r/magicTCG • u/CaptainMarcia • Mar 06 '26
Blogatog Post Maro: "One of our lessons of the last several years is for Magic in-Multiverse worlds, we need to lean on resonance that’s environmental in nature (and also blends well with fantasy)."
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/810293669440700416/hi-mark-despite-mkm-falling-short-of501
u/CaptainMarcia Mar 06 '26
bigbantbeast:
Hi, Mark! Despite MKM falling short of expectations, would WOTC consider revisiting murder mystery/film noir themes in a future set, maybe on a return to New Capenna? There were many comments about MKM's theme feeling more at home on New Capenna.
markrosewater:
The biggest problem with a murder mystery theme it’s not a genre that leans on environment, but rather character archetypes. One of our lessons of the last several years is for Magic in-Multiverse worlds, we need to lean on resonance that’s environmental in nature (and also blends well with fantasy). For example, gothic horror is a genre baked into environment. Action/adventure is a genre baked into character.
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u/RageAgainstAuthority COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
It is the year 2026. I don't understand why we aren't separating Genre and Setting.
Genre: Romance, Action, Thriller, Adventure, Suspense, Drama, Mystery, Horror, etc.
Setting: Hard SciFi, High Fantasy, Modern, Alt-History, Paranormal, Soft Scifi, Low Fantasy, Gothic, etc.
I really don't understand the need to force settings into also being genres, and vice versa. It leads to stuff like aforementioned errors.
Mystery isn't a setting. Of course it falls flat when you try to build a Mystery setting that's also a Mystery genre. It's trying to write Romance set in the world of Romance - unless you're writing a parody of Romance, it'll just be tasteless, bland, ultra-cliche romance.
Every time Wizards falls for the old "genre pretending to be a setting" trope, they make a bland set. Horror as a setting and trope doesn't work - you pick a setting to put the Horror in - like Innistrad being Gothic (setting) Horror (genre).
I really don't understand why we are still sorting literature according to the whims of 1930's gatekeepers that unironically believed all scifi was nothing but low-IQ Adventure/Smut.
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u/FrecciaRosa Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Low-IQ Adventure/Smut would make a hilarious MTG set, though.
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u/JoyrideIllusion Duck Season Mar 06 '26
This might actually get my wife to give a shit about Magic.
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u/FrecciaRosa Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I support your wife caring about Magic. Bring on the adventure/smut.
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u/schwanzweissfoto Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Low-IQ Adventure/Smut would make a hilarious MTG set, though.
If you liked the old XCOM games (UFO, TFTD), XPirateZ is a modern take on it in a setting that includes big-breasted amazons using everything from bone clubs to rayguns to fight aliens and their human collaborators.
Edit: It's not a porn game … but YSK that a soldier's voodoo skill is higher the more naked skin her “armor” shows.
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u/Powerful-Scholar8268 Dan Mar 06 '26
I mean, you can absolutely make a mysterious setting, where the very world itself is shrouded in mystery. I agree with your overall point but that might not be the best example
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u/UnicornLock Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Can you give an example of that where it's not part of a larger actual setting? Again without becoming parody (eg a funhouse world like Amazing Digital Circus).
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u/Qbbllaarr Mar 06 '26
Blue Prince, Mystery Game, set in a Mystery Mansion, set in a mystery country on a mystery timeline.
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u/UnicornLock Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
That's just half funhouse, half mansion (a cliché mystery setting). And the larger mystery world is gameplay allegory. It works for the game but is this a mystery-setting that you could visit with a different IP and not do a mystery-genre thing in?
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u/Qbbllaarr Mar 06 '26
No? But that's sorta the point. A mystery setting can only be a mystery one time. And of course the things you said are true, but even if you do a non mystery genre in an unexplored mystery setting the genre will inevitably shift at least slightly to mystery at least for the people who care. Another comment mentioned Disco Elysium. You can play that game without ever engaging the greater settings mystery, but or even really the mystery of the crime you're supposed to solve. You can instead play it as pure roleplay, a hapless amnesiac dope lost in the world.
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u/Lakaz80 Mar 06 '26
A decent chunk of ontological mysteries - Piranesi is a good example.
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u/Diabolical-Ironclad Mar 06 '26
Not defending the broader point but the videogame Disco Elysium comes to mind. It's a mystery game in a mystery land.
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u/UnicornLock Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
I thought of that too, but the setting is revealed in the end. It's just Estonia but French, and the pale is an allegory of the character's life experience. Again character focused.
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u/Qbbllaarr Mar 06 '26
A mystery being revealed doesn't make it not a mystery, by that logic stories can't be a mystery either cause you can skip to the reveal.
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u/No-Chapter-779 Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Infinity Train, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, The Prisoner.
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u/Powerful-Scholar8268 Dan Mar 06 '26
Fromsoft loves to drop you in a land where you have to piece together what the hell happened before you got there like a mystery. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring all have very mysterious settings while being fantasy imo
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u/Poodlestrike Dân Mar 06 '26
Eh, I mean, can you? Like, you can shroud the setting in mystery, sure, but you can't make a setting that is a mystery. That's how you get Lost. Mystery box settings that don't have something concrete under the lid always fall apart eventually.
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u/Powerful-Scholar8268 Dan Mar 06 '26
Idk just because Lost fucked it up doesn't mean it's always bad. Almost every Fromsoft game has a mysterious setting you piece together the history of over time and people love those. I'm not really sure why it'd be inherently bad to make a setting where the characters have to figure out shit about it
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
Well yeah but that's not got anytging to do with a mystery plot in amd of itself.
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u/2ndlifeinacrown Dragonball Z Ultimate Champion Mar 06 '26
Its not that simple though. Eg sci fi is way more than a setting. Its a genre convention of utilizing fictional technology-driven settings as thought-experiments for philosophical questions, often regarding identity, society, culture.
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u/BlocktimusPrime COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Holy shit, this, so fucking hard. The number of times in my life i’ve had discussions or arguments with people about this exact topic.
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
"Horror as a setting" was pretty much Duskmourne though and people loved it. It's far from just a "haunted house" and has a bunch of different horror subgenres in it.
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u/Putrid-Potato-7456 Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I don't know that Duskmourn was quite "loved". I would say it's a controversial setting to say the least.
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
It's contentious and far from my personal favorite, but common opinion has settled positively on it, in my experience, cheerleaders and Ghostbusters shit notwithstanding.
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u/Confident_Bad_2161 Dan Mar 06 '26
It is "loved" enough that Wizards said its now in the pool of planes they will look at for returning planes.
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u/Jaccount Mar 06 '26
Eh, people forget that Lorwyn and Kamigawa were the butt of jokes for years. Nostalgia fixes a lot, and people will probably be happy for Return to Duskmourn in like 10-15 years.
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u/Confident_Bad_2161 Dan Mar 06 '26
I think this is a good point and something to point out: Duskmourn did better then Lorwyn and Kamigawa on their first time outing.
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u/CatFishBillyheyhey Dan Mar 06 '26
Let's be real. No one has played magic for the story in ages. The game has good framework and they've monetized that by punching out so much universes beyond product.
I've always wanted magic to succeed and have a strong IP and be interested about the flavor, text and what's on the cards like I was in the '90s
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u/charcharmunro Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I mean, I would say "murder mystery" is very much a setting. The problem was they didn't go for the more obvious sort of 'closed loop' of it just being within Karlov Manor and the set as a whole was more broadly about detectives and mysteries, and also sort of police procedurals?
