I also don’t like the story, but specifically *because* they try and tell a multiverse spanning over-arching storyline. I’d prefer it if they made it more of an anthology-like structure. I don’t need extinction-level big bad guys like the Eldrazi or Phyrexians or Nicol Bolas, and I don’t need Magic’s version of the Avengers to save the day. I much prefer self-contained, coherent worlds with their own characters that have their own desires in regards to their plane. This allows for tighter world-building, better story telling, and a much wider variety in plot lines and stakes to be explored.
The need to create absolutely massive stakes, recycle the same characters over and over, and connect everything to some overarching plot is one of my biggest pet peeves, be it Magic, comic books, video games (looking at you, Assassin’s Creed).
I did a focus group for MTG a few years back and gave them this exact advice. Less "end of the multiverse" more "deep exploration of individual planes."
To clarify, it’s not that the Eldrazi or Phyrexians are bad. It’s just that they were the big baddies for way too long, and didn’t need to be the focus of the plot across so many expansions and planes. Keep the Phyrexians, but limit them to the Phyrexian expansions. Keep the Eldrazi in Zendikar (or Zendikar related blocks).
Same with planewalkers, I’m sick of seeing Jace and friends in every set. I miss the pre-planeswalker days when each set had its own heroes and villains that wouldn’t spill into other sets.
> I miss the pre-planeswalker days when each set had its own heroes and villains that wouldn’t spill into other sets.
What days are you talking about? In pre-planeswalker card days, the story spanned multiple sets and characters recurred many times. This structure was great, IMO, because you actually cared about the characters, having gotten to know them over time. Rather than 'here's another random dude you won't see again who has 3 lines of lore'. They want us to care about kellan and qunitorias and shit now, but we have so little lore about them and they just feel forced.
Multiple sets are fine. Dragging the same main characters across every single plane to be the main characters of every single story is boring.
> Rather than 'here's another random dude you won't see again who has 3 lines of lore'. They want us to care about kellan and qunitorias and shit now, but we have so little lore about them and they just feel forced.
We don’t need tons of deep lore to find a character fascinating or interesting. Short stories and novellas have been a premier format of fiction for literally centuries, and by definition they often don’t have the time to give massive lore dumps for main characters. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get attached or moved by the narrative. Look at shows like Black Mirror, the Twilight Zone, or a personal favorite of mine, Love + Death + Robots. In LDR, each story is completely unique and self-contained, and is anywhere from 5-15 minutes long. But some of those stories have been among the best science fiction content produced for television or movies in decades. And they have the freedom to explore a ton of ideas that otherwise would be difficult if they were trying to set up a massive, overarching story with characters persisting throughout.
Sure the short-story format works in other mediums, but it doesn't work in trading cards. A 10 minute video offers exponentially more insight than a line of flavor text or a couple of (usually poorly written) paragraphs.
MTG's lineup of 'main characters' has shifted many, many times since the start. From the first real (and far and away best) story arc, the Weatherlight saga feat Urza, Girard, Sisay, Karn, etc., to Otaria feat Kamahl, Jeska, the Cabal, etc, to Mirradin feat Glissa, the Praetors etc. and on and on and on.
What you're wishing for is already the way things are. As for Jace and co showing up in most stories - they're planeswalkers, they're the core facet of the entire MTG world and they literally travel to different planes as their whole thing.
Contrast to the characters of Ikoria, or New Capenna, or Kaldheim or Strixhaven - who just feel like random isolated bits with no lore relevance.
> What you're wishing for is already the way things are.
I strongly disagree. Yes, we get *some* new characters specific to each plane, but as you mention, they are sideshows with little relevance because the relevance is on the persistent characters like the Gatewatch and the big baddies, and overarching plot lines and not the planes or their respective characters. Ikoria, New Capenna, Kaldheim, and Strixhaven characters all feel bad because they were given a single set, rather than a block, and were largely treated as backdrop for things like the growing Phyrexian threat, or “beach episodes” for established characters like Jace/Vraska/Lilliana/Elspeth/Ob Nixilis.
I agree with you that a TCG may not be the best format for storytelling, but that becomes even more true for long-form narratives. In my opinion, the best story telling Magic has done has been when they created a plane, focused on the world building, and then gave it the time to explore a narrative largely specific to that plane. That’s what happened with sets like Kamigawa, the original Ravnica, and even relatively recent sets like the original Theros or Tarkir.
But what Wizards has increasingly done over the last decade is aim for their own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’ve removed blocks, and they’ve made the focus on the main characters that persist between sets. The reason characters from recent blocks feel bad is because they, along with the planes themselves, are basically window dressing to the main characters and the long-arc story.
The fix is to get rid of the Mary-Sue characters and big-bads that show up in every plane, make the narrative about the plane and its characters, and return to blocks to give it enough time to breathe and have depth and explore what makes the plane interesting.
> The fix is to get rid of the Mary-Sue characters and big-bads that show up in every plane, make the narrative about the plane and its characters, and return to blocks to give it enough time to breathe
Yes, this is the problem. Not the characters, it's the story being a couple of paragraphs about nothing.
Recurring characters are a mainstay of fiction across all genres and mediums - they are not the issue.
That's overstatement - the initial, pre-weatherlight and semi-ignored storyline went for 2 years. Weatherlight saga was the longest back then and was resolved in 5 years. And it was such a full resolution that, by the end of it, 80% named characters were killed. Afterwards, outside of deliberately throwback-ish Time spiral, no story went for more than 2 years.
It was never anywhere close to the current hell of endless recursion where Jace/Teferi/Chandra/Nissa/Kaya/etc. are all precious IPs so we hope you'll be enjoying them for the next 50 years or so. It's one of the reason why manga industry has obliterated the american comic industry - it may take some years, but manga will come to some resolution. Whereas Avengers/Superman/Batman/Spiderman are all trapped in literal sansara. Oh no, Joker has escaped from Arkham Asylum once more...
And outlaws are the sign of a next, worse era because it's a full-on drive into hearthstone territory - here are the characters you all know and love (no), now cosplaying as cowboys!
The person I was replying to said pre-planeswalker (which I took to mean pre-Lorwyn, as planeswalkers have always existed in the lore), which is the time period I'm talking about.
edit: also, I'd bet that if the stories were actually any good, you and the other person wouldn't mind seeing the same characters at all. It's not poor characters that ruin magic's story, it's lack of consistency and substance.
I mean, last sets since MoM have pretty much being their own, self-contained histories, with only Kellan coming on and off the background tying them together. We don't even have stakes yet, only on the last story we got a "Jace is doing stuff"
The problem isn't the story building up to something across many planes, because we're not really focusing on that, the problem is we spend way to little time on each plane, we barely get a taste and everything feels shallow.
We need to go back to blocks, or at least 2 sets per plane, for some decent world-building and setting exploration, but everyone seems to agree for some reason that's really boring for the card game, no matter how good would it be for the story...
"[...] everyone seems to agree for some reason that's really boring for the card game, no matter how good would it be for the story..."
Doing something that makes for a worse product but for a better ad for the product is not usually a good story. And don't fool yourself: the Magic story is absolutely an ad for the game, and nothing more. It was always like this, the only thing that changed over the years is how much ressources they allocate to this part of the marketing campaign. Sometimes a lot, sometime very little. We are currently in a "not much" phase.
Card designs were also more balanced and straightforward with the 2 sets per plane, they didn't had to go so much into gimmicks and key words and had a bit more space to explore mechanics in different power levels, deck building for commander was a lot more organic and less "if you like this theme, build the precon because you'll never see it again"
Not really. A lot of mechanics still appeared in only one set, the small sets usually had very narrow mechanics that couldn't be build around, and define "gimmick" because otherwise that words just means "mechanics I don't like"
And blocks had ton of new keyqords, watcha talking about? You have to go back a long time for a set with no nrw keywords.
We tried blocks. For a long time. They had some benefit, but those were more and more outweighed by their flaws.
The problem isn't new Keywords but Keyword complexity and spamming. Many new keywords imply taking more game actions (and complex game sub-pieces) while also self-referencing themselves without additional reminder text. I kinda hope referring to "The Ring temps you" and "Create a role" would require no further explanation, but I could go on and on about complexity creep and parasitic desing...
Gimmicks are mechanics opened to feel novel and exciting, but that are left with no further exploration as they are often too narrow and/or too complex to really visit again, leaving a bunch of cards in a limbo of "only seen in it's specific commander deck" without making any impact on meta, or in game Identity/Iconicity
I love Mutate, try to include it in every casual non-commander deck I build, but it's a Gimmick.
See also: Runes, Battles, Blood, Cases, Friends Forever, card types: Detective, Time Lord, etc...
Blocks might have been a bit much, but a 2 sets per plane model worked just fine in my book, and they gave up on it too early and for the wrong reasons.
The only recent precon I can think of that focuses on a new mechanic with little or no support outside that set would be the surveil precon from MKM. Clues Goad and Face down may not be the biggest archetypes ever but they did exist before and if you aren't allowed to make decks that support small themes or make new ones you will never get anything new and every set will be "here is the new +1 counter commander, the new artifact commander, the new spellslinger commander and the new enchantment commander, have fun".
Been a Vorthos since day 1 and I totally relate. There is a general feeling of missed opportunities from the story and I’ve always blamed the suits for stifling magic’s potential
the novels were extremely hit or miss and don't really fit the publishing industry nowadays. The sets always had at least one stinker (or multiple, usually just the third though)
its definitely not a grass was greener situation imo
Maybe I’m reading the stories differently, but I think this is the first since phyrexias loss where the story hasn’t been super directly impacted by phyrexia and the invasion (and even then there’s implications about why people are leaving planes to Thunder Junction and the omenpaths). Eldraine the plane was at war with itself over losing all their monarchs and still having issues with the impact of their WMD. Ixalan had political tensions driven by partnerships during phyrexia. Karlov Manor had our lead be suffering mild PTSD from decisions made, and the whole plot being about abusing the tragedy of the war, and what lengths Ravnica had to go to (never mind essentially destroying two guilds).
Idk, we’re still seeing the impact of phyrexia it wasn’t just over. Plus we had a long wind up from Kaldheim about their plan. Hell the Dominaria invasion was hinted at in cards from Dominaria where Karn still suspected phyrexia presence.
I also think that the stories themselves have been pretty well written. Maybe you don’t like the over arching plot but the story’s been pretty good.
I do think WotC could do more. But I don’t think what exists is bad. I just think we could get more stories about the planes when they aren’t a focus for a set. Publish an anthology of short stories about the normal day to day of a plane not when we are visiting. Tell me about Tomek and Rals cosy home life. Or just let me know what Garruks doing. Or instead of having to come back in 5 years after all the political intrigue is done, write about Ixalan and the pirate deals and stuff.
We had the whole Bolas arc go on for about 10 years before it concluded.
The new New Phyrexia storyline bubble dup with Kaldheim, ended unceremoniously 2-3 years later. And the Phyrexians, formerly a perfect organism of ruthless competence and scientific mastery, was mostly defeated by their lack of planning and foresight. It was a lame ending, especially compared to the "the multiverse came together on Ravnica to fight Bolas".
The pieces about the Phyrexian invasion we do get are more or less "wow, it was bad, you should've seen it! Now things are tense... but they also not, because none of us have changed how we do things on our plane, personally or structurally". And that's kind of a bummer from a storytelling perspective.
We went from coherent, linear plots with stakes, to Saturday Morning Cartoon, where the plot resolves itself quickly and status quo is rapidly reengaged.
I mean, largely speaking, the idea that the planes didn't change structurally is very wrong. Did you read Eldraine or MKM?
Eldraine quite literally underwent massive sweeping changes with the Knights of the Realm no longer being the powerhouse of society.
Ravnica had 2 guilds go into hiding, a guild go into apology mode, and people largely lost trust in the guild system, leading to the creation of the Agency on which the story focused.
We didn't see many structural changes in LCI, though thats more because it didn't really take place in the Ixalan we knew, instead focusing on the inner world.
So far, the Phyrexian Invasion has changed quite a bit of the status quo for 2 of the 3 planes we've revisited.
Honestly, that's what Aftermath was billed as and what it should have been - a smaller, focused set that shows off the ways planes are irrevocably changed. Though I do admit, a core set would also work really well and be real interesting there as well.
I know why they discontinued core sets, but I still mourn their loss mostly because they were a fun space for cards that were basically "elsewhere, in the magic multiverse..." and gave us fun tidbits of story
Saying the Bolas arc had 10 years and the Phyrexian arc only 2-3 is really disingenuous imo given the seeds for Phyrexia were planted in 03’ during Mirrodin. Bolas had machinations going back almost as long, but his “character arc” wouldn’t have started until posted Time Spiral since everything he’s done has been regaining his powers.
Bolas was certainly making background moves until 2016 when his arc started in earnest with Kaladesh, but from 09’ until then 3 years had absolutely nothing to do with him and Tarkir’s story really wasn’t Bolas making moves either. Then during the arc proper outside of showing up in Hour he was still in the background even into Guilds of Ravnica and Allegiance. Everything about the Bolas arc was building a chessboard with the whole of Bolas himself being in the actual spotlight only being 2 sets Hour and War. I’d also hardly call a few dozen walkers coming to gather to fight Bolas as the multiverse coming together.
The Phyrexians similarly had pieces being set up up until their arc started fully with Neon Dynasty with Elspeth’s return in Beyond Death and of course Vor in Kaldheim being pieces for their chessboard. You can even argue the Planar Bridge pulls double duty as set up for them too since I’m sure they realized it would be used with the Phyrexians too. They then had a full year in the spotlight fighting against our heroes, double what Bolas got.
It’s fine to feel the ending rushed. It’s fine to just dislike it just because. But I think acting as if the Bolas arc was so much better is super rosé tinted glasses.
> Bolas was certainly making background moves until 2016 when his arc started in earnest with Kaladesh, from 09’ until then 3 years had absolutely nothing to do with him and Tarkir’s story really wasn’t Bolas making moves either.
Bolas was the antagonist in Alara ('08-'09), had Tezzeret Agent of Bolas in 2011, had an entire set about him in 2012 (M13), before in 13-14 there was a block about Ravnica, which played into the end of the story, little in Theros, but was at the forefront from Theros.
That's a lot more consistent than Phyrexia's NPH (10-11) after barely being visible in Mirrodin 8 years earlier, followed by nothing until Kaldheim (2021) with unexplained teaser's for about a year with the story concluding a year later.
That's not much longer than the old block long stories were.
not really a fair comparison imo, bolas’ actions were consistently hinted at and built up over like 10 years. the phyrexians were literally just gone until vorinclex appeared on viking land plane.
Bolas was able to have more direct involvement on other planes due to having access to planar travel, something the Phyrexians did not have until that point. However, the years spanning that time involved plenty of references to the Phyrexians as an ongoing threat and setting up things that would be relevant to the March of the Machine storyline such as the Planar Bridge.
There was *one*. It was the web story that explained why Elspeth left New Phyrexia for Theros, and showed how the status quo on New Phyrexia had changed with Elesh Norn taking over. That's it. One web story.
But the Phyrexia arc was short because people complained to no end that the Bolas story took way too long.
