For real. For pretty much everything that Wizards does people will complain about it to him (valid or not) and he welcomes it all with open arms and tries to engage with it as reasonably as possible. I respect the hell out of that man
He's also mentioned that he's had to defend decisions he doesn't agree with on blogatog- I can't imagine having enough patience to read people angrily complaining about something I was against, blaming *me* for it, then having to either ignore them and get criticized for avoiding a problem (and interpreted by some as implicit endorsement), or defending the decision and looking like I'm a big fan of it. Having a large public scrutinize every single element of your company's work and then putting the responsibility of all of it on you must be so exhausting.
It is very funny when he is allowed to say he's against things, mostly color pie bends and anything that casts from exile. You could feel his frustration with the blue pongify spells or Kaldheim Kaya.
He's got to walk a really rough tightrope - he tries to be as candid and transparent as he can, but he's also the face of a brand and can't just say stuff that will affect sales negatively, so he has to toe the company line on controversial products. Those two things are constantly at odds, but Mark does it about as well as anyone could be expected to.
True, but for well over a decade now, any creative company would fall over themselves to hire Maro, so he knows if he ever does get canned, he won't be out of work for long.
recently someone asked how does he manage the blog in terms of time and the reply was "I'm replying to you while waiting for a collegue to pass me cards during a playtest draft"
When I first started playing Magic and I came to Reddit, the way you used to be able to tell if people thought a white magic card was boring or bad when it shouldn't be was by the fact that that thread would have like a thousand comments versus every other thread having like two hundred.
Take heliod, for example, from Theros beyond death. People obviously saw that it was a good card and they came up with a bunch of combos for it in that thread and one of them even took off.
People didn't think the card was bad, but holy f*** That card was boring and you could see it a huge discussion about it. In a time frame, when white was well, it was boring and bad at doing anything other than agro.
And when you had cards That people thought should have been white, but were not like Tibelts trickery or the raven card or that one card in strixhaven, that was similar.
He was always the one Explaining design processes even if he personally didn't agree with them to angry people.
That being said I think even he admits he kind of messed up by hyping up a white draw three card in strixhaven lol
For real. I've played countless TCGs at various degrees and it feels absolutely wild that the head designer of the game will answer people's questions online, let alone making a podcast about the game etc.
I have issues with the current state of MTG, but I wish games like Vanguard or YGO's teams had a tenth of Mark Rosewater's communication skills.
It is really awesome that he happens to be who he is, likes to use his downtime to field often really rude and presumptive questions from idiots without an ounce of vitriol back.
Me: (looking at the piece) Looks nice. What card is this?
Sue Ann: Waiting in the Weeds.
Me: This can’t be Waiting in the Weeds. It’s got a cat on it.
Sue Ann: So?
Me: Waiting in the Weeds makes squirrels.
Sue Ann: What do you mean?
Me: The card. In the game. It makes squirrels.
Sue Ann: I’m not sure I understand.
Me: The card that this art goes on. Its purpose, what it does in the game, is make squirrels.
Sue Ann: I don’t think so.
Me: Yes. Trust me. It makes squirrels.
Sue Ann: Well, it didn’t say that in the art description.
Me: That’s because the art description specifically said that you can’t see them! We didn’t think it mattered mentioning since the artist wasn’t going to show them.
Sue Ann: Yeah, that wasn’t working.
Me: Then why didn’t you call us and ask if it mattered?
Sue Ann: Why would it matter?
Me: Because… it does!
Sue Ann: There aren’t squirrels in Africa.
Me: And there aren’t dragons either. Besides this isn’t Africa, it’s Jamuraa. And in Jamuraa, there are squirrels.
Sue Ann: How can you be sure?
Me: Because there’s a card called Waiting in the Weeds that makes squirrels!
Sue Ann: Not anymore
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/squirrel-my-dreams-2002-07-22
Edit: JFC it’s been 22 years and I still remember this.
it’s impossible this is from 22 years ago because this article was written after Odyssey came out and that’s one of the newer MTG sets…..dear god i’m old 🥲
If they ever make another* tribute card to him I hope it's [[Drive // Work]]
Both sides represent how driven he is, and the sheer body of work that is attached to his ethos and guidance.
Edited because I didn't know he had a card, albeit a little more cheeky.
"Okay, so todaaay, we are tracking the location of every person who has asked me a bad-faith question on Tumblr" *29 minutes of engine revving interspersed by an occasional thump*
Wizards is blessed with him as the face of the game and more and more often I see how important his background as a writer is for the blog and maybe for the game as a whole.
The only person who's better at being a face for their game is Yoshi-P, the producer for Final Fantasy XIV. People fucking love him.
And soon they'll be crossing over, lol
Having gotten into other games like 40K recently I've come to realize just what a gift having someone like Mark Rosewater is and while I've said before that every game needs a Mark Rosewater I don't think every game can have one because so few people have the patience and the dignity that he does to deal with what must be constant abuse. He only publishes a certain amount of his questions that he receives and I can only guess how many of them are people just spitting vitriol at him. We've seen on this subreddit how many people just hate anything wizards does and often with good reason, looking at you 30th anniversary, but Mark just rolls with it. He's either the most well-adjusted man on the planet or his therapist deserves to be paid even more than they already are.
I’m not going to stop playing Magic, but I don’t like the aesthetic of Duskmourn and I don’t expect to buy much into the set.
I wonder if Duskmourn would hit differently if we hadn’t been inundated with 80s nostalgia bait in our entertainment for years and years. It’s very hard for me to view this set’s aesthetic as being organic from MTG creative rather than a marketing mandate. I felt similarly about MKM, which felt like Hasbro trying launder its failing board game properties (in this case, Clue) through their only successful product.
This, to me, is the biggest problem. The seams of the business are showing, and the design choices don’t consistently read as putting the game’s health ahead of short term profit, which erodes faith in the whole game.
The seams are showing because they're printing too many products too rapidly. If they had a cycle of like 1 UB listing every other year and something more experimental like Duskmourn every couple years it would be fine, but the amount of UB shit they're shoveling out the door just makes this feel like more UB even though it's supposed to be a canonical plane. I honestly can't tell anymore when I see a card that I'm unfamiliar with If this is a mtg character or if this is some character from some IP that I don't recognize.
Adding to this: Maro explicitly calls out Ravnica, Theros, and Zendikar; I'll add to his list Kaladesh, Neo Kawagami, and Eldraine.
Ravnica is fine, it's before my time but visually I don't see any issues people might have had beforehand. It seems like the sort of plane you'd choose to display complaints of only if you were trying to misrepresent someone's concerns, but maybe I'm wrong and there was a lot of uproar about it at the time.
Theros: Would it have hit well if we also had Percy Jackson UB? Probably not.
Original Zendikar: Sold as Adventure World with party mechanics: now that we have Forgotten Realms in the game would it work as well? No it would feel like a cheap imitation of something we already have.
Kaladesh: It's got cars and steampunk and shit. Steampunk cars feel a lot less like cars than my old '91 Civic
Neo Kamigawa: Aesthetically rad but would it be so rad if we had UB Cyberpunk 2077?
Eldraine: The Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales. Actually I'd argue this would still work even if we had Mickey Mouse and Wreck-It-Ralph running around in UB Disney.
My point here is that the more they dilute their own universe with outside IP the more DIRECT comparison they draw between their own worlds and potential UB products.
Someone else mentioned that thought Duskmourn was a Stranger Things Commander set... visually that's a very fair assumption to make. Without UB it would be an interesting set with the 80s aesthetic with the Eldraine treatment on horror movies, but we do have Stranger Things cards, and we do have Walking Dead cards and we do have... 1 sec let me lookup the vast library of foreign IPs we have access to... Doctor Who and Evil Dead cards. So while Duskmourn may ultimately be cool it's not anything new.
This is the pollution that is making Duskmourn not feel cool and special and interesting. It's just one more series of cards set in the modern-ish day with some horror aesthetics as opposed to the horror equivalent of Original Zendikar DnD adventure theme before we got sets of actual DnD and LoTR.
It’s a full standard set releasing in late September. Some spoilers recently came out featuring lots of modern devices like TVs and smart phones and a general 70s/80s slasher fick vibe.
As a game designer I am actually amazed by how consistent Magic is in its extremes. Capenna/Ravnica in one corner, Amonkhet/Theros in another, and then Phyrexia/Duskmourne, while also having space for Lorwyn/Bloomburrow. It's impressive how all of these make sense as a single world with many different faces.
(No I'm not including UB, those are distinct IPs).
I get the complaints from the purists, but for me it's not enough to quit the game. I actually enjoy the variation much more than a whole year on Dominaria.
Whether it started out intentional or not yeah it's by far one of the best things about magic. Mix and match your flavors for alignments and playstyles.
The 5 colors individual definitely but the color combinations and what they ended up representing are the ones that might not have been initially thought out.
I don’t think this could have even predicted initially, but the fact that 5 colors means you get,
* 5 individual colors
* 10 combinations of 2 colors
* 10 combinations of 3 colors
Is so clean, and any sort of idea that doesn’t fit cleanly in one color is almost always easily expressed with a combination of 2 (or 3) colors, is what makes the color pie really shine.
Untamed electricity = red, lightning bolt
Harnessed electricity = izzit: knowledge taming unrefined energy
Ferocity = green, but also kinda red
Clever martial tactics - Well martial/soldiers is usually white, but intelligence is usually blue, so it’s white blue.
My golden rule is always 'does the pie work with this', and Duskmourn has managed to take the five big horror slasher cliches and make a whole pie compliant world from them, so Duskmourn gets my stamp of approval
Lost in the Woods
Creepy Haunted House
Dimlit Industrial Zone
Non-Euclidian Dream
Something in the Dark Marsh
Each of Duskmourn's floors is basically a horror movie set
We don't really have info beyond that for colour pie philosophy, but they're also seemingly pushing Horror and Nightmares into more than monocolour, I think the Nightmare of Losing Teeth is Green or White judging by the art
I think this is why I like Universes Beyond. Seeing the MtG system adapted to so many different worlds and make sense says a lot about the mechanics and compatibility of it.
I am excited for Duskmourn. It's definitely a stretch, but even reading the planeswalker guide convinced me it was solid.
I do get why people don't like it. But the consistency I like is not in the aesthetics of a plane, but in the mechanics of it.
>I think this is why I like Universes Beyond. Seeing the MtG system adapted to so many different worlds and make sense says a lot about the mechanics and compatibility of it.
It's also what I hate about UB sometimes though. When a character is put into certain or all colors not because of personality but functionality (i.e. Bilbo being abzan in the precon and izzet in the set)
I'd say that would never happen in a universe within product, but we literally just got the tribe iconically known for being colorless in a 5-color deck, so maybe I just don't like all these commander products lol
Yeah. I mean to be fair, WotC still misses in- or out- of universe.
[Archelos, Lagoon Mystic is a card they said they made Sultai for specific interactions and not actual flavor, which I always found a little annoying.](https://x.com/JulesRobins/status/1322253764112216064)
I do think color justifications get weird.
