the game is still there, the identity of the game has been completely stripped of anything that made it remotely unique so that it may be assimilated into a monolith of modernity. On a lighter note, keep up on the great content.
Going back to planes we've already visited can only go so far. I don't know why some people would be comfortable with going back to ravnica a 20th time or having a 50th version of Jace. That would do more harm to the game than any universes beyond ever could
@@Kjos_jax The way it used to be was that we had one plane as a sort of hub world, Dominaria, and from there the story would branch into other planes. It kept the game grounded and consistent both narratively and aesthetically while allowing them to explore other ideas in a way that really helped make the planes all feel like a multiverse rather than just being their own thing. As it is the story is so vapid and nonsensical that I checked out after Brothers war. Don't get me started on the literary travesty that is March of the Machines and everything that's come after.
First, in Dominaria, we had a world for the entire game to take place in. Then we had worlds made to support a block. Then worlds were made to host one set, but to become part of a larger multiverse, with potential to return. I don't think there's going to be a Return to Thunder Junction. These worlds are made to last two months, so they're only two months deep.
No intent in returning to Thunder Junction would explain why it's so hollow. Not to mention white-washing of historical nuances found in the American frontier period. Thunder Junction is a safe, theme park rendition of the Wild West genre, where there's no natives to displace/murder (except the cactus people, who apparently don't count), no lingering effects of a civil war over slavery/secessionism, and no exploited immigrants building railroads. You're not meant to think about Thunder Junction's world or story for any longer than it takes to Buy Product, and then get excited for Next Product. Hasbro just wanted to mine the cowboy genre for cheap cash, and to fill a slot in their schedule. (This also explains why Hasbro are making Universes Beyond half the yearly output; they don't have to think about what they're making, just turn the IP of the month into a card set).
You're not wrong, but 10 years from now(or whatever), some neewb currently getting into the game will covet some of these sets b/c they were the first. ugh
@@gravit8ed Why? New players a decade from now won't know the sets ever existed. Fans NOW will probably barely remember them, except as "where the one card in my [X] deck comes from, the one with the cowboys".
Yeah. They should just axe all these lame planes in a big lore event and keep just the good ones. Dominaria, Mirrodin, Ravnica, Zendikar, Innistrad and Kamigawa. The rest is gone for good.
Finally someone told the truth. I don't care about spongebob cards, i care about ridiculous things like Thalia riding the gitrog monster or Olivia voldaren cosplaying as cowgirl
I think people's complaints about UB are kind of connected. The Professor from Tolarian Community College made the same argument when talking about UB coming to standard. He also mentioned some of the concerns laid out in this video: how characters are just there to be in "different costumes" rather than sets explore an interesting and immersive fantasy world. So essentially even the non UB sets of Magic have, as of late, been looking more and more like something coming out of UB, hence exposing the underlying problem.
I call these "Hearthstone sets", but from hearthstone you always expect an exxaggerated take on the warcraft lore and worldbuilding, they always mix the OG serious events with jokes and original additions. Like when they made an expansion in the city Gadgetzan, which was ruled by three-class gangs, or Scholomance, a magical school, and then they raced in wacky vehicles in the Darkmoon Faire. Or when they made a murder mystery in Castle Nathria, or when they made a western set in the Badlands. They even went into outer space this tuesday in a set called "The Great Dark Beyond". Wait, why does it sound so familiar now.....
@@Aaron537_UNIQUESTRING Begun? It's been this way for years, people are just finally realizing this isn't the "fun exception" but instead the referential norm now.
Magic absolutely feels like Hearthstone at this point. Don't get me wrong, I like that Hearthstone is silly. But Hearthstone was silly from the *start.* The flavour text of every card was a joke. Kel'thuzad joked about an achievement for losing to Gluth and then says "Ha ha, there is no achievement for losing to Gluth!" in Naxxramus. Even probably the most serious set in Hearthstone, Frozen Throne, had the Lich King joke about Lady Deathwhisper not running Arcane Explosion. Everything in Hearthstone is a joke, and that's great. It was made that way. Magic, wasn't.
I think Magic and the MCU have had a similar problem. After End Game, Marvel feels a bit lost. Magic has the same after Aftermath. The big war has been fought out... now what?
The problem is that the "big war" never happened because March of the Machine was rushed AF when it it should have been made as a 2 part block at minimum to keep the pace of the story. Realmbreaker and Elesh Norn's plan lasted for a single set cycle. At least War of the Spark was justified in the sense it was Bolas's magnum opus plan in a single or a few days to execute not the whole of Phyrexia declaring world war to the whole multiverse.
A good stepping off point would be small scale stories. Cover the stories of people on planes in the aftermath of such destruction and their quest to rebuild their planes. Edit: time skipping would also be a good start to focus on newer characters in lower stakes adventures. Something like finding a family heirloom that was either lost or stolen in the conflict or hosting a festival to honor the heroes that saved the plane and the activities around that. BloomBurrow does an excellent job with this
@@SRMC23 not to mention that war of the spark was preceded by two ravnica sets that made a point of setting up what was about to happen in war. Things like guild leaders dying and a couple planeswalkers appearing swiftly climbing guild ranks, etc. sure the overall outcome was a maybe a little lackluster, but the point is that we had two sets devoted to showing what was happening on ravnica before nicol bolas enacted his big grand scheme
@@pichutube Yep. While the war itself was short, we'd spent two whole sets "surveying the battlefield", as it were. Learning the land, and the ones who would fight in it. So when the War of the Spark broke out, you really cared about its combatants. Moreover, it felt like the logical leap from at least the two previous sets. If the War of the Spark hadn't broken out, what followed would have been a full blown Guild war. The tension was impossible to release otherwise. So having it be Bolas not only paid off a few years story setup, it released that "cold war" tension, while also being a thorough plot twist to the growing conflict between Guilds. An Outside Context Problem that threw everyone for a loop. March of the Machines just kind of...happened. A war happening everywhere, against everyone, all at once. And it all shakes out and resolves itself in one set? It was NEVER going to feel satisfying, truncated like that. They could have spent an entire extra year's worth of sets, just showing the war on its theoretically infinite fronts (if by only showing planes we already knew, and some new ones for spice). Instead, it felt perfunctory. Both in setup, execution, and resolution.
The mindset of set designs seems to be: pick a concept or genre, slap your magic characters in it, boom thats your setting. we arent getting fleshed out worlds like ravnica, kaladesh, dominaria, zendikar, we get magic but cowboys, magic but animals, magic but its clue, magic but its a haunted house, magic but its car racing ect.
Sets used to be: let's use these tropes and ideas but mix them in with unique Magic flavor to make something familiar but distinct Now it's: put the characters in a new hat, job's done
I'd argue Bloomburrow is one of the few original settings we've gotten recently. True, there isn't a lot of story coming from it, but that's the break neck set release and their lack of further media to support the story. They somehow managed to keep themselves from slapping dozens of furry versions of legendaries from other planes.
@@IamtheTolle I agree I like bloomburrow a lot. It still follows the same design philosophy of just picking a trope/theme/a different IP (id argue redwall) and making it a magic set, which I don't think is sustainable, but it had a much better identity than the other recent sefs
I think one way to gloss this is that older Magic sets & settings were sufficiently coherent places within the MtG universe that it would take you a couple sentences to explain the core idea of Ravnica or Phyrexia or Tarkir, whereas a lot of the more recent sets are adequately summarized by “X, but Magic.” 80s horror, but Magic. Cowboys, but Magic. Gangster noir, but Magic. Everything feels more like a high-concept parody than genuine worldbuilding.
They been doing this the whole time. Let's slowly go back together. Cute critters, but Magic. Detective Noire, but Magic. Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Magic. Fairy Tales, but magic. Infinity war/End Game, but Magic. Hellraiser, but Magic. Harry Potter, but Magic. D&d, but Magic Magic. Kaiju, but Magic. Greek Mythos, but Magic...(a little farther back) Cosmic Horror, but Magic. Steampunk, but Magic...(and all the way back) Arabian Nights, but Magic. Pretty much any set can have this done to it.
This is exactly why I'm so puzzled by the relative outrage around the announcement that half the sets are going to be Universes Beyond going forward. Like, seriously, the last 3 sets were Universes Beyond sets, just without having to pay a licensing deal with any specific IP, so to me it made no sense to draw the line there.
@@KunushiH Most of those recent ones are sets that people would criticize for the same thing. Arabian Nights you have a point, but you can't quite put Urza's block, or Odyssey block, or Onslaught block in the same pithy terms.
The difference with Bloomburrow, for me at least, wasn't that I'm less familiar with the source material (I've definitely engaged with some things over the years, so I recognized some of the tropes). It was more that Bloomburrow put a lot more effort both into taking the set and its story seriously and *also* that even where there *were* references, they were more deeply submerged in Magic's normal tone and style than a lot of the references in the last year's other sets. I still think Twins of Mauer Estate compared to Unsettling Twins really highlights the difference: the first one takes the same trope and works it into the setting of Innistrad more directly, whereas the second one is literally just lifted from a movie scene. Unsettling Twins is far more surface level, and while Magic has always had surface level references like this, if they're *all* we're getting, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb and make the sets feel far more shallow
Bloomburrow did what we want magic sets to do, it took the source material and did it justice while still incorporating the world into the greater magic narrative. Duskmourn was SO close to achieving the same result, but they really botched the survivors. They and their tech needed to look more worn down and tattered. Additionally having jokey light hearted sets is fine, when it's not overdone. Finally, we need to return to the 3 set block structure so that the devs, as well as us the players can flesh out and explore these worlds that are being built. One set is simply not enough to showcase everything going on.
Bloomburrow was still about heroes and beasts, tricksters and wizards. It was high fantasy with a cute furry coat of paint. Aetherdrift is about motorcycle racing. That’s not fantasy.
I've played the game since 1995 and no Bloomburrow is probably one of the least Magic sets for tone and presentation. Magic was never about cutie anthropomorphic cottage core low fantasy.
This is something I’ve heard you say a lot in videos, but is beginning to bother me a little: Bloomburrow is nothing like the other sets this year in terms of being a pastiche of Magic characters in a themed setting. Idk if you’re just being overly cautious because of how unfamiliar you are with the media that inspired it (eg Secret of Nimh or Redwall) or you’re trying to vindicate the malaise that this year has brought in general, but Bloomburrow was absolutely the set that bucked this year’s “characters you know in silly hats” trend.
I will say however, that even though I found the set and its world lovely, I would agree if you made the argument that it was another self-contained story that had very little in terms of forward progression for the overall Magic canon.
@@Thatposer444Bloomburrow is the only set for the past or next year that makes me wish we had blocks again. Even if it was 2 instead of 3. Having a slightly more Calamity Beast set with our heroes heading to the border of the valley would have been very cool. I also feel like it could have been interesting to see the handle of characters that have used Omenpaths get to be much more specific about it having gone to other places and come back, tempting us with the idea that Mabel and the gang would leave. Honestly, something like a Calamity Beast escaping at the end of the story would be interesting. Ral realizes a 4 winged Hawk is a dragon that's been shifted down to Bloomburrow size... What does that mean power wise if a Coyote made of tornados or a Bear that's an earthquake goes through and becomes like a Kaiju stomping around the planes Idk, it feels almost like asking for a post credit sequel setup scene. I *liked* that it's self contained but when a set only exists for like 6 weeks it feels like it has to exist to tie into the future set where these characters return
@Crushanator1 ok but you feeling like you wished it was a block etc...doesn't make it true that Bloomburrow is actually anything like Magic. It isn't cute anthropomorphic creatures was never a thing and kind of actively anti-Magic given most of Magic was body horror, Science Fantasy, D&D style high fantasy etc... I don't even dislike it but it feels like people are actively being disingenuous when they say that Bloomburrow feels like classic Magic
@@TheEvolver311Absolutely agree. Bloom isnt magic in feeling. Not one bit. Its just the set people liked most recently. Which isnt a surprise, many people love cute animals. But thats the only thing bloom had. It still suffers just as much from the same symptoms as the other sets. And if secret of nymh truly was the inspiration, they fukked it up anyway, because bloom feels way more cutesy then that movie. The film „failed“ back then exactly because of its dark tones. Bloom has none of that. Shows true disregard for the source, for magic. Its just about „as many people as possible“.
The thing is, that’s where it feels like MTG is going too. What’s this? A card that’s a goblin crazily driving a car. That’s just Joy-Ride Rigger. What’s this? A character from your favorite show, put in Magic and played for laughs? That’s just Crash Nebula. What’s this? A whole set that takes place in space! Wow! So cool! How original! OH WAIT THATS JUST UNFINITY AS A WHOLE.
It doesn't just feel like one, it looks like one and is a slap in the face to anyone who takes the game seriously. If you like racing, go do racing shit. Magic doesn't need to add racing to be relevant. STOP MAKING SUCH MORONIC CHOICES!! Nobody has started playing the game because suddenly they added cowboy hats. It isn't like just because its a US western land themed set the denizens have to look like the people who inhabited that land over 100 years ago in our own world. You can have a cactus and not also have cowboy hats and revolvers. Like seriously, who even wanted that shit? Did that setting make ANYONE who plays the game happy or bring new people to play it?
People used to hate, when EDH allowed Un-Set as legal. Now people ok with these legal Un-Set called UB, being legal in all format. Heck all UB mostly success. Mtg community really has no consistency, as long as it's all about Fomo and card price.
@@chayadol I personally didn't have much of an issue with LOTR. Magic owes much of its lore and themes to those books and nothing from the set felt truly out of place. Warhammer was a stretch but some of it fit. It's still a fantasy type setting at least. Super heroes, anime and cowboy hats do not fit whatsoever and take me out of the game completely. There are already other games with those elements one can go play. Magic doesn't need Wolverine anymore than Marvel Comics need Jace.
@@mikeydildos I'm on the same boat as you here, I kept forgot that LOTR also UB lol At first I have a mix feeling about WH40K, but after these new UB we'll have. i'd prefer 10 WH40K than those tbh.
@@darthsnarf So, it's kind of "all faults are of Mark Rosewater / Chris Cocks"? (I don't know who actually was / still is in charge of WotC from the moment everything started to rot)
Block sets were the best imo. They had to take a lot more time rather than, as you said, put hats on characters and see what happens. The Sylex, The Weatherlight, the Legacy Weapon, the pieces of Kaldra, the Mirari.... all of these things felt mechanically and thematically unique at the time of their printing. One could argue that they felt that way due to the volume of cards in that "gilded age," but my counterpoint is this: : If you needed a specific card that did a very specific thing, you knew either the family of cards that did the effect or you knew the singular card and any iteration that was printed that did the thing. : Sure, mono white wraths, black paid life, green hates artifacts and has mana dorks, blue had counterspells, red burned... but the Mirari did what the Mirari does. Copy spells by paying 3. Fantastic. Thats why Mirari's Wake made sense in my mind. It stored all that mana. It stored all of that power. Thats why your creatures are stronger and you produce more mana in its presence. : Idk...cards dont "feel" like that anymore.
What’s troubling is not only that there’s a plethora of UB sets coming, but that there’s a good chance the in universe sets are even more uninteresting.
Magic in racecars... Magic in space... yeah they're already garbage. Tarkir COULD be incredible, as can the return to Lorwyn but fuck me why are we getting so much trash and less of this other cool shit we all love?
Say for what Magic really is right now: An Avengers Endgame/Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff. Also WOTC, like many other companies, had fallen on trying to cater to "the modern audience", audience that doesn't even represent half the MTG players, nor are interested in the product, so the creative process is highly questionable; doesn't help that Hasbro is milking the IP as much as possible with so many sets in a year. We had good MTG a decade ago and we didn't know how worse it could get.
