Why does barely anybody care about the lore/storyline behind Magic...

There's been ~50 burn spells printed since Battle for Zendikar. ~1/4 have have "Chandra's" in the name.

>Aetherborne basically saved this story.

t. Tumblr

They're running out of fire words user. Unless you want to start mashing them together so you get "Flaming Scorching Flame Blast" or "Volcanic Blazing Hellfire" or "Erupting Burning Finger" and red magic loses all coherency entirely.

>and red magic loses all coherency entirely.

I mean... that would be in theme, right?

>Erupting Burning Finger

What I'd give for a G Gundam reference in magic...they fucking blew Khans! Instead of actual cool martial arts themes they literally made the story autistic.

That the worst part about modern day fiction. This wasn't supposed to be something we throw rocks at, but tumblr came in all masturbatory and circle jerking in perfect goose step to crack down on the fun we're allowed to have, and now I can't enjoy what might be one of the most interesting races in Magic so far without being associated with those fuckers.

This is what happens when we let girls into our secret boys clubhouse.

Weatherlight Saga was the only story worth following.
The characters weren't shit, the cards tied in very well with the story. The heroes really felt out classed in a genuine way. The villain's motivation was clear.
It was a great time to play magic.

The characters were shit and you only have forgotten that after twenty years because you read it when you were a child
It was wannabe fantasy Star Trek with shallow fucking quips every two paragraphs because 3/4ths of the cast was smarmy cunts acting smarmy

>This is what happens when we let autists into our secret nerdy alcoves.

FTFY

>rightfully blames all women for being incompetent and literally ruining everything

i'm sorry i called you tumblr-grade, brother

>two autistic lesbian idiots
Wait what did I miss?

weatherlight had so much plot armor on the gang that it felt like jojo's bizarre adventure

i still enjoy both though

All they have to do is give them the name of something fire related on the plane. It acts as world building. Take Pillar of Flame from Avacyn Restored. From the name and what the spell does we get the picture that some people on Innistrad cremate the fuck out of corpses so they can't come back as zombies. Or Brimstone Volley from Innistrad. It's people using balls of flaming brimstone as a weapon, and with morbid it's like they're pissed as fuck when they do it because their friend or something just got eaten by a zombie so now they REALLY want to burn them. Cards are a great way to build your world, but Wizards stopped caring when they switched to 2 set blocks. Now blocks are like areas at a theme park. You go to one, go on a ride or two, then get ushered to the next one. There's no point trying to take in the sights because there aren't any sights to take in because there's no reason for them to be there when people are just being rushed through.

Worldbuilding since the Avengers has been fucking awful. Zendikar is this huge sprawling world, but instead we just get the Avengers shoved down our throats.

Market research says players like it when thy can associate their cards with their favorite characters in the story : ^ )

(((Rosewater)))

I don't think the two-set blocks is the problem. I think you nailed the crux of the problem with all the focus being on the Avengers bullshit, though.

Currently oversaturated, bland, multiverse based kitchen sink setting. Still, this basis provides for some really cool artwork and small stories that are great when divorced from the primary storyline.

There is no market research and there never was. I've been playing cardboard since Avacyn Restored and I've never once seen a survey about this. Nobody at my LGS has a favourite character beyond the first one they ever pulled in a pack, and even then it's a nothing to them.

There's really nothing wrong with having a strong central cast, though. The story doesn't suffer for it. It's a different paradigm rather than a worse one, planes become setpieces rather than environments, but that's not actually a negative design philosophy to hold. On the converse side plenty of players gave no shits about planes whatsoever, because once the story moved to another plane, you can't expect to see a native of that plane again for several years at best. You can't have consistent protagonists or villains, and so while some players love the larger universe that focusing on planes brought, plenty of players found the set dressing to be bland and transient.

Fundamentally one's not really better than the other.

Squee
Mishra
Teferi
Baron
Mirri
All had more character to them than the damn Walkers we keep seeing. There's nothing wrong with simple as long as it's also good.

it was a joke, that's literally what Nosewater and all the public representatives say when they give answers

Magic is not supposed to be about a "strong central cast", almost no one actually likes these fucking Planeswalkers, they're more interested in the worlds.