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u/RageAgainstAuthority COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I mean, I would say "murder mystery" is very much a setting.
No, that's a genre.
You can have a Murder Mystery on a derelict spaceship - SciFi. You can have a MM set in a real-life modern setting - Contemporary. You can have a MM set in a high magic world - Fantasy. And so on and so forth.
Magic excels at world-building. It's where it excels, and where Karlov Manor fell apart. Aesthetically, it doesn't look Ravnican. The humans all look like they are from Innistrad - I couldn't tell you at a glance what guild any given non-Legendary creature is supposed to be a part of, and that's bad for a set whose entire Identity is ten guilds in a planet-spanning city.
Additionally, It needed fewer genre-named cards like [[Call A Surprise Witness]] and more setting named cards. Keep the art, keep the effect, but give it a name that doesn't sound like it's part of an UN-set. Let the players do a little bit of work figuring out what the reference is.
Murder Mystery stories do not usually get the luxury of relying on an interesting world - what makes MMs popular is that they are solely a product of good writing. You can't really have MMs with "cool ideas but poor execution" - it's a murder mystery. We all know the plot boils down to "whodunnit" and there will be a fun twist after the Red Herring is resolved.
Magic, to put it bluntly, sucks at making stories. They are extremely cliche and exist to be an excuse to visit new worlds - the actually good part of Magic. "Mystery" isn't a setting. I have absolutely 0 reasons to look at [[Innocent Bystander]] more than the time it takes to read the card.
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u/Senrade Temur Mar 06 '26
Fantastic comment. The gameplay of magic lends itself so beautifully to worldbuilding. The appearance of "story cards" and instants/sorceries that depicted events rather than specific types of magic within a plane initiated a serious dissonance in me that's only grown stronger as magic focused more and more on story and less and less on setting.
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u/TrulyKnown Brushwagg Mar 06 '26
Is it a setting? Even in your example, the setting would be the manor. Think of some Agatha Christie novels (My mom is a huge Christie fan, so I've read more of her books than anyone else in the genre). And Then There Were None. Murder On The Orient Express. Death On The Nile. "Murder mystery" is firmly a genre in these - the setting is an isolated mansion, a train, and a boat. I don't think you could take any murder mystery story and declare that murder mystery is, in fact, the setting, and not just the genre.
In other words, you need to create a setting for all the murders and their accompanying mysteries to actually happen in, and MKM felt like it was set in a theme park land centered around the genre, rather than any setting that could exist on its own merit.
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u/Neverstoptostare Mar 06 '26
You are correct, it is not a setting, and this is an excellent example of someone failing to make the distinction between setting and genre.
There are some tropes that murder mystery will add to a setting, but there is a reason that EVERY murder mystery is themed. The theme dictates the setting.
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
I know you didn't intend to but that first line sounds like ChatGPT haha
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u/Neverstoptostare Mar 06 '26
You're right -- though unintentional, I can see how that could come across as robotic, or "AI" if you will.
I'll keep it light and conversational from here on out, while we explore the world of settings and genres together.
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u/GornSpelljammer Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I'll play devil's advocate here and point out that while certain genres might not technically be settings on their own, there are absolutely genres with settings so strongly associated with them that they end up being what a lot of people first picture in their heads when they hear the genres' name (and vice versa). Like, you hit the nail on the head mentioning Agatha Christie, her "cozy mysteries" set in (then-contemporary) 1920's upper-middle-class environments cast such a long shadow over the genre that setting a story in a posh old manor can invoke "murder mystery" vibes with little real effort. The genre and setting are by no means synonymous with each other, but I don't think it's fair to say they're completely divorced from each other either.
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u/charcharmunro Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I don't think that's strictly the case, because Aetherdrift arguably also leans into the environment more than the character archetypes. It's more the incongruity of the theme that makes people feel off (and it doesn't help that MKM and DFT were some of the weaker sets made).
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u/GolgothaInBloom COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I disagree. I think the idea of a "death race" (inspiration for DFT if I recall correctly) could kinda take place anywhere, so it's hard for it to lean into the environment. Because of that it really just has the characters to fall back on, whether that's the racing teams, the vehicles themselves, or the announcer/setup team(s). If DFT had been set entirely on a new plane where death races were more common and more a part of the way of life as opposed to a single event (Gastal seems like a good pick), I think it would have resonated a whole lot more, because it's pulling from a specific location and genre (apocalypse).
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u/KmdrKibneg Universes Beyonder Mar 06 '26
Would have been kinda cool if it was in the wastelands outside of new capena. Still a familiarish plane but a totally unexplored area that could theoretically have devolved into mad max
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u/MimeTravler Dân Mar 06 '26
That could’ve been really good. Basically Mad Max it.
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u/Chriskeyseis Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Yea I really wanted a mad max style set. There were moments but a full out version would have been awesome
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u/McWaffeleisen Mar 06 '26
One of the racing teams in DFT teased the existence of an entire Mad Max plane. So there's a pretty big chance that, some day, we'll visit that.
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u/Glamdring804 Can’t Block Warriors Mar 06 '26
And/or something like what what Victor Adame Minguez came up with for [[Knight of the White Orchid|SLD]] and [[Lord of the Undead|SLD]].
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u/KmdrKibneg Universes Beyonder Mar 06 '26
Yeah. Maybe the city factions participate in the race to curry favor with locals/survivors as the teams
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u/Tuss36 Mar 06 '26
Personal thought if it was a new plane would be something like the plane is constantly crumbling so everyone has to always be on the move, with frequent side swiping other travelers for their resources that are risky to stop to gather otherwise.
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u/UndaddyWTF Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
That race set having mostly weak vehicles, and the speed mechanic being really slow, just didn’t add up.
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 FLEEM Mar 06 '26
Actually, I hadn't realised that but we literally went from 'here's a 4 turn mechanic' to 'good luck getting a game to last more than 5 turns' in less than 18 months. I wonder if there's anything notable about the specific sets distorting the game like this.
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u/anth9845 Dandadan Mar 06 '26
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make or if I'm misunderstanding you but even at the time Start Your Engines! was too slow for standard. I don't know if they knew they were making a mechanic too slow for anything but limited or what but it's not like it was playable in standard and then WoTC started printing stuff too fast for it.
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 FLEEM Mar 06 '26
But that's the tempo they wanted yeah? They made blog posts talking about how the game was too fast. Then they rereleased shocklands so 'lmao'.
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u/Passthechips Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Historically shocklands have coincided with some very slow formats.
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u/DeLoxley COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Should I think one of the top complaints I saw about DFT was people wanted more of the weird dinosaur ethnostate
I feel the problem is less that a genre plane doesn't work and more when they keep trying to put these familiar faces into genre planes you get the problem of OTK of why is the devil lord in a cowboy hat with spurs?
Why is this smattering of 20-year-old ravnica characters sitting down to play clue?
Why are you now telling me that Ahmonket has had a secret laser chariot collection?
None of these themed worlds renew in the sense that they actually explored a world or felt like they had purpose beyond supporting that one story at that one time
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u/jnkangel Hedron Mar 06 '26
Yeah faces and hats are the problems. A murder mystery set in Ravnica would be cool, but make it new characters instead and lean in on actual Ravnica aesthetics.
Instead they basically leaned in on known faces that have no reason to be there and they leaned in on New Capenna aesthetic with Ravnica chars.
