Does anyone else think the last planes feel small and over-specialized? Especially compared to dominaria

Does anyone else think the last planes feel small and over-specialized? Especially compared to dominaria.

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Dominaria was built not to be specialized. It's just that the story doesn't expand on any places other than one or two major regions, which is such a huge shame considering how much potential there is in places like Kaladesh.

Amonkhet was like that by Bolas' design honestly. He screwed up the rest of the plane to keep his stable of potential super soldiers in one place.

And Ixalan while specifically being "Pirate adventure in dinosaur meso-america" it at least mentions other countries existing with Torrezon, and High And Dry. I can see them creating some suplemental product later on about say... Torrezon eventually (a Commander Deck or Planechase thing?).

I agree with on Kaladesh. But again feels like something that can be messed with in supplementary material.

I like them better this way, I'd rather have variety over believability.

A large part of the reason Dominaria felt so big is because so many sets took place there, and at least half a dozen novels too

the problem is that we don't see large parts of the planes now that we focus on the Jacestice League. Even Kaladesh had Peema and Lathnu, but we never saw them and instead hung around Ghirapur and learned what indian food they eat there

Somebody give me the tl;dr on planes lore. I love the artwork but don't know shit about MTG

Theres a near infinite number of worlds all floating in magic, untraversable soup called the Blind Eternities. Sometimes people are born who can travel between worlds. They're called Planeswalkers. Anything else depends on the setting

Any shorthand on some of your favorite settings?
So far from this plane I've gathered
>Kaladesh - magitek society
>Ixalan - "Pirate adventure in dinosaur meso-america"
Both sound dope.

Planes like Kaladesh, Amonkhet and now Ixalan feel small because we're being confined by the story, and the fact that they only release two sets per plane.

I feel like they would be bigger if they went back to having three sets for each new plane - the first one just introducing the plane and the others are the story. And maybe don't leave everything to the Art books.

>Jund
Primeval darwinian plane of reptillian fuck you.
Only Green, Red and Black Mana, everything eats everything. Its just survival of the fittest to the max, dragons rule it

>Ravnica
Shadowrun but medieval

>Mirrodin
youtube.com/watch?v=vriYd6tVq1s
as a setting

>Dominaria
ITs got fucking everyhting.
Special mention goes to
>Jamuraa
African fantasy that ISNT WE WUZ or "Black KNight"
>Shiv
Volcanic Peninsula of fuck you
>Rath overlay
Another artificial dimension overlaid over dominaria, making everything suck
>Edgewalkers
Black and White aligned Clerics

>Kamigawa
Samurai vs Samurai religion
shittest edition crunch wise IIRC, but cool flavor without beeing blatantly weeb.

Of tecent worlds
Tarkir: World taken over by Asian dragon warlords
Zendikar: world of living land that defends treasure and secrets from adventurers
Innistrad: gothic world that encompasses all horror tropes, from lovecraft to hammer films
Amonkhet: ancient egypt world that worships one of the big bads as their god king

I like the story of Kamigawa.

>Amonkhet-Egyptian world full of zombos
>Alara-Knight world, Dragons kill everything world, Dark magitech world, Jungle Japes world, and Everything is undead world all smash together cause a dragon is a dick. Hilarity ensues
>Lorwyn/Shadowmoor-Celtic world with a Good/Evil dichotomy
>Innistrad-Gothic horror, plus cthulhu came through recently
>Ravnica-Whole worlds a city. Ten factions that run everything and hate each other but have to get along
>Theros-Greek shit
>Kamigawa-Japanese Shinto shit
>Fiora-Every stabs everyone else in the back
>Mirrodin/New Phryxia- Everything is made of metal world. Recently turned into metal hell
>Shandalar-No one cares. Except me
>Tarkir-Dragons and east asian clans
>Zendikar- Adventure world. Recently got fucked by cthuhlus

what was shandalar again, i forgot

Always remember that Esper was the best shard.

Core set took place there, and the old video game from the 90's. Just about the only important thing that happened there was Liliana grabbing the Chain Veil. I don't know why I like it as much as I do, it always seemed quintessentially MTG. Although I guess that's just because of my relative newness.

It's the main Core Set plane, with a lot of generic fantasy tropes. Knights, dragons, goblins, wizards and witches, etc.

It's also the setting of the old computer game with the same name, as well as the location where Liliana got the Chain Veil.

Generic magic plane.

Is every guild on Ravnica horrible?