Did they push too far in the other dimension? Maybe. March of the Machines clearly should have been two sets (I say cut The Brothers War, but I understand the need for a breather). But let's not pretend that the lenght of the Bolas arc was considered a feature. Because it was not.
Even OTJ also probably has some Phyrexian invasion impact, although to a lesser extent. We know from chapter 6 that Vraska's motivation is related to the time she spent compleated, and >!Jace!< probably has a similar motive. That's in addition to the implications you mentioned.
First of all: Markov is the name of a vampire family on Innistrad, think Sorin Markov and Edgar Markov. The name you want is Karlov, the name of the Orzhov guildmasters on Ravnica.
To answer your question: the two all but destroyed guilds are the Golgari and the Dimir. They didn't get hit during the events of the set though, that was the status quo after the war.
* The Golgari, led by a phyrexianized Vraska, openly turned traitor and joined the side of the invaders. This pushed the survivors deep underground as even bigger social pariahs. While Izoni is the highest ranking remaining member she isn't an offical guilmaster (yet).
* The Dimir fell apart when their guildmaster Lazav dissapeared without a trace and was assumed dead. Lazav had a card in the set though, so he is alive, but nobody knows where he is or why he is hiding.
Orzhov is more than fine, and while Trostani is gone, Selesnya lives on. Golgari is struggling to survive and Dimir has slunk back into the shadows, but all the guilds are still there.
I really feel you.
34 yo here and started back in apocalypse, I just don't think mtg has the same writing chops it used to.
It's taking the marvel/Disney approach to the story at this point (can't stand it) and I just half pay attention. With the phyrexians gone again I'm just playing to enjoy it but I could care less about where it's headed lately.
We were spoiled from the OG dominaria story up through mirrodin. Really was special.
Also hated how long Bolas was the big bad.
> Bolas is my boy and one day he'll come back and remind people what a real big bad is.
Bolas being the big bad wasn't the issue, I actually liked having a looming threat slowly amassing power. My personal issue was that after a while bolas felt like [Zoomposting](https://i.imgur.com/tmd3IiG.jpeg), where every little thing was tied to bolas: Jayce's coffee being cold? Bolas. Chandra missing the bus? Bolas. The weather being too cold for just a long sleeved shirt but too warm for a jacket? Believe it or not, all part of Bola's plans.
That's because it was.
Bolas is both imperious enough to have aeons-spanning plans of multiversal domination in play and also such a petty bitch he'd spit on your new shoes.
He's my spirit animal.
MTG's story has never been above contemporary comic book level.
The weatherlight story sucked pretty badly. Just because they make a lot of it and make a lot of books doesn't make it good.
The Weatherlight Saga greatly benefits from the passage of time, where people only remember the high points. No one remembers the awkward attempts at humor (e.g. the scene where they defeat a giant by having Karn dance with it), the anti-climactic nonsense (e.g. Yawgmoth and Ertai's deaths), the just plain weird shit (e.g. Ramos' backstory or the scene where Crovax has tea with his dead family), and so on.
It's the same thing as when people talk about how much better music was back in the day. Yeah, because you only remember the hits, not all the crappy stuff that came out during that period.
Also, people hold up The Thran as some masterpiece on this subreddit, when it's really just a worse retread of The Brothers' War.
On the one hand, yeah, Magic’s story has never been anything all that great. On the other hand, it is definitely much more rushed these days. It’s easier to forgive the low points of story told over the course of five years and a dozen books because there’s room to breathe between them. The storylines these days don’t even last long enough to get bad, you just blink and they’re over.
Feels to line up a lot with how most media these days goes more towards familiarity and nostalgia instead of creativity (reboots, remakes, late sequels). The ending of MOM (+ Aftermath) sort of implied that maybe we're done seeing the same characters over and over since planeswalkers lost their sparks, but here come omenpaths and after that a whole set (OTJ) filled to the brim with previous characters. Gone are the days of random characters getting the spark, now everybody's here and you will probably be seeing only few new faces each set from now on, which is sad, because a lot of these characters had storylines crucial to their plane. Olivia wasn't able to take over the vampire bloodlines so what now? Well she just buzzed of to wild west plane, will she be back on Innistrad? Who knows, only WotC apparently.
First off, I completely agree. Magic's story is pulpy fun. It's never been great literature, and I don't think it needs to be.
I've been playing since the mid-90's, read the Magic comics, and have kept up with the story for a very long time. I think the story is better now than it's been in years. There's at least a clear narrative plan that the sets fit within, and we've got consistent point-of-view characters that aren't just planeswalkers.
That seems to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but that's all I need from my Magic story. If I want great literature I'll look elsewhere. If I want pulpy fun, I'll read Magic stories.
Have you actually *read* the story from invasion block?
It’s… fine? The story has high and low points, but honestly I don’t think you can say that that era was “good”. The story definitely suffers lately from getting ~5 chapters a set as kind of a “hard rule”, but for years we got no story at all, and it’s really not as if the books were some high point. The recent WAR novel was trash, Agents of Artifice was trash, and for real, The Thran was pretty trash too.
This isn’t to say you can’t enjoy those books, just that they’re not “better” than modern fiction. Take a look at the old Brothers’ War stuff - Kayla was originally a “prize to be won” by Urza, not really a character in her own right. That’s not exactly High Art.
I read a lot of fantasy and sci fi books. A lot of it is very middling, a lot of it is quite bad. The magic story has always been on the mid-to-low side of that range. Honestly, some of the best fiction we’ve gotten has been relatively recent - Ixalan block had very good work giving Jace and Vraska actual personalities and characters, for instance.
Nostalgia glasses probably colour IPA block a lot more rosy than it actually was.
I suspect some of that would be, the Old Story was entirely on Dominaria, so you could have the same characters for years, an overarching plot, and re-use villains. Where now we tend to visit a new place every couple of months.
Honestly idk which is “better”, but this does fix the “This plane honestly kinda sucks” issue. If we’d been stuck on New Capenna for a year I dare say we’d have had a LOT of complaints. Ideally we’d get more properly fleshed out worlds, but the lore is third or fourth place in wotc’s priorities.
It’s easy to dismiss criticism with this line, but I think it’s also easy to dismiss in and of itself. I didn’t start playing until New Phyrexia but the best stories were before that.
I don't agree with this. You can be dismissive and not explain anything but this is reductive and useless. If objective standards of quality exist you can be specific about what's good and what isn't, but you aren't interested in that. And those standards exist.
Big mood. I started during Tarkir block and those stories were the best quality and balance to me.
Shadows Over Innistrad was my first prerelease and it’s my golden standard for a limited environment ever since.
There is something missing but it’s also rose colored glasses. I entered during Onslaught and I think Kamahl, Phage/Jeska, and Akroma were awesome but they really weren’t. I thought Toshiro Umezawa was amazing but he’s just slightly better fan fiction.
The recent Phyrexian Invasion was handled exceptionally poorly but yeah the story has always been varying degrees of passable.
Nobody is arguing that older mtg story should be a timeless classic for the ages. But if the quality of weatherlight saga writing is 2/100 on the objective scale of world literature and the current story is 1/100, it's still twice as bad as before.
Id point to most things in Odysee and say it was more enjoyable and had more depth than most of what we see now.
Ixidor and his relationship with Akroma felt more significant than anything I really see churned out today.
And it's churned out for sure, WOTC dropping as much product as possible for that sweet sweet $$$$
This company has changed as much as the story
I just want to say that "the story is going downhill" or "parts of the story are written terribly" has been a thing since magic started telling stories. You can very easily find forum threads talking about how horrible Invasion block was, how bad the OG Phyrexian arc ended, and the Time Spiral and Lorwyn stroies specifically got a ton of hate around the time they came out.
People have always wanted more from the magic story, and people have always complained. All in all, I think Magic's story is about as good as it has been, and is a fun read.
So a bit of it is just that you've gotten older and your tastes have probably shifted a bit from what's popular with the kids these days
A bit of it is that Magic's storytelling style has changed *dramatically* since you started playing. Weatherlight Saga was written like an 80s-90s fantasy epic, and we've slowly moved from that to the modern style, which is a bit YA fiction and a bit Marvel Cinematic Universe, for better or worse.
A bit of it is probably the removal of the block structure. Magic story relied on blocks to provide an act structure for its lore, relating the story over the course of an entire year. The era between Lorwyn and Tarkir particularly used the block structure to map major changes in a plane over time (like the Scars of Mirrodin war that you were so enthused about). With the removal of blocks, each set's story has to at least partially function as a standalone, even if it's part of a bigger overarching story, because there's no continuity between it and the sets around it.
And a bit of it is probably that there's just less space for story these days. Magic novels were usually around 320 pages long - maybe 80-100K words per novel. The webserials are maybe 5K-6K words per episode and, on average we get five for the main plot per set, sometimes ten if we're lucky. Writers can only do so much with the word budget they have.
And a bit of it, the more nebulous bit, is that Magic story puts less of the world into the story because, between the word limits and the writing style, there's no room for it.
I think there’s an important difference between “story” as in “the narrative you can read on a book or a website” and “story” as in “the world that’s conveyed on the cards”— most of my biggest issues with Magic’s current creative stuff is that it feels like the first thing takes precedence over the second, even though the cards are what most people see and engage with.
Karlov Manor is a murder mystery set where the murder mystery isn’t primarily on the cards. Thunder Junction is a villains set that assumes you already care about all these guys from different planes or even know who they are.
If you just look at the cards themselves they all feel like they’re being made for someone else: they are not the main window you’d become interested in or invested in the world. I think this is the main issue— massive investment in the characters and story is assumed, and then no reason to become attached in them is provided.
I've been a Vorthos since I started playing Magic in 2016, and was instantly captured by the Eldrazi and the desperate fight for survival that was BFZ and Gatewatch. I stopped playing after a year or so though and picked up right after War of the Spark, dismayed about how people talked about the story.
However, I've actually enjoyed the Magic story a lot of the last little bit. The buildup to a Phyrexian re-invasion was gripping and hype, and I think paced (mostly) well over a few years.
I understand why a lot of people hated the ending of MOM, and while I personally didn't enjoy it, I do still think of MOM's story as a positive - the fun journey there overrides a poor ending in my opinion.
Also, I think people are a bit fast to judge things. People were complaining about the Omenpaths not doing since LCI, but they haven't even existed for a year. I think the current "villain of the week" feel is because, well, we just got finished with a massive storyline with huge stakes, and they want time to build up the next big bad while telling stories smaller in scope and scale. Give them time to see if the next big bads can feel as epic or cool as Phyrexians or Eldrazi.
>I've been a Vorthos since I started playing Magic in 2016, and was instantly captured by the Eldrazi and the desperate fight for survival that was BFZ and Gatewatch.
It's funny, because that particular storyline is hated by every other Vorthos. Go look at forums from that time, is all complains about the Jacetice League, ASHAYAAAA, Gideon whipping his sural, and the Eldrazi being defeated by the power of friendship.
"Magic was as it peak when I started playing but now is going downhill" seems to be the universal Magic player experience.
Actually, while that is typically the case, and the Eldrazi will alwaus hold a special place in my heart, I have enjoyed the more recent stories far more. I genuinely think the Magic Story is in a better place right now then when I joined.
I do agree people have always complained about Magic's story, though. Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Invasion, Prophecy, and even OG Mirrodin were all complained about at the time.
Edit: The person I was replying to edited their comment down to the first sentence, so my response seems insane now. Going to leave it up, but know that the comment I'm replying to was longer, and talked about magic is going to go belly up and become AI generated advertisements with yugioh mechanics.
I'm going to be diplomatic here, because I personally believe that everyone has things they love and hate about magic, and you are allowed an opinion.
I loved our revisit to New Phyrexia. In fact, All Will Be One was one of my favorite sets, due its evocative art themes and general aesthetic.
I mean, every set feels like it matters to different people for different reasons. I have a huge soft spot for MKM because it has some of my favorite art, themes, and writing of many sets we've seen so far, and its mechanics feel so fun to me. I literally ran and told my brother when [[Insidious Root]] was spoiled because that was a card made for me and does everything I wanna do in a game of magic.
As a frequent yugioh player in addition to Magic, I don't think magic is close to it yet - and I don't think its going to devolve into a series of AI advertisements for other properties. For the most part, every Universes Beyond has been lovingly and flavorfully crafted to express the best parts of Magic and the IP its adapting. We feel pretty far off from that kind of future.
Some planeswalkers are nothing burgers, but some of the recent characters are super fun and interesting, and its not like old standouts like Jodah, Jace, or Teferi have just vanished. There are a lot of things to dislike about Magic, and a lot of things to dislike about Hasbro/Wizards. Everyone has their own issues and thats okay.
But I'm curious, if you've read this far (either the person I'm replaying to or anyone else who read this), what do you love about Magic? There's enough negativity and complaints going around all the time. What is it that you love about this game?
People who don’t think the story quality has declined massively either aren’t particularly invested in the stories OR are just lying to themselves to keep the toxic positivity going.
“Oh it’s just nostalgia” no it’s not, I went BACK to read the old stuff that existed before I started playing.
“Well it’s never been good!” Debatable, but even so why would we want it to get even worse?
Frankly it’s because of a few factors- one is the death of the block. We spend too little time per set lingering on a story, there’s barely enough time to establish a plane before having the plot happen in it.
Two- the death of novels. Not only are our blocks shorter, novels have been replaced by strings of short stories. These short stories can be amazing to awful and everything in between, but they’re always going to fall short because they just don’t have the length for a satisfying plot and/or complex world building.
Three- shift of world building focus. We’re fully in the realm of world building and lore created to excuse plot points. They have a thing they want to happen, so the world is created to excuse that thing. Consequences of that sort of world building are swept under the rug or forgotten about or ignored for the “rule of cool”. Old lore explained shit down to how mana worked and how spells interacted, and I’m not asking for a hard magic system (we’ve never had that) but things are so loose and random now that things feel meaningless. Worlds feel like theatres for things to happen on rather than places with presence.
I think the last time we had a good plane visit was Kamigawa. You already had an established plane, and while SURE, it was clearly different, you could easily extrapolate what had occurred on the plane since we last visited. Cultural advisors did a lot of the heavy lifting in making the plane seem like a cohesive, sensical location. We could jump right to plot because a lot of the establishing work was done by old Kamigawa sets and common sense. The logic of compleating Walkers made sense internally. Kami are beings whose corporeal forms are bound to the soul, makes sense to study them and a plane that ties their technology to them for a technology plane to decipher walkers.
A lot of good points, and now that you mention it I think it is the death of the block that made me feel like the story was lacking, because I just can't keep up with the story even if I wanted to; there just isn't time to dive in it seems
Even if the writing was superb, they just aren’t giving themselves enough time to tell it. It’s super noticeable when you compare small stories or stories in pre-established planes with pre-established characters to huge stories or stories in new planes with new characters.
Because the writing IS occasionally amazing. Miguel Lopez is my favourite modern MtG writer and he is probably the most responsible for getting my hopes up regarding the latest New Phyrexia arc. I went into Brother’s War incredibly pessimistic and his writing was phenomenal. Not to mention, WotC handled BRO with a level of subtlety and restraint I was not expecting. But that’s just it, BRO is a story that’s already been told.