When UB started, I thought I'd have issues with it...especially things that pushed beyond where MTG had thematically been (i.e. not LOTR). In all honesty, we've played EDH games with 1 UB deck from each release (40k, LOTR, Doctor Who, & Fallout) and they've been a blast. I've found through trial and error I dislike bad design more than bad aestetics. So Neon Dynasty...Yeah. Capenna...less so. Duskmourne...Im kind of looking forward to it. Karlov Manner...haven't bought a single card. I really didn't think I'd like Outlaws but limited was a blast.
Bottom line, I'm gonna hold off on judging any release based on looks try to internalize the idea that some sets won't be "for me". As a limited and EDH player, that's fine. Skipping a set or two here and there is a relief to my wallet.
As someone who really enjoys worldbuilding I love that about Magic as well, to an extent. It's a fun exercise to take some concept like "the world is a city", "roaring 20s art deco mob world", "ancient egypt / greece", "multiverse invading metal monsters", or "horror movie trope world" and build a fantasy world from it. But personally the closer everything gets to the present day and to our world, the more difficult I find it to uphold my suspension of disbelief and immersion. All of the above concepts can be done very well while separating the magic world from our world as much as possible. I think New Capenna and OTJ did that very well too (although some small things do bother me a little), even though the times they're inspired from are very recent.
With Duskmourn, everything just feels too close to home. The top down approach doesn't start from some concept, locale, or culture, but a very specific pop culture phenomenon from a few decades ago. And I have a really hard time getting immersed when I see mass manufactured tvs, devices, clothing, sneakers, etc and I think the closer you get to modern day (even more so if it's the US), the harder it is to apply a concept to a fantasy world that feels separate from ours. I do think that it would have been possible to take the 80s horror movie concept and build a world that is distinctly separate from ours, but I get the sense that Wizards made the conscious decision to cash in on the Stranger Things aesthetic as it's just massively popular right now.
Then again, this is my completely subjective opinion, and I do recognize that while people like me do not like Duskmourn at all, this might be fantastic for enfranchised players who really like that 80s horror movie vibe, newcomers who like that type of stuff, and people who simply do not mind that real / fantasy world separation.
I think the issue with pulling Duskmourn's survivors' aesthetic back to a more standard Fantasy approach is that we could run into a similar issue to what Karlov Manor suffered. "Why isn't this on Innistrad?"
Innistrad *is* already the Gothic Horror setting, but it's so old, I'd assume there are some expectations whenever we return there. What are the Cecani doing? Where's Sorin or Sigarda? You can circumvent a lot of it if the story has a broader reach, like MID and VOW's storyline affected all of Innistrad, so you could tell separate stories within the timeframe, but what Duskmourn wants to do, which is the whole Backrooms/House of Leaves-esque "Trap Plane," you'd either need to shoehorn some characters into the House or not include them altogether, and that comes with its own bag of worms. And I'm not even saying Innistrad *can't* do House of Leaves, it *did* and it was great with its singular character Strefan, but you'd need to pull some heavy weights to have that fit an entire set worth of cards and characters and stories.
And you end up with the problem that things like Gatecrash did, you're having to nudge wink 'this world building totally existed, we just didn't talk about it last time, don't think about nephilim'
And so many 'beloved' MTG sets started generic. Lorwyn is mostly Fae folk tropes with the names filed off, Dominaria only has so much history because they didn't want to do Viking Plane and so went for 'niche history period in far off realm of world during ice age that just happened to look and sound swedish'
Yeah, I remember when Duskmourn was first announced I saw a ton of people complain about it not being set on Innistrad even though it was pretty clearly going for something different.
Very good post. I just want to commend you on that last paragraph, as acknowledging one's opinion and openly allowing for others is something too rare, which has led to built up assumptions when someone typically shares their opinion and others take it as declarative fact that must be corrected. Sorry, that got a bit negative. Thanks for the good post!
>With Duskmourn, everything just feels too close to home. The top down approach doesn't start from some concept, locale, or culture, but a very specific pop culture phenomenon from a few decades ago.
Which makes it pretty much the same as Innistrad except a century later, which also heavily relied on 1880s fashion. Ironically combined with a very 1990-2010-ish "werevolves and vampires" trope.
Nah, the take in the OP is just garbage. Quit MTG for whatever reason you please, but NEO is not some egregious slight against the game.
MTG covers thousands of years and countless planes, it's stupid and selfish to ~~demand~~ expect that the game forever services only your comfortable fantasy corner to the exclusion of all else.
NEO is one of my favourite sets of all time, but if it were up to this dude, I would just not have gotten it.
I get that everyone has different sensibilities about what's "too far" but I feel like magic would be tragically boring if every plane was just some marginally different flavour of Tolkien-esque high fantasy.
I'm not sure how popular/unpopular this opinion is on the LOTR set, but I feel like everything EXCEPT the major characters fit incredibly well.
I forget most of those cards aren't just in-universe cards until someone lands a Gandalf and it feels egregious at that point.
Reminds me of this quote from Terry Pratchett:
> J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji
But seriously, LotR is probably the least bad offender. I'm infinitely more annoyed by Stranger Things / Jurassic Park / Transformers / Last of Us / Dr. Who / Assasin's Creed (I'm probably forgetting 10 more things given how many cards they release recently).
The thing that will break the camel's back for me is when they eventually do a Simpsons UB (You know they will, deep in your heart, you know). Saying this as a Simpsons fan.
> More and more it feels like the game just isn't for me, doesn't want the kind of player that feels strongly about cohesion and immersion. And that's fine, it doesn't have to cater to me, and the current approach seems to bring in more people than it drives away. But it still just makes me sad, on a deep personal level, to give up on what has been such a major part of my life.
They’re very explicitly NOT demanding the game caters to their specific fantasy comfort zone. Just expressing disappointment. There’s nothing wrong with voicing disappointment/concern, ESPECIALLY when also acknowledging that not everything has to be for them.
My favorite is the timeline - the OP says they've been playing "since they were 5 years old in the early 2000s" - by the time they were old enough to appreciate theme, Magic had already had SO MUCH variety in the theme and style.
I was against NEO at first too, thinking it was too anime-ish. But now, looking back, I realized it resonate with me more than Karlov Manor. Of all the things that would happened to me - liking a Kamikawa set more than a Ravnica set is definitely not on my expectations.
I honestly think that the art direction throws people more than the actual content. And mechanically (apart from being ridiculously complex) it's great.
How dare Neon Kamigawa break Magic aesthetics by introducing mecha's and cybernetic limbs
Wizards should have stuck with the classical fantasy aesthetics of the old sets, where we had such classic fantasy cards as [[Power Armor]] and [[Priest of Gix]].
/s just in case.
imagine thinking it "breaks immersion" that hundreds if not thousands of planes dont ever evolve anywhere near our real world technology over the span of multiple millenia. if anything, the opposite would be the case
Exactly.
The real dumb thing is that Neon Kamigawa isn't even necessarily the most advanced civilisation to have existed in MTG lore. The Thran were extremely technologically advanced too.
The whole reason Yawgmoth rose to power among the Thran in the first place was because he was hired to figure out a cure for what more-or-less turned out to be *radiation poisoning*.
I would argue that Kamigawa now is more technologically advanced than the Thran empire ever was. At least as it concerns smaller scale applications.
The Thran, while advanced compared to the early Magic story, were still very much bound by a high fantasy concept. Their technology was 'big'. They created machines that were complex, but the Thran were closer to an industrial age (which, compared to Magic's more medieval or rennaissance era, is still very advanced), whereas Kamigawa seems closer to a digital age.
Then again, the Thran did launch a moon into orbit...so that's something.
I think it's a very modern difference: current modern technology like phones and cameras . The thran were in some ways way more technically advanced than our modern world. They had magitech hover-cars, a floating city, even the moon station, robots, and "nukes" with Glacian's stone burners. What they didn't have is an equivalent to our modern information technology.
I loved the neo-kamigawa set and story, but it did knock me out of it for a second reading about cameras in the story. It's such a uniquely modern/future feeling word and type of technology that it did break my immersion. It's definitely a flavor thing. A magical spell that allows communication over distances feels like a fantasy element. A magical device that does it doesn't feel fantasy if they just call it a telephone.
Pre-omenpath, I would have less problem with the technological variance between planes. But with interplanar travel trivially easy for just about anyone, Theros being technologically in the bronze age and coexisting unchanged alongside 80's Duskmorne and Capenna, much less sci-fi kamigawa, strains credulity for me.
That being said, it's a minor flavor issue, and the sets are still fun.
You know, yeah. Monkeys and typewriters and all that.
A modern day plane was an inevitability, and I think there’s a reason they sorta went out of their way to make that plane one of the most unique settings in Magic. It’s not like the Wandering Emperor is going to get an iPhone, there’s no one left to make them or maintain the cell service.
Yea Mark responded to his first question very fair and reasonable and the dude just went further and further into gatekeeping with Mark didn’t cave to him
The concept of pushing to the line is kinda where I’m at. I think magic is doing a bunch of crazy shit right now and a lot of it I don’t love and some of it might be legitimately harmful for the game, but at the end of the day, they gotta make decisions that will be either good or bad, and that do or don’t cross the line. The question isn’t “will we design magic without ever crossing it,” the question is “can we figure out where the line is, what crossing it does, and how to fix any damage that results,” which is a much better line of inquiry than the former, which is closer to what complainers want. I will be bothered by stuff they do, but as long as they aren’t committing to every choice they make, it’s not a bad strategy.
I think the issue with that inquiry, as MaRo talked about in the answers, is that **"the line" is vastly different to person to person**, and **"the line" itself changes for each person as time passes on**. I know a lot of people who were initially miffed about Secret Lair and Universes Beyond, but while some continued never liked them, some accepted them, and some even came to fully love them.
It also doesn't encompass the fact that in addition to a line that should never be crossed, there are people who **clamor for lines to be crossed.** I know a lot of people who were happy to get a mythology set in Magic. I know a lot of people who were happy to get a futuristic cyberpunk world in Magic. And now there's a lot of people I know who love the idea of modern horror in Magic. There will be people you upset with every line you cross but also some people who WANT the line to be crossed. If WoTC never took risks, we wouldn't be there. There's a bunch of Harry Dresden fans who straight up want urban fantasy, and I think they're hopeful for that opportunity because of those endeavors.
The question then is not "will we design magic without ever crossing it" because the line is too relative and ever-changing for this question to matter. The question then is not "can we figure out where the line is, what crossing it does, and how to fix any damage that results" because that still does not fix the ephemeral nature of the line and how diverse it is among people. The question is the same as always, from literature academics' discovery that the most popular Aesop's Fables and European fairy tales are the ones that are familiar but always have a little bit of novelty, to cultural psychologist's realization that culture evolves incrementally from small units of change called memes, to physicists constantly questioning the rules set by the shoulders of giants behind them, to MaRo's 20 years 20 lessons talk stating that the best changes are the ones that make a lot of people happy AND angry: **"How can we change the lines in the best way?"**
Yeah, I love the horror inspirations and the worldbuilding of Duskmourn but I’m gonna groan at some of the most obvious references.
“Ah yes, Frieda the Nightmare Walker, a Bladeripper with a bladed glove and a burnt face who kills people in creative ways in their dreams. What a great original character.”
I'm not gonna lie: I am disappointed by the insertion of 90's america asthetics into the Duskmourn setting, especially considering how cool it seemed without those elements.