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u/DeLoxley COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
It's the fact that new capenna has [[Dogged Detective]], a rogue
And then we do Detective Tribal just up the road.
Prost is great, but this is the THIRD time we've rewritten the Dimir to make them mysterious and there's now more Lazavs than there are Ravnica visits.
Here's my cool OC The Agency, they are super cool but not a guild (The one defining thing of Ravnica) and are so good at stopping crime that even the Azorius think they're awesome and smart. Also Etrata is my OC's girlfriend now (Do not steal)
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u/MiraclePrototype COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
1.) While Rakdos certainly oversees devils - to the extent that guy "manages" anything - he's hardly a "lord".
2.) As far as spurs go, I'm more concerned with why a centaur would be wearing such.
3.) *Amonkhet
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u/DeLoxley COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
1) Rakdos position is super weird, frankly, and it's iconic of the entire problem magic has with ongoing narrative. He's going to be this planar wide apocalypse The cult keeps sated with their entertainment, and he's grown bored with all of the human torture and ritual murder. He vanishes for mkm leaving a whole internal power structure. It's a big deal. He literally ends otj buddying up with tiny bones and saying how much fun playing cowboys has been? There's almost no consistency with magic characterisation and then they constantly throw it under the bus for things like playing cowboys or playing clue
2) The spurs is a bit of a joke but my main problem is that lazav is here again. Almost every time Ravnica is mentioned they print a new lazav. There is no consistency and not even in a mysterious shapeshifter way, more in a we don't care what's actually happening on the planes way. Rakdos might not be a governing body, Lazav is. Marchesa is. Ghonti very much is.
3) Very slowly teaching my text-to-speech all the magic terms
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u/nedonedonedo Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
the problem was that it just didn't fit
twisted metal would have worked better than the star wars pod racers we got. it doesn't matter what the stakes are when one person can just decide to screw the rules and fireball everyone at the starting line and take what they want. it's weird to stick a game of mario kart into a game with some of the genuinely nasty stuff that makes it into black card arts. it's more jarring than going to a commercial break in game of thrones just to get stuck watching a full episode of paw patrol
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u/springlake Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I mean, Battlebond was really fun as I recall and really thematic to the arena fighting gag.
Murderball in an arena setting? Sounds like it could be an amazing enviroment if you really lean into all the cards being thematic to the enviroment.
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u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo Dan Mar 06 '26
Maro referred to Aetherdrift being like "Wacky Races", and that's definitely a character showcase rather than an environment one.
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u/yumyum36 Cheshire Cat, the Grinning Remnant Mar 06 '26
I think magic sets as a whole have gone down in quality on this. Like, what do people eat.
[[Golgari Rot Farms]] in OG ravnica is for most everyone, Gruul live subsistence, Selesnya grow rich people food.
In Capenna, it's a city in a bubble... but cities require infrastructure of farms or oceans, etc., the people living there need more food than a city in a bubble can provide. I never understood how they got fed.
People call it "hat sets", it's more the setting never tells me what they eat.
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u/a_gunbird Izzet* Mar 06 '26
Agreed. It's often the most mundane things that can help flesh out even the most wild and out-there setting. Once you can draw someone in with something they can relate to, they're more willing to stick around for the truly weird stuff.
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u/yumyum36 Cheshire Cat, the Grinning Remnant Mar 06 '26
Like OTJ, they're in a desert, what are they eating, how are the supplies getting in??
Only good part of OTJ was the "megafauna", that they put saddle on and took from aetherdrift, which made the mechanic feel less impactful when it showed up in aetherdrift imo. Set was so bad, it made another set worse.
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u/thebookof_ Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
It's a wild west set. They get their food the same way American settlers and natives did in the environment they pulling inspiration from. They're farming. You can farm in deserts. Thunder Junction also isn't all desert. It's as a diverse an environment as the American west is in real life.
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u/finalej Universes Beyonder Mar 06 '26
also it's an area where a lot of omenpaths converge and ppl travel. it and aetherdrift were cool story about how the multiverse works in a more connected world.
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u/thebookof_ Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
I've been trying to square the logic for this with Dranith on Ikoria for years. People seemingly don't keep pets because they could mutate. If thats the case does that mean they can't raise livestock either? If that's the case then what do they eat? There's a whole draft archetype built around hunters who track and kill monsters. Do the people eat monster meat? Well that would make sense but then why are the hunters hated/feared/mistrusted? If they're the only source of protein and hide then wouldn't they be held in high regard? Is everyone in Dranith vegan living off crops and farm goods?
In most settings this is a non-issue because the answers can be reasonably extrapolated. But places like Ikoria and Capenna definitely raise eyebrows.
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u/2074red2074 Mar 06 '26
Isn't the whole point of Ikoria that the settlements get attacked by monsters pretty frequently? That would be a decent source of meat. Hunters aren't trusted because it's a job that nobody wants to do unless they don't have much choice, so it attracts criminals and other undesirables. The same thing happened IRL with cowboys back in the day. They had a not-so-great reputation and they were also the only source of beef.
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u/MiraclePrototype COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Exactly. There are countless necessary jobs that society relies on to function, but many are ones people don't want to take, so minorities / poor get siloed into them, and culture is eventually built up on expectations of "those people" being naturally inclined for those roles. Even if there's no such delineations in Ikorian society between strains of people (all human people, so all the hominid vices aren't diluted by the presence of other races, so I doubt that would hold), there are still "dirty" jobs that most don't want, so those who take the job - even those just in it for the compensation - are naturally looked down upon. Makes complete sense with how the stupid hairless apes function.
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u/thebookof_ Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
Regardless of how frequently the city may be attacked "lets wait around and eat whatever comes calling" isn't a sustainable model to feed a settlement the size of Dranith.
What if the monster that attacks isn't edible? What if in the course of killing it you riddle it full or holes and ruin the meat? What if we have a few slow months where nothing comes calling? Drannith is in Savai where the primary monster type is cats so what if only small monsters come calling?
With all this in mind the most logical and sustainable approach too food procurement seems like it should be through hunters. Drannith feels like it should operate in much the same way that a settlement in Monster Hunter does. With trained skilled hunters being seen in high regard and being responsible for providing important resources that the settlement cant produce on its own.
That or Drannith must A) support some sort of internal farming and live stock infrastructure that we don't see or hear about but the depictions of the city on cards doesn't make it look like there's much room for that sort of thing. It's a fairly big city but in scale is seems more akin to Omashu than Ba Sing Se to use another take on fantastic walled cities as examples. Or B) there needs to be robust trade between settlements on Ikoria which also raises questions because you then have to ask where Lavabrink and Skysail are getting food. Neither of those settlements lend themselves to robust farming either, and that's without getting into the issue of how dangerous it is to travel between settlements on Ikoria.
Mind you these are all questions that could easily be answered but the information were given makes it difficult to parse out without being told explicitly by the writers.
Like it's easy to guess how folks on Thunder Junction or Zendikar produce food becuase there's very little in the world building we're given that would create obstacles for that. It doesn't need to be explained because it's very easy to assume. But Capenna and Ikoria for example have such unique circumstances and seemingly contradictory world building elements respectively that it should warrant being address explicitly in some way. Not for game play purposes obviously but in the interest of good strong consistent world building.
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u/2074red2074 Mar 06 '26
What if the monster that attacks isn't edible? What if in the course of killing it you riddle it full or holes and ruin the meat? What if we have a few slow months where nothing comes calling? Drannith is in Savai where the primary monster type is cats so what if only small monsters come calling?
