Lore-wise, what are the qualities of a good planeswalker? By "good"...

If I were in WotC's creative department and responsible for flavor text, I would try to add a new blue planeswalker to the setting with some clear guidelines.
1) Mr. Blue should not speak too much; be aware of the ratio of talking flavor texts to action flavor texts.
2) When Mr. Blue does speak, it should usually reveal something. Mr. Blue makes observations; let his quotes reveal something about the world he is in or about events unfolding in the story.
3) Mr. Blue can also have internal dialogues. Mr. Blue contemplates things; when he talks to himself, he should be weighing the pros and cons of two possible courses of action. Emphasis on action. Mr. Blue gets things done.
4) Mr. Blue is quiet. He likes quiet. He does not get loud or excited because that just is not in his nature. And he has no tolerance for boisterous, disrespectful people; if some young hot-head starts speaking out of turn or raising their voice, Mr. Blue will silence them.

Let's go down the list.

>Ajani Goldmane
Liked. At least one good printing, good story contributions.

>Arlinn Kord
Liked, but unimportant.

>Ashiok
Neutral. Some upset by the "genderless" thing.

>Chandra
Disliked. Gatewatch member, weak cards, flavor text lambasted.

>Dack Fayden
Neutral, went from disliked to neutral after being printed.

>Daretti
Neutral, but unimportant.

>Domri Rade
Neutral, but unimportant.

>Elspeth Tirel
Liked. Relatively good cards, good story contributions.

>Freyalise
Liked. Old school.

>Garruk Wildspeaker
Liked. Good printings, good story contributions.

>Gideon Jura
Neutral. Gatewatch member, some weak printings.

>Jace Beleren
Strongly disliked. Gatewatch member, printed too often, broke Standard, hated in flavor text.

>Karn
Well liked. Old school, powerful card, great story contributions.

>Kiora
Liked. Decent story contributions.

>Koth
Liked. Strong story contributions.

>Liliana
Liked. Good printings, decent story contributions.

>Nahiri
Neutral. Good card, some upset by her story contributions.

>Narset
Neutral. Some upset by her actual autism.

>Nicol Bolas
Liked. Old school, powerful card, strong story contributions.

>Nissa
Strongly disliked. Gatewatch member, largely hated for story contributions.

>Ob Nixilis
Neutral. Some may like him for his actions against the Gatewatch.

>Ral Zarek
Neutral. Some upset by the Rarity fiasco surrounding his printing, and also for killing Melek in story.

>Sarkhan
Neutral. Some upset by his belief Tarkir is better off with dragons.

>Sorin
Liked. Fairly good cards, some upset by the fact he's relatively ineffectual in story.

>Tamiyo
Liked, but unimportant.

>Teferi
Liked. Old school, great story contributions.

>Tezzeret
Liked. Good cards, decent story contributions.

>Tibalt
Liked. Somewhat ironically.

>Ugin
Liked. Good card, strong story contributions.

>Venser
Well liked. Good card, good story contributions.

>Vraska
Neutral, but unimportant.

>Xenagos
Liked. Good story contributions.

>>Tibalt
>Liked. Somewhat ironically.
Listen here, nigger, that may be correct, but there's also a very healthy helping of 'but it could be funny' in there.

Venser got away with it.

I liked Venser. Why did they have to kill him off again?

The exception that proves the rule

Because his dead body is how they'll let the New Phyrexians travel to other planes.

Except not at all since his spark is gone

He was building teleportation rigs before his spark ignited in the first place.

He sacrificed himself to save Karn I believe.

Dammit, Karn.

Well, could somebody remind me what ever happened to Radha, Heir to Keld? I thought her and Venser had a thing.

>Tamiyo
I wish they would make her more important. I'm not one of those people with a burning hatred for Jace or anything, but I do like her better as a character than him.
It also makes me happy whenever they acknowledge Kamigawa.

