Magic Story - Burn

Because a living, breathing human being with loves, likes, hates, dreams, and family would die to satisfy childish whims in regards to a card game.

Or are you from the nazi apologist thread and don't see a problem with that

>Yawgmoth, Phyrexia, Urza, all the good old characters
I think by this point it's been made clear that people don't want the old characters back, they just want the planes to be the central focus instead of the group of five idiots

Wouldn't have made sense within the context of the story since later it's revealed she's more obsessed with elvish carpet than Gideon right now.

>He's so damn huge. My head fits under his chin. He smells like sweat and oil, the grime of a long day lifting things.

>I burrow into his arms like a puppy, rest my cheek on his chest, and close my eyes. His heart pounds under my ear. He wraps himself completely around me, armor and all, breath tickling the top of my head.

>It's been a long time since anyone held me like this. If Gids had done this four years ago, it would have made me feel tingly in all the places I like. Now it just feels...

>...Safe.

and time and time again, it was proven that it was a garbage formula for retaining players and a complete waste of fluff for anyone but Nat Geo fetishists who wanted to have a complete story told to them via 200 combat-focused cards about an entire world, its power groups, motivations, and events.

>200 combat-focused
That's today's problem, you dolt.

Yes, he must die and they must reprint all of the reserved list, improve mtgo and send me a booster box or 5 of unlimited

Remember when Walkers didn't act like children?

>purposefully misinterpreting obvious hyperbole for the sake of your argument
Man, your breath must reek of locker room smegma.

Owning the PW's Guide to Alara, I can confirm that 90% of it never made it into the cards because nobody fucking cares about the slaves who sell their flesh, mind, and soul in a desperate and tragic deal to escape the crushing poverty of their lives so that they can be mentioned on a single card that had no flavor text.

Tezzeret's tattoos were marks left by Bolas when he rebuilt his mind after Jace obliterated it CONFIRMED. So now I-have-daddy-issues-Tezz is stuck with ugly-ass red tattoos on his forehead to remind him who's his daddy. I actually like this.

Because truly, everyone on Veeky Forums is always joking, and never, ever serious.

Jokes and hyperbole aren't the same thing.

>the SJWs and the liberals will all be blown the fuck out

I see no problem there

I care, user.

Honestly, I understand the logic and everything, but when standard's red portfolio is nearly filled by 'Chandra blows something up', that's orders of magnitude more boring.

>Love triangle between Chandra, Gideon and Nissa

This is fanfiction tier and not even good fanfiction.

The parts about the Jacetice League were again cringey and horrible. L'Etoile has proven with his Ajani story that he can do better.

At least they try to give explanations for the retcons of Purifying Fire now, instead of pretending that it all didn't happen or that everything was a lie or something.

Only good thing was Baan, as usual.

fair enough, I tend to avoid reading the lore myself and just get summarised to me. It works because the story itself is fine, it's just the writing that's god-awful.

You're right, user. I miss it when Goblins Doing Something Stupid was Red's bag instead.

Nothing's changed, we just have a named Goblin on the packaging now.

No, Goblins are good, and work in Goblin decks. TUMBLR SHITBAG is awful, and works in nothing but the Jacetice League

Let me call Chandra a goblin in peace.

No. Why the fuck should you be allowed to enjoy the Jacetice League?

Because if I clasp my hands together and pray hard enough, maybe Battered Wife Syndrome will kick in and I'll be happy

Guess who's writing this shit.
That exact sentence could have been perfectly bearable if Chandra sounded like a real woman who's spend all his youth in a secluded rural temple and not like what an urban millenial twat thinks young women sound like.

THIS STORY CONTAINS REFERENCES TO SUICIDAL THOUGHTS

I think I could tolerate everything else if it wasn't for this.

I think a lot of you have too high expectations for a card games storyline. When was it ever good?

Because you're the guy in the corner grumbling while everyone else is doing shit they like.

Weatherlight

Owo what's this

What magic has consistently done well is, for lack of a better term, atmosphere. With card art and flavor text (Some examples not withstanding), magic does an excellent job conveying the worlds it takes place in. Long term, conceptual elements of the story are also well done.

Where it falls apart is characters. WoTC cannot write characters for the life of them, and their dialog skills are somehow even worse. That wasn't always a problem.

The GW isn't bad because its character focused, its bad because its character focused and WoTC doesn't know how to do characters.

Think of the cards Mikaeus, the Lunarch and Mikaeus, Unhallowed. That's neat, that's what they're good at. Now think of the oath cards. See the difference?

lol nobody enjoys Jacetice League. Wait a minute... are you just a viral poster for WotC?

This exactly. WotC's no good at characters and especially at constructing a satisfying plotline, because the needs of the game and its release schedule will always screw that over. They can manage passable wordbuilding, but that's about it.