But I'll let them cook. Maybe I'll get used to it. Maybe I'll proxy some alternate art for the cards I need and just won't play with the rest. Either way, this is fine. No need for dramatics.
My main problems are
> The not ghostbuster ghost suckers, previewed in one of the art pocs. I can understand the survivors of the house developing weapons but is such a "DO YOU GET IT" (And excuse to do a crossover) that hinders the world.
> Generic TVs. I can accept some techy horror. But For the love of Yawmogh, at least make the TV's shape weirder or less standard
100% this. It's the same argument, for me, as dusters and ten-gallon hats in TJ: just because something is recognizable in the setting doesn't mean it's *always* the best for it. There are better clothing options for arid climates, especially if you don't have to stick to Earth physics; same goes for guns and screens in a horror setting where people *also* have access to magical spells.
I feel like this is a lose-lose scenario. You include cowboy hats, people are upset that they now exist in magic. You exclude cowboy hats and invent your own version, people complain that they don't make any sense and they should've just used cowboy hats instead since they have more cultural weight to them.
I'm convinced that a big part of the problem is the "one set" system instead of blocks, because there just isn't enough *time* to get to know a setting. A lot of players are just going to get a singular snapshot of what the set looks like and nothing else. It's hard to have things meaningfully change or get a nuanced perspective because by the time you're done establishing everything the story has moved on.
That's why recent sets have felt so much more "Planet of hats" than others. Sure you could argue that Ravnica or Theros or whatever was one-note at the time, but it had breathing room for people to learn about the plane from different perspectives.
WOTC *has* to make the planes more distinct at an initial glance or else they'll all start to blend together.
Honestly, I think part of the goal *is* to make things blend together. They're chasing that Fortnite or Monopoly high to be able to put any style together and resell the same content over and over with a new skin.
LoL. I must have seen this card a 100 times and ot never evoked GB for me. There's no proton pack equivalent and it's sucking the thing in. That being said, I see it now.
Not OP, but I think I do? There was some stuff in the last two Innistrad sets that didn't square with what I expected the setting to be. Certain things like the coven cards worked really well for me, but some of the UR stuff and even some of the core story elements like the key never sat quite right.
That isn't new for innistrad. Look at [[Rage Thrower]]'s geist-powered flame thrower, [[Snapcaster Mage]]'s arm canon, [[Geistcatcher's Rig]], all from original innistrad
See I’m the polar opposite. I’m a huge film buff so seeing all the classic horror movie references just scratches an itch for me.
Plus I like having a variety of different planes and themes it gets exhausting seeing just another variant of Dominaria.
Neither of us are wrong for our choices and we have the choice to pick up as much or as little of each product as we choose
And this is exactly the core of what Mark is saying.
I had basically 0 interest in Murders at Karlov Manor. It’s the first set in a while where I didn’t buy a box. The story was amazing, but I actively disliked most of the cards and mechanics that we got, and the flavor of the whole set. But did I complain about how this is the “end of Magic” and everything was forever wrong? No, I just acknowledged this set wasn’t for me and moved on. My co-worker meanwhile loved that set.
Now with Dudkmourne, I’m almost more excited for it than I was for the return to Ixalan. I *love* the vibe and aesthetic, and the Planeswalker’s Guide made me instantly love the plane as a whole. It has a very Silent Hill feel to me and that hits all the notes I want in a horror set.
Meanwhile that same co-worker isn’t interested in it at all.
And this is all *fine*. The game isn’t going to die because we have some TVs in a card. People can like or dislike whatever they like, but doomposting *all the time* gets tiring.
I was going to come here and drop the same point you did but you did it *way* better then I could have. What's one person's yuck is another person's yum.
I personally *really* don't like the Ravnica sets at all, but I can understand why they'd be really cool and think that's awesome they're there for the VAST MAJORITY of people who love it. I personally love the UB stuff, and please please please give me more Thunder Junction stuff.
The echo chamber of reddit is so intense, it sometimes is super easy to forget that we're as a whole arguably a pretty vocal minority in the whole mtg hobby space.
I'm also a huge film buff and horror fan but so far the references we've seen seem more on the lazy side. The reference to pet sematary is on the alt treatment of a card that shows a glitch ghost, the shining one is just straight up shining but with a weird shadow behind the twins and the jigsaw one is just another quote reference (though from the Planeswalker guide it seems this antagonist is the leader of the slasher faction so we may see more interesting cards). Compared to Innistard that had references like The Fly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or even The Blob but made way more efforts to make them subtle enough to fit the setting. I know that Duskmourn is THE modern horror plane so we're going to get a lot of more direct references but I wish they had made them more of their own. I'm not a fan of the ghostbuster gadgets things, but so far it seems like one of the best example of a reference done right in this set.
Personally I'm off it. There's people who want CRT TVs, headsets and fanny packs in Magic, apparently, and I'm happy for those people. Not trying to be snarky, I really am, it's nice when someone gets the thing they want.
But I, personally, have no interest in those things, and as such I'll skip the set. If that becomes normalised, that means more skipped sets for me. I'll be back once they do fantasy again.
These discussions would be so much easier if we could just put percentages to things.
What percent of MtG players would play MtG pretty much regardless of what got released?
What percentage found set X or Y to be world breaking?
What percentage are playing specifically because of set theme X or Y?
What percentage of people drawn in by crossover X will still be playing in a year?
Which cards in particular put the most people off or draw the most on? After all, maybe a set is 90% good and 10% bad
Things like that.
>*I'm just asking, is it really so difficult to understand why some people feel like something that looks like it came straight out of Ghostbusters simply doesn't fit in with other, more traditional fantasy aesthetics?*
No, he does understand that. That's why he listed a bunch of previous examples where people thought the same thing about older sets.
I’m gonna come off boomerish here but the op Mark is talking to might be too young to understand that. They say they were 5 in the early 2000s. Maybe they were too young to understand how much the examples he listed did get thrown around in almost exactly the same way. Or god forbid the outcry when plansewalkers became a thing. People always question design choices and always have. But when you are young that innovation with things like theros and og ravnica comes off more like nostalgia instead of “wait, people had problems with those?”
Yeah I felt that too, and I'm 27. There is a large difference between being at an event (in this case sets like amonkhet or there's being thrown around in the community), and hearing about it later on, even if everything you hear is accurate.
For the people then, it was actively changing "what magic is", just as is happening now. Mark drew very good parallels between the two times, but it feels like the questioner doesn't have the *experience* of those times to resonate with. It felt like he didn't really understand MaRos point of "things have always been like this, you're just the affected one now".
*Takes a long drag off a cigarette, wheezes, fingers the scars on his flamewar-scorched hands*
You think this is bad, you should have been there in '03, during the Frame Wars, the *single greatest exodus* of "Magic's fantasy aesthetics are ruined forever and I'm quitting!" from people who otherwise don't even own a real sword.
Don't you realize the ENTIRE FANTASY AETHESTIC of Magic is GONE if THE CARDS DON'T LOOK LIKE LITERAL SPELLBOOKS ANYMORE? And what is this MIRRODIN sci-fi crap? The "Magic" is gone from Magic and now it just looks like a colorful spreadsheet. It doesn't even have the Elder Scrolls font as the title of cards anymore, do you feel like you're casting a REAL MAGIC SPELL if you're looking at what might as well be Times New Roman? Magic can never come back from this utter decimation of flavor and aesthetic.
As someone who enjoys both the lore side of MTG - I've ran and played a number of D&D campaigns on both Theros and Ravnica - it seems very weird to me that this is the line that bothers people. Ravnica has earpieces, electric guns, trains, submarines and more, but a T.V. crosses the line? I love the core concept of Duskmourn, the entire Plane is a massive house haunted by a singular demonic entity. I think some people just see the modern-ish technology and are only able to associate it with Stranger Things. I'm looking forward to Duskmourn, while also knowing that more traditional fantasy-style sets are not going to be stopping anytime soon.
It's actually bothered me for a long time from a lore perspective that no planes were allowed to have technology that "looked too modern", simply because of the external concerns of how players might react. Yes, Magic is a fantasy setting, with dragons and spells and the like, but it is also a setting with an expansive multiverse of possible planes, some of which have had civilizations with thousands of years worth of history. It's not like magic existing would make it so no one ever wanted to invent TV, and in fact it might even be easier for someone to do so. The fact that planes are free to copy every recognizable civilization from Earth *except* the most recognizable one (present day) is an extremely arbitrary line, and there's no justification in-universe for why this should be the case.
For me personally it’s all about mundane modernity. T-shirts, cell phones, and TVs bug me because they’re everyday items that don’t appear in older eras.
Ravnica "justifies" all of those with different sorts of magic, plus they tend to have a pretty different aesthetic to their real-world equivalents. I think that's what makes people draw the line a lot of the time.
Ravnica's technology is technomancy and steampunk, as opposed to things from regular old real life.
Same with New Capenna. The technology was there and earth-inspired as opposed to literally earth like we're seeing in Dustmourne.
Multiverse travel enables all sorts of different worlds and modernities, and I'm fine with it. But the moment one of those worlds is our own, it feels different from the game I've been playing for 20 years.
What makes these fine in the Ravnica setting is that these technogies clearly have fantasy aesthetic. Ravnica doesn't look modern. The same trains and guns got so much more complaints in outlaws of thunder junction because they look very different. They borrow from western aesthetic rather than the more steampunk kind of technology found on Ravnica and Khaladesh.
For me, what makes it the line is the genre itself. Modern Horror's core basis for fear is that "it could happen to you". That videotape/CD/USB your friend lent you could be Sadako's tape, that abandoned house down the street could be haunted, or that ugly doll you have might come to life and kill you. Invoking the Familiar then twisting it is how the genre works. In contrast, every other genre that magic has drawn from invites the player into the unfamiliar, whether its a generic fantasy world, the art-deco 20's, or a near-future cyberpunk world. They might then tell a story with familiar themes, but a large part of their appeal is that their settings aren't our day-to-day life.
Isn't the items you listed for Ravnica part of a long tradition of steampunk or some sort of punk fantasy aesthetic?
Instead of creating sets based on fantasy traditions, they are now just hopping on every bag of cash they see in pop culture.
on one hand, they did just introduce magic computers in MKM, but i also remember being like "idk, this is kinda weird". they made them kinda magic-y so it wasn't too bad; we'll have to see how they handle that space opera set that's coming up
I’m old enough to remember folks complaining about how original Innistrad was just old Universal movie monster tropes and thus not Magic. I know because I was one of them. The setting might not be for everyone, but I remember there being a lot of “this is better than expected” at my locals when we saw the whole block and played it.
Duskmourn has a cool hook (demon can’t escape his prison so he’s just gonna embiggen the prison) and we’ve seen like 5 cards. Give it a chance.
I don't have a problem with sets having a more modern aesthetic, but they've been hitting that well a bit too much for what is meant to be a fantasy game
I think the difference is between "science fantasy" and "science fiction".
Phyrexians run off magic oil. Urza mechs run on powerstones. Kaladesh mechs run on aether. Kamigawa tech runs on power from the spirit realm.
But when you start throwing technologies that the players recognize, that illusion breaks down, and you start losing the "fantasy" aspect.