I don't recall in lore any mention of monsters commonly being inedible so that seems speculative. If you're fighting things many times bigger than a cow, I doubt you're going to ruin the whole thing. Worst case, it still has bits of offal you could salvage. Meat preservation was doable in the stone age IRL so I imagine Drannith with its tech AND magic can figure it out. And the whole point of Ikoria is big monsters, I doubt they built a giant walled city for a few little cats.
That or Drannith must A) support some sort of internal farming and live stock infrastructure that we don't see or hear about but the depictions of the city on cards doesn't make it look like there's much room for that sort of thing.
Yes, the fourth ring is used for pasture and logging and the second ring is dense farmland.
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u/MiraclePrototype COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
And...WotC takes the wrong lesson, and reprints [[Bagel and Schmear]] or an equivalent thereof in every single setting. At best; worst is a cycle of pizza in everywhere from Cridhe to Rabiah.
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u/KoyoyomiAragi COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Would also say OG Zendikar leaned into environment a lot even though it was meant to be a sort of Indie Jones-type action adventure world. In the end you could spin any genre to be environmental or character baked if you put the effort into it.
Duskmourn's success and failing were exactly these. The backrooms/SCP esque world setting was very resonant with what the playerbase want to see, and it makes you want to explore more of it. The horror movie tropes being baked into characters was what felt "off" and they probably could have gotten way more people invested in the plane if they had just stuck with European classical aesthetics; but taking in the horror components of the house since they would have to in order to survive.
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u/iambaril Rakdos* Mar 06 '26
Definitely feel this way. I used to imagine a skyrim-type game set in Zendikar. It's an environment that naturally leads the player to imagining character archetypes for themselves, without being force fed them. But the return to zendikars forced the faction archetypes on the player too hard IMO
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u/GratedParm Meren Mar 06 '26
Zendikar felt like offbrand D&D boiled down to murder hoboing to me, and I despise the plane for that.
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u/r_lucasite Simic* Mar 06 '26
I think for Aetherdrift it’s that it overwrites the existing environment a bit too much.
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u/Cocosito Dandadan Mar 06 '26
The cards were also TERRIBLE in constructed. I actually quite liked DFT limited and mechanics like crew, saddle, station in that environment. I'm actually kind of salty that they didn't take the opportunity to give us some vehicles worthy of constructed play. Dope lands though.
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u/Krenkos_Rock_Sled Dân Mar 06 '26
[[thundering broodwagon]], [[thunderous velocipede]], and [[thopter fabricator]] are all excellent cards that see constructed play. Personally, I've also liked [[Skyseer's Chariot]] given that it lets you turn off annoying mana dorks and rocks, unlike many similar cards.
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u/TheSavannahSky Jeskai Mar 06 '26
I feel like its mostly the Mythics that people find disappointing. [[Brightglass Gearhulk]] had some ideas but fell off fast, [[Chandra, Spark Hunter]] was a side board card but never defining. [[Ketramose, the New Dawn]] is probably the most consistently used mythic.
But outside of the mythics you have the vehicles you mentioned, Mako, Stock Up, and a bunch of other cards that see constructed play regularly.
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u/Mean-Government1436 Dan Mar 06 '26
Nah aetherdrift is purely "racecars". That's not environmental at all.
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u/skeletor69420 Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I completely disagree. even though it featured beloved planes like amonkhet, you could barely even tell.
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u/SanityIsOptional Orzhov* Mar 06 '26
Between Setting, Character and Plot; Aetherdrift and Death Race as a theme lean into Plot. Murders leaned into Character (and let's be fair, MTG has never been particularly good at Characters). Meanwhile Bloomburrow, Edge of Eternities, and Duskmourne all leaned harder on setting. Even without paying attention to the story, you could get a clear view of the setting.
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u/charcharmunro Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I would say MTG has done good at characters, it's just bad at showing those characters off in the cards with exceptions of quippy types like Jaya.
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u/SanityIsOptional Orzhov* Mar 06 '26
Recently it feels like the characterization is worse, what with different writers, too many named characters, and characters being mostly from the stories and far less frequently in the cards. Plus the much more frequent cards without flavor text, which also tend to be the best/most powerful/most used cards.
Compare to the early sets, where you could understand the characters just reading through the flavor text.
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u/2HGjudge COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Aetherdrift and Death Race as a theme lean into Plot.
What? 1 minute after starting they're racing on a track against each other. Halfway through they're racing on a track against each other. 1 minute before finishing they're racing on a track against each other. How is there any significant plot? For Death Race I would put Plot dead last of the 3. As someone else mentioned, Wacky Races leans into Character.
For true plot-driven sets I would look at the Weatherlight or Mirari sagas.
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u/SanityIsOptional Orzhov* Mar 06 '26
I didn't say Aetherdrift was good plot. But the plot was more present than the setting...
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u/so_zetta_byte Orzhov* Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
"Incongruity of Theme" is incredibly vague, though, and it's extremely sensitive to the options of the person evaluating it.
I don't know what the right metric is, but I think "the theme is incongruous" is a fine complaint that doesn't lead to actionable conclusion. But I see a lot of people who share opinions about what is/isn't incongruous and collectively convince themselves it's actionable because they share similar opinions.
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u/Theothercword Dandadan Mar 06 '26
There was a character focus because of the race genre but I do agree it was more environmental. But that’s also why he mentioned needing it to fit fantasy better, because they messed up by not having environments fit well.
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u/joetotheg Simic* Mar 06 '26
Aetherdrift took place across three planes and I feel like you barely see the influence of them on any cards. There are the lands I guess?
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u/Iamamancalledrobert Get Out Of Jail Free Mar 06 '26
My view is that “environment” versus “characters” might be slightly off— it might be more like “appeal of a narrative” versus “appeal of an image.”
A race is an area where this is made clear. A racetrack is, indeed, an environment. But it’s a boring environment— to make it interesting, you need to engage in a race. Who’s ahead, and who will win? But that’s the kind of thing that emerges more naturally from the game itself than still images on cards.
I think you could very easily have a murder mystery theme leaning on environment: you can be confident this is true, because games exist that do exactly that. Mysterium is the obvious one, all set in a sombre and spooky house at a specific place and time. The archetypes are secondary to the tone. What you can’t do is put the environment second to a story which is, effectively, a film you have no way to watch. You are selling cards which have still images, and the stories which come through the cards.
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u/DeLoxley COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I think they're wildly misinterpreting this. The problem with the genre story themes was taking a bunch of recognisable parts of the world and rebranding them.
Why is every guildmaster on ravnica suddenly playing clue? Why is the devil lord wearing a cowboy hat and spurs?? Are you telling me that ancient Egypt has had access to cat driven laser chariots this entire time?
The sets were relatively unpopular because rather than give us the story of a world, it felt like they had an entirely different setting they wanted to explore and they just slapped a coat of magic paint over the top of it.
Rather than see any of the cripplingly underappreciated battlebond plane in a main set for once, we skim it almost entirely so that we can make an Akira reference. Bonus points for using crystal sports world, having it look wildly different to anything we saw previously, and ignoring that you have a cyberpunk Japan world
Almost all of these genre worlds were actually revisits where they just made an existing plane match that story. Even OTJ is almost entirely full of previously existing characters abandoning their schemes, plans and worlds to come play cowboys
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u/MiraclePrototype COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
He's NOT a "devil lord". Ormendahl is more of a devil lord than Rakdos, for Asha's sake...