@@HanDaimond no I did, it sounds exactly like the same complaints from when War of the Spark came out and actually doesn't feel applicable to the resent sets which to me feels more like Magic the Anthology story arch, or like the Dying Earth by Vance, a collection of stories that happen in a shared world but are otherwise untethered. So no I understood what you wrote.
@@TheEvolver311 Ok, let's pretend The Gatewatch was created coincidentally after The Avengers movie arc started and not because they were trying to capitalize on the hype. Let's pretend the current sets are also following a series of stories that were already referenced in old books, but coincidentally targets tropes from popular media like Spaghetti Western, 80's horror (with TVs and all) and soon Fast and the Furious, Thor Ragnarok, and Star Wars, and we follow a diverse group of whacky heroes who _definitely_ don't want to be the next Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy. Let's pretend the art is as colorful as it has ever been and there's no intention on trying to attract a modern crowd or anything. Let's pretend the March of the Machine font design didn't look as if it wanted to be part of the MCU lineup. And let's also pretend that they really didn't meant to introduce Spiderman into MTG and force it to be legally playable in more constructed formats, they just _love_ the character. Nah you're right, must be my imagination, my theory only applied to War of the Spark for sure.
@HanDaimond you said specifically end game/guardians of the galaxy. That was War of the Spark. MoM imo wasn't very "MCUy" presentation. You sound like someone in 1999 that the game is dead because the art direction changed from traditional fantasy paintings towards a more graphic style Or when people said the heart of the game was dead because WotC started imposing design consistency standards which ended the "weird" or "abstract art that was common until around Mirrodin. The aesthetic of the game has changed more than once since I started playing in 1995 so you'll have to cry about that somewhere else chicken little
tbf, we got years of people saying they didn’t like/care/read the current Magic story, so it’s funny for everyone to turn around and say that now they really care about it
@@RBGolbatIt's because somebody has to care about the game at some point. If it's all soulless shilling from the top down, then everything feels disingenuous. Take Lorcana. Could have been neat, but it's literally just named sets without any definitive narrative, so it's just collecting art cards. Pokemon TCG has the base games, so you know there's something backing the art and theming. Flesh and Blood gets close, but it needs a little help. MTG has the disadvantage for formerly having at least some sort of narrative, but then they shook all the lore enthusiasts off before trying to half-adopt a story-friendly stance again.
@@RBGolbat I believe most competitive players are not so "strict" with the overall game narrative as long as they have the right competitive playset. As a casual player I always enjoyed the actual fantasy main theme that Magic is/was about.
@@Bardonga1988 just so my perspective is clear, my individual enjoyment of the game is mostly through the gameplay, hard mechanics, and color pie. Whenever the story is good, it’s just a cherry on top, so I’m always looking at the game through the lens of What kind of cool mechanics are the cards doing, and worrying about the flavor of the cards last.
I feel like the MTG creative team is getting more and more overworked, and having one plane per expansion hardly makes a plane rich. In my opinion, they should go back to a three-set-per-plane structure, at least in physical format.
I at least would want 2 set blocks back. 3 set blocks ran into issues with pacing sometimes where set 2 didn't feel distinct storywise from set 1. From when I started playing in OG Zendikar block, there was always some issue with 1 set in the block, either narratively or mechanically. I seem to remember their brief flirtation with 2 block sets at least having better story pacing, just gave settings a little room to breathe, which is something I desperately miss
100% Tbh I don't care if it's two or 3 sets on the same plane; I just want the game to stay in one place long enough for something interesting to happen. Rn it feels like little more than surface level exposition..... jump to one place, take a cool picture, move on. Is it too much to as that they stick in one place & let it develop a bit? And also they need to get that release schedule back under control..... just too many sets, especially with a 3 year rotation. But that's getting off topic.
Agreed, the issue with one set per plane is it makes these places super undercooked. Theres no reason to ever want to return to the location in the same way like Dominaria or Kaladesh, theres flat out not enough even there to return to besides doing Cowboys- but again; or Haunted House- but again. Bloomburrow is the only one that really combats that issue any due to it having a distinct beginning, middle, and end to its story arcs, and is honestly the only recent Magic world i'd even want a future set to return to. I simply just dont care about Thunder Junction or Duskmourn, they didnt bring enough new to the table besides vague references with Magic characters. Legitimately I wanna know how Duskmourn is supposed to follow Bloomburrow besides a cliche "Elsewhere in the multiverse-" and a hard cut to the location.
"Beach episodes" is like the most accurate thing I've heard in a long time to explain the current state of MTG lol it's so true. "Hey gang!" (says a planeswalker to the rest of the planeswalkers) "Whadaya say we all dress up as 1920s gangsters and play mafia? Cool! Now lets dress up as cowboys and play trains! Sick! Now lets shapeshift into furry animals! haha we're having so much fun! Now lets dress up as 1980s horror icons and L.A.R.P. a game of Clue™! Boy howdy that was fun...What? What do I mean by '1920s' and '1980s'? Well obviously I'm referring to the real world that plays us, but shhh we can't break the 4th wall yet until the Deadpool SL comes out hehe~ Anyway time to dress up as Akira characters and do some Tokyo Drift Speed Racing!! Hahaha...What? Nicol Bolas? Phyrexia? Slivers? Urza? Who?? Cares???" It's literally an endless stream of beach episodes and the cast never actually gets back to the main plot. God damn I really miss MTG :c
I think that this video touches upon a symptom of a topic that has been a rising issue over the last few years: WotC wants to cut to as much of the "boring" stuff to get to the cool or neat stuff, often lacking build-up beyond blurbs of backstory posted. I was initially excited about the Multiverse post-March of Machine and exploring the various traumas gained as a result of such a massive war... and to their credit they did explore some of it with Nashi and Trostani. But I was also let down by other things such as Will and Rowan literally jumping from experiencing the worst and most horrific tragedies to have ever happened to them... to both twins having ideological differences about how Eldraine should be rules ala Song of Fire And Ice. They just want to cut to the chase and not let things develop as if they are struggling to keep focus without Ritalin. What I'm saying is that all of these things are good ideas, but they often feel so disassociated with each other because they lack the cohesive focus and time to bring it all together. Basically... like a series of poorly-written fan fiction stories that have good ideas but poor execution
The end of blocks brought the end of longer form story's. They used to have whole years on a single plane, 3-2 sets focused on the same narrative. That's 2-3 books etc... With 1 set to a plane it's really not possible to tell the kind of stories they used to(not that they were good at it then either but bad in different ways)
5:00 I don't think Duskmourn works, in part because it's clearly a 3rd arc climax mixed with a multiverse crossover, rather than either an 80s horror or haunted house movie. Set 1: Your teenagers enter the haunted house; learn about the lore of the house, and awaken something, but escape. Set 2: Your teenagers return to the house because their friends are there, but they don't escape this time... this time the house wins and spreads to engulf the plane. THEN Set 3 (ideally 2 years later): The house uses Omenpaths (ugh) to kidnap people from across the multiverse. Time has no meaning; so you can snatch some historic MTG characters you want to resurrect, and then ends with the house being defeated. Oh, and have better mechanics.
I just can't wait until bloomburrow draft is back again on arena, i want to play with actually fun mechanics and not whatever garbage got spat onto my plate in DSK
I think it kinda shifted when the focus is on the characters instead of the world. When I first played Innistrad it felt like it was a world, and Thalia as a Legendary just lived in it. And I'll try not to make the "Magic is Commander and Commander Only" argument, but with the need for more and more named charaters the sets feels more like Skins in a videogame than a real setting. But also I have a nagging feeling that the comment "UB will always be Magic Adjecent" is the reason why we now get sets in ALL genres that doesn't feel natural, so they can get all of the IPs and we fortnite now boys.
Innistrad is one of the best made planes in my opinion. I hosted a DnD campaign that lasted around 6 years in total. We still felt the world of Innistrad would have had more to give. The cards' flavour really helped me flesh out my homebrew version of that world as a dungeon master. It was a self contained world instead of a purely character centric hero-story.
I agree with you 100%. Magic's niche used to be about creating real, in-depth worlds, and adding characters in later. There were no Planeswalkers or 'main characters,' so everyone had to be made for the plane. As time went on and Planeswalkers took center stage, Magic became about them doing their thing, and making a world for them to do it in. Not that I have a problem with Planeswalkers specifically. Ijust liked it more when they were background characters adding spice and a little stakes to a set, rather than entire sets being designed on a planeswalker's adventure of the week.
The big shift for magic creative design is that they no longer want to make new things; they want to play it safe, and put popular old things against a different backdrop (cowboys, horror, etc). There's a reason bloomburrow did well, and it was a lot because they only included a single, minor recurring character in the main set.
I think the comment of "phoned in" is really key here, especially with these being essentially 100% top-down designs nowadays. Top-down requires a lot of care and attention to the structure and mechanical aspects still, and it feels like when that is attended to (such as Theros and enchantments, or Bloomburrow and creature types), you get a cohesive gameplay experience that complements the theming rather than clashing. Contrast with the top-down designs that function more as collections of tropes without any well-formed underlying connective mechanical tissue like Thunder Junction, and it quickly falls apart as soon as you look for anything more engaging than "Rakdos in a cowboy hat!"
I'm not sure what you mean. You mentioned top-down design in both cases. Is it top-down design that produces good sets (like Theros, bloomburrow, etc) or bottom-up?
@@LifeForAiur Either can produce good sets, but for top-down, it seems like specific care needs to be paid to the mechanical underpinnings in order for it to be successful (for mechanics-first bottom-up designs, the issue is more with finding a good and engaging theming, which is a different issue/discussion). I'd highlight sets like Kaldheim and Crimson Vow in particular as relatively-recent sets that got mixed reviews, and I'd say unclear or underwhelming mechanical underpinnings on both contributed to a lack of general cohesion and impact. The smoking gun for shallow mechanical design lately seems to be when there is a lack of a unifying mechanical through-line to the set, coupled with straight copy-paste cultural or explicit trope references; see Delver of Secrets as an indirect reference to The Fly, and with mechanics that provide a story of transformation without being a word-for-word retelling, vs Haunted Screen, which is literally a black-and-white TV that becomes colored at a cost, and then creates a ghost. They're both perfectly-functional Magic cards, but one provides grist for you to understand and create a story with, while the other delivers a jarringly-direct and -modern story neatly wrapped in a bow.
@@SilverCyan er... no it wasnt, theros was top down from the start... maro wanted to make a greek plane, people added the enchantment theme on top of that
Daretti Rocketeer Engineer makes me think that they are featuring someone with a mobility impairment on a card. And I love that idea! Everyone should be included 😊
When the sets don't take themselves seriously it make me feel like wizards doesn't take me as consumer of their products seriously. Instead of having fun; I'm being made fun of.
You're going to play with your cowboy figures and you will like it. Why should Hasbro respect a walking atm? Because it's learned to write TH-cam comments? Thunder Junction was almost certainly a corporate mandate. Just like MotM it's a crossover set that can sustain the maximum amount of fan service. Unlike MotM it's not the culmination of a longer story and just a (literal) planet of the hats. Corpos don't have any originality so as long as they get to exert control over the creative teams, Magic will just cannibalise its own IP and once that's all eaten up, it will just host other IPs.
One issue with UB is Marvel fans might enter the game, but will they stay in the community once we return to Magic IP planes? Will Lord of the Rings fans be interested in Final Fantasy and help keep the game going once their special set is released and gone? Who knows. Maybe short-term spikes in new player acquisition will lead to an immediate uptick in sales, but then lead to reduced sales across the board once the attracted player bases learn what Magic is really about.
As that one guy once said: "Maybe one day they'll do a crossover with Magic: the Gathering." Because that's literally what the game is now. A "live service model" card game. You got the constant IP crossovers, the fancy skins, the FOMO, the manipulative monetization, the generic genres with the same characters "but they have a cowboy hat now", the modern day / real life settings being more rampant than old school fantasy (and even the latter is more often used with 3rd party IPs)....You see it all around in the things the kids like nowadays. Even though it's an over saturated market that stuff sells, that stuff keeps eyes on it. And most importantly for the Quarterly Reports, it's cost efficient, easier to do and to market. Not alot of effort for the creative department when the lore is pre-established by some other fucking company. That makes them lazy. They hit a roadblock with the old ways and can't figure out how to sell that to kids anymore. Maybe if WotC showed interest in preserving the old lore, make it more available for everyone, maybe even retell or reinvent it more often in a "modern audiences" kind of way, newer folks would give a fuck about it. Maybe they would feel captivated to learn more about the older sets, worlds and stories. Or maybe that just doesn't sell no matter what. But to me, the moment Hasbro/WotC decided that other people's shit sells their game better, that's when it felt they truly gave up. Shows a complete lack of inovation or motivation to use the game to sell the game. So I gave up on them. I'm a grain of sand in a desert in the scheme of things, but it's just how I feel. Now matter how I look at it, It doesn't feel they look at players as players anymore. We're just "sales data"..."statistics" and nothing more. That doesn't jive with me.
Let's just face facts that MTG fucking sucks now and has ZERO true creativity behind it. "Let's just make a racing set" instead of "What if a rift between Amonkhet and Rath formed and some of the survivors from Rath crossed over and influenced the creation of a Mad Max ring of bandits that have big cars and constructs and blah blah blah" and have a faction of "race car" stuff amidst a set. Or better yet a set in a block. Jesus Christ I miss blocks. Or whatever. Insert two applicable planes that could spark that. This is just dumb.
This perfectly incapsulates how I've been feeling about Magic lately. I still love the gameplay, but it kills me to see them debasing their own IP the way they are at the moment.
The problem isn't the setting. It is basically treating the setting as just an excuse to use tropes, cliches, and in jokes. Dresden Files at least at the start as a pulpish noirish urban fantasy works, New Cappenna as 'hey mobsters' doesn't. Deadlands works, Thunder Junction doesn't. Bloomburrow and Duskmourn felt like magic and it seems a lot more care was put into the setting than just 'tropes + mtg'.
I severely disagree on that Duskmourn works The aesthetics are mostly garbage, all the survivors just look like they belong UB more than they belong in Magic
Duskmourn to me is the most tropey and hackneyed set WotC has ever put out, aesthetically speaking. One of the cards is literally an 80s high school cheerleader.
I feel like there's a whole imaginary Rhystic Studies-style video script knocking around the inside of my head about Omenpaths era magic and the backwards way we arriving at top-down designs. I do not know how exactly to articulate my points, but... Much like how the Omenpaths fundamentally tear down the walls of the blind eternities, I feel like the last few years have been spent trying to deconstruct what the fantasy of Magic: The Gathering can and cannot be. In trying to tell the story of the multicultural melting pot, they have diluted magic into genre and trope rather than allowing the established to enrich the unknown they insist on exploring in this era of discovery for the non-planeswalking individuals of this multiverse. In courting genres rather than worlds, Magic has to be squeezed and pounded into the shape of what flavor of the day has been chosen here, rather than just letting these mutliversal elements organically interact. Rather than starting at, "here's a vault villains are trying to find their own means of getting into or just for ways for said villains to find fresh beginnings!" , we started at "Melting pot? that sounds like 'murica, and what's more 'murican than the lawless west?!?" and let that be the guiding principle of what world building is anchored to. We thought we were going to get to explore the ocean, but we've only found ankle-deep puddles for the waters of the multiverse to rush out to.
Fully agreed. The interesting part of having different planes is how all the rich, varied, interesting cultures around the multiverse tell their own stories, how radically different and interesting Ravnica is from Kaladesh is from Mirrodin - and then, through the planeswalkers and other mainline protagonist characters, we get a way into these new places and stories. Post omenpths (and honestly, to a solid extent beforehand), the diversity of the multiverse is now being melted down at an absurd, ridiculous rate, and TJ exemplified that. There's SO MUCH wasted potential in how all the disparate cultures of different planes can end up mixing, gelling, coming into conflict, creating new stories. You can get DOZENS of sets out of those stories. And they want to just leapfrog all of that, for some reason.
