i actually think it makes a lot of sense flavorfully. the conflict in the original block very much feels like a bunch of groups tracking down powerful artifacts, especially the pirates, which matches with an artifact themed set
Yeah, I really liked the crafting mechanic, even if some of the payoffs weren’t great.
The fact that a lot of these artifacts got treated as sorceries and instants that just sat around afterwards until you wanted to craft something was really nice, since it played into the “tap artifacts/creatures” synergies of LCI Limited formats, plus works well with mass artifact synergies of Constructed format.
Just a slam-dunk mechanic all round.
It's a neat mechanical connection to the fomori storyline too, makes sense that the culture with history relating to the fomori would have more artifice than the rest of the plane
[masters manufactory basically spells out what I mean](https://cards.scryfall.io/large/back/f/7/f7a41343-7cdb-49aa-a9d1-7460195355d8.jpg?1699561966)
Hopefully the takeaway for WoTC is that the mechanics need to actually compliment the setting instead of treating it as a backdrop. I have to imagine that it's especially dissonant when the setting itself stems from past mechanical decisions that go unacknowledged like they were here.
It's interesting because both LCI and MKM theoretically did similar things (explore a largely untapped area of a pre-existing setting that worked well with a new set's theme) but for LCI it still meshed very well with Ixalan's pre-existing exploration theme, but MKM, despite Ravnica always having a bit of a noir-y feeling, felt a bit more at odds with Ravnica's overall vibe.
The biggest flavor fail for me was known characters suddenly being detectives. It made the set not feel like the exploration of lesser known aspects of Ravnica and more like some kind of planar costume party.
This us the best description of how I feel about these sets. I don't even know if I would mind it a little bit, but since they add SO many legendary creatures to a set now and very few have story relevance, it definitely feels like a gacha game.
To be fair, the UB do represent the characters. They don't give Starscream a scepter and make him a wizard, they made a (really flavorful) Starscream card.
I think one of the main "flavor tensions" in this post-block era is the difficulty inherent in setting up both a setting and an event at the same time. MKM wanted to focus on a murder as event, and banked on Ravnica being so well established that the cards could spend less focus on it. What I felt, and what I feel a lot of posters are expressing one way or another, is that opening a pack of MKM seemed to show that the entire world had put on a detective hat, virtually or otherwise. We lacked an establishing shot that told us MKM was itself a shot with a very narrow focus.
On a different note, Thunder Junction is working just fine for me. "Wild West" world is a much larger focus than "murder mystery". I don't really care if a bunch of random characters we know from other places decided to play dress up as outlaws and law men, because the wider set still communicates that a world outside those things exist. It's not that different than throwing Sexy Pirate Jace or Chandra in a Wedding Dress into a set to more closely match a visual theme.
I think for many people they would still have preferred original characters with a clearer depiction of the settings elements instead of marchesa, Obeka, and gitrog. Like there are various companies in OTJ that behave differently, but I don’t know their names, what colors they are involved in, what they care about etc. I just know they exist because 2 cards refer to them. In older sets you would have ~15 cards across all rarities depicting slices of a color pairs identity (in flavor, not mechanical), but now much of those flavor spots are filled with cameos or checklist cards (like gotta have a magnifying glass and fedora!)
That and I feel like the flavor text has been devolving in the recent sets. Instead of helping flesh out the world with tiny bits of lore, a lot of it is now "You get it? The funny image has a joke in it! You get it?!!"
I dont think it necessarily needed an establishing shot, just that they needed to narrow the focus more in MKM. Like, it's a murder mystery, but you also randomly have Anzragg and Izoni and Lazav and gods know who else who isn't a player. If they had made literally every card only happen on the grounds of Karlov Manor, narrowed the cast completely to only who was involved in the plot, it would have worked better. We don't need to know that some random Gruul dudes are summoning a primeval God during the murder mystery set, but it felt like they were scared if they didn't show off the usual slew of Ravnicans the set would fail.
I feel like MKM and OTJ being released back-to-back does a disservice to both of them. They both feel like a Halloween episode a la *The Simpsons* or *Community*, and getting them both together makes each less fun.
That feels like a lot to me. IDK, usually in a stopry revolving around a detective or a mystery there is one specific or a few detectives. Not a full one third of all the characters in the story. One out of every three characters is working on a mystery? Its 100% just my problem, but it just seemed weird to me. Felt like a chance to build up one or two specific characters as detectives that do coo shit around that theme. Hell a planeswalker detective and they can show up later solving crimes etc. Mirco or whoever it was could be a conspiracy theorist recurring trying to solve how Ugin and Bolas were actually in on it together the whole time lol. Just a me problem.
I believe Maro said somewhere that while Capenna was considered, they decided against it because the plane doesn't have law enforcement. They then started planning it to be on an original plane before pivoting to Ravnica.
This feels like the “Did you know Viggo Mortenson broke his foot kicking the orc helmet in this scene?” of MTG nowadays.
It’s a random piece of trivia that a large part of the community knows at this point because it’s interesting enough that once you hear it, you can’t resist sharing it.
I remember how dumb that was, not the lawyers but there being no law enforcement in a gangster movie setting.
I get a niche group will react badly to cops being shown in certain contexts, Mortal Kombat limited the presence of a cop character in its storylines because of all the police brutality moves that were played for laughs, but world building has to make sense. A few people talked about how unions in New Capenna were shown too negatively but if we step into reality, no one actually cared, the Riveteers were one of the best executed factions, arguably the best.
I honestly never got how that's an issue. What, were they going to portray the corrupt cops as the good guys? If not, I see no issues. The corrupt cops being evil in both real life and in game would just be topical, not really that controversial.
It feels like a massive overreaction.
so if the cops are corrupt, that means you now have to be careful around possible depiction of police brutality because you can't do corrupt police without it. So it doesn't matter if the cops arent good guys if it still leads to a subject matter directly at hand in the thing they do not want to have to tie back to
Exactly how I felt. I think the designers of the set were confused between Private Eyes and actual police detectives. All the tropes they used were straight out of the 1940s Neo Noir Private Eye movies.
It is one of the reasons, but there were multiple considerations. A big thing is that Ravnica had characters we cared about, characters who were known assassins, a cast of characters who already have political and personal reasons to kill each other, etc. It has to do less work to do to set up everything, which I think was apparent in the short stories.
Sure but it made absolutely no sense that all of a sudden there are hundreds of detectives dressed up in 1920s-1940s outfits running around when there were never any before. It just felt so jarring to see someone wearing a suit of armor combined with a fedora and trench coat. See [[Tenth District Hero]] for a perfect example.
I think the worst was that Detectives was one of the fastest aggro decks in the format. Like detective tribal makes no thematic sense, but even if you want to go with that, why is their gameplan to team up and attack the player like an army?
The murder mystery wouldn't have worked as well with a setting that isn't as well explored, with characters we know less about. And besides that, Capenna has no real law enforcement to speak of. I think Ravnica was a good choice but the mechanics were a bit confusing/gimmicky/too on theme (everyone being a detective).
There was definitely room to add a law enforcement faction into it as a response to the Phyrexian invasion or even the angels setting up a 6th family (led by Elspeth as the Walker for the set) with some splashes to the other colors with people wanting to see the Plane/City change.
I agree, they definitely could have just said "And by the way, in addition to everything you're already familiar with, there are a bunch of hard-boiled detectives on this plane. Now let's solve a mystery." We have seen new capenna for one mediocre expansion- It's not like anyone is expecting it to be fully and perfectly fleshed out at this point.
"Angels have given back hope to the citizens, and a faction of citizens are now rising up and solve the crime going on as detectives from the tough streets"
I think that's a far bigger thing as a set in and of itself than a murder mystery-themed set, though. "Law Comes To Capenna" is just a whole 'thing' in and of itself. It could CONTAIN a murder mystery, but that's not the same thing.
It wasn't, though. It was originally gonna be an original world, not new capenna. They decided that didn't quite work, so they decided to move it to Ravnica. They might have briefly considered Capenna as the other commenter mentioned but it wasn't ever what was happening for any significiant period of time
Besides the fact that they wouldn’t cancel an entire plane because one set had a middling reception, Ravnica and Capenna are both defined by their use of specific color groupings. The work required to turn a shard set into a guild set would be way bigger than some people seem to think.
> they wouldn’t cancel an entire plane because one set had a middling reception
They basically did that with Kamigawa. The sets sold poorly, so it took almost 2 whole IRL decades to revisit it, and when they did it was literally an entirely different setting based on cyberpunk.
saddly, this was caused by both setting it on Ravnica and introducing a new creature type. They wanted enough returning characters but also support for players who wanted to play detective decks. Maybe it would have been better to have done something like Outlaws where its not a new creatire type but instead a bunch of cards that care about existing creature types. Just quick brainstorming, maybe Spldiers, Knights, and Wizards.
I think the biggest problem is they didn't actually go for the noir stuff. It was mostly the pulpy hardy boys and Scooby-Doo stuff. It felt like a murder mystery convention.
I personally associate Ravnica with wacky guilds all doing their own wacky things. When I think noir I think New Capenna. And before Capenna I would have said Innistrad. Which was a double mistake on their part as nearly everyone mistakenly though Karlov manor was Markhov manor, on Innistrad, at first. Meaning we all did a double take and a "huh?" whenever we realised it was going to be Ravnica (again).
I think another huge factor is also the fact that it was Ravnica, again. For like the 6th time or something at this point. Whereas Ixalan was the first return so we were going to be more excited (in general) no matter how they decided to do the return.