>Ravnica:
Fantasy Megacity. Lacks central leadership, is instead jointly run by 10 guilds (or, 9 guilds with the disenfranchised tenth guild occasionally popping upp and trashing places). There is of course a lot of squabbling and fighting between the guilds, but it usually doesn't reach open warfare. Not gonna list all guild but the list includes ghost bankers, mad scientists led by a genius dragon, a violent demon-cult running most of the entertainment and nightlife, and "necromancer druids" handling the recycling

>handling the recycling
Don't eat their food, it's made of people

Theres good people and bad people in each guild but the leaders are all dicks

>Amnokhet:
The ancient egypt plane. Recently got hit by a dose of apocalypse, but I'll focus on pre-apocalypse amokhet because it was pretty dope. The whole plane is afflicted by a curse known as the "curse of the wandering" which causes anything that dies on the plane to rise as a zombie. Most of the plane is a dry hellscape of sandstorms, roaming undead and worse horrors. The exception is the city Naktamun, that is protected by a magic barrier maintained by the gods. The inhabitants of Naktamun embalm their dead, which results in them becoming obedient servant mummies rather than the usual ravaging zombies. With all of the infrastructure and vital work being handled by undead servants, the living citizens of Naktamun spend their lives honing themselves for the rial of the gods, basically a big, lethal coming-of-age-ritual.

Yes, and?

I always assumed it was more mushrooms that grew on dead people and less bits of the dead people themselves, but I guess that still qualifies.

I am so fucking sick of this rumor. We grow vegetables. VEGETABLES motherfucker. Do you even know what a vegetable is you Gruul looking dick bag? It aint a fucking dead body I'll tell you that much. We get rid of your corpses, grow your VEGETABLES, and this is the thanks we get? Eat your fucking soup, I nearly broke my back trying to carry the fertilizer and you are going to enjoy it.

Fairly certain they mostly just use dead people for compost and workers.

>carry the fertilizer
We all know the fertilizer can move on its own.

I was just wondering - Ral Zarek seems like an asshole, and the Izzet are like the worst stereotype of wizards. I don't even know what their Guild's purpose is aside from WIZARDS and EXPLOSIONS.
Vraska seems to have been abused in her past despite being part of the Golgari and presumably a lot stronger than any filth wizard. I mean she turns people to stone.
Don't even get me started on the Orzhov and Teysa.

Domri seems to be the only good planeswalker from Ravnica, but the Gruul are terrible.

IIRC Izzet do a lot of techy infrastructure shit like plumbing and such.

I prefer my vegetables parasite/poison free, so I get them from the Selesnians.

>I don't even know what their Guild's purpose is aside from WIZARDS and EXPLOSIONS.
They build public infrastructure, mostly. Plus, the science experiments, for the rare occasions they turn out to be useful.

The Izzet are the engineers. They literally make sure the pipes run smoothly. You also have to keep in mind that MTG is a combat game. Sure Bob the Orzhov Wage Slave and Gruul tribe of peaceful pussies exist, it's just they aren't as exciting as dickbags who kill each other cause Mommy Guild Leader told them to

No it CAN'T YOU RAKDOS DOG FUCKER. If it could I wouldn't have to bust my balls planting cucumber seeds all day just to feed your ungrateful ass.
>IMFUCKINGPLYING
MY VEGETABLES ARE HEALTHY YOU FUCKTARD. THIS IS WHY NO ONE LIKES YOU AZORIUS

This. Every guild has lots of non-asshole ordinary people doing useful ordinary jobs, they just don't end up on Magic cards.

For a good part of my childhood I lived by a Golgari reprocessing pit, after they kicked-out the Izzet they broke their machinery - flooding the area.
They turned it into the foulest smelling marsh I've ever seen. Turned a pristine city block and turned it into a rotted out husk - filled with all sorts of vermin, garbage and filth.

You aren't fooling me.

>He lives near a fungus farm
>He expects it to smell like roses
Heres an idea. How about you head over to New Prahv, talk with those Azorius vagina swillers, and get them to legalize some FUCKING PEST CONTROL. ALSO THE RATS ARE HELPFUL AND YOU'D KNOW THAT IF YOU DID ANY RESEARCH BITCH

Don’t Selenyians literally use mind control spores and shit?

They're made that way on purpose. MaRo wants each setting to feel like a theme park and for whatever reason Creative listens to his shit.
>The Creative direction of the largest TCG/CCG ever is subject to the whims of a senile man who's only creative endeavor has been writing episodes for Roseanne.

I'm complete trash, because I love Zendikar with the Eldrazi.

It's a plane of massive natural upheaval, where maps are regardless as near-useless because coastlines are constantly being reshaped by waves, forests spring up and die back, rivers change course, volcanic activity causes new mountains to rise and fall.

And it turns out it's because millennia ago, three fucking weird things got imprisoned in the world. All that natural chaos is the world trying to drive out the infection with a fever.

And when they get free, they start causing even more havoc.

Kaladesh Traded expanding their world past one city for more """""""Character Development""""""" with the Gatewatch. Amonkhet was similar, Ixalan is kind of a breath of fresh air but even that is limited to one continent right now. It comes with wizards speeding up how fast they have to push out sets.

What I don't understand about Kaladesh is why they would come up with a plane that doesn't have wizards/magic.