You wrote that you don't know how to articulate your points, and then wrote two paragraphs. Keep at it, then edit what your fingers vomited out (IMPORTANT), and bam, you have a script.
It truly is insulting because hearing Kaladesh and Ravnica were intersecting I had thought "Oh cool! We get to see how these different levels of tech clash or intergrate!" or how Kaladeshi might think of how other planes are lower-aether. And Jace setting up the concept of cross-planar magic being unified with him and Proft's side story... and nothing to come of it. They have planted chekov's guns between the pastiche, but the promise of satisfaction feels more like dread currently.
Blocks where peak magic, don't care about sells numbers or other nonsense. The sets tied together themes, narrative and gaming environment. It now seems like Hasbro doesn't want to strengthen the magic game, but instead sell product.
4:50 I think Bloomburrow felt really inspired because the pool of things to draw from for broader references what smaller, narrowing the scope while leaving room for new design.
I'm just sad that Magic has decided to take a backseat with their own worlds when they had already made it feel like we barely went places since they were single visits that wholly complete per set so never felt fleshed out. Now we get snap visits to its own world building between gimmick sets that are just about attracting new players and fresher wallets.
This short term profit thinking wotc has is going to push all of the veterans away eventually and they'll quickly realize the "new players" aren't sticking around because the game doesn't take itself seriously anymore and neither will they. Hasbro must've told them to suck the last ounce of life out of the game and player base and wa lah...here we are.
I agree. I started playing MtG in Amonkhet and I think what really got me hooked was the way Egyptian mythos was incorporated through MtG’s system. Each color had a clearly defined theme through the trials and the challenges they presented in the first set. Social structures were clear and defined in a way that it felt there was history to be unraveled. In new sets it feels like themes are brought into MTG without a larger culture or planar history
This video is why I am still so grateful for Foundations itself. Even if it isn't pushing a story forward it is absolutely a celebration of what magic should be and was. There is art depicting Ikoria, Bloomburrow, Innistrad, Ravnica and Phyrexia (regardless of reprint or reused art) not a single fucking detective in sight.
This complaint and Universes Beyond are intimately connected. It's the same position. Almost everything will feel like an un set in Magic now. Once you accept super-heros and Sponge Bob you get beach episodes in between.
5:55 I think Brightglass Gearhulk had AI involved in it's creation. I haven't seen a high-definition closeup and we probably won't be able to really inspect it until release but from this shot and from zooming in on Scryfall, it has a number of quintessential AI features. 1) The Kaladeshi curve structures look a little melted. AI is great at producing incredible swirling detail but a closer look usually reveals warping and melted features in certain places. 2) The pathway is reflective and shimmered reflections is something that I've seen AI add frequently with certain prompts involving rain and glass. 3) The stairs looks a bit wonky, jagged and uneven and extends up with no support which is something AI often does for features with a lot of edges and when lacking the context that steps don't just rise without support. 4) It has a foggy background which might be to obscure the combining of different AI assets in the background too. 5) Looking at the gear hulk, the swirling gold plating does look a little random, especially on the arm but overall it looks not to be AI generated. I would speculate that WotC has trained an AI model on their entire catalogue of artwork and are allowing artists to generate certain assets and then paint over with corrections to blend them all together. My main suspicion is the walkway and stairs. It just has that messy AI look of creating a lot of detail but just not exactly in the right places where it should be. Edit: I just had a look at a high-definition version on the artist's Instagram and something is definitely off about the stairs. There are little non-uniform and curved protrusions coming out the side of the lower steps while the upper steps are near perfect and the step widths are all over the place. Also, something that isn't visible in this video but is on Instagram, there are warped textured contours highlighted in the background fog just to the right of the stairs. They don't look natural to me, I would recommend anyone who is curious to go zoom in on the Instagram image. I'm convinced that everything to the right of the gear hulk is AI generated at the very least.
First time I saw the art I had the feeling it was AI, but pushed it away in favor of it being part of the world's quirks and artist's style... but the more I look at it, the more worried I get.
@ I’m predicting it might get to the point where only Universes Beyond cards are AI free because of contractual agreements not to use it while they just go hog wild with AI in their own IP sets to save time because they’re begrudgingly obligated to make an actual Magic set every now and again in between their Universes Beyond releases. I have a strong feeling that a player base which embraces Universes Beyond because the Magic story “was never good” as I hear some of them say, wouldn’t mind AI artwork on Magic cards either
mtg is suffering deeply from irony poisoning, like you said the game isn't able to just take itself seriously anymore even if bloomburrow was a pastiche it felt earnest which is why it was such a beacon against the utter trash surrounding it
Magic was Dark and Ruthless and Brutal, when the main focus of the game was 1vs1 play. Games were no holds barred slug fests, using your wits and skill to outmaneuver your opponents. Now that the focus of the game is a relaxing silly multiplayer format, the sets and worlds and themes are now matching that. Neither is good or bad, but that’s why.
I think the idea is that "UB isnt bad because it's inherently bad. It that there is too much of it and at the same time, MTG IP also feels like UB." There is just no reprieve from.... whatever this is
@@HanDaimond When John Cena enters, you become the monarch. At the beginning of your turn, if you're the monarch, John Cena phases out. John Cena may attack and deal combat damage as though he wasn't phased out.
Dude goldeneye is still awesome what are you talking about!?!? ha. I guess seeing the graphics today is a bit shocking, cause when you were a kid, they seemed like hyper realistic amazing graphics, but not so much anymore ha. The game is still fun as heck tho haha
I quit magic because of this stuff. I know a few guys in my group have. We have been playing sorcery and it's actually fun as fuck. I wish magic didn't do this and spongebob and Spiderman. Ruined the entire feel of the game for us
I had a similar conclusion about modern Magic, vis a vis a kind of "Un-set-ification" of the entire line. That Hasbro's only problem with Un-Sets is that they weren't Standard playable, and thus they couldn't force the entire customer base to buy them on release. I don't think we're going to see another "proper" Un-Set going forward, because EVERY set (that isn't a licensed IP) will be an Un-Set. From Hasbro's perspective, it makes perfect sense. Having creative vision or internally consistent world-building is hard. It's a lot easier to just grab a ton of genre cliches and Xerox them into card frames. And then have a bunch of named characters appear to play dress-up, because Omen Paths are a blank check to throw any recognizable character anywhere else. So few planes - new or returning - feel like actual worlds. They feel instead like studio movie sets. You exit a door on the Cowboy set, job across a utility tunnel, and enter the Spaceship set. The trappings of genre are costumes actors put on, and characters who appear just one-note gags. Internal logic and tone are paper thin, because it's just easier for Hasbro. You don't need to think about how a card fits into a wider milieu, the factions within it, or the narrative being told. You just need to fill a trope checklist for the genre, and move on to the next card. And because it bleeds into existing planes, it waters down what made those planes interesting. Ravnica probably did need some detectives running around. Did they need an entire set's worth of them? What does that add to the larger tension between the Guilds? (Also, why wasn't the Detective set the companion to a larger New Capena block? Gangsters doing crime, and then the hardboiled detectives solving them.).
Kind of silly to point to War of the Spark and March of the Machine as high points when they're some of the biggest signposts of MTG's decline. I'd even say War of the Spark was the point of no return.
@@PowerfulSkeletonprobably because they just start doing build up, and don't have any idea for how to resolve any of this Just remeber that the first phyrexian invasion of dominaria ended really sittily as well
They didn't stick the landing, but it was a lot more exciting and fulfilling than all of this. War of the Spark felt like Magic. It didn't start all of this. It's very silly to say that - it doesn't make any sense.
@@PleasantKenobi No, you're right, it didn't start all of this, which is why I didn't say that. I said it was the point of no return. "All of this" started when they abandoned three-set blocks. War of the Spark was the tipping point, where the problems tipped the game past a point of recovery.
Honestly, if 6 sets, split down the middle between in-universe Magic and Universes Beyond is really the next step forward (A proposition with problems well beyond simple issues of aesthetic, but let's not dwell on small things like "Reprints" as WoTC clearly doesn't), I don't think there's ever been a better time to return the concept of 3-set blocks. Right now, it could seriously help to begin solving some of Magic's identity issues and actually utilize Universes Beyond to help alleviate the risks involved with the 3-set format. No matter how you slice it, Universes Beyond stretches Magic's own narrative and aesthetical integrity to breaking point, so it really needs to make sure, that if only half the sets of Magic actually interact with Magic's lore and style, they cannot afford to waste time on what might as well feel just as vapid and shallow as the Universes Beyonds that preceed and proceed them. Therefore, it'd probably be best to just anchor themselves to their chosen world, really give it the whole year to breathe and immerse those, that are looking to get into the world of Magic. While I always believed that 2 sets was also plenty good for most sets, 3-set blocks simply make sense given the yearly calendar of releases. This is something that Universes Beyond can actually "help" with, as far as a wider context of general audiences are concerned. The ultimate risk of the 3-set block was it's high commitment in both time and effort. Within a year's cycle, one could get tired of the given plotline or setting they've chosen, especially if that setup wasn't vibing with you to begin with. Not to mention that by the end of the cycle, you tended to get some of the weaker sets involved in it. If the intention is to break up conventional Magic releases with Universes Beyond, that might give audiences that might not be as into the current stuff or people that just want a break from it something different in a year's cycle. The design to make sure that each of the 3 sets are consistent in quality will be something they'd need to work on, but I'd honestly consider it worth a shot anyway, as it's unlikely this direction would steer Magic astray more than it already is getting. Honestly, if Lorwyn came around as a considered, thoughtfully put together 3-set narrative to co-incide with the "How I Met Your Mother" Universes Beyond or whatever, I'd at least consider it's delay forgiven. It's unlikely, but if you were to ask me how to meet Wizards halfway on this world they are so adamant about insisting us to live in, I see no more an elegant solution to make.
Remember when the card frames were changed the first time and people said "This doesn't feel like a Magic card"? I think most of us think that they were being a bit overdramatic. But now, Magic cards don't feel like Magic cards. And I think, honestly, a *huge* moment that marked this shift wasn't just the Walking Dead secret lair. I think the moment Magic stopped feeling like Magic was Unfinity. When we saw black bordered cards with such fundamentally un-Magic theming. The set could easily have been called "The Great Multiverse Carnival" and it would have felt like a set that released this year. Unstable wasn't an un-set. It wasn't a joke about Magic the Gathering, it was just a big amusement park set. And what did it lead to? Neon Dynasty, New Capenna. Sets that, people like, but I don't think get enough attention for sounding the death knell of Magic the Gathering as Magic. I'm not going to pretend everything from there was bad, I loved Brothers' War. I liked the Phyrexian sets. But now we have Outlaws of Thunder Junction, which to be fair, I think was a lot more restrained than I expected it to be. But it doesn't feel like Magic. It feels like Unstable. Everything feels like Unstable now. Unstable is the norm now, Magic is the un-set now.
Neon Dynasty mostly felt a bit sketch because it felt like a real jarring change from the original Kamigawa block, but it convinced me once I got ahold of it because it actually interacted with the story of both Kamigawa and the ongoing plot of the Phyrexian war as a whole. New Capenna had a theme and a story that tied into the "big picture" but also stood on its own. The complaint isn't that new sets are built around a gimmick; it's always been built around a gimmick that can be expressed in a few words. The complaint is that the new sets *aren't* built, the gimmick is stolen from elsewhere and a handful of named characters are just kinda haphazardly sprinkled into it.
Not sure if its related to or even could be connected to, but the pace of the game feels so fast nowadays. Maybe I played too much kitchen table Magic before getting into the competitive side, but winning by (or before) turn 3 is ridiculous. The game design seems to focus on playing the game as LITTLE as possible for the sake of winning.
I'm going to start playing Altered. Bought my first starter deck this week. Am I going to quit Magic (Commander in particular) all together? Problably not. But am I going to vote with my dollars elsewhere? Yea.
@CraigStevenLikesStuff gotcha. If you do get the opportunity, give it a chance it's as close to magic that a card game can get. And the art Is Beautiful!
I remember one of the people from LoadingReadyRun (I think) talking about Universes Beyond: "Magic is so successful, that if you want to make a TCG out of your famous IP, instead of making your own, you just go to Wizards and make it a Magic product instead." With this attitude - and with the apparently overwhelming success of UB - the result is a shift toward disposable settings and stories, toward easily understood character archetypes and effects, and away from the "deep synthesis" of old Magic design, where the story can be gleaned vicariously through the cards. Instead, as you pointed out, the cultural and plot markers now come from other media: cowboys, detectives, space opera, Mad Max, Redwall, Stranger Things. Increasingly, these tie-ins even feel dated by the time they come out. Stranger Things came and went in the time they were working on Duskmourn, and our nostalgic connection to it - like your connection to Shenmue - was already drained for all its value. The creators of Magic have become spectators in their own arena, where Hasbro executives, board members, and corporate consultants control the action now, and whisper sweet nothings into Mark Rosewater's ear about the success of the Lord of the Rings crossover, a crossover that was successful only because Magic itself was partially spawned from LOTR IP. Interestingly, Magic product has started to cross back into Dungeons & Dragons itself. Strixhaven, Ravnica, and Theros are all planes within D&D 5th Ed, complete with books and adventures and everything! There's an acknowledged throughline with these settings which is very clearly not acknowledged when we go to Thunder Junction or Duskmourn.
I hope you don't dismiss this post as someone trying to be a prick because I have a legitimate question for you I'd like to explain at an academic level: In your mind, what is the difference in your opinion between Universes Beyond coming to MTG as a norm and MTG becoming only Beach Episodes/Brevity-Fest? How can both of those be reconciled in your mind? I'm the opposite: I feel like both UB and the memeification of MTG to be the same.
Not who you're asking, but it's possible to have regular UB content without "Beach Episode MTG", as long as: 1. The two lines remain separate - UB treated like Un-Sets 2. Both lines are earnest - that is, even in the more lighthearted sets, the fiction treats itself seriously.
a goblin paraplegic would not last the night in OG lore, unless he made himself an abomination of engineering and was a mad genius. This is so- safe. When tf are goblins... SAFE?!
Wizards had been pushing to include more people who have deformities in everything, because they think if people in a wheelchair see someone in a wheelchair they'll be more likely to buy the product
Now, I am of the opinion that the new Daretti card is an abomination and magic is dead, but to give it the tiniest of credence Daretti is a mad genius and normally gets around with abomination of engineering. However, since Kaladesh is a plane of high society and classism were you are much more likely to be put into crippling dept than mauled by a monster it makes perfect sense for Daretti to adopt the garb of setting and forgo metallic monstrosities in order to better succeed in Kaladesh social jungle. I could easily see Daretti in fancy Kaladesh clothes sitting in with the other rice elite assholes betting on the lives of the racers like they are the capitol people from the hunger games. Of course all this goes out the window since he is dressed like a collage jock working on the underside of a car. What a fucking loser. From all powerful master artificer planeswalker to a grease monkey scrub. Something something meta commendatory on the state of the game.
Dude, Daretti has been a character in the lore since OG Conspiracy. the whole deal was that he built himself out of the problem by being a genius artificer/engineer
@@kisukebomb3750you can't use "OG" when talking about conspiracy. That happened like 8 years ago. Seems like a long time but it's not. The game is over 30 years old. His point is that WotC has been pushing this for a while. Goblins, of all creatures, are incredibly brutal. They have a lifespan of like a year because they just fight, and sacrifice, and make mistakes, and die. A lot. A less capable goblin would probably not make it.