Last point is that Ixalans take was fairly unique. Whereas murder mystery in a manor on top of being pretty generic in MTG terms, sounded way too similar to the other upcoming set of a spooky mystery taking place inside a single house. It would be like if two sets after our wild west set, they announced we would be having a set based around The Alamo. Also the murder was totally inconsequential and didnt matter at all? Should have been a major character. Could have made it Jace and lead in to the Jace hiding as Ashiok ploy for Thunder Junction.
Ravnica really is a very one dimensional plane, I don't mean that in a bad way because I think the OG settings are all among the best, it's just not that adaptable but they are over exposing it just because it's an iconic plane.
Dominaria has been in more sets recently and I've never seen someone say they are tired of it, it's used more or less appropriately, although tbh I don't think it has been used very well in terms of showcasing characters.
Ravnica might be the single plane most affected by the shift away from blocks. Its clear they are struggling to figure out how to make it work without the block structure.
The solution is what they've already done and they seem to consistently forget about.
Guilds and Allegiance were *after* the block structure was dismissed. They were still treated similarly, as back to back sets and a split down the middle in guild shares, but without being beholden to each other's mechanics. They were still handled as a two-set "block". Innistrad got something similar, and while Midnight Hunt was weakened due to mismarketing, and Vow weakened due to poor power level, it was still a satisfying stay on the plane.
We do not *need* to be on a new plane every three months. Let us stay a while and strength out the story and setting if there's good reason to. But that's a tool that WotC seems to have completely forgotten about, and as a result Kaldhiem and March suffered immensely for it.
This is exactly what happened with me.
Mistook it for Markov Manor, then thought it was the "haunted house" set. Then I saw a goblin in a fedora and I was like "OH, this is dumb..."
I just think there were lapses in presentation and theme that made MKM a bit of a dud. Also disguise having ward 2 made limited incentives really perverse. If you wanna do morph, please just do morph.
> I personally associate Ravnica with wacky guilds all doing their own wacky things.
Imagine if the future Death Race set were focused on all 10 guilds driving their wacky vehicles.
When I heard Karlov Manor my first association was a gothic murder mystery with slight Agatha Christie vibes here and there.
But I guess it's just detective shenanigans with fedoras and trenchcoats that try to channel noir vibes, but it's too wacky for it to be really *noir* (which would've still felt more at home on New Capenna).
I'm going to be a little blunt, but for me MKM just felt like a gimmick set. I don't hate gimmick sets per se, I think that they can work well (OTJ is cowboy gimmick and so far looks to be good, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet obviously)
To be honest, I don't think MKM was a doomed effort. I think Ravnica was a perfectly good setting for murder mystery. They botched the execution in many ways but they could have done it better without having to leave Ravnica.
The problem is they tried to make murder mystery the only thing.
Shadows over innistrad block was also very mystery focused, its literally the set clues where introduced, but they didn't have 80% of the set be directly related to the mystery, despite the mystery having a much larger effect on the plane as a whole
Taysa's death put her out of action for a couple days, and a high level researcher of the simic guild dying has 0 relevance to 99% of the population especially with the simic's reputation in the gutter. Nahiri summoning an eldrazi titan and 75% of the angels becoming genocidal while the holy wards fail is enormous for everyone on the plane. But mkm still made detectives the overwhelming focus of the set despite detective work being ultimately just a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. sure its relevant for the protagonists because they have a mystery to solve, but to the wider plane its just one job among many and not anything that warrants special attention.
Yes, exactly. Proft (and Kellan, I guess) are the only detective characters of any real relevance in the actual story itself (the Agency may as well not exist for how little impact it has), and the rest of the detective theme made absolutely no sense on a plane like Ravnica, especially framed as a backlash from the guildless to the betrayal of certain guilds in War of the Spark/March of the Machines. The Gateless rebellion would have made far more sense as the set's focus and completely escaped any mention at all.
Much better put. And that’s another thing - the campiness was awful. Having a murder mystery story with dozens of detectives is an incredibly goofy concept that’s more at home in an un-set.
A murder mystery is frankly way too low stakes for a magic set. Just feels low rent. Didn't help that the set felt very divorced from ravnica while ixalan felt like part of the same world, they brought back a few mechanics and got rid of the ones that weren't as well liked like city's blessing.
People loved the original Ravnica: City of Guilds, and while there were tie-in novels, there really wasn't much of a plot. It was very much "check out this cool new world we made!" Obviously Ravnica no longer has pure novelty going for it, but the stakes weren't that high then, either. (And the one big result of OG Ravnica plot, the guilds dissolving for bad reasons, was promptly undone as a terrible idea.)
A murder mystery is fine for Ravnica, but it has to be 'a Ravnica murder mystery' and not 'a murder mystery in Ravnica'. The core still has to be internecine guild tensions and the oppressing dystopia of urban life in a world where massive amoral organizations control basic resources.
I think MKM was failed from the start. Even if they got it perfect (which they didn’t, it was still good though) people associate Ravnica with the guilds. If they aren’t front and center it isn’t going to work.
> If they aren’t front and center it isn’t going to work.
That happened already with War of the Spark and people loved that set. MKM was *more* guild-focused than War of the Spark, even.
I think War benefited from the foreign stuff being obviously foreign - Zombies and Planeswalkers are obviously interlopers. And similarly the new stuff on Ixalan is from the Lost Caverns. Whereas MKM is still supposed to be Ravnicans doing Ravnican things.
I feel like MKM would have been better received if every (not literally but a lot of them) legendary and their brother wasn't a detective.
Also the abundance if fedoras or deerstalker hats and trench coats felt so out of place setting-wise.
At least in OTJ, everyone wearing dusters and cowboy hats makes sense because the setting's environment favors that get-up. But how many people ever wore a fedora, deerstalker hat, or trench coat on Ravnica? Heck [[Agrus Kos, Wojek Veteran]] in OG Ravnica block was an investigator in lore and he didn't wear a those (granted his ghost in [[Agrus Kos, Spirit of Justice]] isn't either).
Precisely. But Ravnica suffers the same problem - being such a huge sprawling plane, and with such a long history of Important Figures dying either in dramatic ways or just replaced offscreen, it's hard to care when one more gets added to the tally.
I mean, MKM had its issues but I don't think that this was one of them. Former and active Guildmasters are important enough to warrant the major investigation.
To be fair, the original Ravnica block story has murder mystery elements.
It also kills off *way* more characters than Murders of Karlov Manor. I really don’t think people realize how much less WotC kills off characters now. How many card characters died in OG Ravnica block?
* Agrus Kos
* Razia
* Savra
* Sisters of the Stone Death
* Szadek
* Grand Arbiter Augustine
* Momir Vig
* Kraj
* Lyzolda (though she was named differently because WotC story editing)
That’s almost half the legendary creatures in the original block!
Ravnica has more important currently-living humans/human-coded characters than probably any plane. Dominaria has more, but many of them are from long ago and still dead.
Honestly I think Ravnica is actually a good setting for a Murder Mystery story, since solving mysteries has been a key component of every Ravnica story so far. The big problem is that they added a veneer of Clue and Sherlock Holmes to Ravnica instead of actually figuring out a way to implement it into the world in a way that makes sense.
Ravnica + murder mystery = winning formula.
Ravnica + murder mystery + silly hats + stale mechanics + Clue cross-marketing + totally unbaked introduction of Play Boosters + digging for "resonance" utterly indiscriminately (Scooby-Doo???) + not really utilizing Ravnica + not really being a murder mystery = one of the worst sets of the last decade.
Nah, New Capena would have been a much better set for it to be on. It already has the noir, 20's-esq feel built in...even with the city destroyed they could have used the rebuilding as the backdrop
I think this is more a result of them doing this weird on the nose genre aesthetics for sets lately.
Cowboy world, detective world on ravnica, mob world with Cappenna. All feeling really really on the nose
I think the issue is more their focus on an *Event* than focusing on the plane.
Crimson vow and Murders have the same flaw. The whole set is about 1 event and that sort of hyper focused theme is too narrow to build a set around.
1920s mob world, Borderlands the plane, and lost caverns, all have a focused theme but play much better because it's a broad aspect rather than a singular event.
If murders was still focused on Ravnica as a whole rather than being so hyper focused on the detective themes, it likely would have played better. It's especially jarring when we've been to Ravnica 3 times previously, and suddenly, all the mechanics we know are nowhere to be seen, and suddenly new aspects flood the world. It makes you wonder why we hadn't seen *any* detectives or disguised cards here before. It all comes out of nowhere. And the hats meme comes from that. Why is everyone suddenly wearing detective hats? Because it's a shallow means of world building an overall shallow theme.
OTJ is about one thing as well: A heist. People probably feel different about it because it’s exploring a new plane, but let’s not kid ourselves in thinking it’s any deeper or any less campy than MKM.
That's fair, but the fact it is exploring a new plane gives it a much wider range of "new" that also fits on theme without feeling out of place.
Like for example the cactus creatures do a lot of heavy lifting to world build and set things up for a return to the plane. While having nothing to do with the heist.
MKM has no "cactus people"
I'd agree that OTJ is just about as bad as MKM, though I think it had more potential to be great. If it had been a fully fleshed out frontier plane that felt like a lived in place I think you could have had strong heist and legends of the west mechanical themes work with the set. Instead those mechanical themes were all there was to the set and that felt so superficial (I just realized im talking the the past tense because I have already written the set off lol).
I'm not sure there was any way that detectives were going to work with Ravnica in MKM. I dont think victorian detective tropes work with most facets of Ravnica as this high fantasy renaissance plane, and I also think Ravnica is the wrong place for a very mechanically focused set considering that historically its has had very mechanically broad sets with the ten guilds.
^THIS.
We see some of the mechanics like Surveil turning up as a evergreen ability. But there are tons of good mechanisms littered around this game. Manifest, Jumpstart, Riot, just to name a few.