Maybe duskmourne tech runs on nightmare fuel according to lore, but I *know* a CRT TV runs on electricity and chainsaws run on gasoline. Because they are technologies so close to my time that I am familiar with how they work.
Well put, and this is kinda what kills it for me as well. Kamigawa has tech and computers and stuff, but they are also jellyfish creatures and looks like a Japanese temple. Kaladesh has cars and airships, but they are all in a filigree gear style, and padded out by plenty of fantastical steampunk gizmos. Urza built mech suits and robot soliders, but he had whole books of buildup where we watched him go from simple wood and cloth ornithopters, to basic clockwork powerstone robots, to implementing all sorts of magic/interplanar tech/etc... into the designs. The tech on duskmourn looks like knockoff Ghostgrabberz™ toys, or some stuff that my grandpa has lying around in his garage. The characters look like my parents when they were in college. And there is no background to justify it. With the other high tech plane of kamigawa, you at least got a few sets to establish the through line of relatively standard feudal Japan setting -> overlay with the spirit world introduces more magic -> spirit-energy based tech evolves and begins to incorporate mechanical tech. So when you finally see the jellyfish temple usb stick, you can at least understand how you got there.
Duskmourn is looking like a set that I won't engage with financially. I also echo the sentiments that I will probably be engaging with magic less going forward if this is the aesthetic direction that things go in the future. If this is your thing, I'm glad for you. But I find this highly unappealing.
Exactly, the people who always wax lyrical about [[Urza's Power Armor]] existing meaning that Magic should have modern aesthetics make no sense whatsoever.
Duskmourne has ghosts, demons, living nightmares, big furry monsters, and TVs that bleed static. It is in no way shape or form "science fiction".
Not that boundary between "science fiction" and "fantasy" is really that solid anyway.
My only issue with the “too close to home” elements is that they really, really are too close to what we, humans on Earth, would recognize as mundane objects, when, supposedly, these artifacts - though superficially similar - are meant to be products of magic and advanced technology whose purpose/function eludes not only Duskmourn’s survivors but might even dumbfound someone from the real world as well. As in, “Woah, that looks like a camera, but is very clearly something else.” Which, were that the case more often (as with that one piece of promo art I’m alluding to), I’d be completely fine with the nods to 80s and early 90s tech. But, like, Toby is straight up wearing headphones. And those are more or less televisions in most cards. You can give both some new finagled, vaguely magical utility - sure, but they’re so close to the real thing that it’s impossible for me to not immediately go, “Well that’s very clearly a TV, that’s obviously a pair of headphones, all from our reality.”
If the art swung closer in the direction of “familiar but not what you think” then the 80s inspirations, at least I personally believe, wouldn’t have been so poorly received. Imagine, say, a card with what looks like a toaster, but there are subtle clues as to its actual function in both its design, rules text, and flavor text. Then in another card you see the “toaster” being used and go, “WOAH HEY! THAT’S WHAT IT DOES! HOT DAMN!”
I also feel that, with the above approach, some interesting worldbuilding could have been done. Imagine, through the glimpses we get of these relics, being able to discern and intuit WHY the plane swung towards the aesthetic it did and more about the plane in general - its people and its culture. You know…before it was subsumed by the House. Unfortunately, what we have at the moment is 80s Americana with no real explanation other than the blanket statement that, prior to the imprisoned demon’s shenanigans, the plane was rich with magic and advanced technology, melding the two to great effect. Fine, I suppose. BUT MORE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE.
Oh, and a small gripe. Could the clothing be more consistent at the very least? You’ve got some survivors in clothes that blends 80s fashion and urban fantasy quite well. Then you’ve guys that look like they stepped out of an 80s aerobics class. This is all coming from someone who actually quite jives with the set, by the way. I personally love the lore we’ve been given about the House, and I’m a sucker for walking horror tropes like the Razorkin and Wicker Folk.
When Innistrad came out people also complained that it was too dark and would ruin magic. But alsothey only made the set because of the Twilight movies and that twilight fanbase would ruin magic.
When Lorwyn came out people complained about how Planeswalkers didn't make sense and how complicated they were. Players are walkers, this isn't magic anymore! Completely ruining magic for ever!
When zendikar came out and brought with it the level mechanic, people complained that Magic was becoming too much like Yu-Gi-Oh! That would ruin magic!! (This was literally the worst argument I ever heard in person)
When New Phyrexia was revealed, people complained about how the lore of magic got ruined and how dare they destroy mirrodin! No respect for the background would surely ruin magic forever!!!
When Theros came out people complained that it was too much based on real world mythology and it ruined the fantasy of magic! Classic Greek does not fit the mideaval fantasy aesthics of magic! It's not magic any more!!!
Duskmourne is just the newest version of this story. The change is too much! And it isn't magic anymore!
Some of us still remamber when Planer Chaos was "too much outside of the color pie", Future Sight "too complex", Rise of the Eldrazi "too alien" and the list goes on. Some things never change I guess.
I mean, I agree that it was too complex, but now it is regarded as "one of the good ones". Most sets (barring stuff like Born of the Gods and Dragon's Maze) are contested and debated until they "magically" become good in Reddit's eye.
Opposed to every other set, I would say Planar Chaos was actually a problem. But what can we take from that? Planar Chaos was recognized as a problematic direction and we never got a set like it again. And Mark Rosewater implied as much with all future concerns, if they do cross the line some day, they can always pull back.
Planar Chaos was *terrible* design. It still has awful implications on the color pie. For example Harmonize is still in practically every single green commander deck because of how blatant of a color pie break it was. It's why they never did that concept ever again.
Future Sight *was* too complex. It had a ridiculous number of mechanics that didn't work well together and a lot of them were complexity for complexities' sake rather than actually being good designs. There's a reason a ton of Future Sight mechanics basically never got used again.
I don't think Rise of the Eldrazi was "too alien" but I do think it was an awful lore twist that stripped Zendikar of its identity for decades and turned it into "the Eldrazi plane".
So, two things.
"People" is tantamount to "nothing and everything." Of course someone is going to dislike something. That's a given. That's not a basis for arguing a specific point about some attribute of a product.
The specific complaint about Duskmourne leaning heavily into TV/film tropes and a "modern" aesthetic is just that. Specific. It very much *is* a sharp turn that would have seemed even sharper if it wasn't for all the Universes Beyond products.
There are categories of aesthetics, and 80s horror simply isn't comparable to whatever has come before it in MTG history.
Do I think it will "ruin" Magic? I already ignore a vast amount of cards that I already find doesn't fit into my idea of what MTG should look like, so this is just a few hundred more that I will (most probably) add to that pile. I will keep on playing and ignoring. If this trend continues, eventually there will be nothing for me in MTG, and that's fine. I'll have 30 years worth of cards to play with, and I'll simply disengage completely with anything current and official. The kitchen table will always be there.
Will it make me even less interested in the story and the canon? There's a high probability of that. Simply because it introduces problems I take issue with as a writer. Yes, MTG is silly and gets sillier by the minute, but the writers have managed to largely make sense of the tools they've been given up until this point. I fear a larger shift in tone and aesthetic will eventually make it non-functioning.
By all means, keep on liking MTG in the midst of people complaining, but argue the actual points brought forward.
Murders at Markor Manor didn't suck because a whodunnit set was a bad idea, it sucked because it was poorly executed. Modern aesthetics won't make or break a new set, but if it's sloppily handled, yeah, why wouldn't it spoil it?
I’ve been playing for decades and only recently have sets really been a turn off/cringey, OP is definitely not alone. MaRo is right though, you just take a break. I wish the power creep would stop though so fair magic can work its way into at least one format.
At this point you stop and come back to a totally different game. How many cards are going to blow their price floor in that time? How hard will power creep? It’s kinda sprinting lately.
Leave for a few sets and the game is very different. Leave for a few years and it’ll be unrecognizable
Mark and the person giving feedback are having two different conversations. The original message, and his follow-ups, are about their individual experience. Mark only responds in what works or doesn't work for the community. Without paraphrasing, this can be summed up in these two statements.
OP in the beginning: "the current approach seems to bring in more people than it drives away. But it still just makes me sad"
Mark at the end: "Will we someday hit the line that upsets enough players that we pull back? Maybe?"
In other words Mark knows that these decisions DO upset some players and push them away, so he could have just said "you're right" from the start and left it there.
Call me crazy but I’ve been playing magic for like 20 years and I like Duskmourne. I really don’t get ghostbusters vibes from it, feels more like a world where someone made a pact with an eldritch god or demon and it really went sideways. It’s cool and unique and everything MKM wasn’t. The modern aspects really don’t bother me as long as there’s a shitload of magic. Like I don’t think I would enjoy, “Jace and Vraska go to time square New York and get hotdogs” the set, but a world that is sort of modern that has been deeply contorted by a demons magics to be a horror house is pretty rad. As long as it’s rad I don’t care if it’s sort of modern, and frankly this set feels like magic still the tone is there the design is still there it feels like it’s supposed to, something that MKM and Thunder Junction completely missed.
I think it should be ok to voice concerns over the direction the art style and aesthetics of Magic are going. Seems like brigade downvoting those opinions is the current trend on this sub.
I am super hyped about Bloomburrow. Like truly hyped as a young kid I loved Redwall and read several of Jacques’ books.
Duskmourne is definitely a set I’m skipping due to the aesthetic. I am just not feeling that one. I think it’s ok to skip sets but also cite concern over where Magic is heading. I think the territorial lines of high fantasy and reality are gone but I’d love to see old traditions stay within the core “world” of Magic and keep these kinds of sets to UB
Not to mention all the upvoted comments of “I will never understand people who [opinion]”…
Like… that’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing to not be able to understand people having different opinions. It’s okay to disagree with them! But it feels like a weird collective lack of empathy that’s going on here.
I get it, Magic evolves. And I'm excited to play even with Universes Beyond! But still, there's a sting somewhere when I play [[Nuka-Cola Vending Machine]] in a [[Sam, Loyal Attendant]] deck.
I can be excited about Universes Beyond where it legitimately feels Magic-adjacent. I think Lord of the Rings was a good fit, as was Dungeons & Dragons, even if they don't want to admit that D&D is UB.
I love Final Fantasy, and I think there's a lot of good potential for most of it to feel like Magic. But I am dreading seeing cards depicting the car or the clothes or the gas station from Final Fantasy XV. If they could downplay or omit those modern-looking aspects, I would be a lot happier with the art.
I really appreciate the tone the first person worded their query. Maro's thoughts on the matter ring true to me but I understand that isn't much comfort for people who feel that a line has been crossed.
I just ignore the stuff I don't like, I don't get why that's so difficult. 25,000 cards with orcs and goblins and mages and whatever other fantasy tropes this guy in particular likes would be boring as shit.
>I just ignore the stuff I don't like, I don't get why that's so difficult.