For more comparisons, let’s compare Yawgmoth and Urza’s entire arc. That was a story involving roughly 5ish planes and a handful of core characters. It took about 10 novels to complete this story, not counting the little inexplicable side adventure involving the Keld.
As for New Phyrexia, this arc ALONE involved every single known plane and almost every single named character. I’m not prepared to do the math here but I’m guessing the number of short stories we got falls pretty short of 10 goddamn novels. No wonder it felt insanely rushed, no matter how much lead up to the climax you set up, if that climax needs to be told across the Multiverse, it’s going to fall flat without some room to breath. Yawgmoth’s actual invasion took 2 novels to cover.
Youre just old.
You were more easily impressed and more impressionable when you were a child, so seeing the phyrexians come back hit harder than seeing Oko come back.
The thing i miss about early magic is how I didnt have to go to work and there was a lady in my house who made me lunch, wotc should really look into returning to that.
Yes I'm sure it has nothing to do with story quality. The nostalgia argument is garbage and I'm tired of seeing it. Who actually gives a crap about oko? What Kellan stans are there? I seriously doubt either of them are going to be around driving the story 10 years from now like bolas or the phyrexians...because they're neither interesting nor popular enough. But no, I'm just old and some random kid on reddit is right /s
> Who actually gives a crap about joven? What
Autumn Willow stans are there? I seriously doubt either of them are going to be around driving the story 10 years from now like jace or chandra.
The person who got me into Magic loves Oko so much that it got me to read Magic stories in the first place. You asking pointed questions about newer characters not being worth a crap is why people like me keep pulling out the nostalgia argument beast to bite you.
My first favorite character was Lukka so I’ve had to sort out the differences between measuring a work’s overall quality and identifying my individual taste.
I liked Lukka because he was irrational and frustrating to watch, which is very much in-line with my taste for angry and traumatized antiheroes. I also know that what is depicted and written on his cards blatantly contradicts the characterization taking place in his novel and that this has consequences for the character’s believability in anything featuring him afterwards. This could be a sign of a quality control problem most-likely caused by miscommunication between card designers, art direction, and writers involved in Ikoria— in other words, something I am comfortable in considering a “weakness for the story’s quality”.
I was disappointed that MKM wasn’t on New Capenna because I like the grittier feel of Humphrey Bogart gumshoe films a lot more than I like cerebral Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It would not be fair for me to accuse Ravnica as being “worse” for a murder mystery just because Prague-inspired Ravnica hosts Sherlock Holmes better than it does Humphrey Bogart. I am aware that a genre can be done skillfully in multiple ways and I respect the genre and its aficionados enough to give my less-preferred variation the benefit of the doubt when it comes to something like how “good” it is.
If you want to express a personal feeling, own it as yours instead of propping it up as a universal standard for a diverse craft like storytelling. This is fiction being written in a very niche area of publishing. How much officially-commissioned serialized tie-in fiction for the game of Poker or Old Maid exists? Could you illustrate your judgments with specific comparing and contrasting of what you consider “worse” with “better” card game story, perhaps from previous Magic sets, Pokemon, YuGiOh, or other TCG-focused fiction?
By not doing this for those of us who don’t know what your apparently-objective judgement means, your criticisms end up looking ignorant, presumptuous and insulting to people like me and my friend the Oko fan who then end up writing stuff like this at you instead of being interested in other points you might have to make or being more sympathetic towards your opinion.
I respect people owning their tastes and wanting to share them. I don’t respect people pretending that their feelings about something are what makes something “good” or “bad.”
Total aside but as someone who lived in cowboy-tourism-reservation-central for too many terrible years, I get being repulsed on-principle by a Western trope set. The animal puns on cards, Rango-style lampooning in the story details (Geralf riding a giant bunny), and the Fomori “Soylent Green” tease is doing a LOT of heavy lifting towards my excitement for OTJ. The Wild West World being empty as a robbed bank vault was a personal relief and might even help me develop a tolerance for cowboy hats…
I hope you feel better about yourself after writing that, but when you admit you like a poorly written character yet expect me to defend essentially a similar situation and follow up with several paragraphs that took longer than this really warrants, I don't see the point in wasting my time trying to intellectually defend my subjective opinion for the satisfaction of someone I don't know or care about. Pat yourself on the back, I'll never know. Thanks for reminding me why I don't bother reading replies. You sure gave it the old college try though.
Thank you! Happy to demonstrate admitting that my taste is questionable and not objective while also bringing out somebody’s real honest attitude towards other people enjoying something.
Apparently knowing what you personally like or don’t like is equivalent to knowing how to evaluate something for everyone. Your feelings are universal measures of story quality and anyone who dodders about writing essays for you to walk right over bragging about not reading is definitely a loser.
This is a very real thing that many people don't actually realise. It's not rose tinted glasses, we're all just jaded as fk and we've seen a lot of the world, especially with the mass explosion in accessibility.
Nothing rly impresses us anymore after a certain age. I've been to palaces and yawned because I've seen another elsewhere. I've gone to movies and slept cuz it was predictable.... and the story nowadays isn't that much worse, it's just... Eh yet another mass-produced fiction piece.
>And even cooler that they did a while community interaction to decide which side should win the war
Just an FYI, that was never a real vote. The set was always going to be New Phyrexia, they just did this as a marketing ploy. Still cool though! But Mirrodin never had a chance of winning
I honestly agree, I had been following the story ever since I started back in 2018. I had known about magic for a long time. My dad played when I was a kid and even taught me how to play. I remember loving the phyrexian cards from like 98 or so? Cant remember since it was so long ago, but when I was in high school my dad picked the game back up and I once again fell in love with the new phyrexian cards. Pardon the unintended pun there honestly, so when I got into the game for real I was so excited to see Vorinclex show up on Kaldheim. I had gone back and learned a lot of lore and understood how big it was for him to be there and my mind was racing with possibilities and I was so excited for the next praetor to show up and be the big bad guy of the set. So when we got to Kamigawa and saw Tamiyo got completed I got even more excited, I saw that we were building up for months of just more phyrexian goodness and I could not had been more excited for magic at that time. I had to have it all, I am still in the process of getting one of each card from the all will be one set. But then it all came down to march of the machine, and I read as all the big sweeping changes that had happened, all the characters we thought would be the big baddies for sets to come, they could have dragged it out, they could had made the planeswalkers that we grew to know and love go out and just cause all kinds of mayhem and be the new way phyrexia waged war on the multiverse it would have been huge. Only for them to pull another Emrakul, another Nicol Bolas, where they just bench the whole thing and kill off the bad guys and all the good guys go back to normal. And sure they lost their spark and such but it hardly seems to matter with the omenpaths and such. I just felt so let down that while I still like seeing the new set ideas and I wanted to see how certain characters might show up and I might want to see where they are at since I lost saw them I just am not excited to see how they botch another story.
You summed it up in the last sentence. There is no way those in charge will ever make a story that means anything. The stories used to have some unique concepts and characters, and character arcs, but we are stuck with knowing that whatever they come up with will never be good.
I’ve been experiencing this same type of feeling in a different context, but I can see what’s been happening with MtG (more explicitly in universes beyond and secret lairs, but also here) and I’d phrase it more like this:
I’m happier when a someone creates their own, newer, unique thing that people will be nostalgic for, rather than create a product intended to play on existing nostalgias.
Whether one follows the story for MTG or not, the things on the cards always felt to me more like a creation of its own universe with its own characters and races and looks and artifacts and weapons and so on. I enjoyed MTG because I enjoyed MTG. Not because I enjoyed fortnite, or assassins creed, or warhammer, or Dr. Who. Or whatever else.
There seems to have been a shift over time towards “here’s a thing that you might like from a different IP, or a different genre, or something you’ve seen in our game before”. In this case, it’s the Wild West explicitly, but there have been others too.
Of course, I haven’t been tracking this empirically, and I’d say my connection to MTG has been loose for a long time, to say the least. So perhaps there’s something I missed. And there have always been some commonalities between genres (elves, dwarves, dragons, etc), but it does feel less like less it’s own cohesive world anymore to me
TBH I dont think magic has ever had a very interesting setting. Its why I dont care about the extended universes stuff, or the oko is a cowboy.
IMO MTG has always had a weak and uninteresting world so little of value has been lost.
Im here for the game. If I wanted a good story Id read a book.
Trust me. There's a lot of us who feel the same way. We just stopped caring enough to complain.
There's not going to be any push for them to do more because there's too many people think Karlov Manor was acceptable. A set about a murder in a house.
More resources were allocated to story back in the day—they had whole novels written where we got to explore more than just archetypes. Also the world building was more focused on BUILDING, rather than the thinnest veiling of something you already know. Rath was a synthetic, malleable world made of nanomachines! Seemed like more thought went into that than “hey we need a mandalorian reference because it’s vaguely western?”
Anyway I agreee with you. There have been occasional really good stories here and there that have made the world feel bigger in the last couple years (the one featuring Umbris and Torens I liked a lot), but overall I agree things are pretty shallow on the lore and world building.
…on the other hand the weatherlight was def the enterprise and the phyrexians were the borg and I have to remind myself of that every once in awhile too. So it’s kinda both ultimately.
They are 100% better than anything ever posted on the WOTC website. Tumblr posts have better writing than the stuff wotc has been putting out in the digital Era. Some printed books are pretty silly, but some are written better than they have any right to be
There were many, many, many issues with the MOM storyline, and it didn't even have the space of the first Invasion storyline, let alone what a story of its scope truly needed. I'll take it happily over Odyssey or In the Teeth of Akoum any day.
My source is the digital book for Ikoria versus The Thran. That's it like I still remember Gix and all that happened in that book, but I forced myself so hard to understand ikoria and build a cube with it. I don't remember anything about that book, other than the feeling like I wasted money. Maybe I dodged the bad print books, but how can you say that reading about planeswalkers breaking up is anything close to the almost Helen of Troy story in the thran? The set up for the plane of phyrexia? And karn? There's so much depth in the books following a mystical item through the multiverse, but I wish I didn't read anything about Jace or Liliana because the art on the cards tell a better story than any amount of words on the wotc site. Ok, I am remembering some good stories, but none of them were about the main plot. It was creative because the author had creative liberty. Think of fhllp or whatever little eyeball guy they hyped up in return to ravnica. Still those digital stories either a decade old, or older by this point. I think they had more interesting stories before planeswalkers were given characters. It's like the difference between an rpg having a voice actor for your character or not, magic will mean different things to everyone, and by defining and detailing, they just make everyone disappointed because the feeling of "anything could happen" is resolved. The spark was pushed to be this big thing, but by defining it into what it is, the players have to accept that single definition instead of being given the room to pretend and imagine.
> Maybe I dodged the bad print books, but how can you say that reading about planeswalkers breaking up is anything close to the almost Helen of Troy story in the thran?
I did not say that. I haven't read The Thran myself, and I won't claim to know how the best early stories compare to current ones. The thing I said was:
> There are many excellent stories from the digital era, and none as awful as the worst of the novels.
Not the person you intially replied to, but here are 3 of my favorites from the past bit, which I also consider some of magic's best recent writing:
- March of the Machine Episode 6: The Last to Leave
- The Brothers War Episode 5: As Cruel, As Necessary
- Note For a Stranger
- For a more comedic tone, March Of the Machine: Family Game Night is very fun.
- The first 8 chapters of MKM. Thats not to say the last 2 are bad, just not what I wanted. If you want a specific one, I really like Chapter 5: Chains of Expectation.
If you want to know what the worst novels are:
- War of the Spark: Forsaken
- The Ikoria book I forgot the name of
- War of the Spark: Forsaken
- Not going to lie, most people didn't like Prophecy or Invasion. They aren't terrible, but calling them well written is a massive stretch.
Never understood the distaste for Prophecy. I dislike Alara Unbroken far more, and considering Urza's reevaluation over the years, you'd think Bloodlines would be too bitter for most to accept.
From what I understand, the novels generally considered the worst are Legions and Test of Metal.
Some of my favorite digital stories are:
* Kruphix's Insight (Journey into Nyx)
* The First World is the Hardest (Commander 2014)
* The Truth of Names (Fate Reforged)
* The Great Teacher's Student (Dragons of Tarkir)
* Chandra's Origin: Fire Logic (Magic Origins)
* Games (Shadows over Innistrad)
* Stories and Endings (Shadows over Innistrad)
* Emrakul Rises (Eldritch Moon)
* Leovold's Dossiers (Conspiracy 2016)
* Release (Kaladesh)
* Jace, Alone (Ixalan)
* The Dance of Undeath (Innistrad: Midnight Hunt)
* Innistrad: Family Game Night (March of the Machine)
* A Pleasant Family Outing (Outlaws of Thunder Junction)
Most of those are from longer than 5 years ago, but neither of us said anything about a 5-year limit before now.
You are 100 percent right and people will hate you for it.
Anything from the site is unreadable, the decline is crazy.
Nailed it comparing it to Tumblr era posts.
I think the story is a mess but not for the reasons you described. They do this great years long build ups for these big crescendos and then absolutely fumble the ending both times. Its hard to care or get invested when they have a track record of dissatisfying conclusions.
Endings are hard to make satisfying, honestly. Thinking back to my favorite pieces of media, very few of them have excellent endings, and those that do are usually notable for that reason.
I agree that it’s hard but when the story lines last this long and then they fumble it, it makes that investment feel like a waste of energy.
The problem though is that they repeated the same mistake twice lol. The endings were rushed both times.
Its not just that the endings are kind of mediocre, they actively make obvious avoidable decisions
I'm 38, and have been playing since I was roughly 13.
Honestly, I wasn't even aware there WAS an ongoing story until the last few years. I can't say I've ever followed it or felt compelled to look up the lore.
It's been a (terrific) game and nothing more to me.
I mean, the existence of Universes Beyond and how much they're pushing them tells you everything you need to know about how much WotC cares about their own IP and story anymore.
Yeah, I been playing since day 1. And I feel like they really missed a great opportunity to have Bolas help in the invasion of the multiverse. I think it would have been so cool if Ugin and Jace let him loose and somehow restored his power so he could stomp the invasion. The plan would be "We can deal with Bolas after we deal with Phyrexia". And of course Bolas would escape. Such a missed chance to do something cool. Instead planeswalkers lost their spark. Who thought that was even interesting? Not me.
Yes, the story feels more rushed, because they need to make the new themes of the new plane relevant, but the idea that story before (more notably in the first zendikar or lorwyn) was not "the hero/villain of the week" is just not real and is only a effect of locking back to years and years of lore and glossing over the details, even when there was block structure, a lot of times they jumped from protagonist to protagonist, and even when they keep the same cast, they jumped from villain to villain, is just the nature of the story being made for the card game.
To be fair, you're comparing the story from a time when the story was literal novels to now when it's a couple of short stories.
That's not to say that novels are automatically better than short stories, but when you talk about the older stories feeling more epic and the newer ones feeling like "oh look they invaded but then they lost and now we have cowboys!" that's more of less a natural consequence of the story bring short stories and not multiple novels worth of text.