>I think the problem is that Jace talks too much, but has very little of interest to say
he's basically got the same problem the weatherlight crew had like fifteen years ago

She burned out her spark fixing time rifts.

Damn, that's right.
What about Jeska? Have we heard from her lately?

Didn't she die in the Mending?

Interesting

Has jace actually DONE anything impressive?

One that actually cares about exploring this mysterious new plane he just showed up on, just like us.

Solving the maze thing and becoming king of Ravnica was sort of cool, maybe.

Why do you think that not being human is inherently interesting?

To this day, I don't know what the plot of Return To Ravnica was.

I had given up on reading the terrible novels some time before that. There was something about a maze showing up for no reason, (which I guess Niv Mizzet ran, based on the set name?) and then it went away and Jace Beleren became magical guild intermediary or something somehow.

And then quit his job? He doesn't seem to be on Ravnica much.

The maze was discovered by the Izzet guild, rather than being run by Niv.

The Izzet organized the competition to run the maze, though.

I'm also peeved on the whole "Jace became the Living Guild pact but has now stayed off world for many sets and has even gone insane" situation.

I half-hope this means we'll be going back to Ravnica to address the fact that Jace a shit

The first leader of the Azorius slipped in some fine print on the Guildpact that basically said that if the Guildpact were to fall apart and a similar replacement wasn't drafted within a certain amount of time, there'd be some serious Supreme Verdicting all over the place. The maze was constructed to try and find someone or something who could make everyone not want to kill each other.

Has Jace actually ever had to work through a difficult choice?

The maze run would qualify as such, based on some of the shit he had to do during and after it.

Good news, now they all want to kill Jace!

I want to like Jace so badly but wotc is making it so difficult. He would be such a boss if they didn't make him go all anime protagonist and instead had him battle it out with Niv-Mizzet some more.

>anime protagonist
What?

>Rarity fiasco
What do you mean by that?

like japanese cartoons

No shit. I'm asking how you think Jace acts like an anime protagonist.

He has a harem of dumb sluts, one of which is a tsundere waifu. How is he not an anime character?

Oh, so you're retarded then. Got it.

Bad writing =/= anime character
Jace is a useless piece of shit but there is also some at least decently writzen anime out there so it would be unjust to discredit anime so badly

He has what, one person who he mind wiped (Emmara), and the other option is Liliana Vess. How is that a harem?

Urza was the scarymad opponent. His plans where extremely competent, if completely heartless

So, the original plan was to print the legendary Guild members in Dragon's Maze as Mythics. Then they decided that this was the best time to print Ral Zarek. A big argument broke out in R&D on whether it would be acceptable for each of the other guilds to get a Legendary Creature but Izzet get a Planeswalker. The ultimate decision, obviously, was "no", and they dropped the Legendary cycle to Rare. This decision came late enough in development that they didn't have time to thoroughly playtest them, so they erred on the side of caution, neutering many of them to be "safe". Some of them, like Emmara Tandris and Voice of Resurgence, got pretty much switched out, Emmara became trash and Voice was accidentally a little too good, making the already strong Thragtusk decks of the time even stronger.

It disrupted a big part of Dragon's Maze's design, leading to a lot of disappointment in both the Maze Runners and Mythics of the set.

emmara getting an ass capable of stopping a craw wurm was pretty amusing, at least

Perhaps the problem is too damn many characters.
32 New-Walkers. 32.

There is no room to focus on anyone or anything except their flat personalities. Some of them barely even get that.

Fuck look at Karn. All of his personality and story comes from "Before", what would we really know of him if all we had was the scars block?

>Garruk Wildspeaker
Liked. Good printings, good story contributions.
>Koth
Liked. Strong story contributions.

...
No.

After getting the rest so right, how'd you fuck up on the two obvious ones?

I've only ever heard positive things about Koth, with some part being that he was probably the best Mono-Red Planeswalker at the time of his printing and for the Resistance team having a lot of support.