Never. Weatherlight started off ok, if generic, but went belly-up partway through.

Well it caused them in me if that counts

A few things I noted.

One, for as much as I've hated the guy up until now, I actually really like Baral. He's probably the most not-Blue-yet-still-mono-Blue character I can imagine.

Two, why the fuck are the Gearhulk not Legendary if the story is going to treat them as such? I get that some people will actually like this more for gameplay purposes, but my inner Vorthos is tearing itself apart about this. Get your fucking shit straight, Wizards!

Three, that bit about suicidal thoughts wasn't even that bad! It was totally within Chandra's character to think like that (as well as it being well within Red's purview of qualities). On top of that, despite being rash and shortsighted, it would have been heroic in its own way. SJW's need to grow the fuck up and realize that everything isn't going to be sunshine and rainbows forever. Quit polluting my lore, you fucks!

WotC is good at characters, but it's better at character moments than ongoing narratives. Geralf and Gisa were initially names in flavor and letters, telling a disjointed story in snapshots. People fucking loved them. half of the one-shot story characters are better than the gatewatch because they have to breathe life into the character, makes us care, and nake them do something all in one story (and the other half fail because they don't do one or more of those)

even the gatewatch can be good, or at least tolerable in small doses. the best gatewatch stories involve three or fewer of them, as soon as you have four or the whole team, it goes to shit because wizards is trying to tie up their narrative or shove the plt along en masse instead of giving us worthwhile characterization. WotC can build up big worlds, they can show us nice snapshots of those worlds, they can't tell a story to save their lives.

>"I won't forget this, Baan."
>"Excellent. I do not care to repeat myself."

I don't care if he's a Marty Stu, Baan is great.

>implying jace won't just mind crush bolas through the power of friendship and maro's drug habit

Yeah, that's fair. They've had reasonable success with flavor-text based characters over the years, and Jace has actually had his share of good stories when the focus is just on him and not trying to work the whole team in.

I like how he just goes up to Baral after he got wrecked and arrests him for overstepping his bounds.

all the gatewatch are better without the rest of the gatewatch, and you can judge the quality of the story by the headcount, with some error for the specific characters involved (if kimberly's writing nissa it's garbage, and none of the writers have a decent grasp of writing chandra as anything but an ADD tween until very recently). go back to jace and lili's date and ravnica and just check each story for number of walkers and general quality. all of it is fine excepting nissa's bipolarity up until chandra ex machina makes everything stupid, then in istrad is fine up until that one episode of the real world: ravnica, then most of kaladesh has been fine save chandra's inability to metally pass puberty. and even then the human moments between her and her mom and mrs pashiri work fine. this last story had ups and downs but she was largely grounded, it was above average for a magic story, and it was a story about primarily three of the gatewatch with jace benched and two cameos.

How is that he seems immune to bad writing, even among the same authors?

Story wise, they were contest entries. Prototypes. They can and will be mass produced eventually, nothing inherently special about them, but for the moment there is only one of each.

Honestly, that's mostly a problem with this specific author. All of the cringy gatewatch dialog that Veeky Forums has posted since Kaladesh started have been written be L'Etoile.

Which is fucking weird, because he can write other characters and scenes just fine. But he has a really weird idea of how to write Chandra, and its 'slip into chaotic stream of consciousness writing and talk like a child'.

Which I can alllllllmost see the logic behind, but it just doesn't work.

'Burn', for all its faults, its still goddamn MILES above Homesick, which was awful in every way. So he is improving.

Huh. Must have missed that bit. Then again, I also missed the fact that Alesha is apparently transgender the first time around... not that it amounted to fucking anything.

Well, one each of Black and Red, as well as part of Blue.........

Green got notably Liliana'd while White got "Beefslabbed"

I feel like Gideon's new nickname should be Spanner.

Nickelback will be gutted and set on fire by friendship. :^) the phyrexians are gonna get it afterwards too.

Can some give me a tl;dr version of this?

>a living, breathing human being with loves, likes, hates, dreams, and family

You list all that shit as if they aren't the lowest of the low of common denominators, applying to pretty much everybody on the goddamn planet.

A nuisance is a nuisance.

>Dovin is the only one getting anything done while Tezzeret yells at everybody
>Tezzeret takes over Dovin's plane, sends Dovin and Baral to lure Chandra and maybe Pia into a trap
>Chandra acts like a teenager
>She also wants Gideon to take her to pound town
>Baral taunts Chandra, leading her and Nissa away while everybody else attacks the Renegades
>Gideon throws himself while invincible into the gears of a Gearhulk to stop it
>Chandra and Baral fight, Chandra nearly gets killed then Nissa, Gideon, Lesbian Artifact Grandma, and Ajani save her
>Dovin arrests Baral because taunting Chandra he revealed all the illegal stuff he did and lied about
>Pia and Chandra hug while having a moment
>Gideon is a bro and gets them ten minutes alone to be mom and daughter

Anything I missed?