>Squee
Literally a joke character
>Mishra
He wasn't part of the weatherlight saga, he was only alive for a single book, and his entire personality was "jealous of Urza"
>Teferi
Smarmy cunt
>Baron
I'm assuming you mean Barrin and not Baron Sengir, but Barrin was pretty much only there to observe and blow up Tolaria that one time.
>Mirri
Yeah, she and Sisay weren't that bad. Not much competition for them, though.

they neo-walker stories all suck because MTG lost it's high fantasy feel. Sure old sets didn't concentrate on one plane but in ha way they made the world bigger. Dominaria seems so vast that you can't possibly imagine the whole fucking plane because it's literally earth 2.0. Every other set starting from mirrodin just turned planes = countries. It narrowed down the scale so hard that you couldn't get engrossed in the flavor anymore (although the flavor/storyline was pretty good around to until RTR/Threros). Ravnica is literally City: the Plane. Good thing original Rav had a fucking good story else it would've been trash.

Now they've just dumbed it down for easier mass consumption. It's pretty bad because the actual game is now shit with regard to standard. If flavor can't even make up for it anymore then why play magic.

Your generalization needs some data to back it up.
I know I don't give the single slightest fuck about Kamigawa or Mirrodin. Only thing I like about Ravnica is the guilds, I can't remember the name of a single person other than Niv-Mizzet. Theros may as well not exist.

this guy gets it

This, this is a good post.

teferi turned goat in time spiral though

but honestly i think he's bad cause he's black
also
>impying barrin's mightstone isn't deeper than any of the neowalkers' personalities

Because it has great ideas that end being shit. It's so disappointing what they do every time that I don't even care anymore

>doesn't care about Mirrodin
No taste.

Time Spiral was a good while after the Weatherlight Saga, user.
Barrin was likeable, but only because he was a level-headed straight man while Urza was being a lunatic. Barrin was not interesting on his own, he was a foil. A good foil has its merits, though.

I liked that Barrin had real emotions especially when he lost his shit and blew up Tolaria after his family died cause Urza is a god damned lunatic.

>It's pretty bad because the actual game is now shit with regard to standard.
No, you see, we will just ban things until they are perfect

I liked the understated lore of the early sets and the Weatherlight Saga, but it kinda started going downhill after that with the only real highlight since was Ravnica.

But Chandra has emotions too! Haven't you seen Chandra's Pyrohelix? She was REAL mad at Baral!

>REAL mad
>2 damage

i missed out on that one

...

The focus on the Jacetice League honestly hurts the story plenty. It's so obvious they are here to be the face for a MtG movie that it's painful. Especially when the setting lends itself so much better to a series.

>movie

HAH

Tell me about "old" Magic lore, Veeky Forums

You grogs always talk about it but never about WHY it was supposedly much better. It's always stuff like >oh the newwalkers are so lame or >it was much better back in Weatherlight

Nu mtg = snowflake fan fiction tier
Old mtg = mediocre high fantasy

markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/95397446143/can-we-get-a-review-of-all-known-info-on-the-magic

>markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/95397446143/can-we-get-a-review-of-all-known-info-on-the-magic

>GoT writer
>Chandra gets raped after having her powers temporarily removed and one hand cut off

>Why does barely anybody care about the lore/storyline behind Magic?

Because A) it sucks and B) it's not necessary to play the game.

In order to play well, you need to study the card's abilities and how they interact, not some cringeworthy back story.

its cause its corny as hell and boring
never have i ever played magic and said "man i really wish i could read a novel about the lore behind these cards"

I miss the snowflake walkers Veeky Forums made

Most of it was pretty mediocre, but bits and pieces were interesting chunks of world building. There were a few sets with nice explorations of an African inspired fantasy culture, but without it feeling forced. The shit Urza pulled, even before becoming a planeswalker, was a nice exploration of ends justify the means in a high magic setting. Also, while some of the phyrexians definitely lacked substance, Yawgmoth felt like a legitimate threat - more so than the eldrazi ever did. I think a major part of how that was pulled off was through his pervasive presence as the villain behind each villain, and the fact that they never gave him a card.

I thought that Khans did a good job of presenting a wider world.

I used to read the novels that came out with every set, then the books stopped being packaged in fat packs

I more find that the Gatewatch stories don't turn out too badly when it's just some of them around at a time. If it's just one or two, sometimes three of them? Things actually more or less work.

Drop all five on the one plane and in the one story? Quality takes a nosedive.

found khans pretty mediocre, the new trend seems to be 1 area for each faction/color per plane.

They could've executed it better but just i really wish they did more with the non-dragon, non-human races besides cameos. Sidisi and zurgo were great, zurgo could've been better though

Characters were mostly flat, but they weren't shit, they were just firmly mediocre, with the rare guy who was actually interesting like Urza. Story had stakes and the action was swashbuckly enough to be enjoyable.

Of the main ten(ish?) crewmen like three or four fuckers lived, and that's not even tallying up the death count of supporting characters outside of the Weatherlight's crew.

