divisionbyzorro
Member
The quality of Magic stories has to be judged relative to other Magic stories, okay? :lol
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Magic: the Gathering - Shadows over Innistrad |OT| Blue's Clues
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
- Start date
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Fine is a relative term. Compared to BFZ block it's markedly better but I don't know that I'd say it was particularly good aside from a flavor perspective. And tbh, I don't think that obviously telegraphing the "big reveal" as something that has been obvious since the set was first revealed is necessarily an indication of good writing.
Definitely not disagreeing with ya there.
BFZ was a god damn mess on so many levels.I've got nothing but props for them for the narrative this block so far. The only real issue I had (and please note that it's small and inconsequential) with how they handled the SOI story was pre-SOI, where Sorin seemed really unsure about where Nahiri was or what happened to her. I feel like while writing that, WotC wasn't 100% even aware of it, and it came across. That said, I think they glossed over that and patched it together pretty well. That kind of thing will happen when you're transitioning how you write and tell your stories.
If you're paying attention AT ALL to anything in the story, you'd know that Emrakul was supposed to be in the third set of the block before they switched to the two block model, which means that Emrakul was a lock for this block no matter what.
Story was supposed to be
Ulamog's story (BFZ)
Kozilek's story (OGW)
Emrakul's story (???)
Once that got dropped, they had to plausibly think up a reason for why Emrakul would be on Innistrad, and Nahiri seeking revenge for the Helvault imprisonment (which imo everyone figured out but only NOW WOTC decided to say it's true) fits the bill.
The real clues weren't inherent to the cards or story but, as Ashodin pointed out, the block structure and their inability to move another block up and push Emrakul off a bit. I never said they messed up, please don't put words in my mouth, I just didn't find the writing in particular to be especially noteworthy. Serviceable is about what I'd qualify it as.
Serviceable is way way way way way way better than BFZ.
Infinite Stars
Member
I mean, we've got no Nissa Stories, so that's already a marked improvement.
"Ashaya!!"
The only issue I have with the UR/MS so far this block is that there's been a lot of set up and very little pay off. We've had Order of Saint Traft, Sigarda, Thalia, Odric, the Cultists infiltrating the Church, Liliana fucking around with the Chain Veil, and that's not including Nahiri's plot.
Granted, most of this is probably going to go off in EMN.
"Ashaya!!"
The only issue I have with the UR/MS so far this block is that there's been a lot of set up and very little pay off. We've had Order of Saint Traft, Sigarda, Thalia, Odric, the Cultists infiltrating the Church, Liliana fucking around with the Chain Veil, and that's not including Nahiri's plot.
Granted, most of this is probably going to go off in EMN.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I mean, this is literally how Magic blocks are set up. The first block is a setting and the next set is the payoff.
Not sure if you're talking about pre-Khans, but in Khans block story it seemed pretty obvious that he knew something about Nahiri that he was hiding from Ugin. At that point in the story the Helvault had already been destroyed, so he knew that she was no longer in there. It's not a stretch to think that he'd assume the first thing she'd do when free was planeswalk away, but he wouldn't necessarily know to where.
I think part of the problem is that we don't have a solid timeline for events. According to the latest story, Avacyn Restored was only a year ago in-world, which means RTR, Theros, Kahns and BFZ blocks all happened within that time frame, but we don't know how long each individual story lasts. It could be that Sorin traveling to Tarkir happens only a few days after the Helvault is destroyed.
SigmasonicX
Member
Spellbombs seem likely, but the Talismans are considered too strong for Standard, I believe.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Just look at the 2 mana rock we got in shadows for confirmation and that was athe rare in a set that depended little on lategame.
Fair enough. Hopefully they complete it through Commander precons then. I really want the extra 2 talismans for my mardu commander deck.
I feel like it's vague enough that they could slide it in, but even Sorin's internal thoughts were vague. I guess they could have been keeping the audience in the dark with that choice until it's time to roll it out but it's just weird to think someone wouldn't be more specific in their own head. Which is fine. It's not like we ever got a list of what popped out of the Helvault. Either way it's a minor detail. I like how they've been doing story stuff as of late.
Is standard so watered down that so-so mana rocks like the talismans are considered too powerful? Christ.
It's that it kills part of the reason to play green.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
but that reason itself has been lowered to cmc 2
SigmasonicX
Member
Note that the default for green mana dorks is now two mana, so having mana acceleration artifacts at two mana is a huge deal.
1G, not (2)
The reason is that they want you to play green for accelleration, its not a power issue.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The vast majority of sets don't have leaks. It was just OGW and SOI that had any. I don't think there were any leaks before that since what, Scars block?
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
It's the Dark Ritual problem. If you always have Llanowar Elves you have to budget everything assuming Llanowar Elves are in play. Its certainly not as simple as adding (G) to the cost of everything, but it does matter to some degree.
I'll go ahead and downvote it so you aren't at the top.
It's not a costing problem- that's Birds/Elves vs Caryatid/Leaf Glider/etc.
This is mana rocks vs rampant growth. The former pushes out the latter.
divisionbyzorro
Member
It's why green is bad in Vintage Cube. Why play green for mana elves when you can play better colors and have signets?
Again, it's not about power. It's about making sure you have a reason to play all 5 colors.
That is precisely why I didn't quote you, because my argument was only tangentially related. I'm fully aware of the effect of mana rocks on the usefulness of green, or rather the requirement to play green.
