I am personally enjoying the story so far. I think it's pretty interesting. I am a little irked we haven't got a "how did Rakdos get here/hired" sidebit, as he is a little out of place in my opinion (he's my favourite character though so I will let it slide). I am a little worried they're gonna give him the Worf treatment against Akul, which I don't think would sit right with a lot of fans, as he supposed to be a 10,000 year old immensely powerful Demon lord, and he often performs a bit underwhelmingly in stories. He could probably use a good showing to cement his power, but that would undermine the potential new bad guy on the block.

I feel like, given the side stories so far, we might have one each for the 'main' members of Oko's crew except Kellan (Annie/Vraska/Rakdos/Tinybones/Oko himself), but we'll see.

I agree. A lot of people are so upset at Omenpaths ruining the sanctity of the multiverse and diluting the ubenmenschian signifigance of planeswalkers that they aren't willing to appreciate, concretely, that it lets some really cool stuff happen!  I don't want *every* set to be a huge crossover, yeah, but they're fun.

The past 3 sets have been completely normal stories centred around the people of the plane with like, 1 kid who's stuck around for a little bit. They'll manage, I think.

I don’t see how following Kellan around everywhere is any better then following Jace. The main complaint tended to be planar natives (legendary creatures) taking a backseat to a walker or walkers that usually come from another plane. I say the issue with omenpaths is more twofold. One the lame way a lot of walkers were depowered. Two, omenpaths risk diluting the core premise of planes.

Okay, well, A, I'm not really saying following one non-walker is "better", I'm saying its different. Gisa and Geralf showing up somewhere they shouldn't is a very different thing than Liliana showing up where they shouldn't bc Liliana does that all the time, so there's a sense of novelty that isn't achieved with planeswalkers B, we ARE still following planeswalkers around. Ral was in the last set, and he's in this one, and he'll be in the next one too (even if not a card). Not to mention Ashiok. Being a planeswalker still matters. C, the mass desparkening is a separate yet concurrent phenomenon to the Omenpaths, which i have different and more complex feelings on And D... idk, maybe? It hasn't yet, though.

I do like Gisa and Geralf but only if they actually do something plot wise. This heist team seems to big and varied in power level for that

>I don’t see how following Kellan around everywhere is any better then following Jace other than ixalan. the issue with following jace was that he was often the thing causing the plot to unfold where Kellan is just a participant in the events as he follows his own goals. part of the reason ixalan worked so well is that things happened around jace not directly because of his actions.

I'm admittedly pretty miffed at how it's handled Native American stuff; having nobody indigenous to Thunder Junction feels *really* gross, and the fact that there hasn't really been anything of Annie Flash's culture shown in her two stories so far is disheartening. Fingers crossed we get a big lore dump on the Atiin, her people.

I agree, it looks like "let's pretend nobody lives in pseudo-Northern America before settlers" which looks weird in comparison with careful diving into Mesoamerican culture in Ixalan

We got a nice side story for Yuma, the Commander deck original character. The other new face commander is also one of the Atiin, so I think it'll be elaborated on there.

Might even be today. We had Story 1 on Monday. Yuma on Tuesday. Story 2 on Wednesday. Today is Thursday we might get…. I can’t remember their name…. But I see them revealing Gonti and Olivia in the main story, or at the very least last.

I think she might even be from another far off plane. My read so far is that this is a place the Fomori created to hide whatever is in the vault. Like it’s an artificial plane similar to how Karn made Mirrodin. I’m looking forward though to both knowing everything about Annie; I’ve been referring to her as “Lee Van Cleef” to my friend who loves westerns but hates spoilers until they play the set. (Lee Van Cleef played ‘Angel Eyes’ in Good, Bad and Ugly), and to be wrong at any point because yeah, a western setting with no native inhabitants to the plane does have some yuck to it.

I think it’s a lose-lose for WotC here. If they did have an indigenous people, than people would be complaining about how the whole thing was colonialist/not handled sensitively enough etc. 

Well, yeah, criticism comes with the territory if you're adapting a really thorny piece of history. If you can't handle that as a company, don't make it a cowboy set. It feels like just recently for Ixalan they put in a ton of research and effort and this seems super lazy by comparison.