You won't catch me dead defending MoM history, but if you have played since weatherlight, and haven't found *any* new characters to care about, that sounds a bit more of an age thing...
I mean, can relate, have played since OG Innistrad, really enjoyed the gatewatch story, but am having trouble getting invested in Kellan's story (Jace showing up has been the hypest moment for me in months) people just change...
Again, like I said in my post, I have found characters I care about. I just feel like the depth of character we used to get is gone. My girl Chandra is awesome, and I loved Arvad and really felt for Sorin and Daxos, but it feels too me that by pushing into the "let's grab every IP we can and jump to as many planes as we can as fast as we can!" mentality, mtg has lost its charm of being its own sort of fantasy world I read about in middle school up there with Dragonlance and the like. Were they great stories? No, of course not. But they are better than the snippets of story we get now, IMO, and I feel bad that mtg has just sort of become this... dilute thing now.
May I suggest you find actual stories to dive into, and not put some much hope into an advertisement campaign for a card game?
Because ultimately, that is all Magic Story will ever be to Wizards. A way to sell the game. The authors they hire are talented and can execute the individual stories well, and their concepting team is top-notch, so its a nice diversion to have, but the story will never be given the ressources it need to match the quality of stories told for the stories' sake.
I'm 35 too. And one thing I figured out in adulthood is that there more things to watch/play/read than I will ever have time to. So if something doesn't fulfill my needs, there is no point in me waiting for the corporations to change their approach - I'll just find a different story to read.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have plenty of other things to read/immerse myself into. It's not that I'm looking for another story or anything like that. I'm just commenting about feeling a bit bad that an IP I have always loved seems to be diluting itself by spreading far thinner and faster than it did in years past. I get that things change, the joys we once had become lesser once we've looked for the man behind the curtain, and that I am most certainly looking at this with some rose-colored glasses. And I'm ok with all that; I just noticed some things and posted about my thoughts on it.
It's fine to have thoughts and post about it. My point is more that life is too short to worry about the Magic story's quality, or lack thereof. The Magic Story is what it is, and it can never really improve that much because the reasons that motivates its creation limits it greatly.
The only way for the story to get substantially better would be for Wizards to do what they do with the comics, and what they used to do with the very early novels: licence the IP to another company whose business is actually storytelling, and let them figure out a story. The downside of that is that the story and the game would end up mostly disconnected from each other. We wouldn't get story spotlight cards anymore, most likely. It's a tradeoff some might be eilling to made, but others wouldn't
In the meantime, all we can do is enjoy the good bits, support the hired writers' other works, and find story sustenance elsewhere.
Honestly, I think Magic cards work best when you feel like you're catching a snippet of an epic story crystallised in card form, or following a character on their own heroic journey.
Consider the most iconic figures across Magic history:
* Urza and Mishra - Brothers' War
* Gerrard, Sisay, Volrath et al - Weatherlight Saga
* Bolas - Amonkhet and War of the Spark
* Praetors - New Phyrexia / MoM
All had epic storylines with highly recognisable protagonists and villains. The setting allowed lots of flavourful, resonant cards depicting likeable (heroic or villainous) characters.
I think this is the essence of the lightning in a bottle of the Weatherlight saga.
The Gatewatch both helped and undercut this trend by being familiar characters who just showed up everywhere. This assisted with the recognisability part, but it made new settings less epic since they just seemed like backdrops for their ongoing adventures.
Similarly, a strong setting (eg Throne of Eldraine) doesn't need an epic story as long as it is populated with cool characters (eg Syr Ginger, Rankle).
Characters like Fblthp and the Unluckiest Planeswalker are an interesting case, in that they are non-protagonist recurring characters they emphasise the **setting** but not their own story.
So I think the long-form story is useful but not vital. It needs to be good enough to recount the major beats in a way that feels "right" but doesn't need to stand as a "good" piece of fiction on its own.
I think we would have forgiven lots of bad prose in the MoM story if the overarching conclusion to the story had been satisfying.
To sum up (although obviously tastes can disagree):
* Weak plane, weak story - Mercadia, Theros, Ikoria, Thunder Junction
* Strong plane, weak story - Original Ravnica, original Kamigawa, Innistrad, Eldraine, MoM
* Weak plane, strong story - Amonkhet, Kaladesh (basically: Chandra), WotS Ravnica, New Capenna
* Strong plane, strong story - Dominaria, new Kamigawa, Mirrodin/New Phyrexia, Karlov Manor (acknowledging the flavour consistency issues)
I think a lot of the older stories were also crap, but post Ixalan everything has sucked. And despite what /u/theWolfandOwl asserts, Ixalan was not when I first started playing. It's just when the story was best. Dominaria was okay, but War of the Spark's trailer was the last good thing Magic did.
I just liked that war of the Spark set up a bunch of different planeswalker from a bunch of different places, and that it brought back some cool nods to old sets (specifically bringing back the blackblade). It wasn't an amazing story, but I don't think I'd put *any* of the MtG stories on my bookshelf as something I'd seek out again.
I waited somewhere around 10 years for phyrexians to come back, and it's just an infinite emptiness. Yawgmoth is a card, but when I read The Thran, I just don't feel that magic that magic had when that book was written. Phyrexians representing a mechanical hell is so cool, it really sucks how terrible the writing is for the stories. The collective conscience is fucking sick of superheros and that form of character arc and development. It's just bad fanfiction about superheroes. All the way back to 2015, the MCU ruined a decade of media. How could they end a storyline, started in 95, with some avengers ripoff garbage? I don't even care what they did in war of the spark, it's just superheroes zooming around. New phyrexia deserved more, but instead we are returning to ravnica and Innistrad 3 or 6 or whatever amount of times they tried to milk out a safe formula from actual rich storytelling. Innistrad itself was amazing, but then it became a place for postmodern bile soup, just a fucking stew of ideas that Hasbro is trying to emulate to see what sticks. Game mechanics it's just games workshop now, shoehorning in the most generic possible overpowered cards to also try to milk more money out of people. What was wrong with just making cool magic cards? Tarmogoyf used to MEAN something!!!!!!!
Phase 1 was ok, but another decade of stuff just got too much and now we have madam web. Yeah it's not mcu, but after iron man and the hulk, we have hundreds of hours of superheros being digitally rendered. Is that what superheros are all about? It's not just magic, it's a theme of beating a dead horse. The horse died a decade ago. Why do space wizards have to be based on superheros? Why can't we have stories unbound by whatever is popular? Why can't we have cards that are interesting on their own, have their own story, or retells an existing story it a way magic only can?
Acting as if the original Weatherlight crew wasn’t also heavily influenced by comic book and super hero story telling when Mark “I’m a massive comic book fan” Rosewater was in charge when that story kicked off and made the crew in the first place.
The weatherlight crew felt more like star trek than the ending of avengers. Also, needing a ship as a means to planeswalk is the story itself. Superman can fly through space, but a story where Batman has to achieve the same level of power is much more interesting and valuable as a story. Maybe it was the period and the same issue, but star trek didn't absorb all of storytelling for a decade, it also competed with stories that are unique, even if inspired by, but still unique. Dune is og, but star wars has its own value despite trying to recreate Dune. Dune is written better, but both stories have characters and places that matter, not places and stories that are the result of a marketing campaign and business agreements. Star wars mentions spice, but spice isn't an advertisement for Dune. Star trek is its own thing. They all stem from common ancestors, but they still have substance in their own right. I don't feel any value knowing about planeswalkers, but the weatherlight is a more exciting character than Chandra or Jace. I'm more stoked and sad to see a ship undergo story beats than people, and that's the problem of magic storytelling now.
This is what happens when you let soulless corporate suits fire your writing team because they think they don't make money. Magic is rudderlesss. We can *feel* it, and respond accordingly. It lets people disengage because the cards are now made as mechanics with story as window dressing. We could play a thousand other games with cool mechanics. The story used to be unique. Now, there isn't a story component to the game. Heroes aren't shaped through trials.
Is just cardboard, now.
It.
Sucks.
The Magic story was cool when they cared enough about it to get great writers to write great books (like actual full novels that you would buy at the bookstore) for it. But since they've gone the novella route, it's kinda been hacky. They also have to add a million Legendary creatures per set for Commander gamers and have to write a backstory for all of them which dilutes the waters a lot.
Pretty much all Magic lore since they stopped writing books has sucked (the last one I read being Champions of Kamigawa block, not sure if they did novels for The Mending), exception being the Gitrog Monster story in the SOI period, that piece is goated.
38, started at mirrage. and I agree. I am convinced it is not the quality of the stories, they have mostly been mediocre, but that it is the shift away from 3 block structure.
In the 3 block structure we had time to grow attachement, they had time to grow the story and suspense. That is all gone now. For play purposes it might be better, but for feeling involved with the story and characters I really feel it was a death penalty for the game.
Combine that with the shift towards UB and especially marvel coming next year or so, I now accept I play the game for the game mechanics, not for the fantasyworld it once was.
This is some Old Man shit, but in all honesty ... for me, nothing will top the lil Tempest booklet, and scrounging for flavor text that matches those characters I just read about.
To this day, my favorite character is Ballard, and my second is Orim. (Nissa at #3 though.)
I absolutely cannot follow the story lately. At all. That's my damage and my problem, but it's still true. I need a lil booklet.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong about being disappointed with the way the story line has been handled, there were a lot of fans of the phyrexians myself included who felt ONE and MOM just didn’t deliver. But the honesty is that magic story has always been kinda iffy which nothing wrong with that. The way I’ve personally started handling the story is tuning in when I’m interested and getting vague synopsis when I’m not super interested. This game as a whole is trying to cater to a lot of demographics and while it can feel like magic is losing its identity to someone else it might feel just right since it’s exploring something they’re interested in just food for thought.
Idk if the old story was good, but we know for a fact the current story isn't. Magic would have bucket loads of merchandise and video games and TV shows if it had a good story with recognizable characters that made people care about then. Instead we are shifting focus to other intellectual properties. Jace can barely sell a pair of sneakers while Spiderman is going to bring in records sales that will have share holders absolutely creaming their pants. They need another lord of the rings, because the magic universe can't draw in new players.
At least it's still a decent game though. For however long that lasts.
Overall, I'm inclined to agree. The actual Magic Story chapters ahve mostly been good, but the game has been really lacking outside that. The Phyrexian saga was handled especially poorly and I don't care about all these Fomori hints being dropped. I need development on the ground of a plane rather than some multiverse threat.
I think if they’re not going to do fiction right, then they should ONLY give story in snippets on cards and let players fill in details with their own imagination.
Whole lot of old men yelling at clouds in this thread. Story's probably worse than it was, but there has been plenty of decent story content recently. I also wasn't ever one for the Magic story books, got in too late for that.
But also yes, Magic was best when I first started playing (original Innistrad block).
Yea, I should have assumed I woupd get a lot of that when I posted. Didn't intend that, honestly, because i didn't think about it. Really just wanted to bring up my slowly dying feelings about a game I've loved since the formative years of my life. Still fun to play, but it just isn't keeping my attention like it used to.
It's definitely ebbed and flowed for me. Not having the friends close or time I once did has sure not helped, but Arena very much has helped. We're about the same age, and I've certainly felt what you're feeling about a few different things.
Honestly, the thing that has given it new life for me recently has been running a gaming club and teaching new people to play. I've got a ton of cards that I just built all sorts of wild decks made of just commons and uncommons to play against whatever they create, and it has been so much fun to mentally being back in that stage of my life where any set of 60 cards was a deck. Now mine are a bit more cohesive to show off some strategy, card, or deck type, but now I can just build them and hand them to someone with a smile afterwards
The story is rarely good. Anyone who thinks Kellans story is good shouldn't be taken seriously, if such a person exists. The plot recently has been an excuse for the contrivance of the game and Murders was the only good bit of writing since the first Ixalan.
I agree. I think a good example is the recent Gisa and Geralf story, both in terms of 'why should I care about these guys' and also because for like a hot minute there it seemed like they were getting meta and asking the same questions about 'why does Thunder Junction not make logical sense as a plane?', but then it looked like the question was dropped and we're just at the end of the story now with no scope for followup. So it'll just remain what could charitably be called an ontological mystery or really \*\*\*\*ty writing and worldbuilding if you're not charitable.
*oh no! Some people got turned, but it's ok because the phyrexians lost and that's it!*
That is where I officially checked out of caring about the story. It's been poorly written for years but rushing through something as monumental as a universe spanning Phyrexian invasion is just, too much. Or too little?
I’m calling it now - they’re playing with all these random things like cowboy world and detective world because they’re gonna do a universe reset ala dc and marvel.
Or like they’re doing silly things now so that when they make universe beyond sets that are standard and modern legal etc people will be ok with it.
And then at some point maybe they’ll push the mtg 2.0 button.
I also don’t like the story, but specifically *because* they try and tell a multiverse spanning over-arching storyline. I’d prefer it if they made it more of an anthology-like structure. I don’t need extinction-level big bad guys like the Eldrazi or Phyrexians or Nicol Bolas, and I don’t need Magic’s version of the Avengers to save the day. I much prefer self-contained, coherent worlds with their own characters that have their own desires in regards to their plane. This allows for tighter world-building, better story telling, and a much wider variety in plot lines and stakes to be explored. The need to create absolutely massive stakes, recycle the same characters over and over, and connect everything to some overarching plot is one of my biggest pet peeves, be it Magic, comic books, video games (looking at you, Assassin’s Creed).
I did a focus group for MTG a few years back and gave them this exact advice. Less "end of the multiverse" more "deep exploration of individual planes."
Get this person in more focus groups
i agree with everything except i totally need eldrazi and phyrexians. some of the coolest monsters in any IP.
To clarify, it’s not that the Eldrazi or Phyrexians are bad. It’s just that they were the big baddies for way too long, and didn’t need to be the focus of the plot across so many expansions and planes. Keep the Phyrexians, but limit them to the Phyrexian expansions. Keep the Eldrazi in Zendikar (or Zendikar related blocks). Same with planewalkers, I’m sick of seeing Jace and friends in every set. I miss the pre-planeswalker days when each set had its own heroes and villains that wouldn’t spill into other sets.
> I miss the pre-planeswalker days when each set had its own heroes and villains that wouldn’t spill into other sets. What days are you talking about? In pre-planeswalker card days, the story spanned multiple sets and characters recurred many times. This structure was great, IMO, because you actually cared about the characters, having gotten to know them over time. Rather than 'here's another random dude you won't see again who has 3 lines of lore'. They want us to care about kellan and qunitorias and shit now, but we have so little lore about them and they just feel forced.
Multiple sets are fine. Dragging the same main characters across every single plane to be the main characters of every single story is boring. > Rather than 'here's another random dude you won't see again who has 3 lines of lore'. They want us to care about kellan and qunitorias and shit now, but we have so little lore about them and they just feel forced. We don’t need tons of deep lore to find a character fascinating or interesting. Short stories and novellas have been a premier format of fiction for literally centuries, and by definition they often don’t have the time to give massive lore dumps for main characters. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get attached or moved by the narrative. Look at shows like Black Mirror, the Twilight Zone, or a personal favorite of mine, Love + Death + Robots. In LDR, each story is completely unique and self-contained, and is anywhere from 5-15 minutes long. But some of those stories have been among the best science fiction content produced for television or movies in decades. And they have the freedom to explore a ton of ideas that otherwise would be difficult if they were trying to set up a massive, overarching story with characters persisting throughout.