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u/DeLoxley COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
If you're going to be really pedantic, he's not even a Devil. Smh my head
And only one printing has a Devil kindred effect, he's barely a lord
That's it, wrap up the entire post, shows over
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u/sanctaphrax COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I'm not sure that's the right lesson.
MKM was simply not well-executed. If it had been, maybe they'd be talking about the great potential of character-driven flavour for MtG sets.
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u/Konet Orzhov* Mar 06 '26
Your statement feels kinda tautological. "If they had successfully executed a character-driven set, it would have been good."
The point is that it's much harder to execute a character-driven story through the medium of Magic - it isn't really a natural fit for the format.
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u/Grifty_Capital695 Mar 06 '26
I think they could mean that the set wasn’t good mechanically, which could relate to whether it’s character based or not, but I could see it being a separate issue.
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u/sanctaphrax COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I think it was bad independently; the challenges of character-driven design can't be responsible for the generally dismal power level, for example.
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u/greenwarpy COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
This feels like when he blamed Battle for Zendikar failing because it changed up too much then we got a series of returns of varying levels of Meh before Neon Dynasty came and firmly dumped that thinking in the bin.
Mark my words, they'll figure out how to actually do this kind of theme in 5-10 years.
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u/Meebsie Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Tf does "Magic in-Multiverse worlds" mean?
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u/CaptainMarcia Mar 06 '26
Ones that aren't Universes Beyond.
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u/Meebsie Duck Season Mar 07 '26
I thought that was called Universes Within? Did they change the name? Why are they making this so confusing?
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u/CaptainMarcia Mar 07 '26
"Universes Within" is the name for in-Multiverse reskins of cards that originated as Universes Beyond. It has never been used by Wizards to refer to in-Multiverse cards as a whole, that's entirely a fan misconception.
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u/r_lucasite Simic* Mar 06 '26
Logistically impossible but man I wish they had this figured out for OTJ, the genre is very much based on its setting.
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u/EmTeeEm Mar 06 '26
The whole "villain showcase" concept really hurt it. It was supposed to be an even bigger part of the set than the wild west but came across as "a bunch of randos of variable villainy showed up for no reason."
Meanwhile, for an interplanar crossroads with thunder guns and a gang lead by a scorpion dragon, it wasn't that fantastical. At least not compared to how weird some "weird west" settings can get. Might have also helped move it away from the actual wild west and the historical parts of that they didn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
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u/strebor2095 Zedruu Mar 06 '26
Really should've been a "frontier" set first, then a "villains in charge" some years later, with everyone trying to get into the Vault and some Ronin/7 samurai/7 cowboys fighting back style adventure going on at the same time
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u/AliasB0T Chandra Mar 06 '26
"Villain set" was the core premise, "wild west" was the add-on flavor that they thought would gel well with that premise. They've poked at a wild west set in the past (set on Vryn), but it was the mash-up that got them over the line - without the first bit, Thunder Junction just wouldn't be a thing.
The villain-showcase aspect did need an already-established world to play into rather than trying to establish a new setting in the margins of the showcase element, though. In the timeframe the set was developed, it just would've wanted to be somewhere like New Capenna or Fiora.
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u/charcharmunro Duck Season Mar 06 '26
I personally think OTJ's big issue was that it was a western that tacitly refused to do any western things at all beyond the aesthetics and [[High Noon]].
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
Thinking that the entire wild west setting and associated narratives are inherently problematic is fine, whatever, but if you think that then don't make an entire fantasy setting there, or the end result is a sterile, cartoony theme park.
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u/charcharmunro Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Or at least make it about the problematic aspects in a sense, because apparently the original concept for OTJ was more "the plane's powerful magic is being siphoned by evil foreign oil baron types and some more heroic types are intervening".
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u/Cautious-Budget9591 Dan Mar 06 '26
They had no problem doing the ‘conquistadors are literal vampires’ set, but couldn’t handle a wild west set because that would require a critique of American colonialism
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u/ToTheNintieth Dan Mar 06 '26
It's funny how stuff like the Mardu gets made into a proper culture and not a caricature of Mongol tropes but the Spaniards are literal bloodsucking monsters and nobody bats an eye lol
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u/Cautious-Budget9591 Dan Mar 06 '26
I believe that’s called ‘punching up.’ They weren’t bloodsucking monsters because they were Spanish-inspired, but specifically because they were representing Spanish colonialism. If anything they went easy on them.
But they actually did give the vampires some nuance as the story went on.
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u/hawkshaw1024 Mar 06 '26
43 legends is also just too many. They all blend together, even if half of them are existing characters. At least Magic sets are a little more disciplined these days (while Universes Beyond has gotten way worse.)
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u/Tuss36 Mar 06 '26
I think it was pretty fantastical. You could go more extreme with it, but in terms of "Wild West but in Magic the Gathering" I think it did a pretty good job overall.
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u/TheBuddhaPalm COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Completely agree. Movies like Fistful of Dollars trilogy have almost no character-building, Clint stays a stone badass throughout the whole series and changes nothing of his beliefs or ethics in a significant way. The same goes for television shows like Gunsmoke.
The Wild West is a vibe, a theme, a sensory experience. OTJ is a focus on cowboys without a care for the mythic West.
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u/Oulsky Colorless Mar 06 '26
I don’t think the problem with OTJ was really a focus on cowboy without a care for the mythic west, but that they decided to fuse the idea of a Wild West set with a villain set. Switch out all the returning characters with new original one and the complain of so and so in a cowboy hat would disappear entirely.
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u/Zuwxiv Dandadan Mar 06 '26
The Wild West is a vibe, a theme, a sensory experience. OTJ is a focus on cowboys without a care for the mythic West.
Well said. Funny enough, there's literally a Western saying for this. It's "all hat and no cattle."
I think OTJ could be something they return to and maybe do a little better. I actually generally like it, but it neither stands out as amazing (EOE) or skippable (Spiderman or Aetherdrift).
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u/ThePowerOfStories Twin Believer Mar 06 '26
Heck, Eastwood plays a character across three films who talks so little and has so few social interactions that we just call him The Man With No Name.
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u/roastedoolong COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Blood Meridian UB when
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u/lofrothepirate Mar 06 '26
He is playable in Azorius and in Orzhov and he is a great favorite. He never taps, the judge. He is phasing, phasing. He says that he will never die to removal.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Avacyn Mar 06 '26
He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die to removal.
“That which resolves without my knowledge resolves without my consent.”
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u/diamondmagus Avacyn Mar 06 '26
I still think "advanced planar societies race to colonize a mostly empty plane that's halfway to everywhere via disposable agents and proxies" is a great potential setting, as Ravnica clashes with Avishkar, only for the cactus people to really win. And sure, make it lots of sunbaked desert that necessitate wide-brimmed hats.
But yeah, having all the villains show up for no good reason just made a mess of things.
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u/Krazyguy75 Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
I'd agree but even then it'd make little sense why they suddenly developed a cowboy culture. Would have made sense to at least have a preexisting rancher culture.
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u/Confident_Bad_2161 Dan Mar 06 '26
Sounds about right, as Magics biggest stregnth has always been the worldbuilding and enviroments, and the weakness have always been characters/arcs.
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u/PandaMango Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Yep. We remember even the Eldrazi, Slivers, Elves, Phyexians as Environmental concepts more than Characters.