That said, to an extent it is always also a power problem. If you made a 5CC Mana Rock that taps for one no one would care about its supposed effect on (the design space of) green.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Vintage Cube is my best format because I just draft green because nobody else does and go for shenanigans involving Craterhoof Behemoth.
Correct, because artifacts/colorless generally have "hyper-expensive version of a colored effect" as part of their "color pie".
See Spine of Ish Sah vs Vindicate.
Yeah, SOI has been a marked improvement over Battle for Zendikar.
Whenever I draft green, I get flooded. ¯\_(ツ
_/¯Edit: dat feeling when you get passed incremental blight in the second pack...
charlequin
Banned
Ethan Fleischer said that he agreed with most of it and when I asked him what he disagreed with, his answer was that it doesn't go far enough because there should be way way fewer Eldrazi in the block, lol.
Part of the problem is that way too many Magic players learned terrible lessons from the Weatherlight saga, a constant cavalcade of unfired Chekhov's guns, random cast deaths, nonsensical character arcs, and enormous retcons that replaces all its protagonists with a ludicrous self-important Mary Sue one act in.
In general there's a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what a story should look like in this type of medium, and also who have no idea how a mystery story works. Any good mystery is going to be solved by some significant percentage of the smartest and most observant parts of the audience, and in any case where the community expects to share their conclusions (instead of something like mystery novels where people purposely avoid "spoiling" anything.) If you can't figure out the mystery and lay out a solid case of why the ending is the ending in advance, the mystery is just not correctly structured.
I don't think this is a good read, actually. It's not like there's some actual fundamental compulsion to do these stories one after another. They could easily have done Kaladesh now, for example, and gone to Innistrad afterwards. Rosewater even said that they never had any actual plans for Emrakul in the block, they just decided that three sets and three Eldrazi matched up so that was the default block structure.
Based on the info we have, I'm pretty sure that Emrakul was ported into the Innistrad storyline as a result of deciding the set would be about insanity, and that they then later moved up the Innistrad return by a couple blocks after they decided to do "continuous" storytelling.
I disagree. The playerbase would assume any next threat would be Emrakul since we only got two of the titans, so they would be frantically looking for the third one. This would cause undue stress on some lore-nerds, and essentially (ha ha) make them go mad.
Having the final titan be drawn out in a revenge story like this gives some great payoff. It's likely that Nahiri could have just came onto the plane and finished what she started with Avacyn in their previous fight. I mean, she was pretty much going to beat her in combat anyway. Then Sorin comes and a huge fight happens while the Innistrad bros just make the populace go mad. They could have invented any other reason for madness on Innistrad, just Emrakul and Nahiri's cryptoliths worked so well.
I do believe you might be correct in how we could have skipped Innistrad and the payoff would have come later, but I do think they wanted to serve the lorehounds/collectors by having all three titans right near each other (and not fade from memory).
In other news
The artist thread got nuked off the map, and I can't understand why.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Nahiri can't beat Avacyn in combat. Avacyn has vigilance.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
How many people that played since then are even around in general and of that subset how many were interested in the story?
Hey. There's plenty of us. I assume. I think I still have the Urza books lying around somewhere.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Volrath looks so great gives off a Terminator 2 vibe.
This. I think moving this event back a block or two would have made discovering it was Emrakul no less obvious, but probably more fun. People are sick of the Eldrazi right now. Some distance between the end of BFZ and SOI blocks would have done this 'mystery' some good. There could have been more foreshadowing and cryptic hints in other sets beforehand. Magic players love that shit.
Maybe Nahiri or Sorin (or Liliana) now play a role in Kaladesh's story why they moved things around. I'm curious to see why when we can access the hindsight of the situation.
Man, I remember how hyped I was for Spirit of the Night, with the whole "Sacrifice X,Y,Z to search your library for SotN and bring him into play" stuff.
charlequin
Banned
A world where WotC ever made decisions on this basis would look very, very different.
Out of the general player population? Not that many. Out of people who post whiny nonsense about Emrakul on reddit, though...?
Anyway, blaming WotC's terrible storytelling for this is just the generous way to talk about it, rather than diagnosing these people as cultural illiterates with no perspective.
EDIT: Browsing and seeing all the people talk about how it would be so "great" if WotC were "trolling" and mislead people on purpose then went with a nonsensical story conclusion "for the lulz," a lot of these people are probably just teenage channer shits who think trolling for no reason is cool.
The Volrath idiocy (where they took this pretty cool character designed to be the villain of the entire saga and sent him off with a random nonsensical plan, then unceremoniously killed him semi-offscreen) is really the clearest indicator that aggressively terrible writers were pulling the Weatherlight story together.
(He hasn't gone into it much yet, but the bits he has shared of the original Weatherlight story plan describe a story that, if not inspiring, at least would have followed some vague notion of proper story structure and narrative development.)
That's possible but I do think it's kind of mislocating the problem a little bit. The underlying storytelling choice (to follow threads more directly instead of jumping between six totally unrelated stories) is a good one and bringing loose ends back around while people might actually remember them is a smart overall direction to take. The problem here isn't that they're returning to the Eldrazi too quickly; it's that BFZ block is terrible and so everyone's feelings on the Eldrazi are worse than they were after the first time they showed up.
You could be right. I don't mind this direction going forward. I can think of a few other threads i'd like some resolution or progression on then if they're following that logic from now on. Bolas, Garruk, New Phyrexia, the list goes on. Get it together WotC!
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I think I found the world's biggest #MTGFinance idiot. Look at this knucklehead and hear his stupid story and awful rationalizations about his terrible life decisions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDitMIr2NOE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDitMIr2NOE
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