I think a big reason why it can be difficult is that formats outside of Commander exists. Like, a large part of deck-building in Commander is self-expression, so you can handicap yourself however you like, but it's not like I can just pretend Bowmasters or The One Ring doesn't exist, when I'm trying to create the best modern deck I can. At least in Commander, I only have to look at the cards when my opponent plays them.
if you play exclusively commander or kitchen table, ignoring what you dislike is easy, but if you play any other format it's literally impossible.
and you can't decide what your opponents are playing anyway
He'd be the guy to know about the negative opinions, but Zendikar is a head-scratcher
Gun to my head when I was getting into the game I could've accidentally thought the setting was what Jund was
He's such a reasonable guy, but there is zero chance that anyone looked at Zendikar and said "this isn't magic because it's too adventury". The 'world of adventure' thing was such an internal memo that did not come through. I saw someone open a dual land at the pre re and I never once thought it was anything to do with 'priceless treasures' even after I was told that was the intent.
I remember people saying it was just a thrown together D&D knockoff. I also remember people complaining it didn't make sense the Kor were there because they were from Rath, which was especially funny since no one was originally from Rath.
Yeah, you know what, legit, after going for a swim and reading this, I take everything back. For real. Of COURSE someone said they were quitting magic because the set was too much about adventuring.
No deletions for posterity, but you are all right and I am wrong.
I feel so conflicted about Duskmourn. I love everything about it, except for the combination of 80s tech and being a canon magic plane. If it were a non-M:tG property, I'd love it. If it were exactly the same, but without the CRTs, it would probably be my new favourite plane. I just... I don't know, in my mind horror and fantasy are two separate things, and Magic has to be fantasy - and whilst you can combine the two to great effect (see: the first two Innistrad blocks) at some point if you remove enough fantasy elements it doesn't feel like fantasy any more. People bring up Neo-Kamigawa as a comparison, but even with all the futuristic tech it still had a fantasy feel. Duskmourn, even with all the monsters and magic and demonic influence, doesn't *feel* like fantasy.
I'm not going to drop Magic or anything, and I think anyone who does is being overdramatic, but that one aesthetic choice completely killed my interest in a set which I otherwise would have been 1,000% on board for, and it's hard not to feel disappointed and maybe a little bitter about that. I'm glad so many people seem hyped for it, and I wish I did too, but I just can't.
I kinda agree with you in that I think the CRTs and 80s fashion gives the setting a vibe that doesn't quite feel fantasy even though I have to say I am not peeved enough by the fashion or concept to not be looking forward to the Set when so many of the Nightmares and Demons look amazing and hit my taste perfectly.
People have a "spot" in their mind when they see media and they think "this is mundane, it could be happening out there" and it is different from where you put the stuff that makes you go "this is fantastical, this is entirely made up". It is why watching someone die in the news or even a relatively grounded comedy feels different from watching it happen in a fantasy movie or a cartoon, it is why the Simpsons usually avoids fantastical elements outside Halloween specials, and it is why most people would deem dressing as "Gale Weathers from Scream" for a Halloween party to be boring.
The people of Duskmourne just look very mundane. 80s fashion isn't outdated enough for these people to really feel like they weren't pulled from our world, so it is a bit harder for your brain to not go "Have I seen this person?"
Despite Cyborgs and Robots being more high tech, I actually think they feel more at home in fantasy than modern tech because they don't look nearly as mundane. Most people have never interacted with one, while there are probably many Magic players for whom a living room with a CRT and a couch looks like "My Parents' Living Room".
I think, even though it has often been considered a game set in a world of High Fantasy, that is changing. Personally, I like where Duskmourn is going - and Innstrad is my favorite plane. I also love Phyrexia - which is decidedly unlike anything you see in traditional High Fantasy settings. So, I really like the horror aspect of mtg. The modern-ish feel doesn't bother me as much as it might some others.
What bothers me is the reduction in classic MTG creature types. My first favorite creature type was Viashino. Now, they're all lizards. Now, that's great from a gameplay perspective - it allows for more support and synergy. I just don't want to lose that specific and unique type of creature. Same with Cephalids. It seemed like they were going the right way by reprinting the humanoid slivers to look more sliver-ish, but deprecating the original creations in the worlds of MTG, I think, reduces some of the appeal. Just one guy's opinion.
> My only recommendation is don’t get rid of your cards. Many Magic players rotate in and out of the game, and the number one complaint I hear from players who rotate back in is them having gotten rid of everything when they rotated out.
thats so 2010s lol
in 2020s its *"sell your collection then get it back as proxies for pennies on the dollar, its quite literally having your cake and eating it too"*
The wider appeal is a nice thought and all but it's mostly to make the most money. They're making UB because it sells, they know what it does to the Magic brand and they accepted that tradeoff because it sells and attracts more customers. It's a bit of a cynical thought but Wizards/Hasbro has only shown to think this way in the past few years.
if you make money by gathering money from a base of people, and the base of people could grow or shrink, and had a fixed rate of shrinkage, appealing to a wider audience and making the most money would be very similar goals
"I'm very attuned to when people get upset and why" - that feels extra dismissive to me, like, "Look, I've been in PR for 30 years, so I *know* what you really mean when you say/write something." That really irks me, on a personal level.
The rest of Mark's "Well the line is different for everyone/previous sets have been called 'too far from style'"-argument I can get, even if I disagree. If nothing else, it's safe, well-rehearsed, and has some truth to it. But when people start to say things that read like, "I have enough experience to never misunderstand someone or misconstrue their point," that's toxic, imo.
I got into Magic right in between the Zendikar and Scars of Mirrordin blocks, and it was the fantasy and diversity that drew me in. I loved looking back at the previous planes—Alara, Ravinca, Kamigawa, etc—and was pretty consistently excited with each new block and setting. I don’t think I would have had any interest in Magic if the stuff that had been around then was Duskmourn and Universes Beyond.
I feel like if there's ever a set where I cannot stand the theme of it, I'd just not play it. Duskmourn is getting close to that border for me, but it's not ruining my enjoyment of magic, it doesn't erase all of the other worlds and characters that I like. It's one set, I can take a break, save up my money for something worthwhile, and come back to magic when it leans more towards the stuff I really enjoy. There's no need for people to be so "final" about things.
The problem, for me, is these "kitsch" sets have already hit that point; and their not being isolated to UB or whatever means I have to deal with them, which makes me want to play less and less over time.
"oh look, Vraska in a cowboy hat, again, backed up by two guys with proton packs in front of a TV."
Urza's Gundams from early days were annoying-yet-amusing, all of this new stuff just feels lazy.
If you want a catered environment build a cube. You control every element including the meta game. You can engage with any set you want. It doesn’t matter what happens, your cube will always be yours and you don’t need to look at any cards you don’t want to. There are many kinds of cubes. Mine specifically excludes UB cards.
Cube will outlive magic.
One thing that makes me tentatively excited about the new Foundations product is that I think it's gonna make an excellent cube starter. Especially since it's closer to the Jumpstart style, which I think is much better for cubes that are typically played by two players.
I graduated high school with Mark and followed his career (I'm not a Magic player) but Mark's consistency and level of effort put forth in his role makes me proud. The man is legendary and we can only wish to possess his level of commitment and knowledge of his craft. Back in HS Mark was nerdy, kind, quiet, gentle, intelligent, and an all-around great guy.
Like I loathe the very concept of the Death Race set. Know what I am going to do.
Not buy any or play with the cards. But there are plenty of other ways for me to get my MTG fix during those 3-4 months
We take for granted what a reasonable guy Mark Rosewater is
And patient from what I've seen
For real. For pretty much everything that Wizards does people will complain about it to him (valid or not) and he welcomes it all with open arms and tries to engage with it as reasonably as possible. I respect the hell out of that man
He's also mentioned that he's had to defend decisions he doesn't agree with on blogatog- I can't imagine having enough patience to read people angrily complaining about something I was against, blaming *me* for it, then having to either ignore them and get criticized for avoiding a problem (and interpreted by some as implicit endorsement), or defending the decision and looking like I'm a big fan of it. Having a large public scrutinize every single element of your company's work and then putting the responsibility of all of it on you must be so exhausting.
It is very funny when he is allowed to say he's against things, mostly color pie bends and anything that casts from exile. You could feel his frustration with the blue pongify spells or Kaldheim Kaya.
He's got to walk a really rough tightrope - he tries to be as candid and transparent as he can, but he's also the face of a brand and can't just say stuff that will affect sales negatively, so he has to toe the company line on controversial products. Those two things are constantly at odds, but Mark does it about as well as anyone could be expected to.
True, but for well over a decade now, any creative company would fall over themselves to hire Maro, so he knows if he ever does get canned, he won't be out of work for long.
Mark makes the everready bunny look lazy… I’m not sure he has a concept of “exhausted”.
Definitely easy to forget him answering all the questions he does isn't even a part of his job, man just does it for the love of the game
recently someone asked how does he manage the blog in terms of time and the reply was "I'm replying to you while waiting for a collegue to pass me cards during a playtest draft"
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/754278228621934592/hi-mark-a-bit-of-a-meta-question-do-you-take-an
thanks! I couldn't find it myself (tumblr search is garbage)
Some say Ethan is still thinking about whether to pick Chrysalis or Phlage P1P1 to this day...
The guy literally made his morning drive into a podcast. This is insane behaviour. I bet he answers tumblr questions or tweets while shitting.
I'm jelly.
i would be patient if i was him, too. patient at a psych ward.
When I first started playing Magic and I came to Reddit, the way you used to be able to tell if people thought a white magic card was boring or bad when it shouldn't be was by the fact that that thread would have like a thousand comments versus every other thread having like two hundred. Take heliod, for example, from Theros beyond death. People obviously saw that it was a good card and they came up with a bunch of combos for it in that thread and one of them even took off. People didn't think the card was bad, but holy f*** That card was boring and you could see it a huge discussion about it. In a time frame, when white was well, it was boring and bad at doing anything other than agro. And when you had cards That people thought should have been white, but were not like Tibelts trickery or the raven card or that one card in strixhaven, that was similar. He was always the one Explaining design processes even if he personally didn't agree with them to angry people. That being said I think even he admits he kind of messed up by hyping up a white draw three card in strixhaven lol
For real. I've played countless TCGs at various degrees and it feels absolutely wild that the head designer of the game will answer people's questions online, let alone making a podcast about the game etc. I have issues with the current state of MTG, but I wish games like Vanguard or YGO's teams had a tenth of Mark Rosewater's communication skills.
It is really awesome that he happens to be who he is, likes to use his downtime to field often really rude and presumptive questions from idiots without an ounce of vitriol back.
I will never forget his rant/article about getting squirrels into magic. I still laugh thinking about the anecdotes from that article.
Ooh, have a link to that one?
Me: (looking at the piece) Looks nice. What card is this? Sue Ann: Waiting in the Weeds. Me: This can’t be Waiting in the Weeds. It’s got a cat on it. Sue Ann: So? Me: Waiting in the Weeds makes squirrels. Sue Ann: What do you mean? Me: The card. In the game. It makes squirrels. Sue Ann: I’m not sure I understand. Me: The card that this art goes on. Its purpose, what it does in the game, is make squirrels. Sue Ann: I don’t think so. Me: Yes. Trust me. It makes squirrels. Sue Ann: Well, it didn’t say that in the art description. Me: That’s because the art description specifically said that you can’t see them! We didn’t think it mattered mentioning since the artist wasn’t going to show them. Sue Ann: Yeah, that wasn’t working. Me: Then why didn’t you call us and ask if it mattered? Sue Ann: Why would it matter? Me: Because… it does! Sue Ann: There aren’t squirrels in Africa. Me: And there aren’t dragons either. Besides this isn’t Africa, it’s Jamuraa. And in Jamuraa, there are squirrels. Sue Ann: How can you be sure? Me: Because there’s a card called Waiting in the Weeds that makes squirrels! Sue Ann: Not anymore https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/squirrel-my-dreams-2002-07-22 Edit: JFC it’s been 22 years and I still remember this.
it’s impossible this is from 22 years ago because this article was written after Odyssey came out and that’s one of the newer MTG sets…..dear god i’m old 🥲
He should be legally allowed to kill one person with every new standard legal set release.
