How can we save MTG fluff?

Just because people saying it doesn't mean it's true doesn't mean it's untrue.

>when the capeshit fad dies out
I think you're going to be waiting a while.

Do you mean the Reserved List?

Reserve List is more Wizards fucking terrified of touching it, getting a lawsuit from collectors (that they could win easily, mind you, this is not the part that worries them) and a judge looking at the booster game and decide it's gambling (this, this is what scare Wizards) and gambling laws should apply to it. Things like making Master sets a Mythic lottery and not wanting to significantly affect the prices of cards via reprint doesn't help their case.

It's not likely to happen if they were sued, but the consequences of being labeled as gambling are serious enough (it would pretty much kills the game) that they want to avoid the issue at all cost.

MTG being labeled as gambling would kill the TCG business model and force the existing manufacturers into LCGs or something similar.

In my book that's a good thing.

>MtG was better in whatever era you first started player
>MtG sucks now because they changed things
There, I told you what you wanted to hear. Can you stop posting now? We don't need 5 threads about this at all times

Maybe accept some things are shit and it's not just nostalgia?

How come Nissa is suddenly absolved of waking up the Eldrazi? She is directly responsible for the deaths of countless millions and almost destroying not just Zendikar, but Innistrad as well. But I'm supposed to believe that it's all OK because she helped use Channel in an asspull power of friendship play.
How come this is never talked about?

Attached: 1514919522404.gif (531x354, 3.6M)

Because we had to get rid of the evil white male greenwalker.

Shit writing, old players are leaving mtg never to return due to shit mechanics and shit sets with maybe one modern legacy and edh worthy card a piece. New players dont care about lore beyond sexy green elf lady XDDDD. Since thats the audience they have to attract to keep the game afloat everything gets dumbed down for normies to keep them cracking packs, as usual they ruin everything for everyone.

Original innistrad was the last good set, your a faggot if you disagree.

>weatherlight was a mistake
W-what? The single best chunk of fluff was a mistake? Says who?

Not always that, we had bad and good sets in the past as well, it's a cyclical thing. We had great things like The Dark, Apocalypse, Ravnica, Innistrad and also had bad sets(with plenty of apologists) like Homelands, Kamigawa, Masques and so on.

MtG has just hit a low again and eventually things people like will start being printed again.

Masques wasn't bad, it was just low powered.

I had hope for DOM but then they got rid of the mana pool, got rid of life loss, errata'd all burn spells to now force planeswalkers as a core part of the game even harder, and introduced those godawful abomination saga cards.

Even Garfield can't save the game now. Fire Maro and all of R&D.

But the errata makes planeswalkers weaker now. It's a good way to get past leyline now.

Planeswalkers show up from future or past planes. It's that easy. Imagine if on Kaladesh we had someone from Ravnica. On Amonket, we had someone from Innistrad. If we had someone from Dominaria in SOI, how fucking cool would that be?

How about we send the Gatewatch against an enemy they can't defeat, like Bolas. He could split them up, prove they're not good enough, and let us get away from the Gatewatch as a team. Then we can focus more on a few individual characters, maybe flesh out Jace's personality, and other neat stuff.

It's funny because you're being ironic but that was an absolute failure as there was no consequence to the Manateers failure and Jace failed to develop at all.

There are Homelands apologists? I honestly don't think I have ever heard one.
Where could they develop? That's the core issue here, they have a bunch of pointless characters who just seem to putz around, but they're shackled to them due to their desire not to make up new planeswalkers and to have each of the 'walkers to have a story.

OP would have been wrong talking about the original Innistrad, but you can't honestly say Shadows over Innistrad wasn't inspired (read: blatantly copied) by Bloodborne.

Homelands had great lore and flavor. The problem is sets from the last dozen years or so have terrible lore and flavor so there's nothing to enjoy when the power curve is weak.

Did it? Because it was just basic bitch fantasy, but with a Big Screwed Up Family fighting a bunch of Quirky Villagers

Wow, you sure convinced me. Thanks, TVtropes!