@@KrepsyK If you want to talk about goblins being 'incredibly brutal' and only being a new thing in not being so, allow me to point you towards the Kyren on Mercadia, from Masques (1999). So no, they aren't always like that. Also, Squee. I called it OG conspiracy because there was a second one, not because it is an OG set or anything, although it is still a full third of the age of the game (2014).
Whenever I see PK's "give me some fucking money" on the patreon pitch I regret that Patreon does not have have "membership, but pay with anger" option. I want PK to get pinged with "here's your fucking blood money" everytime Patreon renews my membership.
The simple fact that you're describing the return to Tarkir as "A light at the end of the tunnel" indicates that there is a very big issue with modern magic 😓 People are *tired* of all the jokes and references and bathos out the ass, we want actual commitment to a story and actual characters we can relate to playing out arcs we can enjoy. I remember when Chandra and Nissa used to be in a relationship and people got mad when WotC just did away with it for no reason. Yes, that shouldn't have happened (imo), but at least people *cared* about the story, enough to be sad to watch it go
There is some payoff coming eith Aetherdrift - Chandra is racing to win the prize that can ignite Nissa's spark. It just sounds like a very silly setup imo
I appreciate your aside with Duskmourn because the cards you show really hit stuff that I like. The modern horror aesthetic, but its polyester and converse that took away. An old, creepy house of infinite rooms was great. My conspiracy is that theres too much coming out. I just imagine someone mentioning a trope and someone else goes "great" and without any further exploration just drops it in, rather than a long cycle of iteration and experimentation to arrive as a cohesive result that is truly magic. Like theyve got 2 colors of clay and instead of working them together to be purple, you just get a smeared swirl of red and blue.
I love PK but you've been championing all the rest of this NONSENSE from SpongeBob to Spider man....but the stupid checkered flag is where you draw you're line.
This is a problem that I've see quite a bit. I hear people saying that they love UB because of the IP that they like, but the IP they don't like is going to far. They don't understand that they are being hypocritical and that if they want / like UB, they have to accept all of it.
This is exactly what I was feeling. I don't understand how PK is in denial over all these world bending UB nonsense IPs polluting the space while complaining about the flanderization of the core IP. He's so close to seeing the truth....
@@Arctanis-vt3hli disagree that it'd hypocritical, they may know it's worse for the game's story and flavor, but they like it enough that the downside isn't an issue for them, it's just UB are only an issue if you care about the story of magic, and you don't like what's in it, personally I see magic as a game first and last, when I make a deck I ask what do I want to do, so far my answers have been play down dwarfs and artifacts, as well as play dinosaurs and put counters on them.
Bloom burrow is highlight of the year for me, I’m still on a wave of getting it. Duskmourn grew on me just as foundations is doing prerelease. I’m an apprehensive of magics future but time will tell. I am personally a bit burnt out with magic now, with its constant releases and secret lairs. Probably gona put more time into warhammer and Pokemon next year
Honestly this was my biggest issue with Universes beyond being 3 sets next year. If Aetherdrift and or the space set were the far out I would be a lot more defensive of them. Instead they are the keystones for what magic is next year.
I think the best way to describe the recent settings is somewhat simple. GREAT settings, I love duskmourn’s setting and want to run stuff like dnd for it, but they just don’t at all translate to magic in the slightest. Western gunslingers, 80s movie horror, and noir detectives…it just feels so goofy but not goofy enough to be funny enough like an unset
Especially appreciate your comments regarding Duskmourn. They came up with this incredible plane, with a fantastic history and memorable denizens and then just slapped a bunch of leg warmers, headbands, and ersatz ghost busting gear on them. It’s like they no longer have faith in creative’s ability to build resonance without having some screamingly obvious pop cultural crutch to lean on.
Yeah I agree with your take mostly. I don't think Bloomburrow feels better just because you are not that familiar with the source material. I'm also not that familiar with westerns, but Outlaws is just incredibly lame by comparison. Bloomburrow itself is more lighthearted and has a lot of humorous elements too, but it fits there. The designers and writers clearly took the genre and world seriously and thought it through. The difference to me is adaptation of a genre vs that episode of a children's cartoon where they are all cowboys or detectives. There is a shallowness to some of these sets that is just hard to look past. They are also often just bad adaptations of the genre, or something vital is missing. A murder mystery usually has one detective, not a million and the story is really more about the suspects and their relationship to the victim and to each other. It's imopretty hard to do in the context of a magic set. With Outlaws they just really shot themselves in the foot with bending over backwards to write out the settler colonialism out of what is, if we are being honest, a settler colonialism fantasy genre. While at the same time trying to have native american representation in there somehow? Honestly, it just reeks of white liberal trying a bit too hard to not be rascist. It's just weird. Duskmourne is the worst, because as you say it has a lot of great stuff in it. The main problem is that most of the 80s horror references just do not make sense in the awesome world they built. Most of these movies are based on the horror invading upon our mundane world - aka basically the opposite of Duskmourne, which is normal people being stuck in hell. It really feels like the tension between Magic as a prodcut and Magic as art has been laid bare in this set in particular. I also think that the creative team might be stretched too thin, since they probably also do stuff for the supplemental sets as well. (there is some worldbuilding in modern horizons sets too). If nothing else, maybe the increase in Universes Beyond sets will at least reduce the workload there a bit.
Thunder Junction also literally had sentient cactus people already living on the plane, so I don't get their "it was actually wide open to colonize, but for real this time" line
Back in the day, the design ethos was basically "we go to this new hat world, but how do we make it fit the MTG style and aesthetics?" Nowadays, the answer to that question is always "put known and beloved legendary creatures in the hats. Done!"
You know, seeing that Tezzeret Image... just as a thought that would be really cool. What if Tezzeret hasn't been Tezzeret for a long while? What if Yawgmoth has been influencing and slowly taking over for a long while? Yawgmoth has always been the pragmatic one, and Tezzeret always wanted power... He's more metal than man now. A perfect host for the Father of Machines. One that's learned lessons from the failed invasions. A Yawgmoth in a new body laying low and looking for just the right place to start anew. Of course I'd be a fool to think wizards would do something that cool with it.
Interesting that you brought up Warhammer. The story behind Space Marine 2 is pretty interesting, apparently GW were very involved and vocal about how the lore should appear in the game, even down to the size of the ankle armour. And it shows. Staying true to the lore gives it an authenticity and satisfies the long time fanbase.
I tried to return to play magic when Ixalan was going to come out... But noticed how sanitised the stuff in the cards was. But hey, that is what you get when you want to appeal to the mass population and not offend anybody
To give credit to Ixalan, it was the set released imitatively after Amonkhet and that place was messed up. The ritualistic child murder being one of the tamer elements of the plane. There are many negative words I would use to describe that era but I think sanitized is a bit much. I mean, one of the primary factions in og Ixalan there where conquistador vampires pillaging and slaughtering the native Aztec dinosaur tamers. You would never see something like that in a modern magic set. Okay, the legion of dusk was present in the 2023 return to Ixalan so perhaps my point is moot, but in return to Ixalan they are raiding tombs along side the good guys and not hunting natives to the Americans analogs so perhaps they are a bad example but return to Ixalan was an incredibly confused mess of a set.
@brennantmi5063 it was already cleaner, because most of the implement deads where the vampires, and at least I noticed how not a single female character in the art was in a defeated position, let alone dead. The clear example is the hostage taker. A woman capturing another woman, but even then, the hostage takes a serious not broken stand. The Alternative art is better just for being fun So all Thouse "edgy deads" are mostly on the vampires for being undead. It felt more like a peter pan adventure, and probably that was the tone they wanted
@@SamuraiMotoko I don't disagree it is a lighter more fun tone, but the story taking place is about Jace healing from how fucked up Amonkhet was right before. Wile you don't see any dead women, there is little focus on the dead. I went back to skin the block and most of the dead are either merfolk or conquistadors and for both of them both genders wear the same outfit. Like, is the person leading the doomed conquistadors in Blinding Fog a women or a feminine man? Sometimes a corpse has no shirt on or facial hair giving it away but very few cards in general show people in trouble. I don't think a magic set needs a critical mass of doom and gloom if it has other strengths. I mean, if you want women having a bad time a few month before Ixalan in Hour of Devestation you have stuff like Nissa on the ground screaming getting tentacled by Nicol Bolas in the card Nissa's defeat. The people featured on the cards in the Amonkhet in general were not having a good time, of course Ixalan is more upbeat, it is following a set about the end of the world. The set is certainly flawed, all the foliage is as tropical as can be and all the pirates are all dressed like they are paroling the English channel and thus it looks like all of them are going to drop dead from heat stroke any moment and the world building as a whole does suffer for marinating the sense of mystery and adventure but I would not say it falls outside of what would be considered reasonable for magic settings.
@brennantmi5063 went from time to time to pre-releases until Pirexia all will be one. And even on the supposedly more twisted set, Pirexia stuff is cleaner, to the point where I did not know if transformed characters have exposed skin, or PG-10 Armor of red and white. And the rebel warriors look kind of lame, or that was my feel Also they made stuff just more expensive and less justifiable to buy
@@SamuraiMotoko Oh for sure, dead game. Wizards business model is entity based on scamming suckers and has been for a long time. New Phyrexia was my favorite plane and the Phyrexian plot that followed war was awful. A complete embarrassment and everyone who worked on it should be ashamed. I have not purchased a magic card since Kaldheim and I don't think anyone could argue against mtg jumping the shark in Ikoria. That said magic was very different in 2017 than in 2023 and I don't think it is fair to criticize 2017 sets for problems in 2023 sets.
I love how everyone is hoping Tarkir will be a return to Magic, only to find that the entire plane has turned into a "Dragon Force - Through Fire and Flame" music video.
I mean, you joke, but the joke at least feels related. I'm sure you could make an AMV for Through the Fire and Flame with Tarkir card art and it'd look like the song summarizes at least part of the story. The issue is that we're not gonna get Dragonforce if this continues. It's gonna be "you guys want the dragon plane again? Ok", and then we get Thunder by Imagine Dragons. Played on a cheap kazoo.
The Protagonists of Magic, just like the characters of Mario, feel like they’re getting together to go Karting, play Golf, Soccer and Tennis, participate in the Olympics with another IP, or literally just dressing up for different Mario Party boards.
I think you mean levity, not brevity. Brevity is not wasting words.
Oh fuck. I DO. A full on malaproprism that I don't think I knew.
I thought that was what made bread rise.
@@sirearlgrey2036 yeah that should be yeast, but in french it is levure - a term probably used in some english speaking areas. Why do I have to learn six lenguages to learn english, now I cannot answer that.
“Brevity is the soul of wit” says one Shakespeare character before babbling on at length. WotC seems to have taken that at face value, only briefly touching on superficial cultural references instead of building a world through genre exploration, as Vince says.
@@Mors
I see the post MOM more as Magic presenting an anthology of tales. Like The Dying Earth by Vance. Which fine, every story told can't be the Oddessy.
the "I want it to be more serious" reminds me of a passage from ye olde D&D 3.0 dungeon master guide which stuck with me as a teen. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it's something to the effect of "be careful of adding explicit parody or comedy to your world. the gameplay at the table will already bring many opportunities to joke around and bring levity. but if your players want to engage with your lore it's important that, within it, it takes itself seriously."
1000%
Got my 3.5DMG at my desk.
"How seriously you take things sets the standard for how seriously the players take things. Jokes and silly remarks can make the game for fun, but they can also detract from the action. If you make funny comments during the game, expect that the players will, too.
Likewise, if you design adventures that are lighthearted, create NPCs that are slightly silly, or introduce embarrassing or humorous situations into the game, realize that it changes the tenor of the game...
[Passage with an example of such a silly world.]
...Overall, it's recommended that you play things straight. Don't intentionally insert jokes into the game. There'll be enough joshing around at the table already to keep the game fun."
@@al8188 Perfect! Thank you for typing it out
YUUUUUUUUUUUP. People defending this trash aren't old or experienced enough to have seen how this can destroy something and how quickly it does it.
I've been a DM for a long time now and a long time ago I banned joke characters and such from my games BECAUSE of this exact thing. Tone is everything and magic has just become... kind of stupid.
How do I double upvote this? The only way a fiction property suspends the viewer’s belief is by believing in itself.
Something that's gotten to me about recent sets is that there's a lot less magic. I don't mean MtG, I mean spellcasting and wizards and actual magic. So many spells and creatures these days are just... normal dudes or normal actions. It's so much less fantasy than I remember it being.
yes! its especially egregious to me with Duskmourn! why are they fighting ghosts with weapons and sci-fi guns and not.... MAGIC? it'd be cool to see someone using magic powers to fend off the horrors and stuff but you literally dont see that in a single card
Hey hey hey guns that can cast magic spells depending on what color of mana ammo that in the magazine sounds EPIC
@@imkingnoobuwu4326 That show was called Outlaw Star.
@@mymarshlandsexcept we literally do? We have Zimone creating fractals, The Wandering Emperor using magical weapons, and Aminatou creating magical equipment for the main cast of characters who travelled to Duskmourne. Not only that, Glimmers are quite literally magic, and are one of the main ways Survivors combat the monsters of Duskmourne
@@mymarshlands I'm no real fan of Duskmourne, but to say you literally don't see that in a single card is just false.
There are many cards, even ones flavored as things that could be mundane, that show as people casting spells, to say nothing of the things that are completely supernatural or impossible.
There's a LOT (indeed, too much for my taste) tech and real-world in the mix, but to say that spellcasting doesn't exist on the cards is misrepresenting it.
After the announcement of some Universes Beyond product, I remember some Magic personality had a Twitter post about it and asked the question, "What universe do you want Magic to collab with next?" I showed that tweet to a friend of mine, and he said, "Dominaria". And I really felt that.
I remember being shown the tweet as well.
I made a comparison to MTG as a whole becoming Phyrexian. While the core experience of the game is still there, the identity of the game has been completely stripped of anything that made it remotely unique so that it may be assimilated into a monolith of modernity.
On a lighter note, keep up on the great content.
Going back to planes we've already visited can only go so far. I don't know why some people would be comfortable with going back to ravnica a 20th time or having a 50th version of Jace. That would do more harm to the game than any universes beyond ever could
@@Kjos_jax The way it used to be was that we had one plane as a sort of hub world, Dominaria, and from there the story would branch into other planes. It kept the game grounded and consistent both narratively and aesthetically while allowing them to explore other ideas in a way that really helped make the planes all feel like a multiverse rather than just being their own thing. As it is the story is so vapid and nonsensical that I checked out after Brothers war. Don't get me started on the literary travesty that is March of the Machines and everything that's come after.
First, in Dominaria, we had a world for the entire game to take place in. Then we had worlds made to support a block. Then worlds were made to host one set, but to become part of a larger multiverse, with potential to return.
I don't think there's going to be a Return to Thunder Junction. These worlds are made to last two months, so they're only two months deep.
Magic should have always been 5 realms and the space between. Matching the mana colors.
No intent in returning to Thunder Junction would explain why it's so hollow. Not to mention white-washing of historical nuances found in the American frontier period. Thunder Junction is a safe, theme park rendition of the Wild West genre, where there's no natives to displace/murder (except the cactus people, who apparently don't count), no lingering effects of a civil war over slavery/secessionism, and no exploited immigrants building railroads.
You're not meant to think about Thunder Junction's world or story for any longer than it takes to Buy Product, and then get excited for Next Product. Hasbro just wanted to mine the cowboy genre for cheap cash, and to fill a slot in their schedule. (This also explains why Hasbro are making Universes Beyond half the yearly output; they don't have to think about what they're making, just turn the IP of the month into a card set).