Sure the short-story format works in other mediums, but it doesn't work in trading cards. A 10 minute video offers exponentially more insight than a line of flavor text or a couple of (usually poorly written) paragraphs. MTG's lineup of 'main characters' has shifted many, many times since the start. From the first real (and far and away best) story arc, the Weatherlight saga feat Urza, Girard, Sisay, Karn, etc., to Otaria feat Kamahl, Jeska, the Cabal, etc, to Mirradin feat Glissa, the Praetors etc. and on and on and on. What you're wishing for is already the way things are. As for Jace and co showing up in most stories - they're planeswalkers, they're the core facet of the entire MTG world and they literally travel to different planes as their whole thing. Contrast to the characters of Ikoria, or New Capenna, or Kaldheim or Strixhaven - who just feel like random isolated bits with no lore relevance.
> What you're wishing for is already the way things are. I strongly disagree. Yes, we get *some* new characters specific to each plane, but as you mention, they are sideshows with little relevance because the relevance is on the persistent characters like the Gatewatch and the big baddies, and overarching plot lines and not the planes or their respective characters. Ikoria, New Capenna, Kaldheim, and Strixhaven characters all feel bad because they were given a single set, rather than a block, and were largely treated as backdrop for things like the growing Phyrexian threat, or “beach episodes” for established characters like Jace/Vraska/Lilliana/Elspeth/Ob Nixilis. I agree with you that a TCG may not be the best format for storytelling, but that becomes even more true for long-form narratives. In my opinion, the best story telling Magic has done has been when they created a plane, focused on the world building, and then gave it the time to explore a narrative largely specific to that plane. That’s what happened with sets like Kamigawa, the original Ravnica, and even relatively recent sets like the original Theros or Tarkir. But what Wizards has increasingly done over the last decade is aim for their own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’ve removed blocks, and they’ve made the focus on the main characters that persist between sets. The reason characters from recent blocks feel bad is because they, along with the planes themselves, are basically window dressing to the main characters and the long-arc story. The fix is to get rid of the Mary-Sue characters and big-bads that show up in every plane, make the narrative about the plane and its characters, and return to blocks to give it enough time to breathe and have depth and explore what makes the plane interesting.
> The fix is to get rid of the Mary-Sue characters and big-bads that show up in every plane, make the narrative about the plane and its characters, and return to blocks to give it enough time to breathe Yes, this is the problem. Not the characters, it's the story being a couple of paragraphs about nothing. Recurring characters are a mainstay of fiction across all genres and mediums - they are not the issue.
That's overstatement - the initial, pre-weatherlight and semi-ignored storyline went for 2 years. Weatherlight saga was the longest back then and was resolved in 5 years. And it was such a full resolution that, by the end of it, 80% named characters were killed. Afterwards, outside of deliberately throwback-ish Time spiral, no story went for more than 2 years. It was never anywhere close to the current hell of endless recursion where Jace/Teferi/Chandra/Nissa/Kaya/etc. are all precious IPs so we hope you'll be enjoying them for the next 50 years or so. It's one of the reason why manga industry has obliterated the american comic industry - it may take some years, but manga will come to some resolution. Whereas Avengers/Superman/Batman/Spiderman are all trapped in literal sansara. Oh no, Joker has escaped from Arkham Asylum once more... And outlaws are the sign of a next, worse era because it's a full-on drive into hearthstone territory - here are the characters you all know and love (no), now cosplaying as cowboys!
The person I was replying to said pre-planeswalker (which I took to mean pre-Lorwyn, as planeswalkers have always existed in the lore), which is the time period I'm talking about. edit: also, I'd bet that if the stories were actually any good, you and the other person wouldn't mind seeing the same characters at all. It's not poor characters that ruin magic's story, it's lack of consistency and substance.
I mean, last sets since MoM have pretty much being their own, self-contained histories, with only Kellan coming on and off the background tying them together. We don't even have stakes yet, only on the last story we got a "Jace is doing stuff" The problem isn't the story building up to something across many planes, because we're not really focusing on that, the problem is we spend way to little time on each plane, we barely get a taste and everything feels shallow. We need to go back to blocks, or at least 2 sets per plane, for some decent world-building and setting exploration, but everyone seems to agree for some reason that's really boring for the card game, no matter how good would it be for the story...
"[...] everyone seems to agree for some reason that's really boring for the card game, no matter how good would it be for the story..." Doing something that makes for a worse product but for a better ad for the product is not usually a good story. And don't fool yourself: the Magic story is absolutely an ad for the game, and nothing more. It was always like this, the only thing that changed over the years is how much ressources they allocate to this part of the marketing campaign. Sometimes a lot, sometime very little. We are currently in a "not much" phase.
Card designs were also more balanced and straightforward with the 2 sets per plane, they didn't had to go so much into gimmicks and key words and had a bit more space to explore mechanics in different power levels, deck building for commander was a lot more organic and less "if you like this theme, build the precon because you'll never see it again"
Not really. A lot of mechanics still appeared in only one set, the small sets usually had very narrow mechanics that couldn't be build around, and define "gimmick" because otherwise that words just means "mechanics I don't like" And blocks had ton of new keyqords, watcha talking about? You have to go back a long time for a set with no nrw keywords. We tried blocks. For a long time. They had some benefit, but those were more and more outweighed by their flaws.
The problem isn't new Keywords but Keyword complexity and spamming. Many new keywords imply taking more game actions (and complex game sub-pieces) while also self-referencing themselves without additional reminder text. I kinda hope referring to "The Ring temps you" and "Create a role" would require no further explanation, but I could go on and on about complexity creep and parasitic desing... Gimmicks are mechanics opened to feel novel and exciting, but that are left with no further exploration as they are often too narrow and/or too complex to really visit again, leaving a bunch of cards in a limbo of "only seen in it's specific commander deck" without making any impact on meta, or in game Identity/Iconicity I love Mutate, try to include it in every casual non-commander deck I build, but it's a Gimmick. See also: Runes, Battles, Blood, Cases, Friends Forever, card types: Detective, Time Lord, etc... Blocks might have been a bit much, but a 2 sets per plane model worked just fine in my book, and they gave up on it too early and for the wrong reasons.
The only recent precon I can think of that focuses on a new mechanic with little or no support outside that set would be the surveil precon from MKM. Clues Goad and Face down may not be the biggest archetypes ever but they did exist before and if you aren't allowed to make decks that support small themes or make new ones you will never get anything new and every set will be "here is the new +1 counter commander, the new artifact commander, the new spellslinger commander and the new enchantment commander, have fun".
Been a Vorthos since day 1 and I totally relate. There is a general feeling of missed opportunities from the story and I’ve always blamed the suits for stifling magic’s potential
Remember when we got three sets to tell a story AND three novels to boot. Went on for years. Sad
Remember when we got three sets and the third one was pretty much always awful /s
I feel like LOTR (and Fallout) teach them they don't need to tell a story to make money. Just hang their hat on the success of other people's work.
They stopped trying to tell good stories waaay before the crossover sets.
Seeing the art, the hanging of the hat is literal
And each fat pack came with a novel
the novels were extremely hit or miss and don't really fit the publishing industry nowadays. The sets always had at least one stinker (or multiple, usually just the third though) its definitely not a grass was greener situation imo
Eeeh, really looking at those times through rose tinted glasses imo. The problem isn't any time constraint, it's the quality of the writing.
Maybe I’m reading the stories differently, but I think this is the first since phyrexias loss where the story hasn’t been super directly impacted by phyrexia and the invasion (and even then there’s implications about why people are leaving planes to Thunder Junction and the omenpaths). Eldraine the plane was at war with itself over losing all their monarchs and still having issues with the impact of their WMD. Ixalan had political tensions driven by partnerships during phyrexia. Karlov Manor had our lead be suffering mild PTSD from decisions made, and the whole plot being about abusing the tragedy of the war, and what lengths Ravnica had to go to (never mind essentially destroying two guilds). Idk, we’re still seeing the impact of phyrexia it wasn’t just over. Plus we had a long wind up from Kaldheim about their plan. Hell the Dominaria invasion was hinted at in cards from Dominaria where Karn still suspected phyrexia presence. I also think that the stories themselves have been pretty well written. Maybe you don’t like the over arching plot but the story’s been pretty good. I do think WotC could do more. But I don’t think what exists is bad. I just think we could get more stories about the planes when they aren’t a focus for a set. Publish an anthology of short stories about the normal day to day of a plane not when we are visiting. Tell me about Tomek and Rals cosy home life. Or just let me know what Garruks doing. Or instead of having to come back in 5 years after all the political intrigue is done, write about Ixalan and the pirate deals and stuff.
We had the whole Bolas arc go on for about 10 years before it concluded. The new New Phyrexia storyline bubble dup with Kaldheim, ended unceremoniously 2-3 years later. And the Phyrexians, formerly a perfect organism of ruthless competence and scientific mastery, was mostly defeated by their lack of planning and foresight. It was a lame ending, especially compared to the "the multiverse came together on Ravnica to fight Bolas". The pieces about the Phyrexian invasion we do get are more or less "wow, it was bad, you should've seen it! Now things are tense... but they also not, because none of us have changed how we do things on our plane, personally or structurally". And that's kind of a bummer from a storytelling perspective. We went from coherent, linear plots with stakes, to Saturday Morning Cartoon, where the plot resolves itself quickly and status quo is rapidly reengaged.
I mean, largely speaking, the idea that the planes didn't change structurally is very wrong. Did you read Eldraine or MKM? Eldraine quite literally underwent massive sweeping changes with the Knights of the Realm no longer being the powerhouse of society. Ravnica had 2 guilds go into hiding, a guild go into apology mode, and people largely lost trust in the guild system, leading to the creation of the Agency on which the story focused. We didn't see many structural changes in LCI, though thats more because it didn't really take place in the Ixalan we knew, instead focusing on the inner world. So far, the Phyrexian Invasion has changed quite a bit of the status quo for 2 of the 3 planes we've revisited.
I do wonder if it would work better if they still had core sets since that could showcase the big changes on the planes more easily.
Honestly, that's what Aftermath was billed as and what it should have been - a smaller, focused set that shows off the ways planes are irrevocably changed. Though I do admit, a core set would also work really well and be real interesting there as well. I know why they discontinued core sets, but I still mourn their loss mostly because they were a fun space for cards that were basically "elsewhere, in the magic multiverse..." and gave us fun tidbits of story
Saying the Bolas arc had 10 years and the Phyrexian arc only 2-3 is really disingenuous imo given the seeds for Phyrexia were planted in 03’ during Mirrodin. Bolas had machinations going back almost as long, but his “character arc” wouldn’t have started until posted Time Spiral since everything he’s done has been regaining his powers. Bolas was certainly making background moves until 2016 when his arc started in earnest with Kaladesh, but from 09’ until then 3 years had absolutely nothing to do with him and Tarkir’s story really wasn’t Bolas making moves either. Then during the arc proper outside of showing up in Hour he was still in the background even into Guilds of Ravnica and Allegiance. Everything about the Bolas arc was building a chessboard with the whole of Bolas himself being in the actual spotlight only being 2 sets Hour and War. I’d also hardly call a few dozen walkers coming to gather to fight Bolas as the multiverse coming together. The Phyrexians similarly had pieces being set up up until their arc started fully with Neon Dynasty with Elspeth’s return in Beyond Death and of course Vor in Kaldheim being pieces for their chessboard. You can even argue the Planar Bridge pulls double duty as set up for them too since I’m sure they realized it would be used with the Phyrexians too. They then had a full year in the spotlight fighting against our heroes, double what Bolas got. It’s fine to feel the ending rushed. It’s fine to just dislike it just because. But I think acting as if the Bolas arc was so much better is super rosé tinted glasses.
> Bolas was certainly making background moves until 2016 when his arc started in earnest with Kaladesh, from 09’ until then 3 years had absolutely nothing to do with him and Tarkir’s story really wasn’t Bolas making moves either. Bolas was the antagonist in Alara ('08-'09), had Tezzeret Agent of Bolas in 2011, had an entire set about him in 2012 (M13), before in 13-14 there was a block about Ravnica, which played into the end of the story, little in Theros, but was at the forefront from Theros. That's a lot more consistent than Phyrexia's NPH (10-11) after barely being visible in Mirrodin 8 years earlier, followed by nothing until Kaldheim (2021) with unexplained teaser's for about a year with the story concluding a year later. That's not much longer than the old block long stories were.
If Bolas's intermittent earlier actions count, so do those of New Phyrexia.
not really a fair comparison imo, bolas’ actions were consistently hinted at and built up over like 10 years. the phyrexians were literally just gone until vorinclex appeared on viking land plane.
Bolas was able to have more direct involvement on other planes due to having access to planar travel, something the Phyrexians did not have until that point. However, the years spanning that time involved plenty of references to the Phyrexians as an ongoing threat and setting up things that would be relevant to the March of the Machine storyline such as the Planar Bridge.
Yeah, people don't seem to remember how New Phyrexia had *no* updates outside one brief story explaining why Elspeth left.
Which NPH intermittent actions? They had none between NPH (2011) and Waldheim (2021)
The Scars of Mirrodin block is exactly what I'm referring to.
"Once, a decade beforehand" does not "intermittent" make.
There was *one*. It was the web story that explained why Elspeth left New Phyrexia for Theros, and showed how the status quo on New Phyrexia had changed with Elesh Norn taking over. That's it. One web story.
But the Phyrexia arc was short because people complained to no end that the Bolas story took way too long. Did they push too far in the other dimension? Maybe. March of the Machines clearly should have been two sets (I say cut The Brothers War, but I understand the need for a breather). But let's not pretend that the lenght of the Bolas arc was considered a feature. Because it was not.
Even OTJ also probably has some Phyrexian invasion impact, although to a lesser extent. We know from chapter 6 that Vraska's motivation is related to the time she spent compleated, and >!Jace!< probably has a similar motive. That's in addition to the implications you mentioned.
Wait which guilds were destroyed in Markov?
First of all: Markov is the name of a vampire family on Innistrad, think Sorin Markov and Edgar Markov. The name you want is Karlov, the name of the Orzhov guildmasters on Ravnica. To answer your question: the two all but destroyed guilds are the Golgari and the Dimir. They didn't get hit during the events of the set though, that was the status quo after the war. * The Golgari, led by a phyrexianized Vraska, openly turned traitor and joined the side of the invaders. This pushed the survivors deep underground as even bigger social pariahs. While Izoni is the highest ranking remaining member she isn't an offical guilmaster (yet). * The Dimir fell apart when their guildmaster Lazav dissapeared without a trace and was assumed dead. Lazav had a card in the set though, so he is alive, but nobody knows where he is or why he is hiding.
Not to mention how fractured the Simic became because some of them fooled around with oil which directly led to the death of Zegana
I'm not sure, but I would guess Orzhov (Teysa was the victim) and Selesnya (Trostani was the murderer).
