It was a nothing block that came out over a decade ago, a gimmick and nothing special, and yet you assholes hail it as some sort of holy grail, like it the last good thing WotC ever did despite the great shit they've given us in these past years.
Why?
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Because fantasy Prague, actual identities for 2 color creatures/decks, and came off the back of less than successful blocks.
Also,
> despite the great shit they've given us in these past years.
Citation needed. Sage
>It was a nothing block
When you start off trying to make objective statements about a subjective concept, you permanently skew the results that you will receive.
Try again if you want to discuss this.
otherwise its pretty obvious that you feel that anger and venom is the only way to gain attention, which is the only thing you desire.
God, I love Ravnica.
When are we going back
I like Mill. One of the Guilds is basically entirely set around Mill. Glimpse the Unthinkable is very iconic for the Dimir, and it is one of myf avorite cards, up there with Archive Trap.
It's better than your favorite block.
Fantasy Slavs. What's not to love?
OP is a shithead
post your ravnica favourites
You already did
Nothing was as satisfying as connecting with this asshole in rtr/theros standard
>mfw they will never make another standard as large, varied, and fun as Ravnica/Time Spiral/Coldsnap
Because it's pretty much the only good-ish fluff nuMagic players have experienced, thanks to Return to Ravnica. It's the only plane they've been to that wasn't
1. a shitty themepark like Innistrad or Kaladesh, or
B) ruined outright by the state of modern "writers," like Mirrodin.
Yes, by the standards of old Magic its just an okay plane, but it shines like gold in a sewer next to what Wizards puts out these days.
OG Innistrad was great. Cthulhu Innistrad was an abomination.
...
Not a fan of Lorwyn / Shadowmoor block?
Because you hate it.
Retarded statements aside it's because almost everyone has at LEAST one card from ravnica/return that they love for mechanics and/or flavor that just makes them feel good inside
you know, the sensation of fun that you clearly have lost
Before OG Ravnica blocks ranked(fluff only, just the cards):
Great Tier
>Invasion block(The culmination of years of creative foundation laying. Finally get to see Phyrexia's army up close and personal as well as the reveal of Yawgmoth and Urza's respective plans)
Good Tier
>Tempest block(Weird but still pretty fun. Volrath was the closest we ever got to a Bond villain in MtG. Lots of flavor text dealing with the main story, some would say too much. Made it harder to flesh out the world on the cards)
>Odyssey block(Still Dominaria but a new continent at least and a whole new cast of characters with new fluff with new-ish races and some minor connections to the Apocalypse times)
OK Tier
>Onslaught block(Karona fucked up this story pretty bad but Kamahl's transformation keeps it from being total shit)
>Mirage block(for the time it was fucking cool but the 3rd set just didn't have a cohesive connection to the first two. So many great named characters, Shauku, Jolreal, Karvaek, Teferi, the list goes on)
>Urza's block(creative was fun but all over the place and at the time it was hard to tell what was going on with the time skips)
>Mirrodin block(Karn and the solution to the Mirari mystery is the only thing that saves this hot mess)
Below Average Tier
>Ice Age(Lim-Dul was kinda fun but the other named characters are mostly shitty. Hard to evaluate since this is the time before story characters made it onto cards very often)
>Kamigawa(no explanation needed)
Shit Tier
> Masques block(the worst three set creative period in MtG history. Mercadia is just an inversion of tropes for no reason. Nemesis has a cool thing with Crovax but not much else. Prophecy is just filler before Invasion)
Ravnica was the best-selling block Wizards ever had at the time of its release.
I mean...I take that as a given, as my favorite set is Portal: Second Age. I like the flavor, what little of it there is.
And the guns.
These sets we're so much fun. I understand why they failed, but it was great knowing Wizards spent a block and a half writing a love letter to old fans.
it also opened the floodgates of shite that are walkers, but you get some bad along with the good
Weren't Walkers the next set?
Yes, but Jaya Ballard hinted at their coming, and Tarmagoyf even moreso. Plus the storyline of Time Spiral block itself is about the nature of the Spark changing.
>Kamigawa(no explanation needed)
If we're talking "fluff only" like you said, then you're an idiot. Kamigawa's art and flavor definitely make it among some of the best blocks out there. Most of its complaints either come from bitching about mechanical experiments that were far too overblown in criticism, or bitching that grognards couldn't figure out how a fucking PHONETIC language actually works and thus could barely read card names.
>Kamigawa
>Not God-Tier
it was okay
>post your Ravnica favorites
You can't say that and then just post the objectively best character in the setting. Where the fuck is the thread supposed to go from here?
Then you post the best duo
Best Mana Rocks to date.
Failed really. A good example of the mechanics failing to support the Fluff.
>Citation needed
Khans of Tarkir was a thing before DoT ruined it
Don't be silly. There's no such thing as a 'khan', especially not on Tarkir.
