Tfw you loved Theros but everyone hated it

>tfw you loved Theros but everyone hated it

I was looking forward to theros, but they fucked it up. They fucked it up bad.

Just like they fucked up every other plane with potential.

It's just going to become Fodder for Phyrexia to force Elspeth to join the Jacetice league.

The problem wasn't with the plane, or even the plot, it was the underpowered mechanics. They fucked it up in similar ways to how they fucked up Kamigawa.

Tarkir was awesome until DTK and even then it's still probably my favorite plane.

This. Thematically Theros was fine, they even had some good stories based in it. The problem was no one wanted to play the cards.

Some of the cards were really cool, Strength from the fallen and Meletis Astronomer are really cool build around cards and still have a special warm fuzzy place in my heart. Unfortunately that doesn't make up for the rest of the cards being shitty and not fun to play. Heroic and devotion are also pretty bad mechanics for limited, and can become boring in constructed.
>one year of pretty much the same mono blue and mono black lists being tier 1
bleerrghh

The mechanics were terrible, they encouraged all the worst feelings in magic. Heroic encouraged massive x for 1s in most scenarios, tribute was letting your opponent choose, inspired was untapping shenanigans and devotion encouraged cluttering board states.

The worst part of all of that is despite everything, the mechanics were really flavorful. Making enchantments gifts from gods really played up the flavor of the gods pushing their ideal mortals to greatness, Monstrosity on a few creatures felt great, constellation was awesome and really should have been in the second set, devotion was awesome in terms of flavor and bestow was really cool as the god's emissaries and favored creations came down to either fight for them or support the god's favorites.

A revisit could totally work but it needs some major mechanical work to make sure its not a dead weight block like theros was.

All Return to Theros needs to do mechanically is have Constellation in the first set and in all colors

Yeah, everything was bang on thematically, the mechanics just nearly all sucked to actually try and win with.

It wasn't just underpowered, though underpowered always hurts.
Heroic wasn't a bad mechanic per say, but combined with the rest really encourage vultroning single creatures too much.
Enchantments matters was poorly handled. Constellation should have been a first set mechanic, not third.
But at least we could tell it was an enchantment set, unlike what happened in Urza's

Monstrous was actually a good mechanic imho. Not all the cards were well designed, but the only overall success imho.

Tribute was terrible, and I'm not conviced could be made not terrible.

Devotion is a neat mechanic, but I feel could have been better in a set more about colors mattering, rather than a lot of it's power coming from it coming after a set with heavy hybrid mana.

The worst part about the set was that BNG and JIN made Theros look like the second coming of zendikar in terms of power.
Having sets full of cards hat were unplayable in the most underpowered formats made it a miserable year of Mono U, Mono B, and UW. Each deck had insanely good match ups that choked out diversity and changed marginally with 400 new cards.

>Enchantments matters was poorly handled.
That's because they wanted an enchantment set to go with the land set and the artefact set but they shat themselves up with Mirrodin and didn't have the balls to follow through on it. They should have had stuff that counted enchantments, stuff that discounted enchantments, made non enchantments into enchantments and so on, but I imagine they had flashbacks to the artefact lands and just backed away from that.

>Monstrous was actually a good mechanic imho.

When you think about it, Monstrous is really just the Eldrazi Werewolves with less flexibility.

The only problem I can see is that if they'd done DFCs for Theros, it would've played poorly with Devotion.

idk, i feel Scars did artifacts mattering pretty decent, without going the massive overboard that original mirrodin did.

Artifact lands+affinity for artifacts was not a good idea. Actually artifact lands was just not a good idea, because it lets you up the artifact count way to fucking easily.

but generally yes, I agree.

Simply not being a DFC makes it better.

DFCs are good though.

>with less flexibility.
and requiring a lot less space, both physically, and it's effect on the set as a whole.

You can stick monstrous into a set without too much other consideration. DFC need a lot more.

I thought it was great, except that Bestow and Constellation were handled poorly.

A mechanic that force you to either use proxies or tediously remove, flip and place again a card is a shitty mechanic.

There were 22 Monstrous cards in Theros block and 33 DFCs in Innistrad block.

That's not really that different when the sets including those mechanics were 399 and 445 cards respectively. That's about 6% of Theros/Journey to Nyx and 7% of Innistrad/Dark Ascension.

it's not a bad mechanic, but it's a big mechanic. Allows for a lot, but it requires a lot in terms of how it changes the format, and play.

It's something that should be restricted to using in rare occasions where they're willing to fully engage. Transforming fit the flavor of innistrad so well that it felt worth it, but it's not something you just stick into a set.

That's why I liked monstrous. It got a little bit of the flavor and play advantage that transform can bring, but shrunk to size that can be just onto single cards and fit into a set without making it a massive part of the set.

DFC change limited formats massively.
They change how the card print runs are done.
Because of how they are distributed in packs you are restricted in terms of how the mechanic is distributed across rarities and colors.

Number of cards is not enough to account for how much DFC shift a set.

>it's not a bad mechanic, but it's a big mechanic. Allows for a lot, but it requires a lot in terms of how it changes the format, and play.
>It's something that should be restricted to using in rare occasions where they're willing to fully engage. Transforming fit the flavor of innistrad so well that it felt worth it, but it's not something you just stick into a set.
It might fit Innistrad, but doesn't change the fact that it's an extremely annoying mechanic to have in a physical medium.
It's like if an Elderazi had a common place mechanic that was all about using out-of-the-game cards, so you'd have to to go around with two decks even during casual matches.

>It might fit Innistrad, but doesn't change the fact that it's an extremely annoying mechanic to have in a physical medium.
it's not nearly as bad as you are making it out.
It takes seconds.

It's not anymore difficult to handle than sets that focus heavily on having counters on cards.

I liked the themes of Theros. What I did not like was that they went "ENCHANTMENTS MATTER!" "ITS MIRRODIN BUT WITH ENCHANTMENTS!" Then fucking made the enchantments creatures and had no fucking good enchantments. Then on top of that after words in OTHER sets they printed obvious Theros enchantments and cards that SHOULD have been in Theros.

I wanted Fucking enchantments out the ass. They could have done so so much with them but nope shitty creatures. Then on top of that the power level was so low. They were depowering hard and they were also over costing new ideas to not break the game and it just ruined every thing.

Theros suffered from a lot of the same things Kamigawa suffered from. Good lore and story but shitty power level and stuff with only a few cards being of any real note and those few cards just taking over and over shadowing everything else.

They need to make EVERY set bottom up. Fuck the story until the mechanics are done. If the story doesn't fit the mechanics change the fucking story not the other way around.