You're not wrong, but 10 years from now(or whatever), some neewb currently getting into the game will covet some of these sets b/c they were the first. ugh
@@gravit8ed Why? New players a decade from now won't know the sets ever existed. Fans NOW will probably barely remember them, except as "where the one card in my [X] deck comes from, the one with the cowboys".
Yeah. They should just axe all these lame planes in a big lore event and keep just the good ones. Dominaria, Mirrodin, Ravnica, Zendikar, Innistrad and Kamigawa. The rest is gone for good.
Finally someone told the truth. I don't care about spongebob cards, i care about ridiculous things like Thalia riding the gitrog monster or Olivia voldaren cosplaying as cowgirl
Who cares
I think people's complaints about UB are kind of connected. The Professor from Tolarian Community College made the same argument when talking about UB coming to standard. He also mentioned some of the concerns laid out in this video: how characters are just there to be in "different costumes" rather than sets explore an interesting and immersive fantasy world. So essentially even the non UB sets of Magic have, as of late, been looking more and more like something coming out of UB, hence exposing the underlying problem.
@@8bitKatwalkmany people
only way to get the message across to them is to skip the wierd sets
@@8bitKatwalk people who hold mtg close to their heart care.
I call these "Hearthstone sets", but from hearthstone you always expect an exxaggerated take on the warcraft lore and worldbuilding, they always mix the OG serious events with jokes and original additions. Like when they made an expansion in the city Gadgetzan, which was ruled by three-class gangs, or Scholomance, a magical school, and then they raced in wacky vehicles in the Darkmoon Faire. Or when they made a murder mystery in Castle Nathria, or when they made a western set in the Badlands. They even went into outer space this tuesday in a set called "The Great Dark Beyond". Wait, why does it sound so familiar now.....
I was gonna make the same comment but you wrote it better than I would have. The hearthstonification of magic is begun
@@Aaron537_UNIQUESTRING Begun? It's been this way for years, people are just finally realizing this isn't the "fun exception" but instead the referential norm now.
Honestly... who is copying who at this point.
Was about to say the same thing lol
Magic absolutely feels like Hearthstone at this point. Don't get me wrong, I like that Hearthstone is silly. But Hearthstone was silly from the *start.* The flavour text of every card was a joke. Kel'thuzad joked about an achievement for losing to Gluth and then says "Ha ha, there is no achievement for losing to Gluth!" in Naxxramus. Even probably the most serious set in Hearthstone, Frozen Throne, had the Lich King joke about Lady Deathwhisper not running Arcane Explosion. Everything in Hearthstone is a joke, and that's great. It was made that way. Magic, wasn't.
I think Magic and the MCU have had a similar problem. After End Game, Marvel feels a bit lost. Magic has the same after Aftermath. The big war has been fought out... now what?
Side quests. Gotta stretch the game to the 80hr playtime mark
The problem is that the "big war" never happened because March of the Machine was rushed AF when it it should have been made as a 2 part block at minimum to keep the pace of the story. Realmbreaker and Elesh Norn's plan lasted for a single set cycle. At least War of the Spark was justified in the sense it was Bolas's magnum opus plan in a single or a few days to execute not the whole of Phyrexia declaring world war to the whole multiverse.
A good stepping off point would be small scale stories. Cover the stories of people on planes in the aftermath of such destruction and their quest to rebuild their planes.
Edit: time skipping would also be a good start to focus on newer characters in lower stakes adventures. Something like finding a family heirloom that was either lost or stolen in the conflict or hosting a festival to honor the heroes that saved the plane and the activities around that. BloomBurrow does an excellent job with this
@@SRMC23 not to mention that war of the spark was preceded by two ravnica sets that made a point of setting up what was about to happen in war. Things like guild leaders dying and a couple planeswalkers appearing swiftly climbing guild ranks, etc. sure the overall outcome was a maybe a little lackluster, but the point is that we had two sets devoted to showing what was happening on ravnica before nicol bolas enacted his big grand scheme
@@pichutube Yep. While the war itself was short, we'd spent two whole sets "surveying the battlefield", as it were. Learning the land, and the ones who would fight in it. So when the War of the Spark broke out, you really cared about its combatants.
Moreover, it felt like the logical leap from at least the two previous sets. If the War of the Spark hadn't broken out, what followed would have been a full blown Guild war. The tension was impossible to release otherwise. So having it be Bolas not only paid off a few years story setup, it released that "cold war" tension, while also being a thorough plot twist to the growing conflict between Guilds. An Outside Context Problem that threw everyone for a loop.
March of the Machines just kind of...happened. A war happening everywhere, against everyone, all at once. And it all shakes out and resolves itself in one set? It was NEVER going to feel satisfying, truncated like that. They could have spent an entire extra year's worth of sets, just showing the war on its theoretically infinite fronts (if by only showing planes we already knew, and some new ones for spice). Instead, it felt perfunctory. Both in setup, execution, and resolution.
The mindset of set designs seems to be: pick a concept or genre, slap your magic characters in it, boom thats your setting.
we arent getting fleshed out worlds like ravnica, kaladesh, dominaria, zendikar, we get magic but cowboys, magic but animals, magic but its clue, magic but its a haunted house, magic but its car racing ect.
Sets used to be: let's use these tropes and ideas but mix them in with unique Magic flavor to make something familiar but distinct
Now it's: put the characters in a new hat, job's done
I'd argue Bloomburrow is one of the few original settings we've gotten recently. True, there isn't a lot of story coming from it, but that's the break neck set release and their lack of further media to support the story. They somehow managed to keep themselves from slapping dozens of furry versions of legendaries from other planes.
@@dawsonyang2595 Blocks not being a thing. They used to only need 1 setting a year now they need 4.
@@IamtheTolle I agree I like bloomburrow a lot. It still follows the same design philosophy of just picking a trope/theme/a different IP (id argue redwall) and making it a magic set, which I don't think is sustainable, but it had a much better identity than the other recent sefs
Magics storytelling was almost comparable to tolkien, now a new set feels like a fortnite episode.
I think one way to gloss this is that older Magic sets & settings were sufficiently coherent places within the MtG universe that it would take you a couple sentences to explain the core idea of Ravnica or Phyrexia or Tarkir, whereas a lot of the more recent sets are adequately summarized by “X, but Magic.” 80s horror, but Magic. Cowboys, but Magic. Gangster noir, but Magic. Everything feels more like a high-concept parody than genuine worldbuilding.
They been doing this the whole time. Let's slowly go back together. Cute critters, but Magic. Detective Noire, but Magic. Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Magic. Fairy Tales, but magic. Infinity war/End Game, but Magic. Hellraiser, but Magic. Harry Potter, but Magic. D&d, but Magic Magic. Kaiju, but Magic. Greek Mythos, but Magic...(a little farther back) Cosmic Horror, but Magic. Steampunk, but Magic...(and all the way back) Arabian Nights, but Magic.
Pretty much any set can have this done to it.
This is exactly why I'm so puzzled by the relative outrage around the announcement that half the sets are going to be Universes Beyond going forward. Like, seriously, the last 3 sets were Universes Beyond sets, just without having to pay a licensing deal with any specific IP, so to me it made no sense to draw the line there.
our comments are so similar i might as well have just copied you lol good to see that a lotta people are thinking alike
@@KunushiH Most of those recent ones are sets that people would criticize for the same thing. Arabian Nights you have a point, but you can't quite put Urza's block, or Odyssey block, or Onslaught block in the same pithy terms.
@@matthewgagnon9426Dominica = medieval fantasy, and then came the robots
The difference with Bloomburrow, for me at least, wasn't that I'm less familiar with the source material (I've definitely engaged with some things over the years, so I recognized some of the tropes). It was more that Bloomburrow put a lot more effort both into taking the set and its story seriously and *also* that even where there *were* references, they were more deeply submerged in Magic's normal tone and style than a lot of the references in the last year's other sets. I still think Twins of Mauer Estate compared to Unsettling Twins really highlights the difference: the first one takes the same trope and works it into the setting of Innistrad more directly, whereas the second one is literally just lifted from a movie scene. Unsettling Twins is far more surface level, and while Magic has always had surface level references like this, if they're *all* we're getting, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb and make the sets feel far more shallow
Bloomburrow did what we want magic sets to do, it took the source material and did it justice while still incorporating the world into the greater magic narrative.
Duskmourn was SO close to achieving the same result, but they really botched the survivors. They and their tech needed to look more worn down and tattered.
Additionally having jokey light hearted sets is fine, when it's not overdone.
Finally, we need to return to the 3 set block structure so that the devs, as well as us the players can flesh out and explore these worlds that are being built. One set is simply not enough to showcase everything going on.
Bloomburrow was still about heroes and beasts, tricksters and wizards. It was high fantasy with a cute furry coat of paint. Aetherdrift is about motorcycle racing. That’s not fantasy.
I've played the game since 1995 and no Bloomburrow is probably one of the least Magic sets for tone and presentation. Magic was never about cutie anthropomorphic cottage core low fantasy.
I disagree. Bloom didnt had the „popculture“-problem, yes. But its still just a compilation of „funny animals“.
@maxchenmusterhausen5311 Please, go read and/or watch Redwall, and read the bloomburrow shorts before critiquing bloomburrow.
This is something I’ve heard you say a lot in videos, but is beginning to bother me a little: Bloomburrow is nothing like the other sets this year in terms of being a pastiche of Magic characters in a themed setting.
Idk if you’re just being overly cautious because of how unfamiliar you are with the media that inspired it (eg Secret of Nimh or Redwall) or you’re trying to vindicate the malaise that this year has brought in general, but Bloomburrow was absolutely the set that bucked this year’s “characters you know in silly hats” trend.
I will say however, that even though I found the set and its world lovely, I would agree if you made the argument that it was another self-contained story that had very little in terms of forward progression for the overall Magic canon.
@@Thatposer444Bloomburrow is the only set for the past or next year that makes me wish we had blocks again. Even if it was 2 instead of 3.
Having a slightly more Calamity Beast set with our heroes heading to the border of the valley would have been very cool. I also feel like it could have been interesting to see the handle of characters that have used Omenpaths get to be much more specific about it having gone to other places and come back, tempting us with the idea that Mabel and the gang would leave.
Honestly, something like a Calamity Beast escaping at the end of the story would be interesting. Ral realizes a 4 winged Hawk is a dragon that's been shifted down to Bloomburrow size... What does that mean power wise if a Coyote made of tornados or a Bear that's an earthquake goes through and becomes like a Kaiju stomping around the planes
Idk, it feels almost like asking for a post credit sequel setup scene. I *liked* that it's self contained but when a set only exists for like 6 weeks it feels like it has to exist to tie into the future set where these characters return
@Crushanator1 ok but you feeling like you wished it was a block etc...doesn't make it true that Bloomburrow is actually anything like Magic. It isn't cute anthropomorphic creatures was never a thing and kind of actively anti-Magic given most of Magic was body horror, Science Fantasy, D&D style high fantasy etc...
I don't even dislike it but it feels like people are actively being disingenuous when they say that Bloomburrow feels like classic Magic
@@TheEvolver311Absolutely agree. Bloom isnt magic in feeling. Not one bit. Its just the set people liked most recently. Which isnt a surprise, many people love cute animals. But thats the only thing bloom had. It still suffers just as much from the same symptoms as the other sets. And if secret of nymh truly was the inspiration, they fukked it up anyway, because bloom feels way more cutesy then that movie. The film „failed“ back then exactly because of its dark tones. Bloom has none of that. Shows true disregard for the source, for magic. Its just about „as many people as possible“.
MtG characters, but with furry suits this time. And marketeable plushies.
This feels like an Unset symbol...
The thing is, that’s where it feels like MTG is going too.
What’s this? A card that’s a goblin crazily driving a car. That’s just Joy-Ride Rigger.
What’s this? A character from your favorite show, put in Magic and played for laughs? That’s just Crash Nebula.
What’s this? A whole set that takes place in space! Wow! So cool! How original! OH WAIT THATS JUST UNFINITY AS A WHOLE.
It doesn't just feel like one, it looks like one and is a slap in the face to anyone who takes the game seriously. If you like racing, go do racing shit. Magic doesn't need to add racing to be relevant. STOP MAKING SUCH MORONIC CHOICES!! Nobody has started playing the game because suddenly they added cowboy hats. It isn't like just because its a US western land themed set the denizens have to look like the people who inhabited that land over 100 years ago in our own world. You can have a cactus and not also have cowboy hats and revolvers. Like seriously, who even wanted that shit? Did that setting make ANYONE who plays the game happy or bring new people to play it?
People used to hate, when EDH allowed Un-Set as legal.
Now people ok with these legal Un-Set called UB, being legal in all format.
Heck all UB mostly success.
Mtg community really has no consistency, as long as it's all about Fomo and card price.
@@chayadol I personally didn't have much of an issue with LOTR. Magic owes much of its lore and themes to those books and nothing from the set felt truly out of place. Warhammer was a stretch but some of it fit. It's still a fantasy type setting at least. Super heroes, anime and cowboy hats do not fit whatsoever and take me out of the game completely. There are already other games with those elements one can go play. Magic doesn't need Wolverine anymore than Marvel Comics need Jace.
@@mikeydildos I'm on the same boat as you here, I kept forgot that LOTR also UB lol
At first I have a mix feeling about WH40K, but after these new UB we'll have. i'd prefer 10 WH40K than those tbh.
It feels like Magic has been outsourced to another company with little regard for Magic's history, or respect for the game.
That company is called "Hasbro"
It'll be outsourced to Tencent soon and you'll have Genshin/Honkai/ZZZ characters in the future :^)
It's been "outsourced" to Hasbro longer than it has been independent so that is not the reason
Well, it has been. WotC started hiring women.
@@darthsnarf So, it's kind of "all faults are of Mark Rosewater / Chris Cocks"?
(I don't know who actually was / still is in charge of WotC from the moment everything started to rot)
Block sets were the best imo. They had to take a lot more time rather than, as you said, put hats on characters and see what happens. The Sylex, The Weatherlight, the Legacy Weapon, the pieces of Kaldra, the Mirari.... all of these things felt mechanically and thematically unique at the time of their printing. One could argue that they felt that way due to the volume of cards in that "gilded age," but my counterpoint is this:
:
If you needed a specific card that did a very specific thing, you knew either the family of cards that did the effect or you knew the singular card and any iteration that was printed that did the thing.
:
Sure, mono white wraths, black paid life, green hates artifacts and has mana dorks, blue had counterspells, red burned... but the Mirari did what the Mirari does. Copy spells by paying 3. Fantastic. Thats why Mirari's Wake made sense in my mind. It stored all that mana. It stored all of that power. Thats why your creatures are stronger and you produce more mana in its presence.
:
Idk...cards dont "feel" like that anymore.
What’s troubling is not only that there’s a plethora of UB sets coming, but that there’s a good chance the in universe sets are even more uninteresting.
Magic in racecars... Magic in space... yeah they're already garbage. Tarkir COULD be incredible, as can the return to Lorwyn but fuck me why are we getting so much trash and less of this other cool shit we all love?
@@thatepicwizardguy Bro we got 3 fucking cards hold your horses
Say for what Magic really is right now: An Avengers Endgame/Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff.
Also WOTC, like many other companies, had fallen on trying to cater to "the modern audience", audience that doesn't even represent half the MTG players, nor are interested in the product, so the creative process is highly questionable; doesn't help that Hasbro is milking the IP as much as possible with so many sets in a year.
We had good MTG a decade ago and we didn't know how worse it could get.
This isn't a War of the Spark video
@ You didn’t understand what I meant then.
@@HanDaimond no I did, it sounds exactly like the same complaints from when War of the Spark came out and actually doesn't feel applicable to the resent sets which to me feels more like Magic the Anthology story arch, or like the Dying Earth by Vance, a collection of stories that happen in a shared world but are otherwise untethered.