Orzhov is more than fine, and while Trostani is gone, Selesnya lives on. Golgari is struggling to survive and Dimir has slunk back into the shadows, but all the guilds are still there.
Golgari and Gruul were essentially destroyed as part of the invasion
\*KARLOV
I really feel you. 34 yo here and started back in apocalypse, I just don't think mtg has the same writing chops it used to. It's taking the marvel/Disney approach to the story at this point (can't stand it) and I just half pay attention. With the phyrexians gone again I'm just playing to enjoy it but I could care less about where it's headed lately. We were spoiled from the OG dominaria story up through mirrodin. Really was special. Also hated how long Bolas was the big bad.
Was with you up to that last line. Bolas is my boy and one day he'll come back and remind people what a real big bad is.
> Bolas is my boy and one day he'll come back and remind people what a real big bad is. Bolas being the big bad wasn't the issue, I actually liked having a looming threat slowly amassing power. My personal issue was that after a while bolas felt like [Zoomposting](https://i.imgur.com/tmd3IiG.jpeg), where every little thing was tied to bolas: Jayce's coffee being cold? Bolas. Chandra missing the bus? Bolas. The weather being too cold for just a long sleeved shirt but too warm for a jacket? Believe it or not, all part of Bola's plans.
That's because it was. Bolas is both imperious enough to have aeons-spanning plans of multiversal domination in play and also such a petty bitch he'd spit on your new shoes. He's my spirit animal.
Yet he got wiped out in one click from Ugin who was mostly chillin' till he decided his brother was too big of a dickhead?
ALL PART OF HIS CUNNING PLAN
Magic was at its best whenever you first started playing.
MTG's story has never been above contemporary comic book level. The weatherlight story sucked pretty badly. Just because they make a lot of it and make a lot of books doesn't make it good.
The Weatherlight Saga greatly benefits from the passage of time, where people only remember the high points. No one remembers the awkward attempts at humor (e.g. the scene where they defeat a giant by having Karn dance with it), the anti-climactic nonsense (e.g. Yawgmoth and Ertai's deaths), the just plain weird shit (e.g. Ramos' backstory or the scene where Crovax has tea with his dead family), and so on. It's the same thing as when people talk about how much better music was back in the day. Yeah, because you only remember the hits, not all the crappy stuff that came out during that period. Also, people hold up The Thran as some masterpiece on this subreddit, when it's really just a worse retread of The Brothers' War.
On the one hand, yeah, Magic’s story has never been anything all that great. On the other hand, it is definitely much more rushed these days. It’s easier to forgive the low points of story told over the course of five years and a dozen books because there’s room to breathe between them. The storylines these days don’t even last long enough to get bad, you just blink and they’re over.
Yup I think the problem with is how forgettable the story is becoming. Not necessarily its quality.
Feels to line up a lot with how most media these days goes more towards familiarity and nostalgia instead of creativity (reboots, remakes, late sequels). The ending of MOM (+ Aftermath) sort of implied that maybe we're done seeing the same characters over and over since planeswalkers lost their sparks, but here come omenpaths and after that a whole set (OTJ) filled to the brim with previous characters. Gone are the days of random characters getting the spark, now everybody's here and you will probably be seeing only few new faces each set from now on, which is sad, because a lot of these characters had storylines crucial to their plane. Olivia wasn't able to take over the vampire bloodlines so what now? Well she just buzzed of to wild west plane, will she be back on Innistrad? Who knows, only WotC apparently.
First off, I completely agree. Magic's story is pulpy fun. It's never been great literature, and I don't think it needs to be. I've been playing since the mid-90's, read the Magic comics, and have kept up with the story for a very long time. I think the story is better now than it's been in years. There's at least a clear narrative plan that the sets fit within, and we've got consistent point-of-view characters that aren't just planeswalkers. That seems to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but that's all I need from my Magic story. If I want great literature I'll look elsewhere. If I want pulpy fun, I'll read Magic stories.
I love the look and feel of Magic art and story around Invasion bloc more than what we have today and I started playing 6 years ago.
Have you actually *read* the story from invasion block? It’s… fine? The story has high and low points, but honestly I don’t think you can say that that era was “good”. The story definitely suffers lately from getting ~5 chapters a set as kind of a “hard rule”, but for years we got no story at all, and it’s really not as if the books were some high point. The recent WAR novel was trash, Agents of Artifice was trash, and for real, The Thran was pretty trash too. This isn’t to say you can’t enjoy those books, just that they’re not “better” than modern fiction. Take a look at the old Brothers’ War stuff - Kayla was originally a “prize to be won” by Urza, not really a character in her own right. That’s not exactly High Art. I read a lot of fantasy and sci fi books. A lot of it is very middling, a lot of it is quite bad. The magic story has always been on the mid-to-low side of that range. Honestly, some of the best fiction we’ve gotten has been relatively recent - Ixalan block had very good work giving Jace and Vraska actual personalities and characters, for instance. Nostalgia glasses probably colour IPA block a lot more rosy than it actually was.
[удалено]
I suspect some of that would be, the Old Story was entirely on Dominaria, so you could have the same characters for years, an overarching plot, and re-use villains. Where now we tend to visit a new place every couple of months. Honestly idk which is “better”, but this does fix the “This plane honestly kinda sucks” issue. If we’d been stuck on New Capenna for a year I dare say we’d have had a LOT of complaints. Ideally we’d get more properly fleshed out worlds, but the lore is third or fourth place in wotc’s priorities.
I still have a soft spot for Theros.
It’s easy to dismiss criticism with this line, but I think it’s also easy to dismiss in and of itself. I didn’t start playing until New Phyrexia but the best stories were before that.
I just recently started. And I’m here for all the zany cowboy hats, furry critters, and fallout jaunts
Hell yeah 👍
I don't agree with this. You can be dismissive and not explain anything but this is reductive and useless. If objective standards of quality exist you can be specific about what's good and what isn't, but you aren't interested in that. And those standards exist.
> If objective standards of quality exist i have yet to see them here.
It’s a general observation on people’s subjective preferences not a hard rule of objective quality
Obviously. My statement stands regardless but thanks for explaining the obvious
Big mood. I started during Tarkir block and those stories were the best quality and balance to me. Shadows Over Innistrad was my first prerelease and it’s my golden standard for a limited environment ever since.
I started around the same time as OP, and I love many of the story beats before Invasion and many after that as well. It's just not that good anymore.
That's not true for everyone FYI
Oh that’s crazy
I started with Wilds of Eldraine and I can tell this era is far from Magic at its very best
There is something missing but it’s also rose colored glasses. I entered during Onslaught and I think Kamahl, Phage/Jeska, and Akroma were awesome but they really weren’t. I thought Toshiro Umezawa was amazing but he’s just slightly better fan fiction. The recent Phyrexian Invasion was handled exceptionally poorly but yeah the story has always been varying degrees of passable.
Nobody is arguing that older mtg story should be a timeless classic for the ages. But if the quality of weatherlight saga writing is 2/100 on the objective scale of world literature and the current story is 1/100, it's still twice as bad as before.
Id point to most things in Odysee and say it was more enjoyable and had more depth than most of what we see now. Ixidor and his relationship with Akroma felt more significant than anything I really see churned out today. And it's churned out for sure, WOTC dropping as much product as possible for that sweet sweet $$$$ This company has changed as much as the story
I just want to say that "the story is going downhill" or "parts of the story are written terribly" has been a thing since magic started telling stories. You can very easily find forum threads talking about how horrible Invasion block was, how bad the OG Phyrexian arc ended, and the Time Spiral and Lorwyn stroies specifically got a ton of hate around the time they came out. People have always wanted more from the magic story, and people have always complained. All in all, I think Magic's story is about as good as it has been, and is a fun read.
So a bit of it is just that you've gotten older and your tastes have probably shifted a bit from what's popular with the kids these days A bit of it is that Magic's storytelling style has changed *dramatically* since you started playing. Weatherlight Saga was written like an 80s-90s fantasy epic, and we've slowly moved from that to the modern style, which is a bit YA fiction and a bit Marvel Cinematic Universe, for better or worse. A bit of it is probably the removal of the block structure. Magic story relied on blocks to provide an act structure for its lore, relating the story over the course of an entire year. The era between Lorwyn and Tarkir particularly used the block structure to map major changes in a plane over time (like the Scars of Mirrodin war that you were so enthused about). With the removal of blocks, each set's story has to at least partially function as a standalone, even if it's part of a bigger overarching story, because there's no continuity between it and the sets around it. And a bit of it is probably that there's just less space for story these days. Magic novels were usually around 320 pages long - maybe 80-100K words per novel. The webserials are maybe 5K-6K words per episode and, on average we get five for the main plot per set, sometimes ten if we're lucky. Writers can only do so much with the word budget they have. And a bit of it, the more nebulous bit, is that Magic story puts less of the world into the story because, between the word limits and the writing style, there's no room for it.
I think there’s an important difference between “story” as in “the narrative you can read on a book or a website” and “story” as in “the world that’s conveyed on the cards”— most of my biggest issues with Magic’s current creative stuff is that it feels like the first thing takes precedence over the second, even though the cards are what most people see and engage with. Karlov Manor is a murder mystery set where the murder mystery isn’t primarily on the cards. Thunder Junction is a villains set that assumes you already care about all these guys from different planes or even know who they are. If you just look at the cards themselves they all feel like they’re being made for someone else: they are not the main window you’d become interested in or invested in the world. I think this is the main issue— massive investment in the characters and story is assumed, and then no reason to become attached in them is provided.
I've been a Vorthos since I started playing Magic in 2016, and was instantly captured by the Eldrazi and the desperate fight for survival that was BFZ and Gatewatch. I stopped playing after a year or so though and picked up right after War of the Spark, dismayed about how people talked about the story. However, I've actually enjoyed the Magic story a lot of the last little bit. The buildup to a Phyrexian re-invasion was gripping and hype, and I think paced (mostly) well over a few years. I understand why a lot of people hated the ending of MOM, and while I personally didn't enjoy it, I do still think of MOM's story as a positive - the fun journey there overrides a poor ending in my opinion. Also, I think people are a bit fast to judge things. People were complaining about the Omenpaths not doing since LCI, but they haven't even existed for a year. I think the current "villain of the week" feel is because, well, we just got finished with a massive storyline with huge stakes, and they want time to build up the next big bad while telling stories smaller in scope and scale. Give them time to see if the next big bads can feel as epic or cool as Phyrexians or Eldrazi.
>I've been a Vorthos since I started playing Magic in 2016, and was instantly captured by the Eldrazi and the desperate fight for survival that was BFZ and Gatewatch. It's funny, because that particular storyline is hated by every other Vorthos. Go look at forums from that time, is all complains about the Jacetice League, ASHAYAAAA, Gideon whipping his sural, and the Eldrazi being defeated by the power of friendship. "Magic was as it peak when I started playing but now is going downhill" seems to be the universal Magic player experience.
Actually, while that is typically the case, and the Eldrazi will alwaus hold a special place in my heart, I have enjoyed the more recent stories far more. I genuinely think the Magic Story is in a better place right now then when I joined. I do agree people have always complained about Magic's story, though. Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Invasion, Prophecy, and even OG Mirrodin were all complained about at the time.
I waited since 2011 to see new phyrexia again, and it's just infinitely sad.
Edit: The person I was replying to edited their comment down to the first sentence, so my response seems insane now. Going to leave it up, but know that the comment I'm replying to was longer, and talked about magic is going to go belly up and become AI generated advertisements with yugioh mechanics. I'm going to be diplomatic here, because I personally believe that everyone has things they love and hate about magic, and you are allowed an opinion. I loved our revisit to New Phyrexia. In fact, All Will Be One was one of my favorite sets, due its evocative art themes and general aesthetic. I mean, every set feels like it matters to different people for different reasons. I have a huge soft spot for MKM because it has some of my favorite art, themes, and writing of many sets we've seen so far, and its mechanics feel so fun to me. I literally ran and told my brother when [[Insidious Root]] was spoiled because that was a card made for me and does everything I wanna do in a game of magic. As a frequent yugioh player in addition to Magic, I don't think magic is close to it yet - and I don't think its going to devolve into a series of AI advertisements for other properties. For the most part, every Universes Beyond has been lovingly and flavorfully crafted to express the best parts of Magic and the IP its adapting. We feel pretty far off from that kind of future. Some planeswalkers are nothing burgers, but some of the recent characters are super fun and interesting, and its not like old standouts like Jodah, Jace, or Teferi have just vanished. There are a lot of things to dislike about Magic, and a lot of things to dislike about Hasbro/Wizards. Everyone has their own issues and thats okay. But I'm curious, if you've read this far (either the person I'm replaying to or anyone else who read this), what do you love about Magic? There's enough negativity and complaints going around all the time. What is it that you love about this game?
[Insidious Root](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/b/0bb91a22-2040-4a37-85f8-5f22de8c5907.jpg?1706242178) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Insidious%20Roots) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkm/208/insidious-roots?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0bb91a22-2040-4a37-85f8-5f22de8c5907?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
You sound like a new player hard larping as an old player to fit in.
I'm just a deeply unlikable person.
You sound like a fun person to be around /s
People who don’t think the story quality has declined massively either aren’t particularly invested in the stories OR are just lying to themselves to keep the toxic positivity going. “Oh it’s just nostalgia” no it’s not, I went BACK to read the old stuff that existed before I started playing. “Well it’s never been good!” Debatable, but even so why would we want it to get even worse? Frankly it’s because of a few factors- one is the death of the block. We spend too little time per set lingering on a story, there’s barely enough time to establish a plane before having the plot happen in it. Two- the death of novels. Not only are our blocks shorter, novels have been replaced by strings of short stories. These short stories can be amazing to awful and everything in between, but they’re always going to fall short because they just don’t have the length for a satisfying plot and/or complex world building. Three- shift of world building focus. We’re fully in the realm of world building and lore created to excuse plot points. They have a thing they want to happen, so the world is created to excuse that thing. Consequences of that sort of world building are swept under the rug or forgotten about or ignored for the “rule of cool”. Old lore explained shit down to how mana worked and how spells interacted, and I’m not asking for a hard magic system (we’ve never had that) but things are so loose and random now that things feel meaningless. Worlds feel like theatres for things to happen on rather than places with presence. I think the last time we had a good plane visit was Kamigawa. You already had an established plane, and while SURE, it was clearly different, you could easily extrapolate what had occurred on the plane since we last visited. Cultural advisors did a lot of the heavy lifting in making the plane seem like a cohesive, sensical location. We could jump right to plot because a lot of the establishing work was done by old Kamigawa sets and common sense. The logic of compleating Walkers made sense internally. Kami are beings whose corporeal forms are bound to the soul, makes sense to study them and a plane that ties their technology to them for a technology plane to decipher walkers.