The Jacetice League ruined it all. Nothing has stakes, the worldbuilding has been neglected in favor of character-driven stories, but none of the characters are worth following. The diet SJW shit is really a secondary complaint for me at this point because it's all just so poorly written in general, though I'm not naive enough to think one isn't directly related to the other. It's amazing just how much I've retroactively come to like the Weatherlight storyline because I've had to hold it up to the last 5 or so years of bouncing from plane to plane on the backs of whiny children interested in interceding in local issues that don't concern them. It'd be kind of meta if it weren't so cringey.

Lore was at its best during times like Fallen Empires when everything was a mystery and they really tried to take advantage of the format, focusing more on building a world than telling a story. Really gave it all a feeling of wonder, only knowing who Urza and Mishra were through scattered pieces of flavor text.

You're a bit misguided. People shouldn't care about it because it's mostly garbage but with an occasional diamond. And by occasional, I mean there are maybe four or five things worth reading.
People do care about it these days because they want to use it as a vehicle for their current objections with the game, grounded or ungrounded as they may be.

>Nothing has stakes
This is the worst part for me.

>Mindbending horrors from beyond space and time are destroying everything you know and love?
>Better strap on your shield and fight one last time in a vain attempt to save everything you've ever known and loved.
>Oh wait, never mind. The Dimension hopping wizards are here to fix everything and sell breakfast cereal.

Lots of people died in JJBA too mein nigga, karn is parctically jojo

People on Innistrad don't burn corpses. It's heresy. Interfering with the corpse angers the geist, burning it produces really angry ghosts and in general prevents the slain from reaching the Blessed Sleep.

what's worse is people actually did die but they tell it in such an uninteresting way that you aren't even bothered to care cus of muh spotligh on le jace tease legume xD

It's a sort of damed if you do, damned if you don't setting.
>Don't bury the dead
>Get angry ghosts
>Do bury the dead
>They're probably going to come back as zombies.
Thinking maybe that cannibal village had the right idea.

Well they can't raise the dead if the Avacynian wards are maintained and the Cathar's do their jobs. Shame that Avacyn is dead and corpses probably outnumber the living 100000000000000:1 now.

Anybody who legitimately thought the Eldrazi were going to completely destroy Zendikar is a fucking retard.

t-thanks gatewatch

>protagonists collpased planes on purpose in the old testament
>mfw now protagonists are being autistic lesbians

No.
But I would have like some more drama, then just having the good guys show up and fix everything.
And they've done it on two planes so far.

Sexual tension so thick it stars in an ebony BBW porno.

The motherfucking gothic horror-turned-cosmic horror plane didn't claim a main character. I'm pretty sure Gerrard's love interest died to fucking consumption or some shit.

You right my nigga I apologize.

Get hype because that's all your going to get. The closest thing you'll get to drama is Gideon microaggressing someone and then apologizing profusely. This isn't even a problem unique to Magic, this is just typical capeshit. Gotta keep 'em coming to sell the next issue, and if things happen and it becomes less accessible like the game admittedly did around Time Spiral (like I fucking liked it) sales go down. Remind yourself that we will never see Kamigawa again because it was mechanically mediocre and retards didn't get the fluff because they tried too hard to avoid it being a theme park setting.

>Play mono-white Angel tribal, use Avacyn in most of my decks
>Oh shit, they're going back to innistrad, my favorite plane, angel HQ! Not to mention kick ass gothic atmosphere!
>Thank god, I was getting so fucking tired of Eldrazi!

>Mfw they reintroduce the Eldrazi RIGHT AFTER ZENDIKAR, kill off every single Angel aside from one, corrupt two of them into Eldrazi, corrupts Avacyn into a psychoath that has to be put down by Sorin, corrupts Mono-white Nahiri into a psycho bitch who walks away free, kills off 95% of the population, completely retcons the entire last set, retcons Werewolves back into existence despite Wolfirs being a thing, and ruins the whole setting overall.
>Than they have the audacity to release a Innistrad book for DnD right afterwords.
>Ima'kul, Youra'kul, Me'merakul

Fuck wizards, Im still salty after that shit.

Not to mention the fact that Innistrad on a whole is utterly fucked now, and the Justice league just says "good luck" and skips out to a Science fair for fuck all reasons, leaving the now angel-less and churchless people to the mercy of some random Werewolf bitch, and a plane full of Vampires, mad scientists, zombies, demons, devils, and now Eldrazi.

Oh, and now thats ANOTHER Mono-white character that gets fucked over.