How else do you want me to encapsulate what i'm driving at? Essentially homelands felt like a lazy homebrew to me, there was a bunch of lore that only tangentially related to the main set and was ultimately a distraction to the building lore about Urza and Mishra, and the Ice Age that came shortly after that. Perhaps it's because IA was when I started, but Homelands was a bitter disappointment to me. There were essentially three playable cards in the entire set when it dropped: Autumn Willow, Serrated Arrows and Spirit Bears.

I'm not arguing that the power level wasn't shit, because it was. The flavor, however, was great. You've got an ancient clan of vampires - real, monstrous vampires rather than the Twilight rejects Zendikar and Innistrad have made the evergreen Black tribe for some horrid reason - out to fuck with an otherwise idyllic plane. In classic vampire fashion, they're not related except by the curse- Inri isn't even the same race as the Baron, and Grandmother Sengir is in fact a mad old Planeswalker who holds a chime that ends worlds. Green's bandland is the Adventurer's Guildhouse- any other set, it'd be the Hippie's Hall, Beast's Den or Elfhame. Green was allowed to be rural rather than outright savage, with the mystical fae shit of the outlands lending a fairy-tale feel. In many ways Homelands was the first run at the kind of flavor Lorwyn brought. Red was pirates and mountain clans without being strictly chaotic and brutish- well without summing everything up I feel like Homelands did a good job of exploring different sides of the colors, sides that we rarely see anymore.

This isn't a slight against Urza's Saga or anything, the Brothers' War is still probably my favorite novel and I love those guys, but Homelands brought a lot to the table and I'd love to see a Coldsnap style set try and do it again, and do it right. Call it, I don't know, Homesnap.

First of all, Homecoming would be my name for it.

I agree that the Vampires were cool, in essence because there were only a few of them, not all of their flunkies were vampires themselves, in fact most of them weren't - because that would be fucking retarded on their part.

I felt Green was just sort of neutered in that set, they didn't feel like themselves because they were ultimately still a representation of civilization.

Red was just confused in many ways, you had the straight just thieves (the two Legendary guys would be Blue these days) and rando-minotaurs. It was strange.

Blue was almost non-existent as a faction in that set, it was without any uniting locus beyond what, the university?

I suppose the justification for all of this is that Serra and Ferroz were more or less focused on certain interpretations of the colors, which biased their creation.

Any of these alone aren't bad, but they were just not as impressive after the interesting post-magical apocalypse that was Ice Age and Alliances.

The Gatewatch was a mistake. Pretty sure everyone can agree on that. I think the best way to handle Magic's story is what they did more or less from Alara through Tarkir where they would allow the various planeswalkers to all have their own goals and adventures that sometimes intersected. It makes the multiverse actually feel big.

Shadows was definitely inspired heavily by Bloodborne but you also can't say that gothic horror and cosmic horror don't go extremely well together. Can't say Emrakul was the best way to introduce squids to Innistrad but I did really like how it affected the plane.

>but then they got rid of the mana pool
No they didn't.
>got rid of life loss
First I've heard of it.
>errata'd all burn spells to now force planeswalkers as a core part of the game even harder
The original PW damage redirect shit was a massive hackjob anyway, but that's just what happens when you try to introduce a new card type several years into a game's life
>and introduced those godawful abomination saga cards.
That's just like your opinion man. I'm still a bit on the fence about the cards' visual design but mechanically I like what they're doing with them.

>I don't fucking know who's causing it
Yeah it is a mystery.

> desire to not make up new walkers
Have you just not been paying attention for the last year? Cause last I checked, /pol/ has been pissing itself that Wizards keeps making new walker girls.

To be fair, "new plane, new rebellious brown action grrrl walker" is a pretty lame trend.

> Angrath and Arlinn Kord are rebellious brown girls
Sure thing user. It's that mean Maro who's dumb, not you.

I think it's referring to Huatli for the Ixalan walker. Then again she's not really in any way rebellious.

>tfw not sure if this post is a joke mocking maro defenders of if user is really this stupid

Attached: thinking-face.png (256x256, 53K)

> Anyone who points out my mistakes must be the real moron.
user, how many times were you dropped as a baby?