"I'm pulling out of my driveway, over the Skull of one of my haters, you know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work."
If they ever make another* tribute card to him I hope it's [[Drive // Work]] Both sides represent how driven he is, and the sheer body of work that is attached to his ethos and guidance. Edited because I didn't know he had a card, albeit a little more cheeky.
[[Maro]]
It would need Aftermath to be a “to” split card, but i’m sure there’s plenty of jokes that could land well on an Aftermath split card
It's gonna be in an Un-Set. One half of the art is him driving a Smugglers Copter and the other is him arriving to the Wizard's Offices.
"Okay, so todaaay, we are tracking the location of every person who has asked me a bad-faith question on Tumblr" *29 minutes of engine revving interspersed by an occasional thump*
Jonpaulcardenas is NOT gonna have a good time.
Totes heard that in his voice!
Only for standard sets though. One for every product released would be too many.
Let him start with whoever approved selling $1000 boxes full of proxy cards for Magic's 30th anniversary.
Wizards is blessed with him as the face of the game and more and more often I see how important his background as a writer is for the blog and maybe for the game as a whole.
The only person who's better at being a face for their game is Yoshi-P, the producer for Final Fantasy XIV. People fucking love him. And soon they'll be crossing over, lol
Having gotten into other games like 40K recently I've come to realize just what a gift having someone like Mark Rosewater is and while I've said before that every game needs a Mark Rosewater I don't think every game can have one because so few people have the patience and the dignity that he does to deal with what must be constant abuse. He only publishes a certain amount of his questions that he receives and I can only guess how many of them are people just spitting vitriol at him. We've seen on this subreddit how many people just hate anything wizards does and often with good reason, looking at you 30th anniversary, but Mark just rolls with it. He's either the most well-adjusted man on the planet or his therapist deserves to be paid even more than they already are.
100 percent, he has been the prime example of a spokesperson/community manager that every game company/community wishes it had.
I’m not going to stop playing Magic, but I don’t like the aesthetic of Duskmourn and I don’t expect to buy much into the set. I wonder if Duskmourn would hit differently if we hadn’t been inundated with 80s nostalgia bait in our entertainment for years and years. It’s very hard for me to view this set’s aesthetic as being organic from MTG creative rather than a marketing mandate. I felt similarly about MKM, which felt like Hasbro trying launder its failing board game properties (in this case, Clue) through their only successful product. This, to me, is the biggest problem. The seams of the business are showing, and the design choices don’t consistently read as putting the game’s health ahead of short term profit, which erodes faith in the whole game.
The seams are showing because they're printing too many products too rapidly. If they had a cycle of like 1 UB listing every other year and something more experimental like Duskmourn every couple years it would be fine, but the amount of UB shit they're shoveling out the door just makes this feel like more UB even though it's supposed to be a canonical plane. I honestly can't tell anymore when I see a card that I'm unfamiliar with If this is a mtg character or if this is some character from some IP that I don't recognize.
Adding to this: Maro explicitly calls out Ravnica, Theros, and Zendikar; I'll add to his list Kaladesh, Neo Kawagami, and Eldraine. Ravnica is fine, it's before my time but visually I don't see any issues people might have had beforehand. It seems like the sort of plane you'd choose to display complaints of only if you were trying to misrepresent someone's concerns, but maybe I'm wrong and there was a lot of uproar about it at the time. Theros: Would it have hit well if we also had Percy Jackson UB? Probably not. Original Zendikar: Sold as Adventure World with party mechanics: now that we have Forgotten Realms in the game would it work as well? No it would feel like a cheap imitation of something we already have. Kaladesh: It's got cars and steampunk and shit. Steampunk cars feel a lot less like cars than my old '91 Civic Neo Kamigawa: Aesthetically rad but would it be so rad if we had UB Cyberpunk 2077? Eldraine: The Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales. Actually I'd argue this would still work even if we had Mickey Mouse and Wreck-It-Ralph running around in UB Disney. My point here is that the more they dilute their own universe with outside IP the more DIRECT comparison they draw between their own worlds and potential UB products. Someone else mentioned that thought Duskmourn was a Stranger Things Commander set... visually that's a very fair assumption to make. Without UB it would be an interesting set with the 80s aesthetic with the Eldraine treatment on horror movies, but we do have Stranger Things cards, and we do have Walking Dead cards and we do have... 1 sec let me lookup the vast library of foreign IPs we have access to... Doctor Who and Evil Dead cards. So while Duskmourn may ultimately be cool it's not anything new. This is the pollution that is making Duskmourn not feel cool and special and interesting. It's just one more series of cards set in the modern-ish day with some horror aesthetics as opposed to the horror equivalent of Original Zendikar DnD adventure theme before we got sets of actual DnD and LoTR.
What is Duskmorn? What kind of set will it be?
It’s a full standard set releasing in late September. Some spoilers recently came out featuring lots of modern devices like TVs and smart phones and a general 70s/80s slasher fick vibe.
As a game designer I am actually amazed by how consistent Magic is in its extremes. Capenna/Ravnica in one corner, Amonkhet/Theros in another, and then Phyrexia/Duskmourne, while also having space for Lorwyn/Bloomburrow. It's impressive how all of these make sense as a single world with many different faces. (No I'm not including UB, those are distinct IPs). I get the complaints from the purists, but for me it's not enough to quit the game. I actually enjoy the variation much more than a whole year on Dominaria.
For me the 5 color system is so robust that everything and anything within human imagination is compatible with it. Great job Richy.
Honestly the 5 color system is genius. It is such a great way to describe and design settings as well as alignments.
Whether it started out intentional or not yeah it's by far one of the best things about magic. Mix and match your flavors for alignments and playstyles.
I'd say it's pretty intentional, being the foundation of the game and all
The 5 colors individual definitely but the color combinations and what they ended up representing are the ones that might not have been initially thought out.
And if r/colorpie is anything to go off of, an MTBI-style personality test to pretend you know anything about
I don’t think this could have even predicted initially, but the fact that 5 colors means you get, * 5 individual colors * 10 combinations of 2 colors * 10 combinations of 3 colors Is so clean, and any sort of idea that doesn’t fit cleanly in one color is almost always easily expressed with a combination of 2 (or 3) colors, is what makes the color pie really shine. Untamed electricity = red, lightning bolt Harnessed electricity = izzit: knowledge taming unrefined energy Ferocity = green, but also kinda red Clever martial tactics - Well martial/soldiers is usually white, but intelligence is usually blue, so it’s white blue.
My golden rule is always 'does the pie work with this', and Duskmourn has managed to take the five big horror slasher cliches and make a whole pie compliant world from them, so Duskmourn gets my stamp of approval
what are those ‘five big slasher cliches’?
Lost in the Woods Creepy Haunted House Dimlit Industrial Zone Non-Euclidian Dream Something in the Dark Marsh Each of Duskmourn's floors is basically a horror movie set We don't really have info beyond that for colour pie philosophy, but they're also seemingly pushing Horror and Nightmares into more than monocolour, I think the Nightmare of Losing Teeth is Green or White judging by the art
And of course to be honest Mark gets a lot of credit for evangelizing the pie and it getting the care and attention it has nowadays within R&D itself.
I think this is why I like Universes Beyond. Seeing the MtG system adapted to so many different worlds and make sense says a lot about the mechanics and compatibility of it. I am excited for Duskmourn. It's definitely a stretch, but even reading the planeswalker guide convinced me it was solid. I do get why people don't like it. But the consistency I like is not in the aesthetics of a plane, but in the mechanics of it.
>I think this is why I like Universes Beyond. Seeing the MtG system adapted to so many different worlds and make sense says a lot about the mechanics and compatibility of it. It's also what I hate about UB sometimes though. When a character is put into certain or all colors not because of personality but functionality (i.e. Bilbo being abzan in the precon and izzet in the set) I'd say that would never happen in a universe within product, but we literally just got the tribe iconically known for being colorless in a 5-color deck, so maybe I just don't like all these commander products lol
Yeah. I mean to be fair, WotC still misses in- or out- of universe. [Archelos, Lagoon Mystic is a card they said they made Sultai for specific interactions and not actual flavor, which I always found a little annoying.](https://x.com/JulesRobins/status/1322253764112216064) I do think color justifications get weird.
When UB started, I thought I'd have issues with it...especially things that pushed beyond where MTG had thematically been (i.e. not LOTR). In all honesty, we've played EDH games with 1 UB deck from each release (40k, LOTR, Doctor Who, & Fallout) and they've been a blast. I've found through trial and error I dislike bad design more than bad aestetics. So Neon Dynasty...Yeah. Capenna...less so. Duskmourne...Im kind of looking forward to it. Karlov Manner...haven't bought a single card. I really didn't think I'd like Outlaws but limited was a blast. Bottom line, I'm gonna hold off on judging any release based on looks try to internalize the idea that some sets won't be "for me". As a limited and EDH player, that's fine. Skipping a set or two here and there is a relief to my wallet.
My biggest problem with UB is that every time I see someone talk about it I think they are talking about Dimir...
I think UB is especially at home in EDH, where the massive card pool means that there’s already a ton of stuff that’s wildly different in play.
As someone who really enjoys worldbuilding I love that about Magic as well, to an extent. It's a fun exercise to take some concept like "the world is a city", "roaring 20s art deco mob world", "ancient egypt / greece", "multiverse invading metal monsters", or "horror movie trope world" and build a fantasy world from it. But personally the closer everything gets to the present day and to our world, the more difficult I find it to uphold my suspension of disbelief and immersion. All of the above concepts can be done very well while separating the magic world from our world as much as possible. I think New Capenna and OTJ did that very well too (although some small things do bother me a little), even though the times they're inspired from are very recent. With Duskmourn, everything just feels too close to home. The top down approach doesn't start from some concept, locale, or culture, but a very specific pop culture phenomenon from a few decades ago. And I have a really hard time getting immersed when I see mass manufactured tvs, devices, clothing, sneakers, etc and I think the closer you get to modern day (even more so if it's the US), the harder it is to apply a concept to a fantasy world that feels separate from ours. I do think that it would have been possible to take the 80s horror movie concept and build a world that is distinctly separate from ours, but I get the sense that Wizards made the conscious decision to cash in on the Stranger Things aesthetic as it's just massively popular right now. Then again, this is my completely subjective opinion, and I do recognize that while people like me do not like Duskmourn at all, this might be fantastic for enfranchised players who really like that 80s horror movie vibe, newcomers who like that type of stuff, and people who simply do not mind that real / fantasy world separation.
