Why did people hate Kamigawa? Was it as bad as people say it was?

Why did people hate Kamigawa? Was it as bad as people say it was?

I loved Kamigawa, but I'm a casual player. I thought it was great, but all the competitive players I knew hated it.

IIRC it was something to do with a lot of the blocks mechanics being very inward facing. All the real depth it had only really functioned in block constructed, and the standard with Kamigawa sets mixed with others just didn't synergise well at all.

It's a shame. I loved the setting and the theme and how characterful and flavourful so many of the cards were.

>Was it as bad as people say it was?
yes

cool setting, interesting mechanics introduced, but a fucking bad set

The sales of it were so poor wizards gave away a box to stores for every three they bought and they STILL didn't bite. After Mirrodin, the playerbase had some expectations for coolness and power level that kamigawa only meets in theme (with some obvious exceptions like sensei's divining top).
Working at a place that has sold magic for years, it seems to be a consistent problem with top-down designed sets. It brute-forces mechanics to fit a theme and they're usually underwhelming. Combine that with Masques-tier hard act to follow syndrome and you end up with a lovely-looking block that few really liked.

So basically Theros?

Not really. While Theros was panned, it did apparently sell pretty well in the end. Possibly just due to having a larger casual playerbase nowadays.

The real shame is that they seem to have associated all this with flavor rather than mechanics, so expect only theme-park versions of mythology like Theros rather than any interesting takes on it like Kamigawa

Mirrodin block had brutally powerful cards and a brutally powerful mechanic/deck (Affinity). Kamigawa block had a lot of things that were much lower powered as a response to that. Given the nature of Standard, that meant Kamigawa had a lot of trash compared to the previous block.

To add insult to injury, the few stand out cards Kamigawa had (Top, Jitte) made the Affinity/Artifacts deck shell even better. So it didn't add threats to the meta or check threats in the meta, it just made the top deck in the meta even more bullshit to play against.

Discounting the fact that Mirrodin was an incredibly strong block by any given standard, a lot of Kamigawa's strengths were also its biggest weaknesses even in a vacuum.

The "Spirits matter" theme that the set had was too weak to compete even with the previous tribal block, Onslaught, which made Kamigawa difficult to play even if you didn't have the turbo-powered artifact decks from Mirrodin at the table.

The set also did a really poor job conveying the "Legendaries Matter" subtheme. Most of the Legendaries from Kamigawa were trash, even by non-legendary creature standards, and there were a metric ton of them.

Saviors of Kamigawa is probably the weakest expansion set in the game, as none of its themes made any sense for the then-current environment. i.e. "Hand size matters" in an environment where Affinity is dumping its hand every turn with a massive card advantage.

The actual mechanics of the set, outside of Bushido, were also just plain bad:

Soulshift was overcosted and inflexible on almost everything it appeared on outside of maybe Burr Grafter and He Who Hungers. This made it impossible to set up meaningful plays with.

Arcane spells are largely the same, being woefully overcosted and far too niche for Splice to be exploitable as anything other than a gimmick.

Flip Cards were confusing and shitty.

Ninjutsu was, like other mechanics mentioned so far, horribly overcosted. Though not really bad, it wasn't good either, as a lot of the time it was painfully obvious when you'd be trying to cast a Ninja, and they'd just wait and use their removal on the Ninja, putting you at a massive disadvantage.

[Type] Offering was great, but was only used on five cards, all of which were fairly mediocre besides the green one.

Sweeps were horrendous in most formats and have largely been forgotten as far as I can tell.

Channel was decent, but underused and generally not impactful.

Epic was trash in any kind of sealed play, and mediocre outside of that.

Every time I remember bad keywords from Kamigawa, I always forget just how,many bad mechanics were in that block, especially for a lot of them to only appear on a handful of cards.

I wouldn't say all the mechanics are trash, especially if you count the legend rule change. The dragons were actually a great way to organically demonstrate the change, and several of them have seen play over the years. I actually liked the idea of flip cards, and at least they functioned without an extra rules or check card in every pack. Sure, most weren't well designed, but discard into rack is great, and I wouldn't have minded more awesome cards turned into conditional classic effects.

Bushido and ninjutsu are great mechanics, and it's a shame they didn't think ahead on them with less precise names.

Mind you, that's not arguing about power, it wss a low power set following a super power set, so expectations alone had a good chance of killing it