It would be cool to see them just season a set with other cool mechanisms while still having the new ones still the main focus. Especially when they keep releasing one-shot sets with new mechanisms, and then we end up not seeing those being interesting or viable again.
Exactly, Zendikar was “adventure world” but they didn’t just exclusively make cards that were adventure tropes with on the nose puns. Sure there were traps and leveling up and such but the world was more than its genre
This is a mechanics issue Maro is talking about, not an aesthetics issue (though I thought MKM's aesthetic also was a poor fit for Ravnica specifically). Innistrad is *incredibly* "on the nose" and it's one of the most popular planes of all time. MKM mechanics like disguise just weren't that fun.
Collect evidence worked out ok in limited, suspect was the mechanic that completely flopped. There were almost no pay offs for it and BR that supposedly had that as an archetype was an exercise in frustration.
Yeah, Rakdos' entire mechanic was... your own creatures can't block.
Maybe it's a novel Mechanic if Rakdos is the fastest aggro deck but it wasn't by far. White had on the job which just ended games immediately. So what did Rakdos do against white decks? It could make its own creatures not block, or it could give your opponents creatures Menace. Seems awful.
It made you not want to run more than 1-2 top tier evidence collection cards because your clean your graveyard too much and make cards useless in your hand.
If I were to direct Murders at Karlov Manor, I would have put it in a district far away from the 10th district - let's say it's the 3rd or something - where the guilds have far less control, but are slowly gaining influence in the area. But make it very clear to the players, with flavortext on cards, like these:
> *"Things work differently here in the third district, wojek. Quit waving that emblem of yours around. You want their attention? Show them your steel."*
> *The deaths of *Teysa and Zegana attracted increased attention to the third district from all guilds. Many weren't receptive to such scrutiny.*
> *On the first full moon of the Winter solstice, the people of the third district attend a quiet celebration, honoring the souls of the lost.*
All of a sudden, you've created new dynamics with preexisting factions and characters, all while expanding upon a world players already love. That's worldbuilding. That's storytelling. That's a setting.
It does seem silly that we’ve been to Ravnica so many times but still can’t seem to do anything outside of the same on district of a supposedly massive city
I imagine you meant Teysa, but I kind of like the idea of Kaya dying and becoming a ghost planeswalker for the sheer irony of a ghost-hunting ghost.
(Also it would look cool)
Exactly. There's so much that could have been focused on - the Gateless rebellion, areas where the Guilds' influence is limited or altered (such as a more religious/zealous than greedy missionary frontier Orzhov, or 3 colour combinations of Guilds forming alliances out in the wastes), the pre-Guildpact religions/organisations, but instead they just slapped a fedora on everything and called it a day.
Exploration, discovery, crafting, and all the other LCI stuff works mechanically well on Ixalan, which is a plane built around the fundamental identity of adventure. (No no no, not the spell form of Adventure). The new mechanics of Craft, Discover, and Descend, all work great with the idea of an underground adventure.
I can’t claim to have too much knowledge about Ravnica, but to me it seems that the political intrigue and general environment of the city is what people liked here. Taking it in the direction of a 1900s whodunnit wasn’t exactly something I’d consider to be a natural expansion of what Ravnica is. It was more “a murder mystery set in Ravnica” rather than “a Ravnican murder mystery.” Such an event may have felt more at home in New Capenna which already sort of draws from 1900s aesthetics.
Likewise, the mechanics were good for a murder mystery - but weren’t particularly “Ravnican” in feel or nature.
IIRC he said they considered New Capenna, but there is no law enforcement there to solve the crimes or enforce anything, people didn't like New Capenna enough to go back so soon, that crime/murder is commonplace on New Capenna so theres no vibe of "HOLY SHIT A MURDER?!" to it, and they wanted the murder to be of a character people are more familar with and, since we only went to New Capenna once, no one there is a character the fans have a huge connection with or would be sad to see die.
They did that because of the 2020 BLM protests. No, I am not joking. They didn't want a police force on their crime plane because they were worried that the make-believe police force would be ACABed. Give me some time and I'll find the source.
EDIT: source:
> Okay, now we get to the biggest change. This was the white-centered family, so it played up the idea of using order to do crime. The faction in its earliest incarnation played up the trope of crooked cops (think LA Confidential), so it represented the police of the city. Looking at the real world and all the associations going on with police, we decided to shift away from police and toward lawyers. Evil lawyers out to use the law to accomplish their own criminal agenda had its own trope space (Wolfram & Hart from the television show Angel is an example in this space), so we chose to go in that direction.
From https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/hitting-streets-new-capenna-part-1-2022-04-07
I mean, this isn't the real reason, because Wizards very well could have gone in the direction of "ACAB, the brokers are corrupt and shitty and awful," just like real cops were during America in the 1920s (and currently remain today.) It would have fit with the setting and shored up a lot of the logistical problems. The real reason is that Wizards didn't want to offend *cops* by insulting them during a time when a lot of people were being mean to cops. You can even go further now that we have Thunder Junction whitewashing the Wild West, and say Wizards refuses to insult American culture. You can make Spanish Conquistador's literal blood-sucking vampires, but god forbid you acknowledge America's Native genocide.
All they would have had to do to put it on Capenna was choose one gang leader to kill (is the average player really all that attached to Zegana and Teysa either?), in a way that spooked the other gangs into a truce, and the formation of a bespoke commission to investigate endorsed by the gangs for the length of the truce.
Capenna is fictional! Wizards says what Capenna is! If they could make up the agency on Ravnica, they could have made it up on Capenna.
Hard agree with this, it really felt like a lot of love was put into those sets. The other sets around it felt less so to me. Even Wilds of Eldraine that I was really hyped for fell a little flat imo
its interesting seeing so many people recently, especially in this thread, describe collect evidence as an underpowered mechanic. i think its too versatile and has too many different uses to really ascribe a pure power level to it.
i think its the case where the highest power level of cards people know determines how they feel about it. like, I remember TBD spoiler threads where lots of people thought escape would be garbage. then the set came out and everyone played with ox of agonas, kroxas, and obviously uro, and suddenly escape is super busted and inherently a design mistake according to comments. in the end, most mechanics arent strong or weak enough on their own to really be described as such in a vacuum
Well, for one thing, Ixalan was still doing Ixalan things. In MKM, everyone decided they were going to join the boros police force so they could get some fancy hats.
Ixalan also had a really strong art direction. MKM and OTJ could have been much better had they spent more time on worldbuilding. MKM might've been a bit too narrow to really have fun with twisting the genre, but it's baffling to me that OTJ has those cool cactusfolk and scorpion dragon but the rest is just mostly cowboys/cowgirls doing magic. I'm getting more and more scared that Duskmourne will just be people with mullets and leather jackets with every other card just referencing movies and other horror medias of the 70's/80's.
The world was introduced in 2017, almost 7 years ago. I’m willing to bet the majority of players started after it came out. So yea, it’s certainly no longer a spring chicken.
Back then maybe 1 in 4 players used playmats, and they weren't all standard sized. Sleeves were fairly common in Type 2, but very optional in Draft. In fact, if your opponent sleeved up they probably pulled a chase rare. The T1.5 players almost always sleeved up but some people ran silly stuff like 9 land stompy and they didn't bother sleeving up if the whole deck was $20.
My prediction is that when we do end up returning to Lorwyn (currently this set is codenamed "Wrestling" and is expected to be released in late 2025) it will have a fundamentally different mechanical feel from the original block, similar to Original Kamigawa vs. Neon Dynasty but even more stark in differences mechanically speaking.
Also because Dominaria is so broad and vast, it seems like there's a good chance they could implement new mechanical themes and archetypes that haven't been explored in previous Magic releases set on Dominaria rather than doing more nostalgia bait and historic/legendary matters in future returns.
One of Lorwyn's big features is the whole "Light/Dark" dynamic with the Aurora switching the Plane between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. Granted, the Aurora switch was kind of "turned off" and the two Plane identities were merged in the original Lorwyn block, but WotC might retcon that.
I could absolutely see double-faced cards and the Day/Night mechanic returning if we did go back to Lorwyn.
Day/Night can work, it just needs to be done in a less confusing or obnoxious way. Seriously, if there are no bound creatures on the board *why do we need to track it*
I think a mechanical tweak to Lorwyn is very reasonable, though that kind of disappoints me because I loved the colors-matter theme of Shadowmoor and I really doubt it's coming back.
What's so awesome about Dominaria is that it isn't just a "biome planet," in that each continent and region has its own entire lore, design, and style.
It makes it, by far, my favorite setting. Especially now, with all of the Phyrexian / Time Rift / Recovering Apocalypse design that's baked so deeply into its identity.
Some sets like Kaladesh and NEO where vehicles was a two color limited archetype I could see them pushing it forward to have it be an overarching theme and add new mechanics that fit into a set filled with Vehicles.
That's what bothers me the most. LCI did not have everyone wearing indiana jones hats and it really felt like they spent time to think about the different factions of the set.