I think the issue with pulling Duskmourn's survivors' aesthetic back to a more standard Fantasy approach is that we could run into a similar issue to what Karlov Manor suffered. "Why isn't this on Innistrad?" Innistrad *is* already the Gothic Horror setting, but it's so old, I'd assume there are some expectations whenever we return there. What are the Cecani doing? Where's Sorin or Sigarda? You can circumvent a lot of it if the story has a broader reach, like MID and VOW's storyline affected all of Innistrad, so you could tell separate stories within the timeframe, but what Duskmourn wants to do, which is the whole Backrooms/House of Leaves-esque "Trap Plane," you'd either need to shoehorn some characters into the House or not include them altogether, and that comes with its own bag of worms. And I'm not even saying Innistrad *can't* do House of Leaves, it *did* and it was great with its singular character Strefan, but you'd need to pull some heavy weights to have that fit an entire set worth of cards and characters and stories.
And you end up with the problem that things like Gatecrash did, you're having to nudge wink 'this world building totally existed, we just didn't talk about it last time, don't think about nephilim' And so many 'beloved' MTG sets started generic. Lorwyn is mostly Fae folk tropes with the names filed off, Dominaria only has so much history because they didn't want to do Viking Plane and so went for 'niche history period in far off realm of world during ice age that just happened to look and sound swedish'
Yeah, I remember when Duskmourn was first announced I saw a ton of people complain about it not being set on Innistrad even though it was pretty clearly going for something different.
>What are the Cecani doing? Bickering (on Thunder Junction) - is this even a question?
Very good post. I just want to commend you on that last paragraph, as acknowledging one's opinion and openly allowing for others is something too rare, which has led to built up assumptions when someone typically shares their opinion and others take it as declarative fact that must be corrected. Sorry, that got a bit negative. Thanks for the good post!
>With Duskmourn, everything just feels too close to home. The top down approach doesn't start from some concept, locale, or culture, but a very specific pop culture phenomenon from a few decades ago. Which makes it pretty much the same as Innistrad except a century later, which also heavily relied on 1880s fashion. Ironically combined with a very 1990-2010-ish "werevolves and vampires" trope.
Nah, the take in the OP is just garbage. Quit MTG for whatever reason you please, but NEO is not some egregious slight against the game. MTG covers thousands of years and countless planes, it's stupid and selfish to ~~demand~~ expect that the game forever services only your comfortable fantasy corner to the exclusion of all else. NEO is one of my favourite sets of all time, but if it were up to this dude, I would just not have gotten it.
I get that everyone has different sensibilities about what's "too far" but I feel like magic would be tragically boring if every plane was just some marginally different flavour of Tolkien-esque high fantasy.
But not literally LotR; that's unacceptable. (This is a joke, I think *not* wanting external IP in MTG is very valid)
I'm not sure how popular/unpopular this opinion is on the LOTR set, but I feel like everything EXCEPT the major characters fit incredibly well. I forget most of those cards aren't just in-universe cards until someone lands a Gandalf and it feels egregious at that point.
Every high fantasy IP is already a Tolkein pastiche to some degree. We've always been playing in Tolkein's playground.
Reminds me of this quote from Terry Pratchett: > J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji
I am a big LotR fan (and Star Trek fan, and Star Wars fan). But I'd prefer if they do not come to MtG world.
Again, I genuinely think that is a reasonable viewpoint. You can't unring that bell.
But seriously, LotR is probably the least bad offender. I'm infinitely more annoyed by Stranger Things / Jurassic Park / Transformers / Last of Us / Dr. Who / Assasin's Creed (I'm probably forgetting 10 more things given how many cards they release recently). The thing that will break the camel's back for me is when they eventually do a Simpsons UB (You know they will, deep in your heart, you know). Saying this as a Simpsons fan.
> More and more it feels like the game just isn't for me, doesn't want the kind of player that feels strongly about cohesion and immersion. And that's fine, it doesn't have to cater to me, and the current approach seems to bring in more people than it drives away. But it still just makes me sad, on a deep personal level, to give up on what has been such a major part of my life. They’re very explicitly NOT demanding the game caters to their specific fantasy comfort zone. Just expressing disappointment. There’s nothing wrong with voicing disappointment/concern, ESPECIALLY when also acknowledging that not everything has to be for them.
My favorite is the timeline - the OP says they've been playing "since they were 5 years old in the early 2000s" - by the time they were old enough to appreciate theme, Magic had already had SO MUCH variety in the theme and style.
I was against NEO at first too, thinking it was too anime-ish. But now, looking back, I realized it resonate with me more than Karlov Manor. Of all the things that would happened to me - liking a Kamikawa set more than a Ravnica set is definitely not on my expectations.
I honestly think that the art direction throws people more than the actual content. And mechanically (apart from being ridiculously complex) it's great.
NEO is literally the most perfect peak execution of sci-fi in magic
I like Mirrordin more but NEO is really good too!
How dare Neon Kamigawa break Magic aesthetics by introducing mecha's and cybernetic limbs Wizards should have stuck with the classical fantasy aesthetics of the old sets, where we had such classic fantasy cards as [[Power Armor]] and [[Priest of Gix]]. /s just in case.
Don't forget [[rocket launcher]]
[Power Armor](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/0/20bc8710-3d56-45fb-81e7-383a274a2374.jpg?1562901076) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Power%20Armor) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dde/62/power-armor?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/20bc8710-3d56-45fb-81e7-383a274a2374?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Priest of Gix](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/c/8cbc4c4c-f1f5-4593-9894-1d8715a2f2c1.jpg?1562921109) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Priest%20of%20Gix) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dde/7/priest-of-gix?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8cbc4c4c-f1f5-4593-9894-1d8715a2f2c1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
imagine thinking it "breaks immersion" that hundreds if not thousands of planes dont ever evolve anywhere near our real world technology over the span of multiple millenia. if anything, the opposite would be the case
Exactly. The real dumb thing is that Neon Kamigawa isn't even necessarily the most advanced civilisation to have existed in MTG lore. The Thran were extremely technologically advanced too.
The whole reason Yawgmoth rose to power among the Thran in the first place was because he was hired to figure out a cure for what more-or-less turned out to be *radiation poisoning*.
I would argue that Kamigawa now is more technologically advanced than the Thran empire ever was. At least as it concerns smaller scale applications. The Thran, while advanced compared to the early Magic story, were still very much bound by a high fantasy concept. Their technology was 'big'. They created machines that were complex, but the Thran were closer to an industrial age (which, compared to Magic's more medieval or rennaissance era, is still very advanced), whereas Kamigawa seems closer to a digital age. Then again, the Thran did launch a moon into orbit...so that's something.
I think it's a very modern difference: current modern technology like phones and cameras . The thran were in some ways way more technically advanced than our modern world. They had magitech hover-cars, a floating city, even the moon station, robots, and "nukes" with Glacian's stone burners. What they didn't have is an equivalent to our modern information technology. I loved the neo-kamigawa set and story, but it did knock me out of it for a second reading about cameras in the story. It's such a uniquely modern/future feeling word and type of technology that it did break my immersion. It's definitely a flavor thing. A magical spell that allows communication over distances feels like a fantasy element. A magical device that does it doesn't feel fantasy if they just call it a telephone. Pre-omenpath, I would have less problem with the technological variance between planes. But with interplanar travel trivially easy for just about anyone, Theros being technologically in the bronze age and coexisting unchanged alongside 80's Duskmorne and Capenna, much less sci-fi kamigawa, strains credulity for me. That being said, it's a minor flavor issue, and the sets are still fun.
You know, yeah. Monkeys and typewriters and all that. A modern day plane was an inevitability, and I think there’s a reason they sorta went out of their way to make that plane one of the most unique settings in Magic. It’s not like the Wandering Emperor is going to get an iPhone, there’s no one left to make them or maintain the cell service.
The roaming fees alone…
Hating Neo is pretty weird to me considering that the Thran existed 20 years ago as full mechs. [[Thran Foundry]] [[Thran War Machine]]
Yea Mark responded to his first question very fair and reasonable and the dude just went further and further into gatekeeping with Mark didn’t cave to him
You know the follow-up questions aren't from the same person as the first one, right?
Aren't questions two and three from the same person?
The concept of pushing to the line is kinda where I’m at. I think magic is doing a bunch of crazy shit right now and a lot of it I don’t love and some of it might be legitimately harmful for the game, but at the end of the day, they gotta make decisions that will be either good or bad, and that do or don’t cross the line. The question isn’t “will we design magic without ever crossing it,” the question is “can we figure out where the line is, what crossing it does, and how to fix any damage that results,” which is a much better line of inquiry than the former, which is closer to what complainers want. I will be bothered by stuff they do, but as long as they aren’t committing to every choice they make, it’s not a bad strategy.
This is one of the best perspectives I’ve seen yet! I will definitely be showing this to my playing group when discussing this set.
I think the issue with that inquiry, as MaRo talked about in the answers, is that **"the line" is vastly different to person to person**, and **"the line" itself changes for each person as time passes on**. I know a lot of people who were initially miffed about Secret Lair and Universes Beyond, but while some continued never liked them, some accepted them, and some even came to fully love them. It also doesn't encompass the fact that in addition to a line that should never be crossed, there are people who **clamor for lines to be crossed.** I know a lot of people who were happy to get a mythology set in Magic. I know a lot of people who were happy to get a futuristic cyberpunk world in Magic. And now there's a lot of people I know who love the idea of modern horror in Magic. There will be people you upset with every line you cross but also some people who WANT the line to be crossed. If WoTC never took risks, we wouldn't be there. There's a bunch of Harry Dresden fans who straight up want urban fantasy, and I think they're hopeful for that opportunity because of those endeavors. The question then is not "will we design magic without ever crossing it" because the line is too relative and ever-changing for this question to matter. The question then is not "can we figure out where the line is, what crossing it does, and how to fix any damage that results" because that still does not fix the ephemeral nature of the line and how diverse it is among people. The question is the same as always, from literature academics' discovery that the most popular Aesop's Fables and European fairy tales are the ones that are familiar but always have a little bit of novelty, to cultural psychologist's realization that culture evolves incrementally from small units of change called memes, to physicists constantly questioning the rules set by the shoulders of giants behind them, to MaRo's 20 years 20 lessons talk stating that the best changes are the ones that make a lot of people happy AND angry: **"How can we change the lines in the best way?"**
I take more issues with the cowboy dress up set than the horror house set, i just wish we don’t get a bunch of known characters on halloween costumes.
Yeah, I love the horror inspirations and the worldbuilding of Duskmourn but I’m gonna groan at some of the most obvious references. “Ah yes, Frieda the Nightmare Walker, a Bladeripper with a bladed glove and a burnt face who kills people in creative ways in their dreams. What a great original character.”
I'm not gonna lie: I am disappointed by the insertion of 90's america asthetics into the Duskmourn setting, especially considering how cool it seemed without those elements. But I'll let them cook. Maybe I'll get used to it. Maybe I'll proxy some alternate art for the cards I need and just won't play with the rest. Either way, this is fine. No need for dramatics.