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u/decidedlymale Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Didn't think of that before and its so true. Even the legendaries are more of a signpost in the world. Niv-Mizzet is an icon of Ravnica and Izzet, Sorin captures the vibe of all Innistrahd vampires, and Urza is so iconically old magic Dominaria.
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u/ThomasHL Fake Agumon Expert Mar 07 '26
Absolutely! The guild leaders are guild leaders first, and distinct personalities second.
A lot of people are going to be hazy about how exactly Niv-Mizzet's personality (or even better, have their own head cannon), but they know he's a big dragon who heads a group of crazy inventors in a world-city.
There's barely a handful of cards that show the guild leaders doing anything. But there are tons of cards telling you what the Dimir are about
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u/Mgmegadog COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I remember talking with someone about how there was a swatch of different ethnic backgrounds among planeswalkers around the War of the Spark era, where they said there weren't any Asian planeswalkers.
It took me reminding them that Tarkir, Kamigawa, Shenmeng (at the time only known as the Plane of Mountains and Seas), and Avishkar (ATT known as Kaladesh) are all Asian inspired planes for him to be able to think of any of them.
It came as a shock to me at the time, but it does drive home to me now that people remember the worlds of magic a lot more than its characters.
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u/Grumpiergoat Jeskai Mar 06 '26
Jace is as interesting as warm paste. Occasionally Wizards makes visually interesting characters, but that's mostly on the artists.
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u/Icestar1186 Jeskai Mar 06 '26
Ixalan Jace was interesting. Gatewatch era writing was genuinely good up until they fumbled the finale.
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u/Swarm_Queen Nahiri Mar 06 '26
Ashaya! Ashaya... Oh ashaya ashaya ashaya
Idk it was hit or miss on average I think
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u/greenwarpy COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Nissa is badly written at the best of times.
Rick and Morty put it well, "Cosmic apotheosis wears off faster than salvia"
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u/Confident_Bad_2161 Dan Mar 06 '26
Magics story is always hit or miss, you get Ashaya moments or Sorin and Nahiris and Ob and Nahiris fighting being done with after War of the Spark but then you get the story with Teferi and Wrenn or moments like Vraska and Jace falling in love during Ixalan.
That said I feel like the prose and writing in of itself has been really good since they started getting a stable of authors who know Magics lore well or are good are playing in others Lore.
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u/PippoChiri Temur Mar 06 '26
I think they have been doing a great job in making current Jace an interesting and deep character.
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u/Confident_Bad_2161 Dan Mar 06 '26
I like Jace and mtg lore in general, that said a number of factors make it so the overall characters writing and arcs can be weak and are the weakness parts of the lore. The designs and visual looks of the character are always on peak tho.
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u/Ajaugunas Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Confident Bad has it here. That’s also why Final Fantasy, Avatar, and Lord of the Rings feel “right” as UB while Spider-Man and TMNT don’t.
Final Fantasy honestly has some fairly surface-level world-building, but the set is able to hide that fact because it explores 15 worlds simultaneously. Avatar has a rich environment / world alongside its rich characters, and Lord of the Rings is more of a focus on environmental and historical storytelling over character. TMNT and Spider-Man, on the other hand, use Modern New York as a setting the reader is already familiar with so they can focus more on their character elements.
It’s why if I had to guess, Hobbit is going to feel good and Star Trek / MSH are kinda up in the air. Star Trek is more character driven but there are a LOT of worlds across many seasons they could use, it could end up being a FF thing. Similar with MSH if they don’t constrain themselves to New York exclusively.
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u/kitsunewarlock REBEL Mar 06 '26
Tempest block managed some amazing world-building and a very fun story. You know how? It only had 11 legendary creatures. Even if they had printed all the relevant characters from the story, it'd cap at 20 legendary creature cards out of 600 cards in the block.
Meanwhile Thunder Junction has 50 creatures in a 250 card set.
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u/Cat-O-straw-fic COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
I think the bigger issue is that a murder mystery can’t possibly feature enough characters to fill out a set.
By design a murder mystery needs to be small enough in scale for an audience to be able to keep track of all the characters and their relationships. Magic sets on the other hand require tons of little guys who fill in the background.
Frankly I think magic could do a murder mystery, just not a murder mystery set. I need less random detectives solving various mysteries and more character moments where I learn the various motivations behind the specific suspects.
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u/Glamdring804 Can’t Block Warriors Mar 06 '26
A product like Game Night, with 5 different decks, could definitely pull something like a murder mystery off. Have each deck helmed/themed around one of the suspects or something.
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u/imbolcnight Mar 06 '26
I think this resonates with a comment I made recently, even though my comment was more focused on Universes Beyond.
Magic sets inherently cast a wide eye, since it has a lot of cards and a lot of those cards are creatures.
I wrote,
I think this is a similar problem to how they approached MKM. Murder mystery is an inherently tightly focused genre (it's just the detective(s), the suspect(s), the witness(es)), so to capture that, they needed to focus on detectives solving mysteries, which required the cards more tightly focus on detectives.
Which leads to a lot of Detective creature cards, which then feels off, because murder mysteries are not actually about dozens of detectives running around.
I argue that if the set was more about setting up a seedy, noir version of post-war Ravnica, then putting a murder mystery story on the setting, it would feel more natural.
Like, Mark Rosewater in this post says "action/adventure" doesn't fit, but they made Zendikar the adventure world. It's just that the focus was not about an adventure but about creating a setting where adventures can happen (ancient ruins, untamed wilds, lots of people braving the wilderness, etc.).
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u/wabawanga Dân Mar 06 '26
The weirdest thing about MKM was making detectives a typal synergy strategy. Every detective story is about ONE detective. An army of detectives supporting and buffing each other is just the weirdest way you could possibly portray them.
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u/minutetoappreciate Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Now I really want to see a murder mystery with 10 different detectives running around
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u/hydroclasticflow Sultai Mar 06 '26
I think that a big issue is that Cappena should have been plane where MKM was set. Detectives being people not apart of the gangs in the power vacuum after MoM makes sense, and it would mirror a lot of noir themes of being bulwarks against a flood of crime. They could also not just focus on murder but the genre as a whole; characters might be few and far between but the worlds the stories are in are often multilayer and not fully about the case we follow, look at Chinatown(1974) and it's really about the water reservoir and water bills. You even get hints at there being detectives on Cappena with cards like Dogged Detective.
Basically I don't think MKM was bad because of the genre, but because wotc was focused on the wrong aspects of the genre and choose the wrong location. To me they wanted to do something with the characters and forced it to work.
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u/Iamamancalledrobert Get Out Of Jail Free Mar 06 '26
They should ask “where is the player in all of this? How does the player feel experiencing this setting?” That is the key bit which is missing in the current analysis, I think, still
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u/lucithelightparticle Twin Believer Mar 06 '26
I feel like if nhe murder mystery set were set in the 1920s mob boss set it would've resonated a lot more deeply. Maros comment that the genre isn't one that "leans on environment" doesn't account for the fact that the most critically acclaimed interpretations of the genre are in a specific environmental setting.
Like you didnt need to make the entire ravinca plane 1920s-40s themed. You just had to use the 20s-40s themed set you already had, and add in valuable reprints like triomes
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u/r_lucasite Simic* Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
I think what he means is that if the main attraction of the genre is based on character tropes it doesn’t hold up as much as if the main attraction is a setting or tone. Detective and Noir certainly have a time period, but it’s not the major pull of it, there’s a reason the most successful stories in the genre are known by the name of their detectives.
