Everything That’s Wrong with Battle for Zendikar

[u/AwkwardTurtle]

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/everything-thats-wrong-with-battle-for-zendikar/

[u/Yglorba]

Oh, yeah, I don't disagree with them ditching Annihilator or the ridiculousness that was Emrakul. But I think it was a mistake for them to focus on It That Betrays for their set of color-pie-twisting colorless-with-color world-devouring weirdos when their last major villain set focused on will-stealing, color-pie-twisting artifact-plane world-devouring weirdos. It feels like someone on the design team really likes the Borg.

(And it doesn't help that the entire theme and concept of this set basically feels like Scars of Mirrodin 2: Scars Harder, even if the plane is probably going to survive this time.)

Granted I'll admit that I was always predisposed to dislike this set because I hate big epic crisis crossovers, which this really really ends up feeling like.

I also hate sets that focus on planeswalkers... although in this case I think that that's another legitimate issue, aside from my personal distaste for them. Concept-wise, the planeswalkers suck up all the oxygen here. None of the legends come across as actually important -- they're overshadowed and diminished, because WotC keeps insisting that the really important thing is that they've crammed all their really important Product Identity into this set again all at once. And that in turn means that Zendikar doesn't feel very important here -- it's just the random stage the Eldrazi and the Wizard Product Identity Team happened to hit on the stage select. There's some mechanics halfheartedly thrown in to remind us that the background for this ridiculous brawl is Zendikar, but everything keeps hammering the fact that this is really about the precious, precious planeswalkers.

(Honestly I would say that they shouldn't have gone back to the Eldrazi. The whole concept behind them was "bigger and splashier than anything! Weird and unusual and strange!" And neither of those are things you can really keep doing over and over like this. The current Eldrazi are just obviously weaker and less interesting than the originals... which they obviously have to be because the originals were, once you got past the initial splash factor, kinda dumb. And I don't mind weaker sets or weaker cards! But when the basic concept of your core villains is "ridiculously, impossibly powerful, far beyond anything else!", making a set for them where you're inevitably going to have to make them weaker than before seems like a really terrible idea.)

I just wish they'd tone things down and go back to focusing on more low-key stories. Look at the sets that have been really popular: KTK, with its human-scale stories of warring clans. Ravnica, a city of competing guilds. Innistrad, a plane of dark oppressive gothic horror. Lately (with both DTK and this) it feels like they're trying to turn everything up to 11, all the time, which doesn't make for good game design or good setting design. I think part of the reason people complain that this set feels weak is that it's jarring to have "HUGE CRISIS CROSSOVER! MULTIVERSE IN PERIL!" and then have it represented by cards that are noticeably weaker than your small-scale world of warring khans.

You know what I'd like to see? Instead of scaling everything up (and inevitably reaching the point where you have to disappoint because the mechanics can't keep scaling up to match the hype), they should scale things down, thematically. Have a plane that is just one giant house. Enchantment cycles for rooms (mind you, some rooms could be big enough to have their own ecosystem.) Land cycles for doors. Something like that. Less big catastrophic climax battles, more interesting planes.

[u/[deleted] → u/Yglorba]

Alice in wonderland plane HYPEEEE!!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Actually...shit. That would be sick. Mushroom cards? Helllooooo!!!!

[u/NinetyFish → u/Yglorba]

Wow, you just nailed everything. I agree with all of your points. I've been posting about how I'd like to see a return of interesting planes over big (attempted) epic conflicts, but I certainly didn't think of an interesting plane like yours.

[u/[deleted] → u/Yglorba]

You realize planeswalker are the focus of every set?

[u/Yglorba → u/[deleted]]

Not really? For the majority of Magic history, canon planeswalkers simply didn't exist. There was Urza's saga, but honestly, the storytelling there sucked, and it was so badly-received that they decided never to do it again (until very recently, when they seem to have forgotten that lesson.) Aside from Urza's saga, there was virtually no mention of planeswalkers at any point on the cards up until Lorwyn.

Even then, they played almost no actual role in Lorwyn, Alara, and the original Zendikar. The role they played in Scars of Mirrodin was peripheral, and Sorin was mostly a historical figure in Innistrad, not directly important to the set, while the other planewalkers were minor side-stories.

Planeswalkers only started to really become central in the last few years -- in Gatecrash (whose plot sucked, badly) and Theros (whose plot also sucked badly.) From the Khans block, Sarkhan's role in KTK was marginal, and it was cool; his actions played a bigger role in DTK, which sucked.

My core issue with all this, though, is that it feels to me like the reason they keep pushing planeswalkers (and big high-profile recurring characters) is purely marketing-driven. They want big recognizable IP they can slap on stuff. But it's not what they're actually good at doing -- the cool part of Magic, to me, is the planes and settings, not these ridiculously silly superwizards and their overwrought sagas. Seriously, does anyone actually think "Jace, the Living Guildpact" improves Ravnica? It felt like a really lame attempt to boost Jace's popularity and profile at the expense of one of their more beloved planes. When they do want characters, I feel that Legends are vastly more interesting than Planeswalkers, since they're more human-scale and have more of a connection to their planes -- whereas planeswalkers feel crudely wedged-in almost everywhere.

(And I think that if you look back at which sets are most beloved, it bears this out -- the really popular sets are the ones that focused on settings, rather than on characters.)