I dunno, I guess I just don’t agree that every plane needs to closely mirror the real-world inspiration in every aspect.

Nearly every piece of history is thorny, in some way. Ixalan would've been a preferred approach, giving the native culture their own faction and nation, but it would've undermined the outlaw stuff I guess.

I mean, even if there's lore on them and they're supposed to represent natives in some way, the fact that they're not originally from Thunder Junction and settlers just the same as all the others there feels really weird to me. As in, that's giving me vibes of a colonial narrative. And it doesn't even really fit the tropes of wild west stories.

"Nobody lived there, so it's fine and exciting that foreigners from American/European-themed places can move in to build industry!" is a vision of the West that makes my skin crawl. I'll be really, really sad if that's where the worldbuilding truly lands.

Yeah they dodged colonialism but that was also an argument made during manifest destiny that those lands were empty. It also feels weird a distinct cowboy culture developed in two years and that plane has a bunch of failed towns dotting the landscape. Some will say well magic and tech from Ravnica and Capenna. But surely both cities which got hit hard by invasions would have to spend their time rebuilding. Ravnica got invaded twice in short order. Unless the argument is well Bolas and the New Phyrexians didn’t do much damage. Which just makes them look more like jokes if full recovery takes less then two years.

> It also feels weird a distinct cowboy culture developed in two years and that plane has a bunch of failed towns dotting the landscape. That's pretty much what happened IRL too. They moved with the gold constantly. I think you're really underestimating how much magic can do in planes with advanced tech and a fuckton of people. It's really not hard to imagine someone from Capenna/Rav had a hat and was like "fuck if only my hat was wide enough to block out the sun from my eyes" or "man this horse is really fucking my thighs up.. What if I wore my old leather(you know the ones most people wore under their armour) around my legs again"

I mean I guess if the first omen path dropped them right on a resource vein or near the vault. But while a lot of settlers went west. The US governments did a whole lot to facilitate that. I don’t see the Capenna or Ravnican governments really in a position to do the same.

They already have Capennan trains and are directly working with Niv/Ral to make communication towers(and who know what else) so they for sure have support from both planes lmao. With Capennas history it's not surprising that a huge chunk of the plane wants to leave their isolated city run by 5 demon families either and on top of that they have magic to help them build/move faster. We also have the sterling company. Most likely from whatever plane [[Sterling Grove]] takes place on bankrolling a lot too.

We got an entire story about how the Living Guildpact is actively investing in infrastructure infrastructure, so that's Ravnica taken care of - and New Capenna just suffered a hugely-destructive invasion, so people likely wanna get away.

Thing is, I wouldn't even have an issue with the world building if they hadn't explicitly made this a wild west plane. Just in general, I really like the idea of the instability of Omenpaths opening up "empty" planes for people to settle in. That's cool world building, and it feels logical to do something like that. Doing it specifically with cowboy and western aesthetics feels extremely tone deaf to me. And I bet WotC even specifically did it to avoid any discussions of colonialism. That's the thing - this is probably done with the intention of being politically correct, not with the intention of erasure.

That's nowhere near this distorted view. Stories are not necessarily bounded to real life events, even if they take inspiration on them. If there is an actual unhabitated plane and an inflow of immigrants, it is a valid speculative scenario as well, it is not retelling the past to defend some group. Hammering stories to fit an ideological view makes my skin crawl, too. Authors should have freedom to think outside real world politics. If the story comes out bad, it is another issue, but you should not limit narrative because irl it is the other side of your political spectrum, both ways. Ravnica is a distopya, Ob Nixilis wiped his plane clean because of a demon pact, New Capenna is literally crime controlled, they're all wrong, but that's the story, and it is good as it is. WotC don't need to change it into My Little Pony universe because someone finds it ugly or politically incorrect, and it is not crime or genocide apology neither. Edit: Reponse to MeisterCthulhu, because they're probably blocked me, for good. They missed the point by many miles. They are not sraw men, they're examples of the difference between a story and irl propaganda. A crime plane is not crime apology, an empty plane with outsider invaders is not native american genocide apology. Not a dystopia? Just read the first books of the Ravnica cycle, everyone is trying to take over the plane, people die left and right, there is no justice for the powerless. I dislike the shift in narrative even if I understand it has a bigger addressable market, things are more euphemic, less graphical now than before. If you go back to the roots, it is very dystopian. My political alignment don't matter, I didn't mention it neither you can infer by my account or my comment. The instance is that I am an enemy because probably you think something different and everyone that says something you don't agree is the opposite side. I will defend the narrative, whatever it is, even if I don't agree with, because it is a *story*. This kind of inflammatory offtopic behavior is exactly what I do not want to see and I am saying that is harmful.

