Humphereys has improved enormously since thern (Journey/FRF were both good verging on great) and he never had the banality of vision issue that plagued anything Tom LaPille touched.
The terribleness of Tom LaPille mystifies me to this day. The man clearly loves Magic, clearly thinks deeply and carefully about the philosophy of design, and yet somehow still manages to be comprehensively, earth-shatteringly wrong on everything from cube design up through set development.
He does not take constructed seriously outside of standard, and its really frustrating, especially with commander/modern becoming more and more important.
Rosewater even makes efforts to stretch outside his comfort zone, but there's no substitute for actual enthusiasm. Commander 2014 is a great set because it's designed by people who really like
and understand the format; same thing goes for sets that play well in Modern or any other area outside Rosewater's usual bailiwick.
Alara shouldn't be nearly as hard to revisit since you can just use the Khans model. Khans II is going to be hard but you at least have an idea of what to do with it. (DIE DRAGONS DIE)
Yeah I don't think it's actually too hard to revisit Alara, and there's certainly tons of room to make it better. I imagine Tarkir 2 is going to be a lot like these other returns (KHANS V. DRAGONS) but with the advantage that at least both sides are pretty comprehensible and easy to define.
Totally agree with you, charlequin. While this set may be disappointing, I do not think it will spell doom for MtG in general. Like you said, they have a tendency to alternate good and bad design and they will surely make up for it in the next set or block.
This is the single thing I like the best about the two-block paradigm -- more opportunity to try out other stuff (and other designers) to keep things fresh.
Alara was my first set and therefore I still like it a lot, but I agree that wasn't the greatest compared to the previous and following sets. Zendikar had a strong design consistency (the only downside of Zendikar was the very aggressive limited). I also really liked Lorwyn block, even though I never drafted it, but maybe because I remember it better from all those broken-ass cards that dominated several formats.
Part of the problem we're seeing with BFZ is that actually a lot of the texture that made Zendikar appealing was in the side stuff (quests and whatnot) which got pushed to the side here. I don't think "Landfall + some cards that like lands" is really a whole theme on its own otherwise.
Lorwyn block is visually beautiful, very cohesive, and does a lot of really smart things with tribal design. They still reprint tons of cards from the block because on that level -- individual cards -- it's full of fantastic designs. The draft format is miserable though -- not like Zendikar, which is just boring and lame, but so complicated that most people are guaranteed to be constantly misplaying, which sucks. People cite Time Spiral as the reason for NWO, but at least in that block everything going on was so insane and bizarre that you kind of felt okay screwing things up. In Lorwyn every screwup is just missing some three-step chain of on-board abilities that would've let you blow out your opponent in combat and then feeling lousy about it.
Honestly the biggest disappointment with BFZ for me so far is how little identity the Zendikar side seems to have besides "allies". I hope other stuff will show up more in the uncommons
All the animated land stuff too. I do think awaken is a very good choice in that regard, given that it's kind of a remix of two ZEN themes, Kicker + living land.