Garruk is one I'd seen a bit of polarizing opinions on, but for the most part people that didn't like how the story was going didn't dislike Garruk himself, just the direction his story took.

The true question is what the hell happened to Tezz

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/checking-planeswalkers-2015-2015-08-19

>Pursuing new sources of power. Although the artificer Tezzeret has pledged his loyalty to the dragon Planeswalker Nicol Bolas, he prefers to recall his pledge only when it works to his own advantage. When Bolas sent Tezzeret to investigate the corrupted plane of New Phyrexia, Tezzeret was eager to wrestle leadership of the plane from its current "Father of Machines," the silver golem Karn. But his efforts were thwarted, and he has since begun a new mission for the dragon, carefully laying out his plans from a new corner of the Multiverse. . . .

>Tezzeret is confirmed not to be on New Phyrexia anymore
>Artifact block coming up

Good times ahead.

The true question is what has happened to Tezz..

I'm waiting for the day Tezzeret is ultimately the one to take out Nickles.

Doesn't land on a new plane and instantly begin empathizing with the people on it and fighting for them. Like, what exactly what Elspeth's motivation on Theros? Selfishly wanting to prove that she's not a massive fuckup or what? She didn't have any. If anything her focus should've been on finding something to combat the Phyrexian invasion/oil that destroyed her home plane. Instead she got herself killed fighting for a cause that she had no reason to be fighting.

>Lore-wise, what are the qualities of a good planeswalker?
They have to be _very_ good at chess.

Might be the wrong thread for this, but you guys might know because it's lore related.

I remember reading a mtg book a long time ago, and during the story there was this girl performing blue magic. However, it was described that the fuel for casting blue magic was memories and all that. There was a girl teleporting herself, and it describes that she was thinking about these beaches that she grew up on, and all these happy memories, and when the spell goes off and she ports, she arrives at the destination almost weeping because all those memories got burned out of her.

Is blue magic still fuck awful to cast for normies in the fluff? I imagine planeswalkers get around this somehow.

I remember memories being involved in The Gathering Dark (with Jodah) but I don't recall memories being burned out of him. Then again, he was using red magic at the time.

>Some upset by the Rarity fiasco surrounding his printing
First I heard of this, what do you mean?

nissa, chandra, liliana, and gideon

Jace splits his mind into multiple wholes, hes able to recall forgotten memories at will if one of his selves remembers still, which he is careful to make sure happens. This is just fluff for the mil/cantrip mechanic's blue uses to get cards.

see

Tezzeret gets one novel to himself, and it's completely insane. It basically reveals that he's a will-to-power ubermensch, and that being brought back to life by Bolas has changed his view on things.

He also turns out to be obssessed with eternium, and - through a complicated series of events - achieves enlightenment.

I pretty much agree with this list.
And this guy tooI wish they could spend more time into developing the story instead of just one uncharted realms article per week.

Her ass is fat.

Jodah was White. His teacher was Red. Atleast in the first novel.

Well, I mean, from what I hear the next Ravnica set is "Guild War," so I guess the guy who stops exactly that from happening being off-world all the time is kinda relevant.

>"You had ONE JOB, Jace!"

Aside from Karn and Bolas what other pre-Mending characters are still active? I can't think of one that didn't either die or lose their spark during Time Spiral.

Sorin, Ugin and Nahiri apparently, they existed back then but they were just written in.

Sorin, Liliana, Ugin, Nahiri, and Ob Nixilis were all oldwalkers.

Two members of the crew came up with the best flavor text in the game, though.

Surprised no one's mentioned Feldon yet, the objectively best one they've come up with.

That might have something to do with the fact Feldon isn't a planeswalker.

Oh right, my bad. No reason he shouldn't.

And here I would've settled for them just making Arcanis a blue planeswalker.

I'll be honest with you, I was shitposting. If you want an answer with some tought into it though, I dont find non humans inherently interesting. Rather, I find planeswalkers more interesting when they dont play it safe, and using a human is usually the safest choice for a character's race.