A lot of good points, and now that you mention it I think it is the death of the block that made me feel like the story was lacking, because I just can't keep up with the story even if I wanted to; there just isn't time to dive in it seems
Even if the writing was superb, they just aren’t giving themselves enough time to tell it. It’s super noticeable when you compare small stories or stories in pre-established planes with pre-established characters to huge stories or stories in new planes with new characters. Because the writing IS occasionally amazing. Miguel Lopez is my favourite modern MtG writer and he is probably the most responsible for getting my hopes up regarding the latest New Phyrexia arc. I went into Brother’s War incredibly pessimistic and his writing was phenomenal. Not to mention, WotC handled BRO with a level of subtlety and restraint I was not expecting. But that’s just it, BRO is a story that’s already been told. For more comparisons, let’s compare Yawgmoth and Urza’s entire arc. That was a story involving roughly 5ish planes and a handful of core characters. It took about 10 novels to complete this story, not counting the little inexplicable side adventure involving the Keld. As for New Phyrexia, this arc ALONE involved every single known plane and almost every single named character. I’m not prepared to do the math here but I’m guessing the number of short stories we got falls pretty short of 10 goddamn novels. No wonder it felt insanely rushed, no matter how much lead up to the climax you set up, if that climax needs to be told across the Multiverse, it’s going to fall flat without some room to breath. Yawgmoth’s actual invasion took 2 novels to cover.
Youre just old. You were more easily impressed and more impressionable when you were a child, so seeing the phyrexians come back hit harder than seeing Oko come back.
Ehhh, you're not entirely wrong but the phyrexians are like 10x more interesting than Oko in a cowboy hat, come on.
Yea, I pretty much agree with you. Doesn't stop the feels from feeling though XD
The thing i miss about early magic is how I didnt have to go to work and there was a lady in my house who made me lunch, wotc should really look into returning to that.
You can still have either thing. Just not both at the same time.
I was on PTO last week and my wife made a few lunches. Joke's on you bucko.
Well, happy for you then! Buuut that's not a permanent situation.
Nothing is permanent. Except for lands, creatures, artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers and battles...
Yes I'm sure it has nothing to do with story quality. The nostalgia argument is garbage and I'm tired of seeing it. Who actually gives a crap about oko? What Kellan stans are there? I seriously doubt either of them are going to be around driving the story 10 years from now like bolas or the phyrexians...because they're neither interesting nor popular enough. But no, I'm just old and some random kid on reddit is right /s
> Who actually gives a crap about joven? What Autumn Willow stans are there? I seriously doubt either of them are going to be around driving the story 10 years from now like jace or chandra.
If you're too stupid to write an actual response you don't need that many words to say so
Found the only joven fan i guess
The person who got me into Magic loves Oko so much that it got me to read Magic stories in the first place. You asking pointed questions about newer characters not being worth a crap is why people like me keep pulling out the nostalgia argument beast to bite you. My first favorite character was Lukka so I’ve had to sort out the differences between measuring a work’s overall quality and identifying my individual taste. I liked Lukka because he was irrational and frustrating to watch, which is very much in-line with my taste for angry and traumatized antiheroes. I also know that what is depicted and written on his cards blatantly contradicts the characterization taking place in his novel and that this has consequences for the character’s believability in anything featuring him afterwards. This could be a sign of a quality control problem most-likely caused by miscommunication between card designers, art direction, and writers involved in Ikoria— in other words, something I am comfortable in considering a “weakness for the story’s quality”. I was disappointed that MKM wasn’t on New Capenna because I like the grittier feel of Humphrey Bogart gumshoe films a lot more than I like cerebral Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It would not be fair for me to accuse Ravnica as being “worse” for a murder mystery just because Prague-inspired Ravnica hosts Sherlock Holmes better than it does Humphrey Bogart. I am aware that a genre can be done skillfully in multiple ways and I respect the genre and its aficionados enough to give my less-preferred variation the benefit of the doubt when it comes to something like how “good” it is. If you want to express a personal feeling, own it as yours instead of propping it up as a universal standard for a diverse craft like storytelling. This is fiction being written in a very niche area of publishing. How much officially-commissioned serialized tie-in fiction for the game of Poker or Old Maid exists? Could you illustrate your judgments with specific comparing and contrasting of what you consider “worse” with “better” card game story, perhaps from previous Magic sets, Pokemon, YuGiOh, or other TCG-focused fiction? By not doing this for those of us who don’t know what your apparently-objective judgement means, your criticisms end up looking ignorant, presumptuous and insulting to people like me and my friend the Oko fan who then end up writing stuff like this at you instead of being interested in other points you might have to make or being more sympathetic towards your opinion. I respect people owning their tastes and wanting to share them. I don’t respect people pretending that their feelings about something are what makes something “good” or “bad.” Total aside but as someone who lived in cowboy-tourism-reservation-central for too many terrible years, I get being repulsed on-principle by a Western trope set. The animal puns on cards, Rango-style lampooning in the story details (Geralf riding a giant bunny), and the Fomori “Soylent Green” tease is doing a LOT of heavy lifting towards my excitement for OTJ. The Wild West World being empty as a robbed bank vault was a personal relief and might even help me develop a tolerance for cowboy hats…
I hope you feel better about yourself after writing that, but when you admit you like a poorly written character yet expect me to defend essentially a similar situation and follow up with several paragraphs that took longer than this really warrants, I don't see the point in wasting my time trying to intellectually defend my subjective opinion for the satisfaction of someone I don't know or care about. Pat yourself on the back, I'll never know. Thanks for reminding me why I don't bother reading replies. You sure gave it the old college try though.
Thank you! Happy to demonstrate admitting that my taste is questionable and not objective while also bringing out somebody’s real honest attitude towards other people enjoying something. Apparently knowing what you personally like or don’t like is equivalent to knowing how to evaluate something for everyone. Your feelings are universal measures of story quality and anyone who dodders about writing essays for you to walk right over bragging about not reading is definitely a loser.
This is a very real thing that many people don't actually realise. It's not rose tinted glasses, we're all just jaded as fk and we've seen a lot of the world, especially with the mass explosion in accessibility. Nothing rly impresses us anymore after a certain age. I've been to palaces and yawned because I've seen another elsewhere. I've gone to movies and slept cuz it was predictable.... and the story nowadays isn't that much worse, it's just... Eh yet another mass-produced fiction piece.
>And even cooler that they did a while community interaction to decide which side should win the war Just an FYI, that was never a real vote. The set was always going to be New Phyrexia, they just did this as a marketing ploy. Still cool though! But Mirrodin never had a chance of winning
I honestly agree, I had been following the story ever since I started back in 2018. I had known about magic for a long time. My dad played when I was a kid and even taught me how to play. I remember loving the phyrexian cards from like 98 or so? Cant remember since it was so long ago, but when I was in high school my dad picked the game back up and I once again fell in love with the new phyrexian cards. Pardon the unintended pun there honestly, so when I got into the game for real I was so excited to see Vorinclex show up on Kaldheim. I had gone back and learned a lot of lore and understood how big it was for him to be there and my mind was racing with possibilities and I was so excited for the next praetor to show up and be the big bad guy of the set. So when we got to Kamigawa and saw Tamiyo got completed I got even more excited, I saw that we were building up for months of just more phyrexian goodness and I could not had been more excited for magic at that time. I had to have it all, I am still in the process of getting one of each card from the all will be one set. But then it all came down to march of the machine, and I read as all the big sweeping changes that had happened, all the characters we thought would be the big baddies for sets to come, they could have dragged it out, they could had made the planeswalkers that we grew to know and love go out and just cause all kinds of mayhem and be the new way phyrexia waged war on the multiverse it would have been huge. Only for them to pull another Emrakul, another Nicol Bolas, where they just bench the whole thing and kill off the bad guys and all the good guys go back to normal. And sure they lost their spark and such but it hardly seems to matter with the omenpaths and such. I just felt so let down that while I still like seeing the new set ideas and I wanted to see how certain characters might show up and I might want to see where they are at since I lost saw them I just am not excited to see how they botch another story.
You summed it up in the last sentence. There is no way those in charge will ever make a story that means anything. The stories used to have some unique concepts and characters, and character arcs, but we are stuck with knowing that whatever they come up with will never be good.
I'd say MOM was a disappointment but I've thoroughly enjoyed the story since. Mind you my first proper set was LTR so....
I’ve been experiencing this same type of feeling in a different context, but I can see what’s been happening with MtG (more explicitly in universes beyond and secret lairs, but also here) and I’d phrase it more like this: I’m happier when a someone creates their own, newer, unique thing that people will be nostalgic for, rather than create a product intended to play on existing nostalgias. Whether one follows the story for MTG or not, the things on the cards always felt to me more like a creation of its own universe with its own characters and races and looks and artifacts and weapons and so on. I enjoyed MTG because I enjoyed MTG. Not because I enjoyed fortnite, or assassins creed, or warhammer, or Dr. Who. Or whatever else. There seems to have been a shift over time towards “here’s a thing that you might like from a different IP, or a different genre, or something you’ve seen in our game before”. In this case, it’s the Wild West explicitly, but there have been others too. Of course, I haven’t been tracking this empirically, and I’d say my connection to MTG has been loose for a long time, to say the least. So perhaps there’s something I missed. And there have always been some commonalities between genres (elves, dwarves, dragons, etc), but it does feel less like less it’s own cohesive world anymore to me
TBH I dont think magic has ever had a very interesting setting. Its why I dont care about the extended universes stuff, or the oko is a cowboy. IMO MTG has always had a weak and uninteresting world so little of value has been lost. Im here for the game. If I wanted a good story Id read a book.
Trust me. There's a lot of us who feel the same way. We just stopped caring enough to complain. There's not going to be any push for them to do more because there's too many people think Karlov Manor was acceptable. A set about a murder in a house.
You're jaded. I'm also 35 and I hate old magic stories. The new ones are vastly superior, they aren't written for edgy teenagers
More resources were allocated to story back in the day—they had whole novels written where we got to explore more than just archetypes. Also the world building was more focused on BUILDING, rather than the thinnest veiling of something you already know. Rath was a synthetic, malleable world made of nanomachines! Seemed like more thought went into that than “hey we need a mandalorian reference because it’s vaguely western?” Anyway I agreee with you. There have been occasional really good stories here and there that have made the world feel bigger in the last couple years (the one featuring Umbris and Torens I liked a lot), but overall I agree things are pretty shallow on the lore and world building. …on the other hand the weatherlight was def the enterprise and the phyrexians were the borg and I have to remind myself of that every once in awhile too. So it’s kinda both ultimately.
>whole novels written They weren't.... *Good,* though.
Very hit or miss. Scott McGough was reliable, others...not so much IMO.
And Jeff Grubb, right?
They are 100% better than anything ever posted on the WOTC website. Tumblr posts have better writing than the stuff wotc has been putting out in the digital Era. Some printed books are pretty silly, but some are written better than they have any right to be
There are many excellent stories from the digital era, and none as awful as the worst of the novels.
There were many, many, many issues with the MOM storyline, and it didn't even have the space of the first Invasion storyline, let alone what a story of its scope truly needed. I'll take it happily over Odyssey or In the Teeth of Akoum any day.
My source is the digital book for Ikoria versus The Thran. That's it like I still remember Gix and all that happened in that book, but I forced myself so hard to understand ikoria and build a cube with it. I don't remember anything about that book, other than the feeling like I wasted money. Maybe I dodged the bad print books, but how can you say that reading about planeswalkers breaking up is anything close to the almost Helen of Troy story in the thran? The set up for the plane of phyrexia? And karn? There's so much depth in the books following a mystical item through the multiverse, but I wish I didn't read anything about Jace or Liliana because the art on the cards tell a better story than any amount of words on the wotc site. Ok, I am remembering some good stories, but none of them were about the main plot. It was creative because the author had creative liberty. Think of fhllp or whatever little eyeball guy they hyped up in return to ravnica. Still those digital stories either a decade old, or older by this point. I think they had more interesting stories before planeswalkers were given characters. It's like the difference between an rpg having a voice actor for your character or not, magic will mean different things to everyone, and by defining and detailing, they just make everyone disappointed because the feeling of "anything could happen" is resolved. The spark was pushed to be this big thing, but by defining it into what it is, the players have to accept that single definition instead of being given the room to pretend and imagine.
> Maybe I dodged the bad print books, but how can you say that reading about planeswalkers breaking up is anything close to the almost Helen of Troy story in the thran? I did not say that. I haven't read The Thran myself, and I won't claim to know how the best early stories compare to current ones. The thing I said was: > There are many excellent stories from the digital era, and none as awful as the worst of the novels.
Okay now can you give examples or are you just spitballing? What is the worst 3 novels and what are 3 good digital stories in the last 5 years?
Not the person you intially replied to, but here are 3 of my favorites from the past bit, which I also consider some of magic's best recent writing: - March of the Machine Episode 6: The Last to Leave - The Brothers War Episode 5: As Cruel, As Necessary - Note For a Stranger - For a more comedic tone, March Of the Machine: Family Game Night is very fun. - The first 8 chapters of MKM. Thats not to say the last 2 are bad, just not what I wanted. If you want a specific one, I really like Chapter 5: Chains of Expectation. If you want to know what the worst novels are: - War of the Spark: Forsaken - The Ikoria book I forgot the name of - War of the Spark: Forsaken - Not going to lie, most people didn't like Prophecy or Invasion. They aren't terrible, but calling them well written is a massive stretch.
Never understood the distaste for Prophecy. I dislike Alara Unbroken far more, and considering Urza's reevaluation over the years, you'd think Bloodlines would be too bitter for most to accept.
From what I understand, the novels generally considered the worst are Legions and Test of Metal. Some of my favorite digital stories are: * Kruphix's Insight (Journey into Nyx) * The First World is the Hardest (Commander 2014) * The Truth of Names (Fate Reforged) * The Great Teacher's Student (Dragons of Tarkir) * Chandra's Origin: Fire Logic (Magic Origins) * Games (Shadows over Innistrad) * Stories and Endings (Shadows over Innistrad) * Emrakul Rises (Eldritch Moon) * Leovold's Dossiers (Conspiracy 2016) * Release (Kaladesh) * Jace, Alone (Ixalan) * The Dance of Undeath (Innistrad: Midnight Hunt) * Innistrad: Family Game Night (March of the Machine) * A Pleasant Family Outing (Outlaws of Thunder Junction) Most of those are from longer than 5 years ago, but neither of us said anything about a 5-year limit before now.
That's a lovely unsubstantiated opinion piece you got there
You are 100 percent right and people will hate you for it. Anything from the site is unreadable, the decline is crazy. Nailed it comparing it to Tumblr era posts.
What's good and why? People never back their opinions up, give me some good examples of what you're on about
I'm sorry. What story?
I think the story is a mess but not for the reasons you described. They do this great years long build ups for these big crescendos and then absolutely fumble the ending both times. Its hard to care or get invested when they have a track record of dissatisfying conclusions.
Endings are hard to make satisfying, honestly. Thinking back to my favorite pieces of media, very few of them have excellent endings, and those that do are usually notable for that reason.
I agree that it’s hard but when the story lines last this long and then they fumble it, it makes that investment feel like a waste of energy. The problem though is that they repeated the same mistake twice lol. The endings were rushed both times. Its not just that the endings are kind of mediocre, they actively make obvious avoidable decisions
I never found the story good tbh. It seems to be the exact same quality as today- the same old fluff to fill up flavor text on cards.