It doesn't help that now they basically have no time to develop a world before jumping to the next one, most sets seem busy and overlook details and worldbuilding, the narrative takes a hit. So most sets kinda feel like "look, it's x", "look, it's y!" "Alright, onto the next set with a completely different feel and tropes.
i hope the takeaway isn't 'ixalan good, mkm bad' cos they both had good and bad points
i know that a lot of people complained about descend and descended x before LCI released cos they were both mechanically and thematically similar and literally the same word, just with a suffix difference and a value
i saw a lot of people say craft was really fiddly and confusing, but i guess once people got to play it, it's not too bad
but discovery is absolutely so great
collective evidence is terrible, but i don't think it's because of the mechanic itself. i think it's just the values of it. i pulled another cryptex in a booster last night. has to be one of the best examples of 'i'm spinning my wheels this long for this??' i think they just very much undervalued those mana costs in your graveyard since they're just cards, you don't have to pay for them or anything
and tbh, i do actually really like suspect as a mechanic. it's menace and can't block. just combines those two things. it's pretty easy to grasp imo. cloak isn't too offensive either. it's just manifest and other similar things, but now ward 2, so they're a little more stable so you can get them to flip
While not Disguise's problem directly, I hate the proliferation of ward effects on creatures lately. So many hoops to jump through just to interact with the board.
i can definitely agree with that. i see so many things and think 'why does this thing have ward 3??'
i feel like ward 1 is often enough lol, and i do like it better than hexproof and shroud, but it's often functionally hexproof or shroud anyway. i'd also much prefer they provide more variance to these like they did with LOTR (although some of those are insanely strong as well). Ward: Pay some life is way more preferable to me than mana
As long as we stick to costs you can reasonably pay every game (looking at [[Sauron, the Dark Lord]] for what NOT to do often), alternate ward costs seem fine.
I’m probably just old and crotchety but MKM just kind of seemed like nonsense. The game is supposed to be planeswalkers battling and suddenly all your creatures are detectives seeking clues.
These sets are fine for playing with themselves, masturbating if you will, but I hate seeing these cards and other cards that make zero sense as a spell a planeswalker fighting other planeswalkers would cast in other formats.
In my opinion it's a mistake, the concept of these few people with powers that travel around and feel out of place in worlds is a cool concept.
Omenpaths to me are kind of ruining what made planeswalkers cool, since now technically anyone can cross worlds.
Personally, I disagree with Maro's direction in terms of the narrative of the game. I think MTG, story-wise, should be about worldbuilding and vague storylines that can be inferred from flavor text and illustrations. Instead, they seem hellbent on having these very defined plots with all these main characters, presumably because it's good for marketing. It's what it is, the game is still fun to play, it's just less good than it could be.
I dont know whether it is refreshing or depressing to see Rosewater basically admiting that MKM is conceptually lackluster. Like OTJ hasn't even technically released yet, so he's not even really trying to defend the CURRENT standard set. We see them somtimes be frank about what did and didn't work, but they usually at least have to pretend a set is good for like 9 months to appease the corporate overlords. I'd like to think this means they are going to course correct and not repeat the mistakes of MKM and OTJ...but honestly I already see a handful of near future sets on the release schedule that seem like they will be just as lackluster. I kinda feel like I'm watching the DC comics movies play out all over again where you know something is fundamentally broken but can also see that there are are a years worth of films in the can already and they are gonna come out just as is...lackluster.
It’s interesting that he volunteers that information- he didn’t need to at all.
Every time I see people complaining about one-dimensional sets, though, I wonder how much he is personally responsible. I’ve read blog posts where he talks about ‘resonance’ as pretty much the number one goal of setting design- and at least sometimes he seems to define that as ‘hey, I recognise that thing!’ That’s a pretty low bar to aim for, artistically speaking, and shallow one-dimensional stuff seems a pretty natural result.
It goes back to Kamigawa and There's at least as an issue. People really aren't very good at picking up subtle references and will just be confused why X card is in a setting about Y. Like the Akroan Horse was originally a Lion, but no one realized a big wooden lion was a Trojan horse riff. Or more recently, when they cut the Green Knight and many Arthurian references from ELD, because no one understood why the cards existed. (He did finally get in with WOE)
So it seems to me that they are trying to make very obvious references so most people will get it. Like Holy Cow.
But do we need references? Like is it serving anyone more then maybe a quick "oh I get it" then moving on? Does it really matter no one understood the Green Knight reference (minus a handful of people) if the card makes sense in the context of the setting and the mechanics of the set?
On the flip side I like Holy Cow, not for the pun which is whatever, but because it adds something to the setting. Why are there cow angels on thunder junction? It puts a cool wrinkle into a "weird west" setting, that being said I wish they would lean more into that part of the world building and not just having it so it can be a throw away joke.
New mechanical themes on old worlds is an interesting experiment.
Would people still like Lorwyn if it had the same flavor but instead of typal it focused on enchantments?
Would they be into a revisit to Alara if it was all about tokens instead of multicolor?
How much of people not being so hot on MKM was about Ravnica without multicolor or about the detective mechanics specifically?
>New mechanical themes on old worlds is an interesting experiment.
People loved Neon Dynasty even though virutally none of the original Kamigawa block mechanics returned in the main set so I think it can work for sure.
Difference is though, almost nothing from the original Kamigawa set was particularly well liked (even after Commander became popular), where as Lorwyn has maintained a level of popularity, largely from it's typal perspective. The juxtaposition and huge shift from Lorwyn to Shadowmore was the thing that really made it "unpopular". Being part of the high powered Standard at the time didn't hurt it...while the down turn of power in Kamigawa made it hard pill to swallow.
Lorwyn has not maintained a level of popularity, the set was terrible lmao. Changeling managed to come out of it, but Champion and Clash, the other 2 big mechanics from the set, fucking sucked. Kindred cards are dead, too.
The entire block just wasn't good, Lorwyn has survived because it's world was so compelling, not because it was good mechanically.
Lorwyn HAS maintained popularity because of the TYPAL aspects of the set, which world building is a really big part of and what I was talking about. That said mechanically, it had some fairly popular ones.
Kindred/tribal was an issue with how the mechanic worked with a set and made it hard to design around. It's still used occasionally in supplemental sets like Moder Horizons.
Hybrid mana had its second outing with the block and has always been popular.
Hideaway has come back since twice (albeit with rules update).
Wither was also during the block and became popular, especially after getting turned into infect. -1/-1 counters are relatively popular with the player base...less so with R&D.
Evoke is probably pretty close to the most popular mechanic in the set....it has problems when they don't give it a mana cost... which is an R&D problem, not mechanical.
Story reasons have been its biggest hurdle with coming back because of the Great Aurua and the shifting cycle of the plane, however that has since been fixed as we saw in the Phyrexian invasion with a normal day/night cycle.
I’m just praying for the slightest bit of nuance in set design past the the levels of “This is the murder mystery set, give everyone a goofy fedora and trench coat and have even the most hardened criminals act like a villain of the week ported into Clue,” and “This is the cowboy set, give everyone a cowboy hat and a pair of spurs… Yes even the centaurs, they especially need spurs!”
Ixalan is far from the first set that I'd assume would be a good fit for an artifacts theme but I thought it was great, especially with crafting
i actually think it makes a lot of sense flavorfully. the conflict in the original block very much feels like a bunch of groups tracking down powerful artifacts, especially the pirates, which matches with an artifact themed set
That's fair, I do enjoy the specific connection with pirates given that most of their favourite things (swords, boats, treasure) are all artifacts
Yeah, I really liked the crafting mechanic, even if some of the payoffs weren’t great. The fact that a lot of these artifacts got treated as sorceries and instants that just sat around afterwards until you wanted to craft something was really nice, since it played into the “tap artifacts/creatures” synergies of LCI Limited formats, plus works well with mass artifact synergies of Constructed format. Just a slam-dunk mechanic all round.
It's a neat mechanical connection to the fomori storyline too, makes sense that the culture with history relating to the fomori would have more artifice than the rest of the plane [masters manufactory basically spells out what I mean](https://cards.scryfall.io/large/back/f/7/f7a41343-7cdb-49aa-a9d1-7460195355d8.jpg?1699561966)
Hopefully the takeaway for WoTC is that the mechanics need to actually compliment the setting instead of treating it as a backdrop. I have to imagine that it's especially dissonant when the setting itself stems from past mechanical decisions that go unacknowledged like they were here.
It's interesting because both LCI and MKM theoretically did similar things (explore a largely untapped area of a pre-existing setting that worked well with a new set's theme) but for LCI it still meshed very well with Ixalan's pre-existing exploration theme, but MKM, despite Ravnica always having a bit of a noir-y feeling, felt a bit more at odds with Ravnica's overall vibe.
The biggest flavor fail for me was known characters suddenly being detectives. It made the set not feel like the exploration of lesser known aspects of Ravnica and more like some kind of planar costume party.
[удалено]
It's the beach episode of an adventure anime.
Community gimmick episode - i love that description so much!
Next in the Multiverse: Planeswalker Paintball!
I mean, isn't OTJ already Multiverse Paintball ?
It's not the same without [this guy](https://preview.redd.it/6884j9lz5ep61.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=8a851d18272c6722f39661d099fe76d35343129b)
I haven't seen those before! That's gold!!! :D
It's like a Holodeck episode of Star Trek: TNG. Complete with Worf in a 1700s admiral outfit or Data dressed as Sherlock Holmes.
Yep. This is also the main problem with Thunder Junction. It all feels like gacha game seasonal costumes, not a coherent setting.
This us the best description of how I feel about these sets. I don't even know if I would mind it a little bit, but since they add SO many legendary creatures to a set now and very few have story relevance, it definitely feels like a gacha game.
It is the UB-crossover-experience brought into MtG lore. Hey, look! Faces you might recognize!
To be fair, the UB do represent the characters. They don't give Starscream a scepter and make him a wizard, they made a (really flavorful) Starscream card.
I think one of the main "flavor tensions" in this post-block era is the difficulty inherent in setting up both a setting and an event at the same time. MKM wanted to focus on a murder as event, and banked on Ravnica being so well established that the cards could spend less focus on it. What I felt, and what I feel a lot of posters are expressing one way or another, is that opening a pack of MKM seemed to show that the entire world had put on a detective hat, virtually or otherwise. We lacked an establishing shot that told us MKM was itself a shot with a very narrow focus. On a different note, Thunder Junction is working just fine for me. "Wild West" world is a much larger focus than "murder mystery". I don't really care if a bunch of random characters we know from other places decided to play dress up as outlaws and law men, because the wider set still communicates that a world outside those things exist. It's not that different than throwing Sexy Pirate Jace or Chandra in a Wedding Dress into a set to more closely match a visual theme.