So no I understood what you wrote.
@@TheEvolver311 Ok, let's pretend The Gatewatch was created coincidentally after The Avengers movie arc started and not because they were trying to capitalize on the hype.
Let's pretend the current sets are also following a series of stories that were already referenced in old books, but coincidentally targets tropes from popular media like Spaghetti Western, 80's horror (with TVs and all) and soon Fast and the Furious, Thor Ragnarok, and Star Wars, and we follow a diverse group of whacky heroes who _definitely_ don't want to be the next Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy.
Let's pretend the art is as colorful as it has ever been and there's no intention on trying to attract a modern crowd or anything.
Let's pretend the March of the Machine font design didn't look as if it wanted to be part of the MCU lineup.
And let's also pretend that they really didn't meant to introduce Spiderman into MTG and force it to be legally playable in more constructed formats, they just _love_ the character.
Nah you're right, must be my imagination, my theory only applied to War of the Spark for sure.
@HanDaimond you said specifically end game/guardians of the galaxy. That was War of the Spark.
MoM imo wasn't very "MCUy" presentation.
You sound like someone in 1999 that the game is dead because the art direction changed from traditional fantasy paintings towards a more graphic style
Or when people said the heart of the game was dead because WotC started imposing design consistency standards which ended the "weird" or "abstract art that was common until around Mirrodin.
The aesthetic of the game has changed more than once since I started playing in 1995 so you'll have to cry about that somewhere else chicken little
It just feels like filler after filler while in the meantime we have lost the main plot.
tbf, we got years of people saying they didn’t like/care/read the current Magic story, so it’s funny for everyone to turn around and say that now they really care about it
@@RBGolbatIt's because somebody has to care about the game at some point. If it's all soulless shilling from the top down, then everything feels disingenuous. Take Lorcana. Could have been neat, but it's literally just named sets without any definitive narrative, so it's just collecting art cards. Pokemon TCG has the base games, so you know there's something backing the art and theming. Flesh and Blood gets close, but it needs a little help.
MTG has the disadvantage for formerly having at least some sort of narrative, but then they shook all the lore enthusiasts off before trying to half-adopt a story-friendly stance again.
The problem is that I don't trust them with the main plots, either.
@@RBGolbat I believe most competitive players are not so "strict" with the overall game narrative as long as they have the right competitive playset. As a casual player I always enjoyed the actual fantasy main theme that Magic is/was about.
@@Bardonga1988 just so my perspective is clear, my individual enjoyment of the game is mostly through the gameplay, hard mechanics, and color pie. Whenever the story is good, it’s just a cherry on top, so I’m always looking at the game through the lens of What kind of cool mechanics are the cards doing, and worrying about the flavor of the cards last.
I feel like the MTG creative team is getting more and more overworked, and having one plane per expansion hardly makes a plane rich. In my opinion, they should go back to a three-set-per-plane structure, at least in physical format.
I at least would want 2 set blocks back. 3 set blocks ran into issues with pacing sometimes where set 2 didn't feel distinct storywise from set 1. From when I started playing in OG Zendikar block, there was always some issue with 1 set in the block, either narratively or mechanically. I seem to remember their brief flirtation with 2 block sets at least having better story pacing, just gave settings a little room to breathe, which is something I desperately miss
100%
Tbh I don't care if it's two or 3 sets on the same plane; I just want the game to stay in one place long enough for something interesting to happen. Rn it feels like little more than surface level exposition..... jump to one place, take a cool picture, move on.
Is it too much to as that they stick in one place & let it develop a bit?
And also they need to get that release schedule back under control..... just too many sets, especially with a 3 year rotation. But that's getting off topic.
Agreed, the issue with one set per plane is it makes these places super undercooked. Theres no reason to ever want to return to the location in the same way like Dominaria or Kaladesh, theres flat out not enough even there to return to besides doing Cowboys- but again; or Haunted House- but again. Bloomburrow is the only one that really combats that issue any due to it having a distinct beginning, middle, and end to its story arcs, and is honestly the only recent Magic world i'd even want a future set to return to. I simply just dont care about Thunder Junction or Duskmourn, they didnt bring enough new to the table besides vague references with Magic characters.
Legitimately I wanna know how Duskmourn is supposed to follow Bloomburrow besides a cliche "Elsewhere in the multiverse-" and a hard cut to the location.
I feel like the mtg creative team took the brunt of the layoffs last year.
"Beach episodes" is like the most accurate thing I've heard in a long time to explain the current state of MTG lol it's so true. "Hey gang!" (says a planeswalker to the rest of the planeswalkers) "Whadaya say we all dress up as 1920s gangsters and play mafia? Cool! Now lets dress up as cowboys and play trains! Sick! Now lets shapeshift into furry animals! haha we're having so much fun! Now lets dress up as 1980s horror icons and L.A.R.P. a game of Clue™! Boy howdy that was fun...What? What do I mean by '1920s' and '1980s'? Well obviously I'm referring to the real world that plays us, but shhh we can't break the 4th wall yet until the Deadpool SL comes out hehe~ Anyway time to dress up as Akira characters and do some Tokyo Drift Speed Racing!! Hahaha...What? Nicol Bolas? Phyrexia? Slivers? Urza? Who?? Cares???"
It's literally an endless stream of beach episodes and the cast never actually gets back to the main plot. God damn I really miss MTG :c
I think that this video touches upon a symptom of a topic that has been a rising issue over the last few years: WotC wants to cut to as much of the "boring" stuff to get to the cool or neat stuff, often lacking build-up beyond blurbs of backstory posted. I was initially excited about the Multiverse post-March of Machine and exploring the various traumas gained as a result of such a massive war... and to their credit they did explore some of it with Nashi and Trostani. But I was also let down by other things such as Will and Rowan literally jumping from experiencing the worst and most horrific tragedies to have ever happened to them... to both twins having ideological differences about how Eldraine should be rules ala Song of Fire And Ice. They just want to cut to the chase and not let things develop as if they are struggling to keep focus without Ritalin.
What I'm saying is that all of these things are good ideas, but they often feel so disassociated with each other because they lack the cohesive focus and time to bring it all together. Basically... like a series of poorly-written fan fiction stories that have good ideas but poor execution
The end of blocks brought the end of longer form story's. They used to have whole years on a single plane, 3-2 sets focused on the same narrative. That's 2-3 books etc...
With 1 set to a plane it's really not possible to tell the kind of stories they used to(not that they were good at it then either but bad in different ways)
5:00 I don't think Duskmourn works, in part because it's clearly a 3rd arc climax mixed with a multiverse crossover, rather than either an 80s horror or haunted house movie.
Set 1: Your teenagers enter the haunted house; learn about the lore of the house, and awaken something, but escape.
Set 2: Your teenagers return to the house because their friends are there, but they don't escape this time... this time the house wins and spreads to engulf the plane.
THEN Set 3 (ideally 2 years later): The house uses Omenpaths (ugh) to kidnap people from across the multiverse. Time has no meaning; so you can snatch some historic MTG characters you want to resurrect, and then ends with the house being defeated.
Oh, and have better mechanics.
I just can't wait until bloomburrow draft is back again on arena, i want to play with actually fun mechanics and not whatever garbage got spat onto my plate in DSK
@@xolotltoloxwhich mechanics specifically and why are they bad?
I think it kinda shifted when the focus is on the characters instead of the world. When I first played Innistrad it felt like it was a world, and Thalia as a Legendary just lived in it.
And I'll try not to make the "Magic is Commander and Commander Only" argument, but with the need for more and more named charaters the sets feels more like Skins in a videogame than a real setting. But also I have a nagging feeling that the comment "UB will always be Magic Adjecent" is the reason why we now get sets in ALL genres that doesn't feel natural, so they can get all of the IPs and we fortnite now boys.
Innistrad is one of the best made planes in my opinion. I hosted a DnD campaign that lasted around 6 years in total. We still felt the world of Innistrad would have had more to give. The cards' flavour really helped me flesh out my homebrew version of that world as a dungeon master. It was a self contained world instead of a purely character centric hero-story.
I agree with you 100%. Magic's niche used to be about creating real, in-depth worlds, and adding characters in later. There were no Planeswalkers or 'main characters,' so everyone had to be made for the plane. As time went on and Planeswalkers took center stage, Magic became about them doing their thing, and making a world for them to do it in. Not that I have a problem with Planeswalkers specifically. Ijust liked it more when they were background characters adding spice and a little stakes to a set, rather than entire sets being designed on a planeswalker's adventure of the week.
The set symbol really is... bad looking. It's not just that it's a goal flag, but it's a bad looking one too.
lmao it's a Nascar set.
@@HanDaimond I would take a NASCAR UB set over this.
Feels like even outside of UB, all the sets are just weird genre choices for Magic. All of them are “Magic, but it’s in *insert weird setting here*”
The big shift for magic creative design is that they no longer want to make new things; they want to play it safe, and put popular old things against a different backdrop (cowboys, horror, etc).
There's a reason bloomburrow did well, and it was a lot because they only included a single, minor recurring character in the main set.
I think the comment of "phoned in" is really key here, especially with these being essentially 100% top-down designs nowadays. Top-down requires a lot of care and attention to the structure and mechanical aspects still, and it feels like when that is attended to (such as Theros and enchantments, or Bloomburrow and creature types), you get a cohesive gameplay experience that complements the theming rather than clashing. Contrast with the top-down designs that function more as collections of tropes without any well-formed underlying connective mechanical tissue like Thunder Junction, and it quickly falls apart as soon as you look for anything more engaging than "Rakdos in a cowboy hat!"
I'm not sure what you mean. You mentioned top-down design in both cases. Is it top-down design that produces good sets (like Theros, bloomburrow, etc) or bottom-up?
@@LifeForAiur Either can produce good sets, but for top-down, it seems like specific care needs to be paid to the mechanical underpinnings in order for it to be successful (for mechanics-first bottom-up designs, the issue is more with finding a good and engaging theming, which is a different issue/discussion).
I'd highlight sets like Kaldheim and Crimson Vow in particular as relatively-recent sets that got mixed reviews, and I'd say unclear or underwhelming mechanical underpinnings on both contributed to a lack of general cohesion and impact. The smoking gun for shallow mechanical design lately seems to be when there is a lack of a unifying mechanical through-line to the set, coupled with straight copy-paste cultural or explicit trope references; see Delver of Secrets as an indirect reference to The Fly, and with mechanics that provide a story of transformation without being a word-for-word retelling, vs Haunted Screen, which is literally a black-and-white TV that becomes colored at a cost, and then creates a ghost. They're both perfectly-functional Magic cards, but one provides grist for you to understand and create a story with, while the other delivers a jarringly-direct and -modern story neatly wrapped in a bow.
Theros was bottom-up design, i.e. the central idea was "enchantments matter," not "It's Greece!"
@@SilverCyan er... no it wasnt, theros was top down from the start... maro wanted to make a greek plane, people added the enchantment theme on top of that
Daretti Rocketeer Engineer makes me think that they are featuring someone with a mobility impairment on a card. And I love that idea! Everyone should be included 😊
When the sets don't take themselves seriously it make me feel like wizards doesn't take me as consumer of their products seriously. Instead of having fun; I'm being made fun of.
You're going to play with your cowboy figures and you will like it. Why should Hasbro respect a walking atm? Because it's learned to write TH-cam comments?
Thunder Junction was almost certainly a corporate mandate. Just like MotM it's a crossover set that can sustain the maximum amount of fan service. Unlike MotM it's not the culmination of a longer story and just a (literal) planet of the hats. Corpos don't have any originality so as long as they get to exert control over the creative teams, Magic will just cannibalise its own IP and once that's all eaten up, it will just host other IPs.
One issue with UB is Marvel fans might enter the game, but will they stay in the community once we return to Magic IP planes? Will Lord of the Rings fans be interested in Final Fantasy and help keep the game going once their special set is released and gone? Who knows. Maybe short-term spikes in new player acquisition will lead to an immediate uptick in sales, but then lead to reduced sales across the board once the attracted player bases learn what Magic is really about.
As that one guy once said: "Maybe one day they'll do a crossover with Magic: the Gathering."
Because that's literally what the game is now. A "live service model" card game. You got the constant IP crossovers, the fancy skins, the FOMO, the manipulative monetization, the generic genres with the same characters "but they have a cowboy hat now", the modern day / real life settings being more rampant than old school fantasy (and even the latter is more often used with 3rd party IPs)....You see it all around in the things the kids like nowadays. Even though it's an over saturated market that stuff sells, that stuff keeps eyes on it. And most importantly for the Quarterly Reports, it's cost efficient, easier to do and to market. Not alot of effort for the creative department when the lore is pre-established by some other fucking company. That makes them lazy. They hit a roadblock with the old ways and can't figure out how to sell that to kids anymore.
Maybe if WotC showed interest in preserving the old lore, make it more available for everyone, maybe even retell or reinvent it more often in a "modern audiences" kind of way, newer folks would give a fuck about it. Maybe they would feel captivated to learn more about the older sets, worlds and stories. Or maybe that just doesn't sell no matter what. But to me, the moment Hasbro/WotC decided that other people's shit sells their game better, that's when it felt they truly gave up. Shows a complete lack of inovation or motivation to use the game to sell the game. So I gave up on them. I'm a grain of sand in a desert in the scheme of things, but it's just how I feel. Now matter how I look at it, It doesn't feel they look at players as players anymore. We're just "sales data"..."statistics" and nothing more. That doesn't jive with me.
Let's just face facts that MTG fucking sucks now and has ZERO true creativity behind it.
"Let's just make a racing set" instead of "What if a rift between Amonkhet and Rath formed and some of the survivors from Rath crossed over and influenced the creation of a Mad Max ring of bandits that have big cars and constructs and blah blah blah" and have a faction of "race car" stuff amidst a set. Or better yet a set in a block. Jesus Christ I miss blocks. Or whatever. Insert two applicable planes that could spark that. This is just dumb.
This perfectly incapsulates how I've been feeling about Magic lately. I still love the gameplay, but it kills me to see them debasing their own IP the way they are at the moment.
The problem isn't the setting. It is basically treating the setting as just an excuse to use tropes, cliches, and in jokes. Dresden Files at least at the start as a pulpish noirish urban fantasy works, New Cappenna as 'hey mobsters' doesn't. Deadlands works, Thunder Junction doesn't. Bloomburrow and Duskmourn felt like magic and it seems a lot more care was put into the setting than just 'tropes + mtg'.
I severely disagree on that Duskmourn works
The aesthetics are mostly garbage, all the survivors just look like they belong UB more than they belong in Magic
Duskmourn to me is the most tropey and hackneyed set WotC has ever put out, aesthetically speaking. One of the cards is literally an 80s high school cheerleader.
I feel like there's a whole imaginary Rhystic Studies-style video script knocking around the inside of my head about Omenpaths era magic and the backwards way we arriving at top-down designs. I do not know how exactly to articulate my points, but...
Much like how the Omenpaths fundamentally tear down the walls of the blind eternities, I feel like the last few years have been spent trying to deconstruct what the fantasy of Magic: The Gathering can and cannot be. In trying to tell the story of the multicultural melting pot, they have diluted magic into genre and trope rather than allowing the established to enrich the unknown they insist on exploring in this era of discovery for the non-planeswalking individuals of this multiverse.
In courting genres rather than worlds, Magic has to be squeezed and pounded into the shape of what flavor of the day has been chosen here, rather than just letting these mutliversal elements organically interact. Rather than starting at, "here's a vault villains are trying to find their own means of getting into or just for ways for said villains to find fresh beginnings!" , we started at "Melting pot? that sounds like 'murica, and what's more 'murican than the lawless west?!?" and let that be the guiding principle of what world building is anchored to.