Thats not thiccest elf.
why does the simic one look like it's in a toilet?
False
Huh?
Care to elaborate?
This magnificent bastard.
I can't wait to return to Ravnica.
It is
Spice. Must. Flow.
God, I thought I was alone in Invasion being my favourite block of all time. I fucking adored everything about it back in the day.
They're never going to print new Kavu again, are they? I still have a dumb old Kavu tribal deck I've vainly trying to make at least casual playable over the years.
I liked the fluff
evidently you weren't there when it came out.
it was absolutely beatiful and amazing for everyone involved.Since we are talking about that let me walk you through what we saw:
-a good powered deck after the unplayable turd that was kamigawa
-a diverse enviroment after the silver reign of affinity, which actually almost crashed mtg.
-art direction is fancy, original and relatable, yet still within the aesthetic expectations of classic fantasy.
-plane was original and not an unoriginal themed park featuring everything from the unfortunate real human culture WotC decided to fuck with.
-fucking finally color fixing for standard and casual players! go look what we had for color fixing in mirrodin and kamigawa, i dare you.
-obvious themed decks that you could actually mix with older cards, unlike Samurai tribal and the mirrodin artifact bullcrap
-Value was guaranteed by shocklands.It felt much safer for everyone buying anything from a single pack to 20 cases to know that there are 3 rares in the expansion that will still be at 10$ after a decade.
-the return of multicolor, which most new player never had the ability to experience...which allowed...
-powerful cards across all rarities. We were literally in awe for a 3/3 wolf for 2 mana.The powercreep was healthy, and it was more of a recover from the shitshow low powered(across the field, looking away from aff.) common+uncommon enviroment of the previous expansions.
...
>powerful cards across all rarities. We were literally in awe for a 3/3 wolf for 2 mana.The powercreep was healthy, and it was more of a recover from the shitshow low powered(across the field, looking away from aff.) common+uncommon enviroment of the previous expansions.
would like to add to this that 99% of the rares were at least good. I just went over them in Gatherer and the only one I would actively hate to open is Molten Sentry. Has there been any other block with such a concentration of iconic rares?
[Spoiler] Return to Ravinica was the block I started with [/spoiler]
a cripple
a slut
a shit
Lorwyn was the last legitimately good fluff. Alara was... okay, basically five themeparks taped together but you still got decent flavor out of that just by sheer volume. It's all been varying shades of shit since then.
Too many to pick. Have this detective soldier knight guard person.
Ravnica was cool and all, but I'm convinced Khans was infinitely better in establishing neat factions tied to color combinations.
>there will never be another ad as good as this
It was important once, back when gold cards were actually rare and enemy-color pairs were especially rare. Nowadats every single set has all ten color pairs, and the difference between ally and enemy colors has evaporated, and this is entirely due to the success of Ravnica. So.nowadays, yeah, it seems boring because every set to come after it has been just like it.
Ironically enough, the settings they treat with a little bit of nuance are the o es that they coukd get away with treating as complete stereotypes because they're the ones with white people. Another example is Innistrad. Innistrad is Germany and the names of everything are in fake German. And yet they're not all prancing around in lederhosen and shitting on each other's chests.
Please do not bully the superior timeline
This looks really neat. Too bad the quality looks bad in this video
There has only ever been one timeline. Everyone knows this!
Just imagine if they had banned all cards from Khans in all formats once Dragons was released.
>Just imagine if they had banned all cards from Khans in all formats once Dragons was released.
Pfft. That would've never happened. Timeline fuckery or not, Wizards stopped pulling that kind of meta shit in Homelands.
T I G O L'
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I only now realized those hips and thighs.
God damn, muh dick.
Funny, because I think Khans was an abject failure and a waste of the "enemy color" concept that utterly failed to provide factions that reflected their color identity. It was basically just "ok here's five real world cultures we've arbitrarily assigned colors to have a nice day"
What do you mean by "arbitrarily assigned colors"? Each faction fit their colors pretty well.
>Mardu: White for muh clan, black for brutality and ambition, red for freedom (they're nomads after all)
>Temur: Red for elemental magic and freedom again, blue for divination/fortunetelling, green for community with nature and shamanism
>Jeskai: White for discipline, blue for seeking enlightenment, red for their Tao-esque unconventional streak and elemental magic
>Sultai: Black for backstabbing little shits, blue for scheming little shits, green for "strongest have the right to power"
>Abzan: White for muh family, black for necromancy and ambition (don't forget these guys are traders), green for thriving in the desert
I mean, sure, some colors don't show up as obviously, like Green in Sultai and Abzan, but to be fair Green doesn't have a hell of a lot going for it in terms of complexity. It's usually "muh strength" or "muh nature." As it is, though, I think they did a pretty good job of working out how a culture could accommodate all three of their respective color identities. Some individual cards were a bit questionable (Like, Bear's Companion isn't much more than green, if you want to be strict about it), but the factions themselves were very well designed. What makes you say they're arbitrary?