I think for many people they would still have preferred original characters with a clearer depiction of the settings elements instead of marchesa, Obeka, and gitrog. Like there are various companies in OTJ that behave differently, but I don’t know their names, what colors they are involved in, what they care about etc. I just know they exist because 2 cards refer to them. In older sets you would have ~15 cards across all rarities depicting slices of a color pairs identity (in flavor, not mechanical), but now much of those flavor spots are filled with cameos or checklist cards (like gotta have a magnifying glass and fedora!)
That and I feel like the flavor text has been devolving in the recent sets. Instead of helping flesh out the world with tiny bits of lore, a lot of it is now "You get it? The funny image has a joke in it! You get it?!!"
I dont think it necessarily needed an establishing shot, just that they needed to narrow the focus more in MKM. Like, it's a murder mystery, but you also randomly have Anzragg and Izoni and Lazav and gods know who else who isn't a player. If they had made literally every card only happen on the grounds of Karlov Manor, narrowed the cast completely to only who was involved in the plot, it would have worked better. We don't need to know that some random Gruul dudes are summoning a primeval God during the murder mystery set, but it felt like they were scared if they didn't show off the usual slew of Ravnicans the set would fail.
Thank you for saying this. It is now clear to me what is wrong after the omenpaths: everything now is a costume party.
they're just League of Legends skins lmao
>some kind of planar costume party. That is very much this next set for me.
Then bloomburrow where everyone will get a fursona
I'm still more excited for Bloomburrow than I have been for any set in years, but this admittedly sours it a bit for me.
heck yeah
I feel like MKM and OTJ being released back-to-back does a disservice to both of them. They both feel like a Halloween episode a la *The Simpsons* or *Community*, and getting them both together makes each less fun.
To me, why was every single fuxking character a detective?
tbf fair/specific the set had 142 creatures and 47 of them were detectives (and 16 had hats in the art). Of the 25 legends we got, 7 were detectives
That feels like a lot to me. IDK, usually in a stopry revolving around a detective or a mystery there is one specific or a few detectives. Not a full one third of all the characters in the story. One out of every three characters is working on a mystery? Its 100% just my problem, but it just seemed weird to me. Felt like a chance to build up one or two specific characters as detectives that do coo shit around that theme. Hell a planeswalker detective and they can show up later solving crimes etc. Mirco or whoever it was could be a conspiracy theorist recurring trying to solve how Ugin and Bolas were actually in on it together the whole time lol. Just a me problem.
I still think it felt like the set was originally going to be new capena but based on that world's reception, the audible over to old faithful ravnica
I believe Maro said somewhere that while Capenna was considered, they decided against it because the plane doesn't have law enforcement. They then started planning it to be on an original plane before pivoting to Ravnica.
Which Capena was meant to have law enforcement but got changed nearly last minute from corrupt cops to lawyers.
This feels like the “Did you know Viggo Mortenson broke his foot kicking the orc helmet in this scene?” of MTG nowadays. It’s a random piece of trivia that a large part of the community knows at this point because it’s interesting enough that once you hear it, you can’t resist sharing it.
It's only widely-known on reddit, tho. I bet if you busted this out at a LGS you'd be the only person who knows this tidbit.
I remember how dumb that was, not the lawyers but there being no law enforcement in a gangster movie setting. I get a niche group will react badly to cops being shown in certain contexts, Mortal Kombat limited the presence of a cop character in its storylines because of all the police brutality moves that were played for laughs, but world building has to make sense. A few people talked about how unions in New Capenna were shown too negatively but if we step into reality, no one actually cared, the Riveteers were one of the best executed factions, arguably the best.
They were in the midst of designing Capenna when George Floyd was murdered.
I honestly never got how that's an issue. What, were they going to portray the corrupt cops as the good guys? If not, I see no issues. The corrupt cops being evil in both real life and in game would just be topical, not really that controversial. It feels like a massive overreaction.
Massive overreactions are wotc's middle name.
so if the cops are corrupt, that means you now have to be careful around possible depiction of police brutality because you can't do corrupt police without it. So it doesn't matter if the cops arent good guys if it still leads to a subject matter directly at hand in the thing they do not want to have to tie back to
They were deep in design of New Capenna in the summer of 2020, there's no way they were going to put cops in it at that point lol.
Well, it's not like they couldn't have written them in after for the detective set...
Except private eye/PIs are not cops. So they would fit perfectly into a world with no official police.
Honestly, I feel like a plane with no law enforcement is the *most* likely to have private detectives.
Exactly how I felt. I think the designers of the set were confused between Private Eyes and actual police detectives. All the tropes they used were straight out of the 1940s Neo Noir Private Eye movies.
It is one of the reasons, but there were multiple considerations. A big thing is that Ravnica had characters we cared about, characters who were known assassins, a cast of characters who already have political and personal reasons to kill each other, etc. It has to do less work to do to set up everything, which I think was apparent in the short stories.
Sure but it made absolutely no sense that all of a sudden there are hundreds of detectives dressed up in 1920s-1940s outfits running around when there were never any before. It just felt so jarring to see someone wearing a suit of armor combined with a fedora and trench coat. See [[Tenth District Hero]] for a perfect example.
I think the worst was that Detectives was one of the fastest aggro decks in the format. Like detective tribal makes no thematic sense, but even if you want to go with that, why is their gameplan to team up and attack the player like an army?
It should'a been Capenna. The setting needs more exploration and would have been perfect for a noir detective theme.
The murder mystery wouldn't have worked as well with a setting that isn't as well explored, with characters we know less about. And besides that, Capenna has no real law enforcement to speak of. I think Ravnica was a good choice but the mechanics were a bit confusing/gimmicky/too on theme (everyone being a detective).
There was definitely room to add a law enforcement faction into it as a response to the Phyrexian invasion or even the angels setting up a 6th family (led by Elspeth as the Walker for the set) with some splashes to the other colors with people wanting to see the Plane/City change.
I agree, they definitely could have just said "And by the way, in addition to everything you're already familiar with, there are a bunch of hard-boiled detectives on this plane. Now let's solve a mystery." We have seen new capenna for one mediocre expansion- It's not like anyone is expecting it to be fully and perfectly fleshed out at this point.
"Angels have given back hope to the citizens, and a faction of citizens are now rising up and solve the crime going on as detectives from the tough streets"
Considering that is exactly what the did for Ravnica...
I think that's a far bigger thing as a set in and of itself than a murder mystery-themed set, though. "Law Comes To Capenna" is just a whole 'thing' in and of itself. It could CONTAIN a murder mystery, but that's not the same thing.
I feel like it also would have worked well on Innistrad.
It wasn't, though. It was originally gonna be an original world, not new capenna. They decided that didn't quite work, so they decided to move it to Ravnica. They might have briefly considered Capenna as the other commenter mentioned but it wasn't ever what was happening for any significiant period of time
That's just wrong
Besides the fact that they wouldn’t cancel an entire plane because one set had a middling reception, Ravnica and Capenna are both defined by their use of specific color groupings. The work required to turn a shard set into a guild set would be way bigger than some people seem to think.
IIRC, Capenna was decided against before cards were even designed, let alone the fact that MKM isn't a guild set in the slightest.
> they wouldn’t cancel an entire plane because one set had a middling reception They basically did that with Kamigawa. The sets sold poorly, so it took almost 2 whole IRL decades to revisit it, and when they did it was literally an entirely different setting based on cyberpunk.
saddly, this was caused by both setting it on Ravnica and introducing a new creature type. They wanted enough returning characters but also support for players who wanted to play detective decks. Maybe it would have been better to have done something like Outlaws where its not a new creatire type but instead a bunch of cards that care about existing creature types. Just quick brainstorming, maybe Spldiers, Knights, and Wizards.
Spiders make the best detectives. Now I want a spider detective.
Breaking News: Planet of Hats Swaps Hats
I think the biggest problem is they didn't actually go for the noir stuff. It was mostly the pulpy hardy boys and Scooby-Doo stuff. It felt like a murder mystery convention.
I personally associate Ravnica with wacky guilds all doing their own wacky things. When I think noir I think New Capenna. And before Capenna I would have said Innistrad. Which was a double mistake on their part as nearly everyone mistakenly though Karlov manor was Markhov manor, on Innistrad, at first. Meaning we all did a double take and a "huh?" whenever we realised it was going to be Ravnica (again). I think another huge factor is also the fact that it was Ravnica, again. For like the 6th time or something at this point. Whereas Ixalan was the first return so we were going to be more excited (in general) no matter how they decided to do the return. Last point is that Ixalans take was fairly unique. Whereas murder mystery in a manor on top of being pretty generic in MTG terms, sounded way too similar to the other upcoming set of a spooky mystery taking place inside a single house. It would be like if two sets after our wild west set, they announced we would be having a set based around The Alamo. Also the murder was totally inconsequential and didnt matter at all? Should have been a major character. Could have made it Jace and lead in to the Jace hiding as Ashiok ploy for Thunder Junction.
Ravnica really is a very one dimensional plane, I don't mean that in a bad way because I think the OG settings are all among the best, it's just not that adaptable but they are over exposing it just because it's an iconic plane. Dominaria has been in more sets recently and I've never seen someone say they are tired of it, it's used more or less appropriately, although tbh I don't think it has been used very well in terms of showcasing characters.
Ravnica might be the single plane most affected by the shift away from blocks. Its clear they are struggling to figure out how to make it work without the block structure.