Let's go over each set in the post-origins period, shall we?
>BFZ block
no new walkers
>SOI block
Arlinn Kord. White, not really rebellious, old. Doesn't do anything in the story.
>KLD block
Saheeli Rai, Dovin Baan. Saheeli is a brown girl who joins a rebellion, so okay, one hit. Dovin is a male vedalken who works for the asshole government.
>AKH block
Samut. Brown girl, rebels against Bolas. Wow. Two hits.
>XLN
Huatli, Angrath. Huatli is a brown girl but isn't really rebelling against anything. Angrath is a male minotaur who's pissed because he isn't able to see his family.

Very good analysis there famalam.

>I think the best way to handle Magic's story is what they did more or less from Alara through Tarkir where they would allow the various planeswalkers to all have their own goals and adventures that sometimes intersected. It makes the multiverse actually feel big.

user, are you me? I've been saying this exact thing since Origins fucked it up

user, someone else already pointed out you forgot Huatli. It's okay to be embarrassed at your mistake but pretending it never happened is just silly.

More diversity.

Attached: Screenshot_20180318_050809.png (621x720, 81K)

>his go-to point of reference is capeshit

What a surprise. "Cultural touchstones" my ass, they're important because multibillion dollar media companies tell us they're important.

So what you're saying is there is in fact a three-block trend from Kaladesh to the present. Well, thanks for doing the research to support the analysis, user.

I suppose it's possible to think that when the MCU has been around for half of your life, but Marvel and DC superheroes have been part of nerd culture for half a century.

2/5 blocks have had a single character of that type and the next set is going to have nothing but oldwalkers and the Jacetice League in it.

Except he's specifically talking about the movies there. Seems you were a little too eager for that gotcha to actually follow the reply chain.

3 consecutive blocks (let's stop forgetting Huatli) is enough to establish a trend, and I will be amazed if Tetsuo's daughter or Sisay's whatever doesn't wind up sparking out at some point.

Huatli doesn't fit the trend.

The theme is shit, but kids can get behind it. What's killing the game is the cost. They stay afloat off of a few whales and aren't bringing any new, younger players in because Hearthstone and Pokemon are FREE to start.

This
Pokemon, YuGiOh and FoW have low entrance cost and there are cheap decks that can put a fight against the meta decks. Compare that with the awful Event Decks they were giving us in the last years (the decent ones were the BfZ BG Midrange,MonoB Aggro from Theros and the Modern Event Deck).
I think the challender decks won't change a goddamn thing in the long run because the secondary market will raise the price of the missing pieces for those decks.

Yeah, but she's brown, so they're ignoring the fact that they had other words in there originally.

>Innistrad is a copy of Bloodborne.
Wut.

Using the model you just posited, explain literally every other block besides the three you used as examples. I'm sure WOTC follows trends (they'd be stupid not to), but claiming that's the primary factor in set design is just being obstinate.

Eh, I don't know about that. It still featured Jace as a central character, and brought back fucking Vraska when we haven't even had a story update on Garruk since before Theros. Maybe they'll move past their superfriends garbage, but they still have a ways to go to prove that any other characters still matter to the IP.

Because the overarching story doesn't fucking matter any more. The huge buildup to the confrontation with the eldrazi got resolved with the impact of a wet noodle, and the obvious plot hook with Nahiri got shelved until they need to hype another set to boost sales. Nothing these characters are doing is framed by any overall driving force, which is what Wizards wants so they can characterize them however they like in any given situation.

They're only doing Dominaria because Garfield wanted to, and I'd be shocked if it has any relevance to the Cardboard Cutout Club or the 'main' conflict with Bolas. At least, I hope it doesn't.

It's a shame because Vraska was actually interesting before. Since Maro loves his capeshit why not just focus on what she already was, the Punisher of Ravnica?

But people loved weatherlight.

>Both eras had equally poor reception.

Weatherlight was pretty bad mechanically, and most of the sets with the crew were also bad, but the storyline itself was not the problem.

>most sets with the crew were also bad
Invasion block still kicks ass. Tempest block had mediocre draft environments but is an overall good block (aside from how parasitic Shadow is)

Exodus was pretty shit apart from a few good cards.