Fuck you WotC.

>Not to mention the fact that Innistrad on a whole is utterly fucked now, and the Justice league just says "good luck" and skips out to a Science fair for fuck all reasons,

I mean, technically the JACETICE LEAGUE is there to stop planar destroying things ie eldrazi. After that, they're off. At least, that's the gist of what I got. I stopped caring about the lore after the whole "planeswalkers are just wizards who can hop planes instead of demigods now"

It's okay friend. We can be angry together.

You are in a MASSIVE minority on the side of disliking the retcon on Wolfir I'd wager. I know no one who preferred Wolfir to Werewolves, and Wizards and Maro are on record saying they got big backlash for replacing them and removing transform in general.

Also, the church is still intact, just the center of worship is now Sigarda, the only angel who remained loyal to the humans. I don't think they explained how or if it affected their faith magic though. I thought Avacyn was what gave their faith power, but maybe it's more like they just need a focal point, and Avacyn's disappearance just made people lose faith which weakened their magic, but as long as they have something to put their faith in, the Sigardian church's magic still has power.

The reason we had Eldrazi again was because this was a direct continuation of the BFZ block story. Think of it like Lorwyn -> Shadowmoor more than how they did it before, where block stories where wholly seperated. To me, it's like complaining they did Elves again on Shadowmoor even though it's a new block. BFZ block really soured people on Eldrazi. I recall most people LOVING them before then. I get he idea of having too much of a good thing, but man we had about an old 3-set block's worth (BFZ large, OGW small, EMN small) of Eldrazi, so I don't think it should be too much yet.

It's also possible that Avacyn always sorta kinda existed as like some kind of passive entity. We see in cards like Faith Unbroken that you can still get power from her, so something is up there. Either Avacyn has gone back to just being white mana similar to how there are old sea god on Innistrad that give power to worshippers but don't have forms or he couldn't unmake her fully any more, so 'Avacyn' as a entity doesn't exist but her passive faith based powers still do.

One of the biggest issues is that they went to far in AVR with things like Wolfir meaning that they had to fuck Avacyn up in order to make it look like Innistrad did the first time around.

Alternatively, Sigarda is the new head boss bird.

Holy crap, you're still butthurt about that?
You're not still making threads about it, are you?
Nothing will ever change the fact that the heavy angel focus is part of why AVR sucked and ruined Innistrad block.

Unfortunately Sigarda is 10 leagues beneath Avacyn in terms of power, if she couldn't hold off the evil when all her sisters and flights were alive, what hope does she have now?

Reminder that the "old sea god" was purely an echo of the eldrazi.

An echo of the Eldrazi that has existed for at least as long as the vampires? That doesn't sound right.

It's purely conjecture, since we have no idea how any of this works, but perhaps with worship slowly turning to Sigarda instead, she starts gaining much of the former power-through-belief which Avacyn held, without having to share it with her sisters.

She may not end up being as powerful as Avacyn was, since gothtits had the added boost from being created by an oldwalker, but her lack of retarded programming may make up the difference.

But gothtits is best angel.

The World building is still on point, but their writing and lore has not been that great. I thinks it's more a case of that its nice that it exists, but its just not a draw on its own.

I haven't read the art book, but the old sea god the Nephalian cultists and Stromkirk vampires worship is now named (I forget what it is) and is far as I know unrelated to the Eldrazi.

Oh shit my B senpai, I was thinking Ula, Emeria and Cosi from zendikar.

mtg.gamepedia.com/Emeria
mtg.gamepedia.com/Cosi
mtg.gamepedia.com/Ula

Of course I don't
Instead, I have internalized my hate, as a reminder to never give another cent to WotC. I have not bought a single card, booster, or any other product from WotC to this day, nor do I ever intend to do so again.

But fuck you, Angels were great in AVR. But unike SoI, even if you hated how it ended, at least there was a balance between good and evil. Avacyn was released, at the cost of the demons of the Helvault going free.

SoI and EM just fucked everything over.

I will agree that the Wolfir thing was a step too far. But retconning the Wolfir entirely, and than forcefeeding us the Werewolves as some sort of alternative to the angels was dumb. They could have just said that the Wolfir, without Avacyn, were degenerating. Or that Avacyn was purposefully removing the spell, so as to help purge the peoples of Innistrad.

Sigarda though, is just not that powerful, as put it. Although, I would accept the idea that via the faith of the people, Sigarda COULD be that strong, or even stronger than Avacyn, as she is the lone angel to pay tribute to now. Making her the actual last Angel does piss me off though.