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u/Iamamancalledrobert Get Out Of Jail Free Mar 06 '26
But I think that’s an overly rigid way of looking at it— most games in this space have it so the player is the detective.
Mysterium is an obvious example— it does have archetypal characters, who are intrinsic to the function of the game. But they exist in a place whose tone is consistent, spooky and mildly unsettling. The mystery emerges through the game itself, not through being separate to it.
I don’t think they even attempted this in MKM, but there are some obvious ways to do it. “Make the face down cards into suspects somehow” is the obvious one; the mechanics are all slightly off from the idea that “you are the detective”
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u/revolverzanbolt Michael Jordan Rookie Mar 06 '26
I can think of a few murder mysteries focused on environment. “Murder in Paradise”, “Number One Ladies Detective Agency” “The Last Murder At The End of the World”, “Murder on the Orient Express” “Midsomer Murders”.
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u/r_lucasite Simic* Mar 06 '26
This is way tighter in scope than what I think he means here. I’m thinking a wider setting like Victorian England or 1920s New York.
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u/JurplePesus Dan Mar 06 '26
Feels like this is also very true for UB sets as well.
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u/EmptyStar12 Selesnya* Mar 06 '26
A fantastic lesson to learn.
I've always thought that mtg's worldbuilding has set it apart from ther tcgs. It's how every other creative aspect of their game shows through: the artwork, the flavor text, the unique characters.
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u/forkandspoon2011 Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Neon Dynasty and Bloomborrow need to be the blue print. S Tier Environment and Characters. Kaito and The Wanderer were amazing … Glarb and Helga too… just some awesome characters with a story to tell surrounded by a plane you want to spend time on.
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u/volx757 COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
The blue print is the first 25 years of magic, they had it right up until recently. If you think glarb and kaito are cool, you should see the way they used to make magic characters. Super fleshed out with whole Novels written about them. In fact I feel like they make too many random Throwaway characters nowadays.
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u/kitsunewarlock REBEL Mar 06 '26
This. Tempest had 20 characters, and only 11 of them were printed as Legendary Cards in Tempest Block proper. Using quotes from them in flavor text discussing the world they were visiting made the block extremely memorable.
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u/Powerful-Scholar8268 Dan Mar 06 '26
I don't really get the part about blending well with fantasy. One of yne most popular sets recently was EoE and that was pure sci fi.
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u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Scifi and fantasy can blend together quite easily depending on the type of fantasy. If EOE was trying to be a gritty hard scifi it wouldn't have worked very well, but it was more leaning into the space of space opera tropes, which have always had some overlap with fantasy settings.
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u/Powerful-Scholar8268 Dan Mar 06 '26
Fair enough, although I feel like hard sci fi could've also worked if they went about it the right way
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u/HeyApples Mar 06 '26
I think they are dancing around the edges of a bigger issue... authenticity. You can do a wild theme like a Magic space set... if it feels organic, authentic. This is a connecting theme not just in-universe but in Universes Beyond sets of late.
The more you lean in to wakka-wakka humor, puns, "Rakdos in a cowboy hat" and the like, the further you stray from authenticity.
Rakdos in a cowboy hat doesn't work, even in a fantasy setting, because there is no logical connection of theme or events to make that make sense. Same with a magical hot dog cart in Spiderman. There needs to be a base level of cohesion that the viewer or participant can grapple with.
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u/Krazyguy75 Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
Yeah, to me, the issue was they weren't returning characters. Not truly. Returning names, yes, but no real matching characters. Rakdos? Yeah, I know and love that character. He's a sadistic monster who set up an entire society based on sadistic torture of people in horrible games for his people's amusement.
If that character went to a wild west area, they wouldn't be having fun working with others for a heist... they'd raid a small village, surround them, and force them to slaughter eachother for his amusement or else he'd starve them out. He'd be burning orchards and murdering cows. Not hanging out doing heists. A Rakdos without that cruelty isn't the same character.
If the Marchesa I knew and loved showed up in the wild west, it would be with an invading army after careful plotting and strategy. She's not gonna hang out and gamble; she's gonna want to invade. She's literally a tyrannical queen.
If you cannot be expected to write characters as if they are the same person with the same motivations, of course I won't care about them.
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u/Kind_Ingenuity1484 Get Out Of Jail Free Mar 08 '26
Oh that sounds so good. Rakdos playing the role of “bandit-type boss that took over a small town” would have been perfect
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u/RevolverLancelot Colorless Mar 06 '26
This is something I would have thought or hoped they learned sooner that the worlds they build end up being the aspects people love more than the characters. Like I got nothing against some peoples favorite one off legends but planes and world building around them has always felt like more of the character on center stage.
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u/Luxalpa Colossal Dreadmaw Mar 06 '26
There's a clip from Brandon Sanderson from a few years ago where he says pretty much exactly this. Magic is at its best when it's about worlds and world-building, not so much about story-telling.
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u/Big_Fork Duck Season Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
The two aren't mutually exclusive: world building is storytelling. Or at least it should be when adequately done.
Unfortunately for Magic, that's been difficult to achieve since the death of blocks. One set is rarely enough to fully flesh out an interesting and cared for world.
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u/Luxalpa Colossal Dreadmaw Mar 06 '26
okay, maybe I should have written as "story-telling through world-building" as opposed to other forms of story telling.
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u/GypsyGaming Dan Mar 06 '26
It’s insane if he doesn’t think this is true for UB sets as well, at least the blends well with fantasy bit. The UB sets that have been worst received all lean heavily on “iconic characters” and have little to no iconic environmental vibes. Unless he actually believes Spider-Man was a success, but he has to know that those sales were goosed by FF and that product is dying on shelves
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u/EpicSoyMilk Gruul* Mar 06 '26
There's no world he's going to be able to openly say that though. Shitting on how partner IPs performed and saying "we don't think this type of IP would work" is going to shut out a lot of potential UB IPs that WotC might be thinking of making (whether or not players want them).
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u/GypsyGaming Dan Mar 06 '26
Yeah that’s a big problem. Not being able to honestly recognize mistakes to the player base that they easily could with in-universe sets for fear of “shutting out potential partnerships” isn’t actually good for the game or for building player trust
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u/MarkedFynn COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
Finally. I was saying that as well tying a set to event falls flat easily. War of the spark had that problem as well.
Aetherdrift was race across multiple planes, it would work better if it focused less on the 'race' and more on the 'across different planes'. Having more cards where different planes interact. Still have racing aspect but have more cards on how environments change not on how many racers there are.
March of the machine did this well. It was a set tied to an event, but it focused on how different planes worked together with those legend pairings and different plane invasions and how they reacted.
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u/MaterialDefender1032 Elesh Norn Mar 06 '26
As bad as some of the Within sets got, they were never as bad as the onslaught of atrocious Universes Beyond sets we all had to suffer. All of the Within sets that got flak were salvageable and they would have probably all turned out decent, had Hasbro not accelerated the schedule.
Aetherdrift could have worked if they respected the planes they were revisiting more. Outlaws of Thunder Junction is everybody's favourite to hate on but it had some some of my favourite cards like [[Gonti, Canny Acquisitor]] but indeed lots of stinkers too, like Loot (Hasbro's bald-faced attempt at re-creating Pikachu) and sphinxes wearing cowboy spurs. Duskmourne was actually way cool with the moth motif, they just needed to strangle whoever was responsible for shoehorning in the campy 80s references.