Is this supposed to demonstrate that Chandra sees Gideon as a replacement daddy figure, or that she wants to fuck him? Or both?

>Dovin arrests Baral because taunting Chandra he revealed all the illegal stuff he did and lied about

Jesus christ. Saturday morning cartoon villain.

She wanted to fuck him silly some time ago, but right now sees him as a daddy figure, probably because Nissa is the newest crush. As fits red she moves on quickly.

>Ajani
Huh

So in the end, Baan will arrest himself for allowing Tezzeret to do all that shit, right?

I just don't see how anyone could be attracted to Nissa. She isn't even that good-looking and her personality is bland whenever she isn't literally Hitler.

Replacing Garruk as the main green walker was a mistake.

Damn maro, you really can't handle criticism, can you?

A lot of Nissa's art isn't even good. Compare pic related

to this

Same set, even

Yeah, Baral was always a sadistic dipshit. His status as a mage hunter made him an indispensable tool, though. As long as his targets were enemies of the state anyway, no one in power cared much that he was an evil fuck.

Dovin, however, does. Technically, Dovin doesn't even arrest Baral for being evil. He arrests him for lying about it on his paperwork and using consulate resources to do it. Because Dovin actually believes in the system.

I'm pretty sure that Baan is being set up as the 'one sane man' who will end up in charge of Kaladesh when this is all over.

Pia leads the revolution, but she has neither the ability or inclination to run an entire country. Baan does, and he is too autistic to be evil. He is like a calculator: he does the math for whoever asks it of him, but he never stops to wonder if they are using him for the right ends. He just implicitly assumes that the consulate, by right of being the consulate, is on the side of order and thus is right.

Tezzeret won't have to do much to prove to Baan that that consulate needs reform.

>Love triangle

I don't know. I feel like this story firmly cemented Gideon as not in the running anymore and he's not the type to push boundaries.

However this story did have a "platonic hug interpreted as a romantic hug by the real love interest" moment which is pure fan fiction tier bullshit

Ehh... Nissa and Chandra strike me as Platonic Soul-Buddies more than Lesbians. I mean, there's a closeness there but I am not seeing any real romantic feelings. And sure, Chandra describes Gideon's hug as being safe rather than making her tingle, but she also wasn't really looking for a romantic hug; she wanted somebody to embrace her warmly, caringly.

I'm not saying you're neccessarily wrong but it's more shipbait than anything else.

I think the parallel we're supposed to draw is that Gideon makes her feel safe like her dad did and is giving her the embrace he can't. It's no coincidence this is happening right around the same time she reunited with her mom. It also probably helps on some level that Gideon is effectively an immortal being while she's coping with her father's mortal demise, thus making it "safer" to put those feelings on him.

This means she's lot closer to Gideon than previously when she only thought of him as schlickbait, but not necessarily closer in a romantic way. There's a million different writers writing these characters though so some developments will just get swept under the rug.

Does this mean that Gideon is gonna bang Chandra's mom?

Could be an interesting development if only for Pia bullying Chandra about it.

Its interesting that Chandra seems to be gravitating to what she sees as islands of stability.

Gideon is, if nothing else, super dependable. He doesn't back out on you, and with his particular skillset he is the rock of the group.

But where Gideon is physically stable, Nissa is sort of spiritually stable. Chandra sees Nissa as having her shit together in a way that Chandra can't even really understand, and she envies how much control Nissa seems to have. Which is funny, because everything we ever see from Nissa's perspective is confusion and feeling like she doesn't belong.

Compare that tot he other members of the group. Chandra barely thinks about Jace at all, and she only hangs out with Lilliana when Lili is manipulating her.

Chandra is so Red it hurts, but it looks like he desperately wants to be less flightly and scattershot, but doesn't know how to get her life together beyond clinging to those she thinks already have it together themselves.

The way I see it is there's definitely going to be relationships between Gatewatch members.

I feel we're in for another year or two of will they won't they with Jace and Lili so they're off the table

Among the remaining members it feels like they're going with Chandra/Nissa to hit the gay main character checkbox. It feels like they've acknowledged Chandra had some romantic feelings for him but they've simmered down to just finding him hot while he's a friend.

Since Nissa couldn't really go with anyone else she goes best the raging ball of emotions that is Chandra.

This lets Gideon play the role of stoic justice man

GideonxJustice is the only OTP

100% on board with him and Ajani being justice bros

They need to head to Gideon's home plane and rescue Elspeth from hell so they can really get the Justice flowing.