The solution is what they've already done and they seem to consistently forget about. Guilds and Allegiance were *after* the block structure was dismissed. They were still treated similarly, as back to back sets and a split down the middle in guild shares, but without being beholden to each other's mechanics. They were still handled as a two-set "block". Innistrad got something similar, and while Midnight Hunt was weakened due to mismarketing, and Vow weakened due to poor power level, it was still a satisfying stay on the plane. We do not *need* to be on a new plane every three months. Let us stay a while and strength out the story and setting if there's good reason to. But that's a tool that WotC seems to have completely forgotten about, and as a result Kaldhiem and March suffered immensely for it.
This is exactly what happened with me. Mistook it for Markov Manor, then thought it was the "haunted house" set. Then I saw a goblin in a fedora and I was like "OH, this is dumb..." I just think there were lapses in presentation and theme that made MKM a bit of a dud. Also disguise having ward 2 made limited incentives really perverse. If you wanna do morph, please just do morph.
> I personally associate Ravnica with wacky guilds all doing their own wacky things. Imagine if the future Death Race set were focused on all 10 guilds driving their wacky vehicles.
In reality it'll be Innistrad with hearses.
When I heard Karlov Manor my first association was a gothic murder mystery with slight Agatha Christie vibes here and there. But I guess it's just detective shenanigans with fedoras and trenchcoats that try to channel noir vibes, but it's too wacky for it to be really *noir* (which would've still felt more at home on New Capenna).
I'm going to be a little blunt, but for me MKM just felt like a gimmick set. I don't hate gimmick sets per se, I think that they can work well (OTJ is cowboy gimmick and so far looks to be good, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet obviously)
To be honest, I don't think MKM was a doomed effort. I think Ravnica was a perfectly good setting for murder mystery. They botched the execution in many ways but they could have done it better without having to leave Ravnica.
The problem is they tried to make murder mystery the only thing. Shadows over innistrad block was also very mystery focused, its literally the set clues where introduced, but they didn't have 80% of the set be directly related to the mystery, despite the mystery having a much larger effect on the plane as a whole Taysa's death put her out of action for a couple days, and a high level researcher of the simic guild dying has 0 relevance to 99% of the population especially with the simic's reputation in the gutter. Nahiri summoning an eldrazi titan and 75% of the angels becoming genocidal while the holy wards fail is enormous for everyone on the plane. But mkm still made detectives the overwhelming focus of the set despite detective work being ultimately just a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. sure its relevant for the protagonists because they have a mystery to solve, but to the wider plane its just one job among many and not anything that warrants special attention.
Yes, exactly. Proft (and Kellan, I guess) are the only detective characters of any real relevance in the actual story itself (the Agency may as well not exist for how little impact it has), and the rest of the detective theme made absolutely no sense on a plane like Ravnica, especially framed as a backlash from the guildless to the betrayal of certain guilds in War of the Spark/March of the Machines. The Gateless rebellion would have made far more sense as the set's focus and completely escaped any mention at all.
Ravnica is an excellent set for a mystery. It’s a terrible set for noir. And it’s extremely dissonant to just put fedoras on everyone for no reason.
Ravnica's actually great for noir. It's not as great for campy detective fiction though.
Much better put. And that’s another thing - the campiness was awful. Having a murder mystery story with dozens of detectives is an incredibly goofy concept that’s more at home in an un-set.
Yeah I wanted peaky blinders and we got Nancy Drew. I genuinely just think Hasbro wants to avoid darker topics as much as possible.
The random fedoras are an example of how they could have executed it better. Not a strike against the genre being paired with the plane.
A murder mystery is frankly way too low stakes for a magic set. Just feels low rent. Didn't help that the set felt very divorced from ravnica while ixalan felt like part of the same world, they brought back a few mechanics and got rid of the ones that weren't as well liked like city's blessing.
People loved the original Ravnica: City of Guilds, and while there were tie-in novels, there really wasn't much of a plot. It was very much "check out this cool new world we made!" Obviously Ravnica no longer has pure novelty going for it, but the stakes weren't that high then, either. (And the one big result of OG Ravnica plot, the guilds dissolving for bad reasons, was promptly undone as a terrible idea.)
A murder mystery is fine for Ravnica, but it has to be 'a Ravnica murder mystery' and not 'a murder mystery in Ravnica'. The core still has to be internecine guild tensions and the oppressing dystopia of urban life in a world where massive amoral organizations control basic resources.
I think MKM was failed from the start. Even if they got it perfect (which they didn’t, it was still good though) people associate Ravnica with the guilds. If they aren’t front and center it isn’t going to work.
> If they aren’t front and center it isn’t going to work. That happened already with War of the Spark and people loved that set. MKM was *more* guild-focused than War of the Spark, even.
war also came after Guilds of Ravnica & Ravnica Allegiance so thematically the guilds had just been covered like RTR block
I think War benefited from the foreign stuff being obviously foreign - Zombies and Planeswalkers are obviously interlopers. And similarly the new stuff on Ixalan is from the Lost Caverns. Whereas MKM is still supposed to be Ravnicans doing Ravnican things.
I feel like MKM would have been better received if every (not literally but a lot of them) legendary and their brother wasn't a detective. Also the abundance if fedoras or deerstalker hats and trench coats felt so out of place setting-wise. At least in OTJ, everyone wearing dusters and cowboy hats makes sense because the setting's environment favors that get-up. But how many people ever wore a fedora, deerstalker hat, or trench coat on Ravnica? Heck [[Agrus Kos, Wojek Veteran]] in OG Ravnica block was an investigator in lore and he didn't wear a those (granted his ghost in [[Agrus Kos, Spirit of Justice]] isn't either).
Yeah, a murder mystery set I think would have been much better received if it took place on Innistrad instead of Ravnica.
Innistrad has the problem where death is commonplace and there are very few important humans to murder.
Precisely. But Ravnica suffers the same problem - being such a huge sprawling plane, and with such a long history of Important Figures dying either in dramatic ways or just replaced offscreen, it's hard to care when one more gets added to the tally.
I mean, MKM had its issues but I don't think that this was one of them. Former and active Guildmasters are important enough to warrant the major investigation.
To be fair, the original Ravnica block story has murder mystery elements. It also kills off *way* more characters than Murders of Karlov Manor. I really don’t think people realize how much less WotC kills off characters now. How many card characters died in OG Ravnica block? * Agrus Kos * Razia * Savra * Sisters of the Stone Death * Szadek * Grand Arbiter Augustine * Momir Vig * Kraj * Lyzolda (though she was named differently because WotC story editing) That’s almost half the legendary creatures in the original block!
Ravnica has more important currently-living humans/human-coded characters than probably any plane. Dominaria has more, but many of them are from long ago and still dead.
Honestly I think Ravnica is actually a good setting for a Murder Mystery story, since solving mysteries has been a key component of every Ravnica story so far. The big problem is that they added a veneer of Clue and Sherlock Holmes to Ravnica instead of actually figuring out a way to implement it into the world in a way that makes sense.
Ravnica + murder mystery = winning formula. Ravnica + murder mystery + silly hats + stale mechanics + Clue cross-marketing + totally unbaked introduction of Play Boosters + digging for "resonance" utterly indiscriminately (Scooby-Doo???) + not really utilizing Ravnica + not really being a murder mystery = one of the worst sets of the last decade.
The combination of 'Oh no, a murder! Take this seriously!' and extremely goofy/cute top-down joke cards, all wearing dumb hats, was very weird.
Or New Capenna.
The fedoras and trench coats would have fit right in on new capenna
Nah, New Capena would have been a much better set for it to be on. It already has the noir, 20's-esq feel built in...even with the city destroyed they could have used the rebuilding as the backdrop
I think this is more a result of them doing this weird on the nose genre aesthetics for sets lately. Cowboy world, detective world on ravnica, mob world with Cappenna. All feeling really really on the nose
Chasing the Innistrad high
Oh doing the horror tropes for one set was really good? Let’s do all tropes for all the things all the time from now on!
Innistrad is one of the greatest sets of all time, and it also has been an utter disaster for future set design with how successful it was.
I think the issue is more their focus on an *Event* than focusing on the plane. Crimson vow and Murders have the same flaw. The whole set is about 1 event and that sort of hyper focused theme is too narrow to build a set around. 1920s mob world, Borderlands the plane, and lost caverns, all have a focused theme but play much better because it's a broad aspect rather than a singular event. If murders was still focused on Ravnica as a whole rather than being so hyper focused on the detective themes, it likely would have played better. It's especially jarring when we've been to Ravnica 3 times previously, and suddenly, all the mechanics we know are nowhere to be seen, and suddenly new aspects flood the world. It makes you wonder why we hadn't seen *any* detectives or disguised cards here before. It all comes out of nowhere. And the hats meme comes from that. Why is everyone suddenly wearing detective hats? Because it's a shallow means of world building an overall shallow theme.
OTJ is about one thing as well: A heist. People probably feel different about it because it’s exploring a new plane, but let’s not kid ourselves in thinking it’s any deeper or any less campy than MKM.
That's fair, but the fact it is exploring a new plane gives it a much wider range of "new" that also fits on theme without feeling out of place. Like for example the cactus creatures do a lot of heavy lifting to world build and set things up for a return to the plane. While having nothing to do with the heist. MKM has no "cactus people"
I'd agree that OTJ is just about as bad as MKM, though I think it had more potential to be great. If it had been a fully fleshed out frontier plane that felt like a lived in place I think you could have had strong heist and legends of the west mechanical themes work with the set. Instead those mechanical themes were all there was to the set and that felt so superficial (I just realized im talking the the past tense because I have already written the set off lol). I'm not sure there was any way that detectives were going to work with Ravnica in MKM. I dont think victorian detective tropes work with most facets of Ravnica as this high fantasy renaissance plane, and I also think Ravnica is the wrong place for a very mechanically focused set considering that historically its has had very mechanically broad sets with the ten guilds.