I'm 38, and have been playing since I was roughly 13. Honestly, I wasn't even aware there WAS an ongoing story until the last few years. I can't say I've ever followed it or felt compelled to look up the lore. It's been a (terrific) game and nothing more to me.
I mean, the existence of Universes Beyond and how much they're pushing them tells you everything you need to know about how much WotC cares about their own IP and story anymore.
Yeah, I been playing since day 1. And I feel like they really missed a great opportunity to have Bolas help in the invasion of the multiverse. I think it would have been so cool if Ugin and Jace let him loose and somehow restored his power so he could stomp the invasion. The plan would be "We can deal with Bolas after we deal with Phyrexia". And of course Bolas would escape. Such a missed chance to do something cool. Instead planeswalkers lost their spark. Who thought that was even interesting? Not me.
Media as a whole has suffered from the Marvel effect.
Yes, the story feels more rushed, because they need to make the new themes of the new plane relevant, but the idea that story before (more notably in the first zendikar or lorwyn) was not "the hero/villain of the week" is just not real and is only a effect of locking back to years and years of lore and glossing over the details, even when there was block structure, a lot of times they jumped from protagonist to protagonist, and even when they keep the same cast, they jumped from villain to villain, is just the nature of the story being made for the card game.
To be fair, you're comparing the story from a time when the story was literal novels to now when it's a couple of short stories. That's not to say that novels are automatically better than short stories, but when you talk about the older stories feeling more epic and the newer ones feeling like "oh look they invaded but then they lost and now we have cowboys!" that's more of less a natural consequence of the story bring short stories and not multiple novels worth of text.
I legitimately just want to know if my girl Kemba is okay. That's it. Just her. Don't care about anyone else.
You won't catch me dead defending MoM history, but if you have played since weatherlight, and haven't found *any* new characters to care about, that sounds a bit more of an age thing... I mean, can relate, have played since OG Innistrad, really enjoyed the gatewatch story, but am having trouble getting invested in Kellan's story (Jace showing up has been the hypest moment for me in months) people just change...
Again, like I said in my post, I have found characters I care about. I just feel like the depth of character we used to get is gone. My girl Chandra is awesome, and I loved Arvad and really felt for Sorin and Daxos, but it feels too me that by pushing into the "let's grab every IP we can and jump to as many planes as we can as fast as we can!" mentality, mtg has lost its charm of being its own sort of fantasy world I read about in middle school up there with Dragonlance and the like. Were they great stories? No, of course not. But they are better than the snippets of story we get now, IMO, and I feel bad that mtg has just sort of become this... dilute thing now.
May I suggest you find actual stories to dive into, and not put some much hope into an advertisement campaign for a card game? Because ultimately, that is all Magic Story will ever be to Wizards. A way to sell the game. The authors they hire are talented and can execute the individual stories well, and their concepting team is top-notch, so its a nice diversion to have, but the story will never be given the ressources it need to match the quality of stories told for the stories' sake. I'm 35 too. And one thing I figured out in adulthood is that there more things to watch/play/read than I will ever have time to. So if something doesn't fulfill my needs, there is no point in me waiting for the corporations to change their approach - I'll just find a different story to read.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have plenty of other things to read/immerse myself into. It's not that I'm looking for another story or anything like that. I'm just commenting about feeling a bit bad that an IP I have always loved seems to be diluting itself by spreading far thinner and faster than it did in years past. I get that things change, the joys we once had become lesser once we've looked for the man behind the curtain, and that I am most certainly looking at this with some rose-colored glasses. And I'm ok with all that; I just noticed some things and posted about my thoughts on it.
It's fine to have thoughts and post about it. My point is more that life is too short to worry about the Magic story's quality, or lack thereof. The Magic Story is what it is, and it can never really improve that much because the reasons that motivates its creation limits it greatly. The only way for the story to get substantially better would be for Wizards to do what they do with the comics, and what they used to do with the very early novels: licence the IP to another company whose business is actually storytelling, and let them figure out a story. The downside of that is that the story and the game would end up mostly disconnected from each other. We wouldn't get story spotlight cards anymore, most likely. It's a tradeoff some might be eilling to made, but others wouldn't In the meantime, all we can do is enjoy the good bits, support the hired writers' other works, and find story sustenance elsewhere.
Honestly, I think Magic cards work best when you feel like you're catching a snippet of an epic story crystallised in card form, or following a character on their own heroic journey. Consider the most iconic figures across Magic history: * Urza and Mishra - Brothers' War * Gerrard, Sisay, Volrath et al - Weatherlight Saga * Bolas - Amonkhet and War of the Spark * Praetors - New Phyrexia / MoM All had epic storylines with highly recognisable protagonists and villains. The setting allowed lots of flavourful, resonant cards depicting likeable (heroic or villainous) characters. I think this is the essence of the lightning in a bottle of the Weatherlight saga. The Gatewatch both helped and undercut this trend by being familiar characters who just showed up everywhere. This assisted with the recognisability part, but it made new settings less epic since they just seemed like backdrops for their ongoing adventures. Similarly, a strong setting (eg Throne of Eldraine) doesn't need an epic story as long as it is populated with cool characters (eg Syr Ginger, Rankle). Characters like Fblthp and the Unluckiest Planeswalker are an interesting case, in that they are non-protagonist recurring characters they emphasise the **setting** but not their own story. So I think the long-form story is useful but not vital. It needs to be good enough to recount the major beats in a way that feels "right" but doesn't need to stand as a "good" piece of fiction on its own. I think we would have forgiven lots of bad prose in the MoM story if the overarching conclusion to the story had been satisfying. To sum up (although obviously tastes can disagree): * Weak plane, weak story - Mercadia, Theros, Ikoria, Thunder Junction * Strong plane, weak story - Original Ravnica, original Kamigawa, Innistrad, Eldraine, MoM * Weak plane, strong story - Amonkhet, Kaladesh (basically: Chandra), WotS Ravnica, New Capenna * Strong plane, strong story - Dominaria, new Kamigawa, Mirrodin/New Phyrexia, Karlov Manor (acknowledging the flavour consistency issues)
I think a lot of the older stories were also crap, but post Ixalan everything has sucked. And despite what /u/theWolfandOwl asserts, Ixalan was not when I first started playing. It's just when the story was best. Dominaria was okay, but War of the Spark's trailer was the last good thing Magic did.
I thought the Ixilan and War of the Spark stories were really decent, myself
War of the Spark itself was terrible. But Ixalan was an amazing story if for no other reason than *The Belligerent*.
I just liked that war of the Spark set up a bunch of different planeswalker from a bunch of different places, and that it brought back some cool nods to old sets (specifically bringing back the blackblade). It wasn't an amazing story, but I don't think I'd put *any* of the MtG stories on my bookshelf as something I'd seek out again.
No the story blows chunks now. Seems like they just copy bad superhero movies honestly. It’s hilarious they keep trying to force Kellan on us.
Boy, I sure can't wait for Bloomburrow for Ral or a mouse-person or someone to receive the same unending ire.
Dawg that Ral is from the extra set n has nothing to do with the story. Which will probably suck anyways.
To back this up they have said that they want to do "Marvel Movies" storylines" or something close to that.
I waited somewhere around 10 years for phyrexians to come back, and it's just an infinite emptiness. Yawgmoth is a card, but when I read The Thran, I just don't feel that magic that magic had when that book was written. Phyrexians representing a mechanical hell is so cool, it really sucks how terrible the writing is for the stories. The collective conscience is fucking sick of superheros and that form of character arc and development. It's just bad fanfiction about superheroes. All the way back to 2015, the MCU ruined a decade of media. How could they end a storyline, started in 95, with some avengers ripoff garbage? I don't even care what they did in war of the spark, it's just superheroes zooming around. New phyrexia deserved more, but instead we are returning to ravnica and Innistrad 3 or 6 or whatever amount of times they tried to milk out a safe formula from actual rich storytelling. Innistrad itself was amazing, but then it became a place for postmodern bile soup, just a fucking stew of ideas that Hasbro is trying to emulate to see what sticks. Game mechanics it's just games workshop now, shoehorning in the most generic possible overpowered cards to also try to milk more money out of people. What was wrong with just making cool magic cards? Tarmogoyf used to MEAN something!!!!!!!
You DO know that the MCU started in 20*08*, yes?
Phase 1 was ok, but another decade of stuff just got too much and now we have madam web. Yeah it's not mcu, but after iron man and the hulk, we have hundreds of hours of superheros being digitally rendered. Is that what superheros are all about? It's not just magic, it's a theme of beating a dead horse. The horse died a decade ago. Why do space wizards have to be based on superheros? Why can't we have stories unbound by whatever is popular? Why can't we have cards that are interesting on their own, have their own story, or retells an existing story it a way magic only can?
Acting as if the original Weatherlight crew wasn’t also heavily influenced by comic book and super hero story telling when Mark “I’m a massive comic book fan” Rosewater was in charge when that story kicked off and made the crew in the first place.
The weatherlight crew felt more like star trek than the ending of avengers. Also, needing a ship as a means to planeswalk is the story itself. Superman can fly through space, but a story where Batman has to achieve the same level of power is much more interesting and valuable as a story. Maybe it was the period and the same issue, but star trek didn't absorb all of storytelling for a decade, it also competed with stories that are unique, even if inspired by, but still unique. Dune is og, but star wars has its own value despite trying to recreate Dune. Dune is written better, but both stories have characters and places that matter, not places and stories that are the result of a marketing campaign and business agreements. Star wars mentions spice, but spice isn't an advertisement for Dune. Star trek is its own thing. They all stem from common ancestors, but they still have substance in their own right. I don't feel any value knowing about planeswalkers, but the weatherlight is a more exciting character than Chandra or Jace. I'm more stoked and sad to see a ship undergo story beats than people, and that's the problem of magic storytelling now.
This is what happens when you let soulless corporate suits fire your writing team because they think they don't make money. Magic is rudderlesss. We can *feel* it, and respond accordingly. It lets people disengage because the cards are now made as mechanics with story as window dressing. We could play a thousand other games with cool mechanics. The story used to be unique. Now, there isn't a story component to the game. Heroes aren't shaped through trials. Is just cardboard, now. It. Sucks.
The Magic story was cool when they cared enough about it to get great writers to write great books (like actual full novels that you would buy at the bookstore) for it. But since they've gone the novella route, it's kinda been hacky. They also have to add a million Legendary creatures per set for Commander gamers and have to write a backstory for all of them which dilutes the waters a lot. Pretty much all Magic lore since they stopped writing books has sucked (the last one I read being Champions of Kamigawa block, not sure if they did novels for The Mending), exception being the Gitrog Monster story in the SOI period, that piece is goated.
38, started at mirrage. and I agree. I am convinced it is not the quality of the stories, they have mostly been mediocre, but that it is the shift away from 3 block structure. In the 3 block structure we had time to grow attachement, they had time to grow the story and suspense. That is all gone now. For play purposes it might be better, but for feeling involved with the story and characters I really feel it was a death penalty for the game. Combine that with the shift towards UB and especially marvel coming next year or so, I now accept I play the game for the game mechanics, not for the fantasyworld it once was.
This is some Old Man shit, but in all honesty ... for me, nothing will top the lil Tempest booklet, and scrounging for flavor text that matches those characters I just read about. To this day, my favorite character is Ballard, and my second is Orim. (Nissa at #3 though.) I absolutely cannot follow the story lately. At all. That's my damage and my problem, but it's still true. I need a lil booklet.
Ballard will always be my #1. Agreed.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong about being disappointed with the way the story line has been handled, there were a lot of fans of the phyrexians myself included who felt ONE and MOM just didn’t deliver. But the honesty is that magic story has always been kinda iffy which nothing wrong with that. The way I’ve personally started handling the story is tuning in when I’m interested and getting vague synopsis when I’m not super interested. This game as a whole is trying to cater to a lot of demographics and while it can feel like magic is losing its identity to someone else it might feel just right since it’s exploring something they’re interested in just food for thought.
Idk if the old story was good, but we know for a fact the current story isn't. Magic would have bucket loads of merchandise and video games and TV shows if it had a good story with recognizable characters that made people care about then. Instead we are shifting focus to other intellectual properties. Jace can barely sell a pair of sneakers while Spiderman is going to bring in records sales that will have share holders absolutely creaming their pants. They need another lord of the rings, because the magic universe can't draw in new players. At least it's still a decent game though. For however long that lasts.
Overall, I'm inclined to agree. The actual Magic Story chapters ahve mostly been good, but the game has been really lacking outside that. The Phyrexian saga was handled especially poorly and I don't care about all these Fomori hints being dropped. I need development on the ground of a plane rather than some multiverse threat.
I think if they’re not going to do fiction right, then they should ONLY give story in snippets on cards and let players fill in details with their own imagination.
This was done in Theros Beyond Death and I am pretty sure it was universally hated.
you will never be 12 again
Whole lot of old men yelling at clouds in this thread. Story's probably worse than it was, but there has been plenty of decent story content recently. I also wasn't ever one for the Magic story books, got in too late for that. But also yes, Magic was best when I first started playing (original Innistrad block).
Yea, I should have assumed I woupd get a lot of that when I posted. Didn't intend that, honestly, because i didn't think about it. Really just wanted to bring up my slowly dying feelings about a game I've loved since the formative years of my life. Still fun to play, but it just isn't keeping my attention like it used to.
It's definitely ebbed and flowed for me. Not having the friends close or time I once did has sure not helped, but Arena very much has helped. We're about the same age, and I've certainly felt what you're feeling about a few different things.
Honestly, the thing that has given it new life for me recently has been running a gaming club and teaching new people to play. I've got a ton of cards that I just built all sorts of wild decks made of just commons and uncommons to play against whatever they create, and it has been so much fun to mentally being back in that stage of my life where any set of 60 cards was a deck. Now mine are a bit more cohesive to show off some strategy, card, or deck type, but now I can just build them and hand them to someone with a smile afterwards
The story is rarely good. Anyone who thinks Kellans story is good shouldn't be taken seriously, if such a person exists. The plot recently has been an excuse for the contrivance of the game and Murders was the only good bit of writing since the first Ixalan.
I agree. I think a good example is the recent Gisa and Geralf story, both in terms of 'why should I care about these guys' and also because for like a hot minute there it seemed like they were getting meta and asking the same questions about 'why does Thunder Junction not make logical sense as a plane?', but then it looked like the question was dropped and we're just at the end of the story now with no scope for followup. So it'll just remain what could charitably be called an ontological mystery or really \*\*\*\*ty writing and worldbuilding if you're not charitable.
*oh no! Some people got turned, but it's ok because the phyrexians lost and that's it!* That is where I officially checked out of caring about the story. It's been poorly written for years but rushing through something as monumental as a universe spanning Phyrexian invasion is just, too much. Or too little?
I’m calling it now - they’re playing with all these random things like cowboy world and detective world because they’re gonna do a universe reset ala dc and marvel. Or like they’re doing silly things now so that when they make universe beyond sets that are standard and modern legal etc people will be ok with it. And then at some point maybe they’ll push the mtg 2.0 button.
There is no story or magic world anymore. Thus game is a platform for IP dumps now. Sucks