We thought we were going to get to explore the ocean, but we've only found ankle-deep puddles for the waters of the multiverse to rush out to.
Fully agreed. The interesting part of having different planes is how all the rich, varied, interesting cultures around the multiverse tell their own stories, how radically different and interesting Ravnica is from Kaladesh is from Mirrodin - and then, through the planeswalkers and other mainline protagonist characters, we get a way into these new places and stories.
Post omenpths (and honestly, to a solid extent beforehand), the diversity of the multiverse is now being melted down at an absurd, ridiculous rate, and TJ exemplified that. There's SO MUCH wasted potential in how all the disparate cultures of different planes can end up mixing, gelling, coming into conflict, creating new stories. You can get DOZENS of sets out of those stories.
And they want to just leapfrog all of that, for some reason.
You wrote that you don't know how to articulate your points, and then wrote two paragraphs. Keep at it, then edit what your fingers vomited out (IMPORTANT), and bam, you have a script.
It truly is insulting because hearing Kaladesh and Ravnica were intersecting I had thought "Oh cool! We get to see how these different levels of tech clash or intergrate!" or how Kaladeshi might think of how other planes are lower-aether. And Jace setting up the concept of cross-planar magic being unified with him and Proft's side story... and nothing to come of it.
They have planted chekov's guns between the pastiche, but the promise of satisfaction feels more like dread currently.
Blocks where peak magic, don't care about sells numbers or other nonsense. The sets tied together themes, narrative and gaming environment. It now seems like Hasbro doesn't want to strengthen the magic game, but instead sell product.
Bring on the McDonalds secret lair. Ronald McDonald, Fry Guys, Birdie, Grimace, and the villainous Hamburgler
McDonaldland was an actual plane before it became New New Phyrexia.
I will give props to Duskmorne: the world building concept is cool as HELL. The 80s horror tropes detract so much from that tho.
Magic is so un-magic feeling anymore, I’ve given up my cardboard for plastic. For the Emperor!
4:50 I think Bloomburrow felt really inspired because the pool of things to draw from for broader references what smaller, narrowing the scope while leaving room for new design.
I'm just sad that Magic has decided to take a backseat with their own worlds when they had already made it feel like we barely went places since they were single visits that wholly complete per set so never felt fleshed out. Now we get snap visits to its own world building between gimmick sets that are just about attracting new players and fresher wallets.
This short term profit thinking wotc has is going to push all of the veterans away eventually and they'll quickly realize the "new players" aren't sticking around because the game doesn't take itself seriously anymore and neither will they. Hasbro must've told them to suck the last ounce of life out of the game and player base and wa lah...here we are.
I agree. I started playing MtG in Amonkhet and I think what really got me hooked was the way Egyptian mythos was incorporated through MtG’s system. Each color had a clearly defined theme through the trials and the challenges they presented in the first set. Social structures were clear and defined in a way that it felt there was history to be unraveled. In new sets it feels like themes are brought into MTG without a larger culture or planar history
Magic feels like it's being designed by people ashamed to be designing Magic.
Is your username a Haruhi Suzumiya reference?
@@musashishinmen4286 That and Madoka Magica
Aka Commander players 🤷
I feel like foundations will be the only thing that feels like magic for a lonnng time
I actually just reinstalled MTG Arena to play Foundations sealed. It feels like a breath of fresh air.
Foundations is really a return to form. I hope it sells well, bettern than those stupid UB sets and they listen to their player base.
How you describe just a bunch of beach eps, sounds a lot like End Game with Marvel. We did the big thing with All Will Be One and...uh now what?
This video is why I am still so grateful for Foundations itself. Even if it isn't pushing a story forward it is absolutely a celebration of what magic should be and was. There is art depicting Ikoria, Bloomburrow, Innistrad, Ravnica and Phyrexia (regardless of reprint or reused art) not a single fucking detective in sight.
This complaint and Universes Beyond are intimately connected. It's the same position. Almost everything will feel like an un set in Magic now. Once you accept super-heros and Sponge Bob you get beach episodes in between.
‘Lesser than the sum of its parts’ is a perfect way to describe duskmourne.
5:55 I think Brightglass Gearhulk had AI involved in it's creation. I haven't seen a high-definition closeup and we probably won't be able to really inspect it until release but from this shot and from zooming in on Scryfall, it has a number of quintessential AI features.
1) The Kaladeshi curve structures look a little melted. AI is great at producing incredible swirling detail but a closer look usually reveals warping and melted features in certain places.
2) The pathway is reflective and shimmered reflections is something that I've seen AI add frequently with certain prompts involving rain and glass.
3) The stairs looks a bit wonky, jagged and uneven and extends up with no support which is something AI often does for features with a lot of edges and when lacking the context that steps don't just rise without support.
4) It has a foggy background which might be to obscure the combining of different AI assets in the background too.
5) Looking at the gear hulk, the swirling gold plating does look a little random, especially on the arm but overall it looks not to be AI generated.
I would speculate that WotC has trained an AI model on their entire catalogue of artwork and are allowing artists to generate certain assets and then paint over with corrections to blend them all together. My main suspicion is the walkway and stairs. It just has that messy AI look of creating a lot of detail but just not exactly in the right places where it should be.
Edit: I just had a look at a high-definition version on the artist's Instagram and something is definitely off about the stairs. There are little non-uniform and curved protrusions coming out the side of the lower steps while the upper steps are near perfect and the step widths are all over the place. Also, something that isn't visible in this video but is on Instagram, there are warped textured contours highlighted in the background fog just to the right of the stairs. They don't look natural to me, I would recommend anyone who is curious to go zoom in on the Instagram image. I'm convinced that everything to the right of the gear hulk is AI generated at the very least.
First time I saw the art I had the feeling it was AI, but pushed it away in favor of it being part of the world's quirks and artist's style... but the more I look at it, the more worried I get.
@ I’m predicting it might get to the point where only Universes Beyond cards are AI free because of contractual agreements not to use it while they just go hog wild with AI in their own IP sets to save time because they’re begrudgingly obligated to make an actual Magic set every now and again in between their Universes Beyond releases. I have a strong feeling that a player base which embraces Universes Beyond because the Magic story “was never good” as I hear some of them say, wouldn’t mind AI artwork on Magic cards either
“When ambition meets industry, passion is poisoned by greed.” -Blackcleave Cliffs flavortext.
There's simply no denying Magic has a severe identity crisis at this point.
Hmm... That's quite a lot of words to say "maybe the gatekeepers had a legitimate set of points."
The Weatherlight and its original crew was based on the Starship Enterprise. The stories about it were not "Look, we're doing Star Trek now!"
Exactly this.
mtg is suffering deeply from irony poisoning, like you said the game isn't able to just take itself seriously anymore
even if bloomburrow was a pastiche it felt earnest which is why it was such a beacon against the utter trash surrounding it
Mtg can now do a 5Ds style anime with duels on bikes!
Shivan Dragon Archfiend
@@jdvred9210 that concept gave me mental whiplash, thanks
As much as I loathe the thought, we finally got cardgames on motorcycles to come to MTG. I don't know if it's something I'm happy about though.
Magic was Dark and Ruthless and Brutal, when the main focus of the game was 1vs1 play. Games were no holds barred slug fests, using your wits and skill to outmaneuver your opponents. Now that the focus of the game is a relaxing silly multiplayer format, the sets and worlds and themes are now matching that.
Neither is good or bad, but that’s why.
I think the idea is that "UB isnt bad because it's inherently bad. It that there is too much of it and at the same time, MTG IP also feels like UB." There is just no reprieve from.... whatever this is
I got inspired by that video to name a phenomenon: Rosewater tinted glasses. Its like tose tinted, but for Magic.
The unreleased UB set is WWE. We're going to have the "Sean Michaels, Heart Break Kid" and "The Undertaker" in MTG
Honestly, I've been waiting for the WWE Secret Lair/UB Set. It will happen.
Getting some Rob Schamburger art in there would slap, though.
I’d do some questionable things for a Macho Man, Randy Savage card
WWE tried several digital and physical card games so not that out of question
That's... that is just going to be hilarious. Imagine John Cena, with nothing in the card.
@@HanDaimond When John Cena enters, you become the monarch. At the beginning of your turn, if you're the monarch, John Cena phases out. John Cena may attack and deal combat damage as though he wasn't phased out.
Things i loved as a child that i wished i had kept as memories and never returned to:
1. Goldeneye
2. Moshpits
3. Mtg
Dude goldeneye is still awesome what are you talking about!?!? ha.
I guess seeing the graphics today is a bit shocking, cause when you were a kid, they seemed like hyper realistic amazing graphics, but not so much anymore ha. The game is still fun as heck tho haha
I quit magic because of this stuff. I know a few guys in my group have. We have been playing sorcery and it's actually fun as fuck. I wish magic didn't do this and spongebob and Spiderman. Ruined the entire feel of the game for us
I had a similar conclusion about modern Magic, vis a vis a kind of "Un-set-ification" of the entire line. That Hasbro's only problem with Un-Sets is that they weren't Standard playable, and thus they couldn't force the entire customer base to buy them on release. I don't think we're going to see another "proper" Un-Set going forward, because EVERY set (that isn't a licensed IP) will be an Un-Set.
From Hasbro's perspective, it makes perfect sense. Having creative vision or internally consistent world-building is hard. It's a lot easier to just grab a ton of genre cliches and Xerox them into card frames. And then have a bunch of named characters appear to play dress-up, because Omen Paths are a blank check to throw any recognizable character anywhere else.
So few planes - new or returning - feel like actual worlds. They feel instead like studio movie sets. You exit a door on the Cowboy set, job across a utility tunnel, and enter the Spaceship set. The trappings of genre are costumes actors put on, and characters who appear just one-note gags. Internal logic and tone are paper thin, because it's just easier for Hasbro. You don't need to think about how a card fits into a wider milieu, the factions within it, or the narrative being told. You just need to fill a trope checklist for the genre, and move on to the next card.
And because it bleeds into existing planes, it waters down what made those planes interesting. Ravnica probably did need some detectives running around. Did they need an entire set's worth of them? What does that add to the larger tension between the Guilds? (Also, why wasn't the Detective set the companion to a larger New Capena block? Gangsters doing crime, and then the hardboiled detectives solving them.).
Don't usually comment on things but this was well written and made great points. 👍
Kind of silly to point to War of the Spark and March of the Machine as high points when they're some of the biggest signposts of MTG's decline. I'd even say War of the Spark was the point of no return.
The writers really struggle to have these big stories pay off in meaningful ways.
@@PowerfulSkeletonprobably because they just start doing build up, and don't have any idea for how to resolve any of this
Just remeber that the first phyrexian invasion of dominaria ended really sittily as well
They didn't stick the landing, but it was a lot more exciting and fulfilling than all of this.
War of the Spark felt like Magic. It didn't start all of this. It's very silly to say that - it doesn't make any sense.
@@PleasantKenobi "it was bad magic, but at least it was magic" is what I presume you are meaning
@@PleasantKenobi No, you're right, it didn't start all of this, which is why I didn't say that. I said it was the point of no return. "All of this" started when they abandoned three-set blocks. War of the Spark was the tipping point, where the problems tipped the game past a point of recovery.
What I cannot unsee in the flag is that it isn't actually waving it's just 2 misaligned paralellograms
Honestly, if 6 sets, split down the middle between in-universe Magic and Universes Beyond is really the next step forward (A proposition with problems well beyond simple issues of aesthetic, but let's not dwell on small things like "Reprints" as WoTC clearly doesn't), I don't think there's ever been a better time to return the concept of 3-set blocks. Right now, it could seriously help to begin solving some of Magic's identity issues and actually utilize Universes Beyond to help alleviate the risks involved with the 3-set format.
No matter how you slice it, Universes Beyond stretches Magic's own narrative and aesthetical integrity to breaking point, so it really needs to make sure, that if only half the sets of Magic actually interact with Magic's lore and style, they cannot afford to waste time on what might as well feel just as vapid and shallow as the Universes Beyonds that preceed and proceed them. Therefore, it'd probably be best to just anchor themselves to their chosen world, really give it the whole year to breathe and immerse those, that are looking to get into the world of Magic. While I always believed that 2 sets was also plenty good for most sets, 3-set blocks simply make sense given the yearly calendar of releases.
This is something that Universes Beyond can actually "help" with, as far as a wider context of general audiences are concerned. The ultimate risk of the 3-set block was it's high commitment in both time and effort. Within a year's cycle, one could get tired of the given plotline or setting they've chosen, especially if that setup wasn't vibing with you to begin with. Not to mention that by the end of the cycle, you tended to get some of the weaker sets involved in it. If the intention is to break up conventional Magic releases with Universes Beyond, that might give audiences that might not be as into the current stuff or people that just want a break from it something different in a year's cycle. The design to make sure that each of the 3 sets are consistent in quality will be something they'd need to work on, but I'd honestly consider it worth a shot anyway, as it's unlikely this direction would steer Magic astray more than it already is getting.
Honestly, if Lorwyn came around as a considered, thoughtfully put together 3-set narrative to co-incide with the "How I Met Your Mother" Universes Beyond or whatever, I'd at least consider it's delay forgiven. It's unlikely, but if you were to ask me how to meet Wizards halfway on this world they are so adamant about insisting us to live in, I see no more an elegant solution to make.
Remember when the card frames were changed the first time and people said "This doesn't feel like a Magic card"? I think most of us think that they were being a bit overdramatic. But now, Magic cards don't feel like Magic cards. And I think, honestly, a *huge* moment that marked this shift wasn't just the Walking Dead secret lair. I think the moment Magic stopped feeling like Magic was Unfinity. When we saw black bordered cards with such fundamentally un-Magic theming. The set could easily have been called "The Great Multiverse Carnival" and it would have felt like a set that released this year. Unstable wasn't an un-set. It wasn't a joke about Magic the Gathering, it was just a big amusement park set. And what did it lead to? Neon Dynasty, New Capenna. Sets that, people like, but I don't think get enough attention for sounding the death knell of Magic the Gathering as Magic. I'm not going to pretend everything from there was bad, I loved Brothers' War. I liked the Phyrexian sets. But now we have Outlaws of Thunder Junction, which to be fair, I think was a lot more restrained than I expected it to be. But it doesn't feel like Magic. It feels like Unstable. Everything feels like Unstable now. Unstable is the norm now, Magic is the un-set now.
Neon Dynasty mostly felt a bit sketch because it felt like a real jarring change from the original Kamigawa block, but it convinced me once I got ahold of it because it actually interacted with the story of both Kamigawa and the ongoing plot of the Phyrexian war as a whole. New Capenna had a theme and a story that tied into the "big picture" but also stood on its own. The complaint isn't that new sets are built around a gimmick; it's always been built around a gimmick that can be expressed in a few words. The complaint is that the new sets *aren't* built, the gimmick is stolen from elsewhere and a handful of named characters are just kinda haphazardly sprinkled into it.
Not sure if its related to or even could be connected to, but the pace of the game feels so fast nowadays. Maybe I played too much kitchen table Magic before getting into the competitive side, but winning by (or before) turn 3 is ridiculous. The game design seems to focus on playing the game as LITTLE as possible for the sake of winning.
It's always been like this. In middle school we had goblin decks that won on turn 3-4 regularly.
They need to put the adults back in charge.
I'm going to start playing Altered. Bought my first starter deck this week.
Am I going to quit Magic (Commander in particular) all together? Problably not.
But am I going to vote with my dollars elsewhere? Yea.
Try sorcery bro its so fun
@deadizbetter I've heard of Sorcery, but haven't seen it in my scene. My LGS is doing Altered weekly events so that sealed the deal for me.