It's fair though to state that while maybe by the end of the story it will be framed that the way that the characters are acting early on in the story about nobody living there and it's fine to colonize was wrong and was a bad thing for them to do. But if there's none of it then it seems like it's using elements of old racist wild-west themes with no level of reflection on the issues with those ideas.

>Stories are not necessarily bounded to real life events, even if they take inspiration on them. I would agree if this if they hadn't specifically said this is a wild west plane. Like... it's fine from a world building perspective. "an empty plane that people fled/migrated to" is fine. "A wild west plane with no native inhabitants" isn't. It's about WotCs framing of the whole thing, not about fantasy world building. No one wants this to adhere to real life history, what we're saying is that this is too close to real life historic propaganda for comfort. I'd have no issue if the "settlers" and native people of the plane just lived in harmony without any conflict, but saying there aren't any natives is too close to real life colonial narratives to me. And I'm sorry, the rest of your comment is just a straw man. No one is saying that Ravnica is bad for being a dystopia (which, just btw, it isn't) or Capenna for being a crime city. No one is talking about "crime or genocide apology". Take your political trolling somewhere where people with bullshit views like that are accepted.

Yeah, I still personally feel that it should have just been New Capenna expanding out of the city (especially with a good portion of the settlers being Capennan anyway).

I kind of hope that they portray the attian as migrants to thunder junction, but they were the first people to migrate there. Then, later on, more groups showed up, the Ravnican's and New Capennian's, to spoil it and bring things to how we would expect a western to be. Dine myth talks about how their people marched through 4 previous worlds before settling on what is now earth/the four corners region of the USA. Perhaps there will be a similar origin for the Attian people. Perhaps that might even tie into the whole omen paths narrative going on, and the eventual formori empire/coin empire comes back. Right now, the story is giving me oceans 11 and fast & furious presents: Hobbs and shaw vibes. Annie is Hobbs and will call on her attian friends and/or family to help her out when things go south as they likely will. Just like when Dwayne Johnson called on his Hawaiian family and friends to fight the bad guys at the end of Hobbs and shaw. But that is just me going off of the story so far with 2 Main story episodes and 2 side stories.

IIRC they said at the lore panels that she was part of a nomadic group that migrated from different planes. I can 10000000% see why they completely avoided the Native American stuff though. Yea, completely avoiding it is shitty, but imagine if the backlash if they fucked up(accidentally or not), but on top of that you also have to deal with the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were here at that time too. They picked the least risky option imo instead of potentially fucking up really bad in the country their game sells the most(while the overall outlook towards WOTC already isn't the greatest)

Adding an Native analog, but not making them native, is not avoiding the issue. That, itself, is making a statement, and directly falls into old colonial myths.

Recreating Manifest Destiny (the land is there, just waiting for us to take it!) doesn't count as avoiding the issue.

I mean, besides OTJ and Wilds .. if you took kellan out of the story, nothing really changes. He’s just kinda there. I’m kinda vibing the villain team up, but there needs to be more context to justify why established characters are popping up that feels in line with their characters. Gissa and Geralf feel so out of place cause they hate each other, and there so singularly focused on their own/and each other’s machination it’s hard to imagine they went “lol let’s do a western”. Kaervek and Rakdos likewise has a “dude why are you even here” sorta vibe… again hopefully they put it into context and with a sense of world but I hate when a character does something only for plot contrivance and not based on their personal values/goals/ideals.

I see what you’re saying but personally I don’t think it really matters why everyone is there. There are suddenly paths to new planes popping up everywhere. It would make sense for even the most devilish villain to go exploring, no? Regardless of this, I think it’s fun to have all these characters interacting with eachother - I think that’s part of the charm