TL;DR, wow nice post fagtron way to convince me with those hot opinions
Agrus Kos is shit. If it weren't for him, Momir Vig would have Made Ravnica Great Again and brought about the genetic singularity.
Fuck Kos.
Holy shit, I never noticed.
I wish she didn't have that weird hood on. I get the aesthetic but still.
Also, the Mardu strictly followed a code called the Edicts of Illagra which is where I think their white mainly comes from, as it is not mentioned any more as the Kolaghan clan.
It's a really old ad so I never found one in better quality, which is a shame.
>memer big
simic a shit
Momir Vig is the most Did Nothing Wrong character to ever appear in MtG.
No time for the Edicts or teaching people the Edicts when Boss Murderhobo says you gotta go fast
Literally my very first deck.
Building on this, the field was WIDE FUCKING OPEN. Sure I'll concede that data propagation wasn't anything in 2005 like it is now, but there were decks of every conceivable kind that were top tier. You had aggro in naya zoo, control in UB, control goodness in 4-color Solar Flare, cheap go-wide tempo in Ghazi Glare, and you had midrange in WB Ghost Dad. I'm sure there were combo decks too but they escape me at the moment.
The economy hadn't been shanghai'd by speculators which also helped. The shocklands were also the most expensive cards in standard at 10-15, and the idea of any standard card above 25 was unheard of.
>these factions have various surface elements that define colors in nuMagic, thus they are a good use for defining the wedges!
wow nice post fagtron way to convince me with those hot opinions
Seriously though, you really think just taping together colors is sufficient? Ravnica's guilds had definitions of their own, the intersections of the philosophies they embodied. Simic used science and magic to "improve" on the natural world, Orzhov embodied the negative aspects of both White and Black dogmatism, Dimir was so obsessed with secrecy nobody knew they existed. They were more than just "color + color." Even Alara managed that to some extent. Khans takes some serious reaching to even attribute the surface traits of colors to their respective clans, as your post handily demonstrates.
Man, hard to believe there are people who actually liked Khans. Guess it's been a while since there was actual good fluff.
I don't think what I did counts as serious reaching by any means.
>Thus they are a good use for defining the wedges!
I think this is the problem you're having, here: the Khans tribes weren't emblematic of their colors, but that's not a problem. If anything, people assuming that stuff like the Guilds are "definitions" of their color pairs can lead to some stupid reactions, like, "Hey, why aren't these UG guys Simic scientists?" Because they're not on Ravnica, and Simic isn't the only available possibility for UG. In the same way, Khans clans are XYZ colors because that's what they come closest to. Some of those elements are a bit superficial, and I acknowledge that's a weakness, but that's a weakness of the crunch-fluff connection, not of the fluff itself, which was strong.
In short: I can agree with you that some of the Khans factions were connected to some colors less strongly than others. Apparently, this is because they only decided to make it a wedge block later in development. I agree with you that this resulted in some factions having some colors that didn't fit as well as the rest in terms of group philosophy, but I disagree with your claim that this makes the underlying fluff bad somehow.
>nuMagic
And I don't even know what you mean by this. As far as I know, the various "philosophies" of the color pie are still mostly unchanged. Are you just trying to sound like an oldfag here?
Nemesis is probably one of the best MTG novels (I know it doesn't say much), the set could be garbage but lorewise it's great.
Gold cards are still pretty rare tho if you're looking at single sets like Kaladesh and stuff where they are meant to tell you what the limited archetype is.
That's still a lot more common than they used to be - they used to not have any at all, or maybe 3 for an entire block if it wasn't a multicolor block specifically. Same with artifacts for a while.
Changed with...original Innistrad I believe, which is when they started putting in the limited archetype uncommons
I don't mind, personally - I don't think multicolor is something that needs to be special and reserved for its own thing - but it IS something that's changed.
I mean it helps for me because I didn't get a UB one in HOU draft so I packed a ton of gy hate cards and passed New Perspectives because I'm a dumb shit.
Turns out UB was cycling.
best boy
Ravnica was the greatest setting WotC ever did. Old School Zendikar was an amazing world, but Ravnica's guilds were the best.
The lands in ravnica were pretty shit tough. Differently coloured part of cities and buildings dont really leave much interpretation and grandiosity as some of the other lands like the ones in Zendikar.
>Momir Vig Did Nothing Wrong
what was the goal of Project Kraj again?
To give every single living being in Ravnica genetic superiority.
That's why the Orzhov Conspiracy was against him; the Obzedat isn't alive, and wasn't part of Vig's plan of genetic supremacy.
Such an angry little dude...
What do you want? It's a city, parks are going to be the closest you get to a forest, etc.
Correct.