White is truly the best protagonist color

I think the main issue with vital force is that the bottom-up angle isn't very flattering since that angle tends to make the person look fatter. It's a common tactic to take pictures from a top-down angle to give the illusion of being thinner after all.

I think for the most part the main cast has suffered from being bland. As the "faces" of Magic I expect WOTC to want them to be as likeable as possible. But I also think there's a disconnect between how characters are perceived on cards versus the stories. Just compare the vibe you get from Jace's flavor text to the actual fumbling he does in the stories for example.

Gideon is the best.

Have to admit this is pretty weird to see in a Magic story, not even sure that the Purifying Fire (Which I think was written by a romance novelist) or the Brother's War which sort of dealt with a love triangle between Urza, his wife, and Mishra, had writing like this.

The plane concept is cool, but truly the problem is that the planes themselves can be hit and miss and the stories and such for them would be rushed so they could be completed in three sets. Even older sets got the three book treatment for some reason. The only books that seemingly didn't suffer for this were the ones that were part of the main storyline and thus the planes took a backseat to focusing on the characters.

Planeswalker's Guide to Alara was small, but it was neat and did seemingly give you a much more flavorful look at the shards than the actual cards themselves did.

Admittedly I was a child/teenager, but the main story with Urza and the Weatherlight didn't seem that bad. It possibly helped that the majority of characters weren't planeswalkers and the planeswalkers were for the most part crazy in one way or another due to being immortals. Urza's journey into Phyrexia with a team of planeswalkers has an element of fun to it because for the most part another element of being a planeswalker was distrusting or out right hating other planeswalkers.

Really though I haven't kept up with Magic in years and can't attest to the current quality of the writing. With the current crop of characters I can remember enjoying Agents of Artifice, Test of Metal, and the interactions between Sorin and Nissa in the Zendikar novel.

>Tezzeret won't have to do much to prove to Baan that that consulate needs reform.

Or, more likely, that the consulate is so corrupt and spineless that they let a raving lunatic scare them so shitless that they made him Head Judge of this year's Inventor's Fair, and THEN Head Consul (which sounds like he basically crowned himself king).

There's obviously some degree of corruption in the system (exhibit A: Baral) and inventors getting shuffled off or straight up disappearing in some cases even prior to Tezzeret showing up. But Psycho McBitchface 5000 turned that knob to 11 and ripped it off, leading to the current state of affairs on Kaladesh.

Combined with Rashmi accidentally (re)inventing inter-planar travel and giving the keys to said insane cyborg, who last we saw was the blunt tool of a very powerful, very old, and decidedly evil Planeswalking Elder Dragon. No, not Ugin, the other one.

If I were the one writing this story (not saying I'm a good writer or anything), but it ends with the Jacetice League succeeding in overthrowing the main Consulate government. Mama Nalaar helps rebuild stuff (literally) while Baan helps run the government side of stuff. The rest of the team chases after Tezzeret, who probably escapes like a Saturday morning cartoon villain through the planar gate (with the plans for it too) and to Bolas' current base of operations, not!Egypt.

We need a story of how a random stranger popped up on Kaladesh one day and managed to attain so much power so quickly

I mean do background checks just not exist? Motherfuckers got no paperwork

Oh god, I just remembered that Gideon's home plane in Theros, and there's a good chance he's not been back to it since Theros block happened.

It is going to end up being Gideon + Ajani doing a "descent into the Underworld" to rescue Elspeth, and probably kill a god or two along the way (most likely them killing Heliod and Elspeth becoming the new god of the sun).

>talks like a 2016 earlytwentysomething

You should really go outside once in a while.

More like a middleteensomething

I suspect the simplest explanation for how Tezzeret got so much power is a combination of three things:

1. Being a really savvy inventor (thanks to his home plane of Esper/Alara, he knows how to work metal better than most).

2. Knowing just enough of Bolas' mind rape magic to mind fuck his way into power.

3. Straight up killing people who opposed him, as we've seen him basically be on one huge rage trip since being on Kaladesh (though this might be an act, based on what Baan mentally intoned to the reader).

Off-topic but can Sorin fly? Many of the vampires on Innistrad can fly. Can he?

He created an angel from nothing, I think he's capable of flight in some capacity.

How sad would it be for an inter-dimensional demigod to be incapable of flight?

he can but he doesn't fly for the others plebwalkers

>skipped leg day

Wait...Chandra's suicidal? Haven't read the last 7ish stories.

she was. briefly. kinda.

She was going to blow herself up, no one got a trigger warning when Barrin did it.

>she was. briefly. kinda.
Explain.

He did. In her fight against Baral she had a moment where she was ready to nuke him and herself to just end it because she realized she kept fucking up

Nissa came up behind her and went all IMAGINE YOURSELF IN A FROZEN FOREST and got her to step back from that ledge