All that aether stuff is hella magic, isn't it? They just have to (prefer to? Chandra is from there and was pyromancing before she 'walked, I think?) channel it using devices rather than spellcasting directly.

In a world with magic super-gas everywhere, pyromancy allowed freely is a BAD idea.

Planes in MTG are like planets, but smaller and don't have to adhere to physical laws like being spherical because magic and shit. Some are about the size or a regular planet (Dominaria and Mirrodin come to mind) while others are fairly small (the entirety of Lorwyn can be crossed on foot in a few months).

Creatures born on planes cannot leave them and typically don't know others exist. 1 in about 1000 are born with a magic whatsit in their soul called a Spark. Of those about 1 in 1000 ignite their spark and get to travel between planes. They used to be on tier with gods, now they're just super powerful versions of whatever their species is. Those who were alive in the old times typically want that power back and are asshats about it.

I think the planes to set ratio is:
Alara - 3 Sets
Amonkhet - 2 Sets
Bablovia - 1 Set
Dominaria - 25 Sets - 35 Counting Core Sets
Fiora - 2 Sets
Innistrad - 3 Sets
Ixalan - 2 Sets
Kaladesh - 2 Sets
Kamigawa - 3 Sets
Lorwyn - 4 Sets
Mirrodin - 6 Sets
Mercadia - 1 Set
Rabiah - 1 Set
Rath - 4 Sets - +3 per block if you count Invasion, Time Spiral, Odyssy or Onslought
Ravnica - 6 Sets
Tarkir - 3 Sets
Theros - 3 Sets
Zendikar - 5 Sets
Whatever Set Homelands was on - 1

And then you have a few more planes featured only in supplemental stuff like Commander decks or Origins.

And these last couple of new Planes have had the three punch combo of no novel to flesh them out, a focus on the Jacetsu cunts, and only 2 sets to explore them in. Less time, less cards, divided focus, and less story. Of course they're going to be lesser than the planes we had before. Pre-Alara we got a novel per set.

Probably not, I mean not without the family history of each potato, squash, and tomato. But no seriously if you see selesnyan fruit salesmen, report it to the closest Boros Guildhall, were still recovering from the last Lettuce War

>Innistrad - 3 Sets
5 sets

Apparently the idea is that Kaladesh doesn't have a lot of natural magic users that can just *do* magic. Instead, they get artificers and aether stuff, which might just be their magic expressing itself differently. Chandra and Baral are both rare natural magic users with specialties in fire and counterspells respectively. Considering how much aether influences the landscape and wildlife, it probably has something to do with that.

I thought that shit was awesome too. When the Eldrazi were a sleeping or immediately emergent force they were really fun and interesting to work with. Sure they were big fuck off eldritch horrors, but they didn't actively fuck with the idea of Zendikar as "Adventure World" too hard until BfZ, which turned them into basically Tyranids.

What really sucks is that the artbook goes into how much cool stuff the creative team put into the Trials themselves and the actual inner workings of Nakatmun, only for almost none of it to show up in the set's story because they had to condense it down to like a week for the gatewatch. The Trials normally take months to years, and are super in-depth and interesting in their preparations.

Knew I'd miscount somewhere. Yeah, old 3 block and the decent 2 block.

How would Zendikar have the Adventure World theme crawling with giant eldritch monsters?

>especially compared to dominaria
dominaria has literal years extra worth of history and sets to build upon. All planes are small and specialized compared to dominaria.

What? literally no plane is going to match dominaria in scale.A plane that has had something like 20 sets..
I do want to explore the planes, that the planewalkers are meant to go to. Of course they are going to be specialized, how else would they manage to even stand out?

Is blue magic the most... limited?
It seems to come in three forms; mind magic, water magic and counter magic.

Before Rise of the Eldrazi Zendikar was a playground (of chaotic terrain and trapped ruins) for parties of D&D-style adventurers. That was what the whole Allies mechanic was supposed to be about before it turned into the Rebel Alliance but against Cthulhu.

Mind magic, water magic, wind magic, shapeshifting magic, metamagic (especially mimicry, though red gets some of it too), a lot of artifact manipulation stuff, whatever the fuck unsummoning is, ice magic, and all the various flavors of that stuff. Blue's got a pretty decent kit, depending on implementation.

Personally I've always really liked Lethemancers from Grixis. Mind magic entirely based around erasure and amnesia, but flavored ostensibly as altrustic (until they go nuts) was super fun.

what was the 3 set block that had the best transition?

zendikar was a fiasco, landfall was fun, allies were fun, but then they butchered all of that.

is there a set that's opposite to zendikar in this characteristic?

>whatever the fuck unsummoning is
it's teleportation magic, but back to nowhere
they got a ton of teleportation too, and time magic

Damn, forgot those and also forgot all the weird invisibility magic they get too. This is why I don't play blue.