I just really loved the fluff. Also it makes a great setting to run tabletop RP in.
Really? Does it work well?
But they are awesome! They are all cities, sure, but its a gorgeous cityscape
>like it the last good thing WotC ever did
That's because it kinda was. The Ravnica-Time Spiral era was the height of the game's last golden age which ended right after Zendikar.
>the great shit they've given us in these past years.
Bait.
Khans weren't bad, but they were a pretty weak take on the Wedges. Hopefully we get some better ones in a future set
>And I don't even know what you mean by this
People mean several different things with nuMagic usually at the same time. To name a few you have the introduction of planeswalker cards, the mythic rarity, NWO, and the Gatewatch.
The main combo decks didn't appear until Time Spiral came out. There was one with Saffi Eriksdotter + this one black zombie uncommon from Rakdos that let you sacrifice Saffi an infinite number of times. I forget how it killed you though. There was also an infinite mana combo with one of the slivers but I can't remember the specifics of it since I never played against it.
>
I think this is the problem you're having, here: the Khans tribes weren't emblematic of their colors, but that's not a problem
I could agree with this stance more readily if Khans were not the first set to do a wedge focus and thus the one that largely defines them going forward. You'll notice people use "Mardu" as a catchall for any white-black-red deck. As the first set to dip into this archetype heavily, Khans was going to be setting precedent going forward, but it failed to develop any sort of strong identity for the wedges, and just sort of slapped them on haphazardly. One can't even really justify this by saying it was a necessary measure to service the story, because the story was retarded time travel bullshit and sucked dick at the end of the day.
Basically I think the concept of "enemy colors" is seriously underexplored and I was hype to see what Khans did with it, and was ultimately so disappointed in the execution I didn't bother buying into the block at all. Just my hot take as a lorefag.
>And I don't even know what you mean by this. As far as I know, the various "philosophies" of the color pie are still mostly unchanged. Are you just trying to sound like an oldfag here?
It means a lot of things, which would take a long time to explain to someone who wasn't there. But in this particular instance, it refers to the vast simplification of each color's domain. Just as a key example, Red once embodied:
>Fire
>Stone
>Lightning
>Forgecraft
>Chaos
>Ice
Among other things.
Now, Red embodies Fire and on a good day Lightning. Where it could stand for independence, survivalism and even straight up anarchy back in the day, thanks to Chandra it's YOLO ADHD burn 'em all. Hell, even that aspect has decayed in quality, just look at Jaya's lines on cards compared to Chandra's.
FEATHER
CARD
WHEN
>tfw getting nostalgic for all the good sets
>tfw Garfield won't give us another amazing set ever again
>tfw we'll never go back to that era if card design around zendikar where cards were allowed to be weird and interesting and the best cards weren't just over started green beaters
This new philosophy of card design feels so wrong. You could feel it in khans and battle a bit but now you REALLY feel it
I thought I heard that Garfield worked on Dominaria.
It's not going to be the same
I thought he wasn't going to be a lead anymore anyway
Garfield's working on Ixalan, so we have something to look forward there.
I still miss my RG Horned Kavu.
of course the biggest thing I miss among my collection is Book Burning and seeing the look of disbelief on my opponent
Pivlic deserves one too
Don't forget sjw pandering is a huge part of nu magic.
My friend plays this card all the time and I just realized that he has 2 dudes next to him.
I always just thought of it as a big chair
I've noticed that people use "Mardu" as a catchall for any white-black-red deck, and as I pointed out earlier, people do the same for Ravnica guilds when it comes to two color decks. This is purely down to players' shorthand, though, and has nothing to do with the actual lore of the game. I mean, as plenty of people pointed out around the time Khans came out, the wedges already had names people could use like that, from Apocalypse. Was it a weakness of Apocalypse's lore that made "Raka" fail to catch on in the same way? Of course not, so the fact that "Jeskai" did even though that faction might not perfectly define a wedge of Magic (ignoring, again, the fact that color pairs can and do represent different things in different settings), that's not a weakness of the lore.
>Basically I think the concept of "enemy colors" is seriously underexplored...
In other words, it wasn't what you expected. That's a question of your expectations for the lore, not of the lore itself. I agree that the time travel and story were crap. I really just like the setting.
>It means a lot of things, which would take a long time to explain...
Then don't bring it up.
I'm not fully convinced that this "simplification" of yours has taken place. Amonkhet, off the top of my head, included just about all of those except perhaps "chaos" and "ice." In addition, on that plane, red was associated with sand. So how can you say that Red is losing diversity?
I have noticed that, specifically, lightning gets used a hell of a lot for specifically Red direct-damage spells, but isn't this just another kind of the same "precedent" you extolled earlier? People are used to lightning representing direct damage. You're going both ways on what you want Magic to do: you want factions to be emblematic of their colors, but not restrictive. That's a contradiction.