But I will straight up disagree with you on the Eldrazi. There was absolutely no reason to introduce the Eldrazi RIGHT after giving them plenty of new cards in BFZ and OGW. But more importantly, it felt like a wasted oppertunity to just straight up have the last free Eldrazi titan get captured RIGHT after it escapes, and the other two die. Further more, it just hurts the plane of Innistrad conceptually, as it dilutes the Gothic horror of it into some bland mish mash of Eldrazi.

Eh, Wolfir do still exist if your issue is that you don't like that they were there and now they were gone. They actually DID say that the Wolfir reverted because Avacyn had gone mad and couldn't maintain the cursemute (I forget where, but I'm 99% certain they said it, and I know for sure it was implied in one of the earlier stories where the man kills his family but he doesn't know that it was him, because he thought the cursemute cured him of his lycanthropy, but he realizes that he's turned back), and there are still SOME Wolfir (though I think the only example in the block was Silverfur Partisan-- I'd bet there's more explanation on this in the artbook) for some reason.

And to be fair, it wasn't RIGHT after OGW. It wasn't until EMN that we had Eldrazi again even though we know it was Emrakul the whole time anyway, and there were less there as well. But if they wanted to continue and conclude that storyline, they had to do it in the next block. That's just how a serialized storyline works. I can understand if you like how they did it before where the stories were sort of chopped up and left on cliffhangers to come back to, but I also don't think it was incorrect for them to immediately give us more Eldrazi if it was the correct thing to do story progression-wise.

Also, they've said that Innistrad as a plane is really hard to limit purely to Gothic horror, and I can see that. They already played up almost all the most resonant old-school horror tropes in the first block. What else could they do, and could they make another whole block out of what's left? What about the next time they went to Innistrad? So they decided that Innistrad would just encompass all horror, and decided to lean hard on Lovecraft tropes this time.

Urza was a Planeswalker and he was the closest thing Magic had to a protagonist/poster boy for a long while. There were cards where they jerked off Freyalise and Teferi. Off the top of my head the early Magic comics and video game(s) where all about Planeswalkers.

Planeswalkers kind of got out of the spotlight for the Weatherlight crew and then after Invasion I don't think they really took center stage again until Time Spiral. Though Kharn did become a Planeswalker and so you could argue that he had a role in Odyssey, Onslaught, and Mirrodin. Not to mention Time Spiral revealed that all the weird shit happening on Mirrodin, Kamigawa, and Ravnica was the multiverse suffering from Planeswalker abuse.

Suppose one of the things that possibly made the original Planeswalker's fun is that in some ways you supposedly weren't supposed to relate to them, the majority were assholes and Planeswalkers got triggered if they came across one another.

I understand where people come from when they say they didn't like the angel focus in AVR. The issue is that SOI was the other extreme, they could have done what they did to angels on Zendikar and had them getting murdered en masse by Eldrazi as they try in vain to protect the plane. To make the angels evil then kill them all doesn't just go back on AVR it reverses it to the other extreme which is no better.

Wizards just likes to corrupt angels. What better thing to corrupt then the purest of all beings?

It's even worse with Kaladesh, because we don't even see the rest of the country-plane.
It should've been Ghirapur: City of Invention, because the rest of Kaladesh might as well not exist as far as the entire block is concerned.

Also, more seriously, they did the "Avacyn goes crazy" thing for a number of reasons, and mayeb more that aren't obvious or they haven't said outright. Since the set played up cosmic horror and specifically Lovecraft themes, going mad is kind of a huge trope for that. It also meant that it made a mystery that had to be solved (why did Avaycn go mad?) which is also pretty Lovecraft (Jace filling the role of the Lovecraftian protagonist here), on top of giving them an en excuse and way to go back to pre-AVR Innistrad.

It's also a pretty shitty thing for Innistrad's protectors to not just be getting killed, but for them to outright turn on the humans who are now forced to kill their divinities. It just emphasizes how shitty of a place Innistrad is.

We used to have weekly threads every Wednesday (when the new story went up) about Magic's lore, up until...somewhere in SoI block, where it became more sporadic.
It stopped entirely sometime around Kaladesh.

From what I saw that's because it got upended and taken over by the snowflake thread.

>the cards tied in very well with the story

Oh fuck you. They fucking did not. I don't want to play "Gerrard's Verdict" just as much as I don't want to play "Chandra's Fire Thing" in a deck. I hate seeing these characters I don't care about in cards just as much with the old fucks like Squee. Thank goodness there are comparable alternatives to Vindicate now. Because of the shitty old story, that card doesn't make any sense unless you know what it's showing.