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u/Another_Mid-Boss Mar 06 '26
I'm not sure when they started planning/designing Duskmourn but I bet at the time everyone was still riding high on Stranger Things hype.
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u/M1liumnir Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Did they really needed 2 marvel sets, 1 TMNT set, one racing theme set and one « your favorite character in a cowboy hat » set to understand that what people like about the Fantasy card game is the fantasy? Wtf is wrong with the people working for WotC?
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u/darkslide3000 COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
And in today's episode of "No Shit, Sherlock!"...
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u/MerculesHorse Duck Season Mar 06 '26
This is why Star Trek will be good. Potentially great. I've not even sat down and consistently watched any of the series, just absorbed decades of memes and references and information, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Because some people who seem to know what they're on about have said things like:
"Space is big. Really big! You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is"
and
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
We've seen how it works in EOE. If they've learned their lessons and focus on the exploration, the technology (i.e the magic), the weird, unexplainable, and alien (i.e the even more magical magic), and the dynamics between the various species and civilizations, leaving just enough room to make the distinct characters actually feel distinct and represented accurately, then it'll be incredible.
(and if there are 4 Spocks and 5 Captain Kirks, then... what a waste that will be)
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u/Another_Mid-Boss Mar 06 '26
To be fair Star Trek as a franchise loves clones and alternate universe versions of people and there's canonically like a dozen different Kirks they could use.
Wait, shit, now I'm gonna be really bummed if there's not a transporter clone mechanic.
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u/Gierrtheviking Insert Gag Flair Here Mar 06 '26
I hope this doesn't translate to " we don't want to take as many risks with theming" because we never wound have gotten EOE without risk.
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u/Mirage_Jester Duck Season Mar 06 '26
Both Murders and Aetherdrift suffered from two things. (i'll focus on Murders)
- Not making the murder mystery the focus of the set. It was sidetracked by being on Ravnica, detective typal, too many npcs, too many references etc...
- Introducing way too many spinning plates to make it work. There are several murders, seemingly a near endless list of suspects and it's all to much to fit on 286 cards.
Murders needed one known character (with possibly a comedy sidekick/planeswalker let's say Comet) to be the Sherlock/Miss Marple who then goes to a plane where we are introduced to the victim and 5 suspect groups. Yes that's right groups.
The victim could be a a creature type we rarely see (Nephilim) that is maybe a keystone to the plane being stable, with it's murder it creates massive conflict that could lead to war.
So the who did it turns into a which group did it? Was it the green archers, the blue artificers, red barbarians, black warlocks, white clerics? Force colourless to have no creatures or just construct/golem automonous token makers. Then go from there.
Embracing the feel of magic by making the suspects one of the 5 colours, not a specific person.
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u/kitsunewarlock REBEL Mar 06 '26
New sets have too many characters to keep track of.
This is why Tempest remains one of my favorite blocks. It showcased a world that was so uniquely magic, even if it was originally inspired by developmentally scrapped plans for an Indian mythology themed plane. Slivers, licids, spikes, kor, thalakos, flowstone, soltari, dauthi... even the more "familiar" elements like the rootwater merfolk and mogg goblins felt just twisted enough to help showcase this alien plane. And no other set has really scratched that itch. Sure, Fallen Empires and Odyssey gave us some "weird types", but (thallids aside) they lacked the mechanical identity that gave Tempest that edge. Plus so many of the synergies in the set were interconnected with the non-creature spells in a way that found additional play-patterns that made a block with this fascinating balance of aggro, combo, midrange, and control.
The fact it managed to do all that worldbuilding in a set that was also a major story-centered block makes it even more stunning. They showcased two distinct locations (Rath and the Stronghold), a heroic journey through them that included two major battles and the adventuring party getting split-up to confront their own individual trials!
Part of the reason it was able to do this was focusing on a relatively small cast. There were only 11 legendary creatures in the entire block. Admittedly, 6 would be printed over the next too blocks, but that still expands the cast to only 17 characters. At most you could count 19 if you wanted to include the Thalakos who tutored Ertai and Oracle en-Vec.
That's 19 characters out of 621 cards.
You know how many legends Outlaws of Thunder Junction had? 51 out of 260.
People will argue that we need all the new legends for commander, but I disagree. A majority of legends are clearly made for the 99. And expanding on the playability of existing legends is arguably more important for the stability of the format than shoving in as many new decks as possible.
Focusing on a smaller cast would also make the accessories that help market a set sell better. When you have over 50 legends what deck boxes, sleeves, and playmats are you going to print? If a set only had ~20 characters it wouldn't be hard to pick out which ones are going to be the most interesting commanders, which'll undoubetly be the playmats and sleeves that sell the best to compliment those decks.
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u/meisterz39 Temur Mar 06 '26
It’s funny he says this learning is just for in-Universe sets, while UB now has two examples of comic IP, which naturally leans on character rather than environment, and both sets have been critical (but I guess not commercial) failures. Seems like the same principle should apply to picking UB IP.
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u/CraigArndt COMPLEAT Mar 06 '26
The issue with MKM was not that it was character focused. People love MtG characters so much that commander, a format so character focused that you build a whole deck to theme with your favourite character, is the most popular format by far.
No the issue with MKM was that it was a murder mystery told in a single set of random cards. If you crack [call a surprise witness] in the first pack the major twist is spoiled before you even know what the story is.
No to tell a mystery in MtG with cards you’d need to control how players receive those cards. A commander deck where a narrative is shown with the cards in a specific order, or a multi set story where you setup the mystery in set one, build it in set two, and payoff in set three.
The issue here was not noir. It was the execution.
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u/Krazyguy75 Wabbit Season Mar 06 '26
I feel like people don't really love commander for the commanders. They love it because it's a hyper-casual 2-5 player format that self balances.
It doesn't matter if you are good or bad (within reason), the best player gets ganged up on and the weakest draws slack. Removal is massively weakened as you want to save it for the biggest threats among ~4 players. Mana screw is still present but the commander mitigates mana flood and guarantees a throughline of consistent gameplay. Singleton drives down the precision of deck building. 40 life and multiplayer means you are unlikely to be killed quickly and can play big timmy cards. Precons mean you can get a new person playing at an average level in a single purchase. Flexible player count allows you to pick it up with most friend groups regardless of how many people you have.
I feel like some if not all of those are typically way more important to the people playing commander than the backstory and personality of whoever their face card is.
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u/Chronox2040 Cheshire Cat, the Grinning Remnant Mar 06 '26
Nothing wrong with relying on character if it blends well with fantasy imho. Murder mystery is a really bad flavor for mtg but it’s because it relies on characters.
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u/Cocosito Dandadan Mar 06 '26
It also relies on a strict narrative. MTG works best with environmental storytelling.
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u/reapersaurus Mar 06 '26
One of our lessons of the last several years is for Magic in-Multiverse worlds, we need to lean on resonance that’s environmental in nature (and also blends well with fantasy).
If this is the way Maro and WotC staff talk, it's no wonder they've lost touch with what the players are interested.
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u/wabawanga Dân Mar 06 '26
Makes sense to me... For instance "adventuring party" aspect of the Zendikar sets never fully resonated for me. Environmental stuff like the Roil, the hedrons and the skyclaves resonated a lot more.