@CraigStevenLikesStuff gotcha. If you do get the opportunity, give it a chance it's as close to magic that a card game can get. And the art Is Beautiful!
This is healthy in general. Part of any magic outrage is people making it their main hobby with no alternatives.
I remember one of the people from LoadingReadyRun (I think) talking about Universes Beyond: "Magic is so successful, that if you want to make a TCG out of your famous IP, instead of making your own, you just go to Wizards and make it a Magic product instead." With this attitude - and with the apparently overwhelming success of UB - the result is a shift toward disposable settings and stories, toward easily understood character archetypes and effects, and away from the "deep synthesis" of old Magic design, where the story can be gleaned vicariously through the cards. Instead, as you pointed out, the cultural and plot markers now come from other media: cowboys, detectives, space opera, Mad Max, Redwall, Stranger Things. Increasingly, these tie-ins even feel dated by the time they come out. Stranger Things came and went in the time they were working on Duskmourn, and our nostalgic connection to it - like your connection to Shenmue - was already drained for all its value. The creators of Magic have become spectators in their own arena, where Hasbro executives, board members, and corporate consultants control the action now, and whisper sweet nothings into Mark Rosewater's ear about the success of the Lord of the Rings crossover, a crossover that was successful only because Magic itself was partially spawned from LOTR IP.
Interestingly, Magic product has started to cross back into Dungeons & Dragons itself. Strixhaven, Ravnica, and Theros are all planes within D&D 5th Ed, complete with books and adventures and everything! There's an acknowledged throughline with these settings which is very clearly not acknowledged when we go to Thunder Junction or Duskmourn.
I hope you don't dismiss this post as someone trying to be a prick because I have a legitimate question for you I'd like to explain at an academic level: In your mind, what is the difference in your opinion between Universes Beyond coming to MTG as a norm and MTG becoming only Beach Episodes/Brevity-Fest? How can both of those be reconciled in your mind? I'm the opposite: I feel like both UB and the memeification of MTG to be the same.
Not who you're asking, but it's possible to have regular UB content without "Beach Episode MTG", as long as:
1. The two lines remain separate - UB treated like Un-Sets
2. Both lines are earnest - that is, even in the more lighthearted sets, the fiction treats itself seriously.
“ I don’t think that every set has to feel like an Un-set that isn’t and Un-set” this encapsulates the issue perfectly.
Thunder Junctions lore was a 1 to 1 copy of Borderlands
your pronunciation of Shenmue is amazing "Shemnoo"
a goblin paraplegic would not last the night in OG lore, unless he made himself an abomination of engineering and was a mad genius. This is so- safe. When tf are goblins... SAFE?!
Wizards had been pushing to include more people who have deformities in everything, because they think if people in a wheelchair see someone in a wheelchair they'll be more likely to buy the product
Now, I am of the opinion that the new Daretti card is an abomination and magic is dead, but to give it the tiniest of credence Daretti is a mad genius and normally gets around with abomination of engineering. However, since Kaladesh is a plane of high society and classism were you are much more likely to be put into crippling dept than mauled by a monster it makes perfect sense for Daretti to adopt the garb of setting and forgo metallic monstrosities in order to better succeed in Kaladesh social jungle. I could easily see Daretti in fancy Kaladesh clothes sitting in with the other rice elite assholes betting on the lives of the racers like they are the capitol people from the hunger games.
Of course all this goes out the window since he is dressed like a collage jock working on the underside of a car. What a fucking loser. From all powerful master artificer planeswalker to a grease monkey scrub. Something something meta commendatory on the state of the game.
Dude, Daretti has been a character in the lore since OG Conspiracy. the whole deal was that he built himself out of the problem by being a genius artificer/engineer
@@kisukebomb3750you can't use "OG" when talking about conspiracy. That happened like 8 years ago. Seems like a long time but it's not. The game is over 30 years old. His point is that WotC has been pushing this for a while. Goblins, of all creatures, are incredibly brutal. They have a lifespan of like a year because they just fight, and sacrifice, and make mistakes, and die. A lot. A less capable goblin would probably not make it.
@@KrepsyK If you want to talk about goblins being 'incredibly brutal' and only being a new thing in not being so, allow me to point you towards the Kyren on Mercadia, from Masques (1999). So no, they aren't always like that.
Also, Squee.
I called it OG conspiracy because there was a second one, not because it is an OG set or anything, although it is still a full third of the age of the game (2014).
Looks like you finally saw reality
Whenever I see PK's "give me some fucking money" on the patreon pitch I regret that Patreon does not have have "membership, but pay with anger" option. I want PK to get pinged with "here's your fucking blood money" everytime Patreon renews my membership.
a race in kaladesh as a way to showcase vehicles seems a lot more thought out to me than "what if transmorphers and captain underpants in magic".
The simple fact that you're describing the return to Tarkir as "A light at the end of the tunnel" indicates that there is a very big issue with modern magic 😓 People are *tired* of all the jokes and references and bathos out the ass, we want actual commitment to a story and actual characters we can relate to playing out arcs we can enjoy. I remember when Chandra and Nissa used to be in a relationship and people got mad when WotC just did away with it for no reason. Yes, that shouldn't have happened (imo), but at least people *cared* about the story, enough to be sad to watch it go
There is some payoff coming eith Aetherdrift - Chandra is racing to win the prize that can ignite Nissa's spark.
It just sounds like a very silly setup imo
I appreciate your aside with Duskmourn because the cards you show really hit stuff that I like. The modern horror aesthetic, but its polyester and converse that took away. An old, creepy house of infinite rooms was great.
My conspiracy is that theres too much coming out. I just imagine someone mentioning a trope and someone else goes "great" and without any further exploration just drops it in, rather than a long cycle of iteration and experimentation to arrive as a cohesive result that is truly magic. Like theyve got 2 colors of clay and instead of working them together to be purple, you just get a smeared swirl of red and blue.
I love PK but you've been championing all the rest of this NONSENSE from SpongeBob to Spider man....but the stupid checkered flag is where you draw you're line.
This is a problem that I've see quite a bit. I hear people saying that they love UB because of the IP that they like, but the IP they don't like is going to far. They don't understand that they are being hypocritical and that if they want / like UB, they have to accept all of it.
This is exactly what I was feeling. I don't understand how PK is in denial over all these world bending UB nonsense IPs polluting the space while complaining about the flanderization of the core IP. He's so close to seeing the truth....
Yeah, I think content creators really haven't been as opposed to this stuff as they should be
@@GreatWhiteElf they're scared of biting the hand that feeds since it means they'll probably stop getting free product
@@Arctanis-vt3hli disagree that it'd hypocritical, they may know it's worse for the game's story and flavor, but they like it enough that the downside isn't an issue for them, it's just UB are only an issue if you care about the story of magic, and you don't like what's in it, personally I see magic as a game first and last, when I make a deck I ask what do I want to do, so far my answers have been play down dwarfs and artifacts, as well as play dinosaurs and put counters on them.
Bloom burrow is highlight of the year for me, I’m still on a wave of getting it. Duskmourn grew on me just as foundations is doing prerelease. I’m an apprehensive of magics future but time will tell. I am personally a bit burnt out with magic now, with its constant releases and secret lairs. Probably gona put more time into warhammer and Pokemon next year
Honestly this was my biggest issue with Universes beyond being 3 sets next year. If Aetherdrift and or the space set were the far out I would be a lot more defensive of them. Instead they are the keystones for what magic is next year.
Hey, the midnight hunt video was the one that got me following your channel!
Thats pretty awesome. I've wanted to do similar stuff again - but outside of the Body Horror of All/MoM I've not been inspired in that way.
@@PleasantKenobi That's completely fair. I hope things change in a way that can let you really make that kind of content shine again.
I think the best way to describe the recent settings is somewhat simple. GREAT settings, I love duskmourn’s setting and want to run stuff like dnd for it, but they just don’t at all translate to magic in the slightest. Western gunslingers, 80s movie horror, and noir detectives…it just feels so goofy but not goofy enough to be funny enough like an unset
Especially appreciate your comments regarding Duskmourn. They came up with this incredible plane, with a fantastic history and memorable denizens and then just slapped a bunch of leg warmers, headbands, and ersatz ghost busting gear on them. It’s like they no longer have faith in creative’s ability to build resonance without having some screamingly obvious pop cultural crutch to lean on.
Yeah I agree with your take mostly.
I don't think Bloomburrow feels better just because you are not that familiar with the source material. I'm also not that familiar with westerns, but Outlaws is just incredibly lame by comparison. Bloomburrow itself is more lighthearted and has a lot of humorous elements too, but it fits there. The designers and writers clearly took the genre and world seriously and thought it through.
The difference to me is adaptation of a genre vs that episode of a children's cartoon where they are all cowboys or detectives. There is a shallowness to some of these sets that is just hard to look past. They are also often just bad adaptations of the genre, or something vital is missing.
A murder mystery usually has one detective, not a million and the story is really more about the suspects and their relationship to the victim and to each other. It's imopretty hard to do in the context of a magic set.
With Outlaws they just really shot themselves in the foot with bending over backwards to write out the settler colonialism out of what is, if we are being honest, a settler colonialism fantasy genre. While at the same time trying to have native american representation in there somehow? Honestly, it just reeks of white liberal trying a bit too hard to not be rascist. It's just weird.
Duskmourne is the worst, because as you say it has a lot of great stuff in it. The main problem is that most of the 80s horror references just do not make sense in the awesome world they built. Most of these movies are based on the horror invading upon our mundane world - aka basically the opposite of Duskmourne, which is normal people being stuck in hell. It really feels like the tension between Magic as a prodcut and Magic as art has been laid bare in this set in particular.
I also think that the creative team might be stretched too thin, since they probably also do stuff for the supplemental sets as well. (there is some worldbuilding in modern horizons sets too). If nothing else, maybe the increase in Universes Beyond sets will at least reduce the workload there a bit.
Thunder Junction also literally had sentient cactus people already living on the plane, so I don't get their "it was actually wide open to colonize, but for real this time" line
Murder mystery with many detectives has been done. In Murder by Death
I am absolutely loving Magic right now. I like that each set kind of feels like its own universe and they are paying homage to so many things I love.
I'm going to go on a hunch and say all the creative people that worked on the older sets left or got fired.
"Marvel slop: the gathering"
Cowboys, Detectives, and 80s horror is no good, but the dumbass furry set is fantastic, yeah okay dudes 😂
Haha yeah thats probably the lamest of them all lmao
Back in the day, the design ethos was basically "we go to this new hat world, but how do we make it fit the MTG style and aesthetics?"
Nowadays, the answer to that question is always "put known and beloved legendary creatures in the hats. Done!"
Oh but vampires riding dinosaurs is fine, or a Giant robot Spinosaurus? Or Cyberpunk Ninjas? But cars is where we draw the line. Right...
You know, seeing that Tezzeret Image... just as a thought that would be really cool. What if Tezzeret hasn't been Tezzeret for a long while? What if Yawgmoth has been influencing and slowly taking over for a long while? Yawgmoth has always been the pragmatic one, and Tezzeret always wanted power... He's more metal than man now. A perfect host for the Father of Machines. One that's learned lessons from the failed invasions. A Yawgmoth in a new body laying low and looking for just the right place to start anew.
Of course I'd be a fool to think wizards would do something that cool with it.
You're experiencing the tcg version of ludonarrative dissonance
Interesting that you brought up Warhammer. The story behind Space Marine 2 is pretty interesting, apparently GW were very involved and vocal about how the lore should appear in the game, even down to the size of the ankle armour.
And it shows. Staying true to the lore gives it an authenticity and satisfies the long time fanbase.
I tried to return to play magic when Ixalan was going to come out... But noticed how sanitised the stuff in the cards was.
But hey, that is what you get when you want to appeal to the mass population and not offend anybody
To give credit to Ixalan, it was the set released imitatively after Amonkhet and that place was messed up. The ritualistic child murder being one of the tamer elements of the plane. There are many negative words I would use to describe that era but I think sanitized is a bit much. I mean, one of the primary factions in og Ixalan there where conquistador vampires pillaging and slaughtering the native Aztec dinosaur tamers. You would never see something like that in a modern magic set.
Okay, the legion of dusk was present in the 2023 return to Ixalan so perhaps my point is moot, but in return to Ixalan they are raiding tombs along side the good guys and not hunting natives to the Americans analogs so perhaps they are a bad example but return to Ixalan was an incredibly confused mess of a set.
@brennantmi5063 it was already cleaner, because most of the implement deads where the vampires, and at least I noticed how not a single female character in the art was in a defeated position, let alone dead. The clear example is the hostage taker. A woman capturing another woman, but even then, the hostage takes a serious not broken stand. The Alternative art is better just for being fun
So all Thouse "edgy deads" are mostly on the vampires for being undead.
It felt more like a peter pan adventure, and probably that was the tone they wanted
@@SamuraiMotoko I don't disagree it is a lighter more fun tone, but the story taking place is about Jace healing from how fucked up Amonkhet was right before.
Wile you don't see any dead women, there is little focus on the dead. I went back to skin the block and most of the dead are either merfolk or conquistadors and for both of them both genders wear the same outfit. Like, is the person leading the doomed conquistadors in Blinding Fog a women or a feminine man? Sometimes a corpse has no shirt on or facial hair giving it away but very few cards in general show people in trouble. I don't think a magic set needs a critical mass of doom and gloom if it has other strengths.
I mean, if you want women having a bad time a few month before Ixalan in Hour of Devestation you have stuff like Nissa on the ground screaming getting tentacled by Nicol Bolas in the card Nissa's defeat. The people featured on the cards in the Amonkhet in general were not having a good time, of course Ixalan is more upbeat, it is following a set about the end of the world.
The set is certainly flawed, all the foliage is as tropical as can be and all the pirates are all dressed like they are paroling the English channel and thus it looks like all of them are going to drop dead from heat stroke any moment and the world building as a whole does suffer for marinating the sense of mystery and adventure but I would not say it falls outside of what would be considered reasonable for magic settings.
@brennantmi5063 went from time to time to pre-releases until Pirexia all will be one. And even on the supposedly more twisted set, Pirexia stuff is cleaner, to the point where I did not know if transformed characters have exposed skin, or PG-10 Armor of red and white.
And the rebel warriors look kind of lame, or that was my feel
Also they made stuff just more expensive and less justifiable to buy
@@SamuraiMotoko Oh for sure, dead game. Wizards business model is entity based on scamming suckers and has been for a long time. New Phyrexia was my favorite plane and the Phyrexian plot that followed war was awful. A complete embarrassment and everyone who worked on it should be ashamed. I have not purchased a magic card since Kaldheim and I don't think anyone could argue against mtg jumping the shark in Ikoria. That said magic was very different in 2017 than in 2023 and I don't think it is fair to criticize 2017 sets for problems in 2023 sets.
I love how everyone is hoping Tarkir will be a return to Magic, only to find that the entire plane has turned into a "Dragon Force - Through Fire and Flame" music video.
I mean, you joke, but the joke at least feels related. I'm sure you could make an AMV for Through the Fire and Flame with Tarkir card art and it'd look like the song summarizes at least part of the story. The issue is that we're not gonna get Dragonforce if this continues. It's gonna be "you guys want the dragon plane again? Ok", and then we get Thunder by Imagine Dragons. Played on a cheap kazoo.
I hope we get an Initial D secret lair or a remember Paul Walker secret lair. 🙏
As much as I dislike UB and some secret lairs, I would buy the crap out of an initial d secret lair
Nah, gimme a NASCAR SL. Raise hell, praise Dale!
The Protagonists of Magic, just like the characters of Mario, feel like they’re getting together to go Karting, play Golf, Soccer and Tennis, participate in the Olympics with another IP, or literally just dressing up for different Mario Party boards.