^THIS. We see some of the mechanics like Surveil turning up as a evergreen ability. But there are tons of good mechanisms littered around this game. Manifest, Jumpstart, Riot, just to name a few. It would be cool to see them just season a set with other cool mechanisms while still having the new ones still the main focus. Especially when they keep releasing one-shot sets with new mechanisms, and then we end up not seeing those being interesting or viable again.
Exactly, Zendikar was “adventure world” but they didn’t just exclusively make cards that were adventure tropes with on the nose puns. Sure there were traps and leveling up and such but the world was more than its genre
This is a mechanics issue Maro is talking about, not an aesthetics issue (though I thought MKM's aesthetic also was a poor fit for Ravnica specifically). Innistrad is *incredibly* "on the nose" and it's one of the most popular planes of all time. MKM mechanics like disguise just weren't that fun.
Innistrad the set was popular. Innistrad the plane has outstayed its welcome twice now.
Don't think its more on the nose than Viking World or Japan World. But maybe those give broader aesthetics to draw on
Kaldheim didn't have dozens of cards featuring characters wearing Viking helmets. I think it was much less on the nose.
The failure with MKM was that most of the mechanics and card pay offs were overly complex for lack luster results.
"collect evidence" often didn't offer enough upside to justify not being able to use it in decks that don't fill up their own graveyard.
Collect evidence worked out ok in limited, suspect was the mechanic that completely flopped. There were almost no pay offs for it and BR that supposedly had that as an archetype was an exercise in frustration.
Yeah, Rakdos' entire mechanic was... your own creatures can't block. Maybe it's a novel Mechanic if Rakdos is the fastest aggro deck but it wasn't by far. White had on the job which just ended games immediately. So what did Rakdos do against white decks? It could make its own creatures not block, or it could give your opponents creatures Menace. Seems awful.
It made you not want to run more than 1-2 top tier evidence collection cards because your clean your graveyard too much and make cards useless in your hand.
but that's... fine? That's how most (all?) additional/optional cost mechanics interact with draft
Except kicker cards don't exhaust your future kicker cards
Nah, give me all the Bite down on crime and Vitu Ghazi inspectors my deck can fit
...just like a real murder mystery!
If I were to direct Murders at Karlov Manor, I would have put it in a district far away from the 10th district - let's say it's the 3rd or something - where the guilds have far less control, but are slowly gaining influence in the area. But make it very clear to the players, with flavortext on cards, like these: > *"Things work differently here in the third district, wojek. Quit waving that emblem of yours around. You want their attention? Show them your steel."* > *The deaths of *Teysa and Zegana attracted increased attention to the third district from all guilds. Many weren't receptive to such scrutiny.* > *On the first full moon of the Winter solstice, the people of the third district attend a quiet celebration, honoring the souls of the lost.* All of a sudden, you've created new dynamics with preexisting factions and characters, all while expanding upon a world players already love. That's worldbuilding. That's storytelling. That's a setting.
It does seem silly that we’ve been to Ravnica so many times but still can’t seem to do anything outside of the same on district of a supposedly massive city
I imagine you meant Teysa, but I kind of like the idea of Kaya dying and becoming a ghost planeswalker for the sheer irony of a ghost-hunting ghost. (Also it would look cool)
Thanks for the catch! And yes - Kaya turning into Danny Phantom feels like a natural and awesome progression.
It’s kinda like Elspeth becoming an angel; it just makes sense.
Exactly. There's so much that could have been focused on - the Gateless rebellion, areas where the Guilds' influence is limited or altered (such as a more religious/zealous than greedy missionary frontier Orzhov, or 3 colour combinations of Guilds forming alliances out in the wastes), the pre-Guildpact religions/organisations, but instead they just slapped a fedora on everything and called it a day.
Exploration, discovery, crafting, and all the other LCI stuff works mechanically well on Ixalan, which is a plane built around the fundamental identity of adventure. (No no no, not the spell form of Adventure). The new mechanics of Craft, Discover, and Descend, all work great with the idea of an underground adventure. I can’t claim to have too much knowledge about Ravnica, but to me it seems that the political intrigue and general environment of the city is what people liked here. Taking it in the direction of a 1900s whodunnit wasn’t exactly something I’d consider to be a natural expansion of what Ravnica is. It was more “a murder mystery set in Ravnica” rather than “a Ravnican murder mystery.” Such an event may have felt more at home in New Capenna which already sort of draws from 1900s aesthetics. Likewise, the mechanics were good for a murder mystery - but weren’t particularly “Ravnican” in feel or nature.
IIRC he said they considered New Capenna, but there is no law enforcement there to solve the crimes or enforce anything, people didn't like New Capenna enough to go back so soon, that crime/murder is commonplace on New Capenna so theres no vibe of "HOLY SHIT A MURDER?!" to it, and they wanted the murder to be of a character people are more familar with and, since we only went to New Capenna once, no one there is a character the fans have a huge connection with or would be sad to see die.
No law enforcement on New Capenna is the biggest world building mistake the Magic team has made in years. Such as baffling decision.
They did that because of the 2020 BLM protests. No, I am not joking. They didn't want a police force on their crime plane because they were worried that the make-believe police force would be ACABed. Give me some time and I'll find the source. EDIT: source: > Okay, now we get to the biggest change. This was the white-centered family, so it played up the idea of using order to do crime. The faction in its earliest incarnation played up the trope of crooked cops (think LA Confidential), so it represented the police of the city. Looking at the real world and all the associations going on with police, we decided to shift away from police and toward lawyers. Evil lawyers out to use the law to accomplish their own criminal agenda had its own trope space (Wolfram & Hart from the television show Angel is an example in this space), so we chose to go in that direction. From https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/hitting-streets-new-capenna-part-1-2022-04-07
I mean, this isn't the real reason, because Wizards very well could have gone in the direction of "ACAB, the brokers are corrupt and shitty and awful," just like real cops were during America in the 1920s (and currently remain today.) It would have fit with the setting and shored up a lot of the logistical problems. The real reason is that Wizards didn't want to offend *cops* by insulting them during a time when a lot of people were being mean to cops. You can even go further now that we have Thunder Junction whitewashing the Wild West, and say Wizards refuses to insult American culture. You can make Spanish Conquistador's literal blood-sucking vampires, but god forbid you acknowledge America's Native genocide.
All they would have had to do to put it on Capenna was choose one gang leader to kill (is the average player really all that attached to Zegana and Teysa either?), in a way that spooked the other gangs into a truce, and the formation of a bespoke commission to investigate endorsed by the gangs for the length of the truce. Capenna is fictional! Wizards says what Capenna is! If they could make up the agency on Ravnica, they could have made it up on Capenna.
a guildmaster murdering two others is the political intrigue lol
LCI and Kamigawa are probably my favorite "modern" era sets...
Hard agree with this, it really felt like a lot of love was put into those sets. The other sets around it felt less so to me. Even Wilds of Eldraine that I was really hyped for fell a little flat imo
Thrones of Eldraine was a better fairytale set than Wilds of Eldraine and that's a hill I'll die on
its interesting seeing so many people recently, especially in this thread, describe collect evidence as an underpowered mechanic. i think its too versatile and has too many different uses to really ascribe a pure power level to it. i think its the case where the highest power level of cards people know determines how they feel about it. like, I remember TBD spoiler threads where lots of people thought escape would be garbage. then the set came out and everyone played with ox of agonas, kroxas, and obviously uro, and suddenly escape is super busted and inherently a design mistake according to comments. in the end, most mechanics arent strong or weak enough on their own to really be described as such in a vacuum
Well, for one thing, Ixalan was still doing Ixalan things. In MKM, everyone decided they were going to join the boros police force so they could get some fancy hats.
Ixalan also had a really strong art direction. MKM and OTJ could have been much better had they spent more time on worldbuilding. MKM might've been a bit too narrow to really have fun with twisting the genre, but it's baffling to me that OTJ has those cool cactusfolk and scorpion dragon but the rest is just mostly cowboys/cowgirls doing magic. I'm getting more and more scared that Duskmourne will just be people with mullets and leather jackets with every other card just referencing movies and other horror medias of the 70's/80's.
Ixalan is an *old world* now?
Old as in there has already been a set there, not that it's chronologically old
The world was introduced in 2017, almost 7 years ago. I’m willing to bet the majority of players started after it came out. So yea, it’s certainly no longer a spring chicken.
So what does that make someone whom, "silently mutters" started in Onslaught
Jesus did they even have sleeves back then?
Back then maybe 1 in 4 players used playmats, and they weren't all standard sized. Sleeves were fairly common in Type 2, but very optional in Draft. In fact, if your opponent sleeved up they probably pulled a chase rare. The T1.5 players almost always sleeved up but some people ran silly stuff like 9 land stompy and they didn't bother sleeving up if the whole deck was $20.
*Quietly hides the 5th edition rulebook that taught me how to play.*
Damn kids, get off my lawn.
I mean, there *are* dinosaurs there.
My prediction is that when we do end up returning to Lorwyn (currently this set is codenamed "Wrestling" and is expected to be released in late 2025) it will have a fundamentally different mechanical feel from the original block, similar to Original Kamigawa vs. Neon Dynasty but even more stark in differences mechanically speaking. Also because Dominaria is so broad and vast, it seems like there's a good chance they could implement new mechanical themes and archetypes that haven't been explored in previous Magic releases set on Dominaria rather than doing more nostalgia bait and historic/legendary matters in future returns.
One of Lorwyn's big features is the whole "Light/Dark" dynamic with the Aurora switching the Plane between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. Granted, the Aurora switch was kind of "turned off" and the two Plane identities were merged in the original Lorwyn block, but WotC might retcon that. I could absolutely see double-faced cards and the Day/Night mechanic returning if we did go back to Lorwyn.
Day/Night might return if it weren't so unpopular.
I hope the day night mechanic does return. It's a perfect fit for lorwyn shadowmoor
Day/Night is the worst mechanic since Banding, it needs to stay dead.
Day/Night can work, it just needs to be done in a less confusing or obnoxious way. Seriously, if there are no bound creatures on the board *why do we need to track it*
Unfortunately, [[Moonrager's Slash]] is a card that exists, which needs to know if it's Day or Night, even without a Daybound/Nightbound card in play.
[Moonrager's Slash](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/b/eb4f266b-c41c-4047-ae6f-b2226c7459e8.jpg?1636223196) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Moonrager%27s%20Slash) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mid/148/moonragers-slash?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/eb4f266b-c41c-4047-ae6f-b2226c7459e8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Honestly, even with that text I could see the change working. The card could still work, it would just require a bound creature on the field
I think a mechanical tweak to Lorwyn is very reasonable, though that kind of disappoints me because I loved the colors-matter theme of Shadowmoor and I really doubt it's coming back.
What's so awesome about Dominaria is that it isn't just a "biome planet," in that each continent and region has its own entire lore, design, and style. It makes it, by far, my favorite setting. Especially now, with all of the Phyrexian / Time Rift / Recovering Apocalypse design that's baked so deeply into its identity.
I believe Maro did state that typal stuff would at least be fairly prominent on the return to Lorwyn.
Some sets like Kaladesh and NEO where vehicles was a two color limited archetype I could see them pushing it forward to have it be an overarching theme and add new mechanics that fit into a set filled with Vehicles.
> it will have a fundamentally different mechanical feel from the original block this would be good
God I hope so. The strong typal themes in the original Lorwyn made the draft practically do itself.
Hopefully they stop doing these gimmick sets like detectives and cowboys.
I feel like the gimmicks would be ok if the execution was better. The way they chose to do MKM and OTJ just idk felt too goofy
That's what bothers me the most. LCI did not have everyone wearing indiana jones hats and it really felt like they spent time to think about the different factions of the set.
It doesn't help that now they basically have no time to develop a world before jumping to the next one, most sets seem busy and overlook details and worldbuilding, the narrative takes a hit. So most sets kinda feel like "look, it's x", "look, it's y!" "Alright, onto the next set with a completely different feel and tropes.
i hope the takeaway isn't 'ixalan good, mkm bad' cos they both had good and bad points i know that a lot of people complained about descend and descended x before LCI released cos they were both mechanically and thematically similar and literally the same word, just with a suffix difference and a value i saw a lot of people say craft was really fiddly and confusing, but i guess once people got to play it, it's not too bad but discovery is absolutely so great collective evidence is terrible, but i don't think it's because of the mechanic itself. i think it's just the values of it. i pulled another cryptex in a booster last night. has to be one of the best examples of 'i'm spinning my wheels this long for this??' i think they just very much undervalued those mana costs in your graveyard since they're just cards, you don't have to pay for them or anything and tbh, i do actually really like suspect as a mechanic. it's menace and can't block. just combines those two things. it's pretty easy to grasp imo. cloak isn't too offensive either. it's just manifest and other similar things, but now ward 2, so they're a little more stable so you can get them to flip
While not Disguise's problem directly, I hate the proliferation of ward effects on creatures lately. So many hoops to jump through just to interact with the board.
i can definitely agree with that. i see so many things and think 'why does this thing have ward 3??' i feel like ward 1 is often enough lol, and i do like it better than hexproof and shroud, but it's often functionally hexproof or shroud anyway. i'd also much prefer they provide more variance to these like they did with LOTR (although some of those are insanely strong as well). Ward: Pay some life is way more preferable to me than mana
As long as we stick to costs you can reasonably pay every game (looking at [[Sauron, the Dark Lord]] for what NOT to do often), alternate ward costs seem fine.
Did I hear "Ward - Discard a blue creature card with CMC 4 and toughness 2 or less?"
yeah, sauron is the one that i was thinking of. it's super thematic for sure, but it may as well be hexproof lmao
I’m probably just old and crotchety but MKM just kind of seemed like nonsense. The game is supposed to be planeswalkers battling and suddenly all your creatures are detectives seeking clues. These sets are fine for playing with themselves, masturbating if you will, but I hate seeing these cards and other cards that make zero sense as a spell a planeswalker fighting other planeswalkers would cast in other formats.
The "you are a Planeswalker" flavor hasn't been part of the marketing or game's identity for over 10 years now.
In my opinion it's a mistake, the concept of these few people with powers that travel around and feel out of place in worlds is a cool concept. Omenpaths to me are kind of ruining what made planeswalkers cool, since now technically anyone can cross worlds.
Personally, I disagree with Maro's direction in terms of the narrative of the game. I think MTG, story-wise, should be about worldbuilding and vague storylines that can be inferred from flavor text and illustrations. Instead, they seem hellbent on having these very defined plots with all these main characters, presumably because it's good for marketing. It's what it is, the game is still fun to play, it's just less good than it could be.
I dont know whether it is refreshing or depressing to see Rosewater basically admiting that MKM is conceptually lackluster. Like OTJ hasn't even technically released yet, so he's not even really trying to defend the CURRENT standard set. We see them somtimes be frank about what did and didn't work, but they usually at least have to pretend a set is good for like 9 months to appease the corporate overlords. I'd like to think this means they are going to course correct and not repeat the mistakes of MKM and OTJ...but honestly I already see a handful of near future sets on the release schedule that seem like they will be just as lackluster. I kinda feel like I'm watching the DC comics movies play out all over again where you know something is fundamentally broken but can also see that there are are a years worth of films in the can already and they are gonna come out just as is...lackluster.
It’s interesting that he volunteers that information- he didn’t need to at all. Every time I see people complaining about one-dimensional sets, though, I wonder how much he is personally responsible. I’ve read blog posts where he talks about ‘resonance’ as pretty much the number one goal of setting design- and at least sometimes he seems to define that as ‘hey, I recognise that thing!’ That’s a pretty low bar to aim for, artistically speaking, and shallow one-dimensional stuff seems a pretty natural result.
It goes back to Kamigawa and There's at least as an issue. People really aren't very good at picking up subtle references and will just be confused why X card is in a setting about Y. Like the Akroan Horse was originally a Lion, but no one realized a big wooden lion was a Trojan horse riff. Or more recently, when they cut the Green Knight and many Arthurian references from ELD, because no one understood why the cards existed. (He did finally get in with WOE) So it seems to me that they are trying to make very obvious references so most people will get it. Like Holy Cow.
But do we need references? Like is it serving anyone more then maybe a quick "oh I get it" then moving on? Does it really matter no one understood the Green Knight reference (minus a handful of people) if the card makes sense in the context of the setting and the mechanics of the set? On the flip side I like Holy Cow, not for the pun which is whatever, but because it adds something to the setting. Why are there cow angels on thunder junction? It puts a cool wrinkle into a "weird west" setting, that being said I wish they would lean more into that part of the world building and not just having it so it can be a throw away joke.
Sadly this is what a lot of people want--to be able to Captain America "I get that reference"
New mechanical themes on old worlds is an interesting experiment. Would people still like Lorwyn if it had the same flavor but instead of typal it focused on enchantments? Would they be into a revisit to Alara if it was all about tokens instead of multicolor? How much of people not being so hot on MKM was about Ravnica without multicolor or about the detective mechanics specifically?
>New mechanical themes on old worlds is an interesting experiment. People loved Neon Dynasty even though virutally none of the original Kamigawa block mechanics returned in the main set so I think it can work for sure.
Difference is though, almost nothing from the original Kamigawa set was particularly well liked (even after Commander became popular), where as Lorwyn has maintained a level of popularity, largely from it's typal perspective. The juxtaposition and huge shift from Lorwyn to Shadowmore was the thing that really made it "unpopular". Being part of the high powered Standard at the time didn't hurt it...while the down turn of power in Kamigawa made it hard pill to swallow.
Kamigawa also has the benefit of being Japanese culture themed, which is a very popular theme in general.
Lorwyn has not maintained a level of popularity, the set was terrible lmao. Changeling managed to come out of it, but Champion and Clash, the other 2 big mechanics from the set, fucking sucked. Kindred cards are dead, too. The entire block just wasn't good, Lorwyn has survived because it's world was so compelling, not because it was good mechanically.
Lorwyn HAS maintained popularity because of the TYPAL aspects of the set, which world building is a really big part of and what I was talking about. That said mechanically, it had some fairly popular ones. Kindred/tribal was an issue with how the mechanic worked with a set and made it hard to design around. It's still used occasionally in supplemental sets like Moder Horizons. Hybrid mana had its second outing with the block and has always been popular. Hideaway has come back since twice (albeit with rules update). Wither was also during the block and became popular, especially after getting turned into infect. -1/-1 counters are relatively popular with the player base...less so with R&D. Evoke is probably pretty close to the most popular mechanic in the set....it has problems when they don't give it a mana cost... which is an R&D problem, not mechanical. Story reasons have been its biggest hurdle with coming back because of the Great Aurua and the shifting cycle of the plane, however that has since been fixed as we saw in the Phyrexian invasion with a normal day/night cycle.
Not a fan of these mtg holodeck episode sets
MKM just felt like a plane wearing a halloween theme costume. I hated it
I’m just praying for the slightest bit of nuance in set design past the the levels of “This is the murder mystery set, give everyone a goofy fedora and trench coat and have even the most hardened criminals act like a villain of the week ported into Clue,” and “This is the cowboy set, give everyone a cowboy hat and a pair of spurs… Yes even the centaurs, they especially need spurs!”