My main problems are > The not ghostbuster ghost suckers, previewed in one of the art pocs. I can understand the survivors of the house developing weapons but is such a "DO YOU GET IT" (And excuse to do a crossover) that hinders the world. > Generic TVs. I can accept some techy horror. But For the love of Yawmogh, at least make the TV's shape weirder or less standard
100% this. It's the same argument, for me, as dusters and ten-gallon hats in TJ: just because something is recognizable in the setting doesn't mean it's *always* the best for it. There are better clothing options for arid climates, especially if you don't have to stick to Earth physics; same goes for guns and screens in a horror setting where people *also* have access to magical spells.
I feel like this is a lose-lose scenario. You include cowboy hats, people are upset that they now exist in magic. You exclude cowboy hats and invent your own version, people complain that they don't make any sense and they should've just used cowboy hats instead since they have more cultural weight to them.
I'm convinced that a big part of the problem is the "one set" system instead of blocks, because there just isn't enough *time* to get to know a setting. A lot of players are just going to get a singular snapshot of what the set looks like and nothing else. It's hard to have things meaningfully change or get a nuanced perspective because by the time you're done establishing everything the story has moved on. That's why recent sets have felt so much more "Planet of hats" than others. Sure you could argue that Ravnica or Theros or whatever was one-note at the time, but it had breathing room for people to learn about the plane from different perspectives. WOTC *has* to make the planes more distinct at an initial glance or else they'll all start to blend together.
Honestly, I think part of the goal *is* to make things blend together. They're chasing that Fortnite or Monopoly high to be able to put any style together and resell the same content over and over with a new skin.
I think every decision made by the MTG setting team is an exercise in choosing the better loss in a lose-lose situation.
Do you have a problem with innistrad's ghostbuster stuff too? [[Arcane Infusion]]
LoL. I must have seen this card a 100 times and ot never evoked GB for me. There's no proton pack equivalent and it's sucking the thing in. That being said, I see it now.
Not OP, but I think I do? There was some stuff in the last two Innistrad sets that didn't square with what I expected the setting to be. Certain things like the coven cards worked really well for me, but some of the UR stuff and even some of the core story elements like the key never sat quite right.
That isn't new for innistrad. Look at [[Rage Thrower]]'s geist-powered flame thrower, [[Snapcaster Mage]]'s arm canon, [[Geistcatcher's Rig]], all from original innistrad
[Arcane Infusion](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/a/9ab520b7-ad87-4c8e-a454-5c022e378564.jpg?1636225112) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Arcane%20Infusion) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mid/210/arcane-infusion?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9ab520b7-ad87-4c8e-a454-5c022e378564?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
When it comes to modern day items in a fantasy setting you have to stylise it or it comes off like duskmorne where it’s out of place
See I’m the polar opposite. I’m a huge film buff so seeing all the classic horror movie references just scratches an itch for me. Plus I like having a variety of different planes and themes it gets exhausting seeing just another variant of Dominaria. Neither of us are wrong for our choices and we have the choice to pick up as much or as little of each product as we choose
And this is exactly the core of what Mark is saying. I had basically 0 interest in Murders at Karlov Manor. It’s the first set in a while where I didn’t buy a box. The story was amazing, but I actively disliked most of the cards and mechanics that we got, and the flavor of the whole set. But did I complain about how this is the “end of Magic” and everything was forever wrong? No, I just acknowledged this set wasn’t for me and moved on. My co-worker meanwhile loved that set. Now with Dudkmourne, I’m almost more excited for it than I was for the return to Ixalan. I *love* the vibe and aesthetic, and the Planeswalker’s Guide made me instantly love the plane as a whole. It has a very Silent Hill feel to me and that hits all the notes I want in a horror set. Meanwhile that same co-worker isn’t interested in it at all. And this is all *fine*. The game isn’t going to die because we have some TVs in a card. People can like or dislike whatever they like, but doomposting *all the time* gets tiring.
I was going to come here and drop the same point you did but you did it *way* better then I could have. What's one person's yuck is another person's yum. I personally *really* don't like the Ravnica sets at all, but I can understand why they'd be really cool and think that's awesome they're there for the VAST MAJORITY of people who love it. I personally love the UB stuff, and please please please give me more Thunder Junction stuff. The echo chamber of reddit is so intense, it sometimes is super easy to forget that we're as a whole arguably a pretty vocal minority in the whole mtg hobby space.
I'm also a huge film buff and horror fan but so far the references we've seen seem more on the lazy side. The reference to pet sematary is on the alt treatment of a card that shows a glitch ghost, the shining one is just straight up shining but with a weird shadow behind the twins and the jigsaw one is just another quote reference (though from the Planeswalker guide it seems this antagonist is the leader of the slasher faction so we may see more interesting cards). Compared to Innistard that had references like The Fly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or even The Blob but made way more efforts to make them subtle enough to fit the setting. I know that Duskmourn is THE modern horror plane so we're going to get a lot of more direct references but I wish they had made them more of their own. I'm not a fan of the ghostbuster gadgets things, but so far it seems like one of the best example of a reference done right in this set.
Personally I'm off it. There's people who want CRT TVs, headsets and fanny packs in Magic, apparently, and I'm happy for those people. Not trying to be snarky, I really am, it's nice when someone gets the thing they want. But I, personally, have no interest in those things, and as such I'll skip the set. If that becomes normalised, that means more skipped sets for me. I'll be back once they do fantasy again.
Yeah some of the monsters I've seen have been really cool, and then there are cards like chainsaw that do absolutely nothing for me.
These discussions would be so much easier if we could just put percentages to things. What percent of MtG players would play MtG pretty much regardless of what got released? What percentage found set X or Y to be world breaking? What percentage are playing specifically because of set theme X or Y? What percentage of people drawn in by crossover X will still be playing in a year? Which cards in particular put the most people off or draw the most on? After all, maybe a set is 90% good and 10% bad Things like that.
>*I'm just asking, is it really so difficult to understand why some people feel like something that looks like it came straight out of Ghostbusters simply doesn't fit in with other, more traditional fantasy aesthetics?* No, he does understand that. That's why he listed a bunch of previous examples where people thought the same thing about older sets.
I’m gonna come off boomerish here but the op Mark is talking to might be too young to understand that. They say they were 5 in the early 2000s. Maybe they were too young to understand how much the examples he listed did get thrown around in almost exactly the same way. Or god forbid the outcry when plansewalkers became a thing. People always question design choices and always have. But when you are young that innovation with things like theros and og ravnica comes off more like nostalgia instead of “wait, people had problems with those?”
Yeah I felt that too, and I'm 27. There is a large difference between being at an event (in this case sets like amonkhet or there's being thrown around in the community), and hearing about it later on, even if everything you hear is accurate. For the people then, it was actively changing "what magic is", just as is happening now. Mark drew very good parallels between the two times, but it feels like the questioner doesn't have the *experience* of those times to resonate with. It felt like he didn't really understand MaRos point of "things have always been like this, you're just the affected one now".
*Takes a long drag off a cigarette, wheezes, fingers the scars on his flamewar-scorched hands* You think this is bad, you should have been there in '03, during the Frame Wars, the *single greatest exodus* of "Magic's fantasy aesthetics are ruined forever and I'm quitting!" from people who otherwise don't even own a real sword. Don't you realize the ENTIRE FANTASY AETHESTIC of Magic is GONE if THE CARDS DON'T LOOK LIKE LITERAL SPELLBOOKS ANYMORE? And what is this MIRRODIN sci-fi crap? The "Magic" is gone from Magic and now it just looks like a colorful spreadsheet. It doesn't even have the Elder Scrolls font as the title of cards anymore, do you feel like you're casting a REAL MAGIC SPELL if you're looking at what might as well be Times New Roman? Magic can never come back from this utter decimation of flavor and aesthetic.
Writing to a man who has probably answered 1 million questions on tumblr - “You’ll probably never read this…”
My impression is for every one he answers there's a couple more he doesn't so they might not be wrong.
As someone who enjoys both the lore side of MTG - I've ran and played a number of D&D campaigns on both Theros and Ravnica - it seems very weird to me that this is the line that bothers people. Ravnica has earpieces, electric guns, trains, submarines and more, but a T.V. crosses the line? I love the core concept of Duskmourn, the entire Plane is a massive house haunted by a singular demonic entity. I think some people just see the modern-ish technology and are only able to associate it with Stranger Things. I'm looking forward to Duskmourn, while also knowing that more traditional fantasy-style sets are not going to be stopping anytime soon.
It's actually bothered me for a long time from a lore perspective that no planes were allowed to have technology that "looked too modern", simply because of the external concerns of how players might react. Yes, Magic is a fantasy setting, with dragons and spells and the like, but it is also a setting with an expansive multiverse of possible planes, some of which have had civilizations with thousands of years worth of history. It's not like magic existing would make it so no one ever wanted to invent TV, and in fact it might even be easier for someone to do so. The fact that planes are free to copy every recognizable civilization from Earth *except* the most recognizable one (present day) is an extremely arbitrary line, and there's no justification in-universe for why this should be the case.
For me personally it’s all about mundane modernity. T-shirts, cell phones, and TVs bug me because they’re everyday items that don’t appear in older eras.
Ravnica "justifies" all of those with different sorts of magic, plus they tend to have a pretty different aesthetic to their real-world equivalents. I think that's what makes people draw the line a lot of the time.
Ravnica's technology is technomancy and steampunk, as opposed to things from regular old real life. Same with New Capenna. The technology was there and earth-inspired as opposed to literally earth like we're seeing in Dustmourne. Multiverse travel enables all sorts of different worlds and modernities, and I'm fine with it. But the moment one of those worlds is our own, it feels different from the game I've been playing for 20 years.
What makes these fine in the Ravnica setting is that these technogies clearly have fantasy aesthetic. Ravnica doesn't look modern. The same trains and guns got so much more complaints in outlaws of thunder junction because they look very different. They borrow from western aesthetic rather than the more steampunk kind of technology found on Ravnica and Khaladesh.
For me, what makes it the line is the genre itself. Modern Horror's core basis for fear is that "it could happen to you". That videotape/CD/USB your friend lent you could be Sadako's tape, that abandoned house down the street could be haunted, or that ugly doll you have might come to life and kill you. Invoking the Familiar then twisting it is how the genre works. In contrast, every other genre that magic has drawn from invites the player into the unfamiliar, whether its a generic fantasy world, the art-deco 20's, or a near-future cyberpunk world. They might then tell a story with familiar themes, but a large part of their appeal is that their settings aren't our day-to-day life.
Isn't the items you listed for Ravnica part of a long tradition of steampunk or some sort of punk fantasy aesthetic? Instead of creating sets based on fantasy traditions, they are now just hopping on every bag of cash they see in pop culture.
My issue with Duskmourn is that they made Tyvar wear a fanny pack. He just looks like a doofus
It makes him more of a himbo
That's what the no shirt with vest look was for, the fanny pack is too goober-ish
on one hand, they did just introduce magic computers in MKM, but i also remember being like "idk, this is kinda weird". they made them kinda magic-y so it wasn't too bad; we'll have to see how they handle that space opera set that's coming up
I’m old enough to remember folks complaining about how original Innistrad was just old Universal movie monster tropes and thus not Magic. I know because I was one of them. The setting might not be for everyone, but I remember there being a lot of “this is better than expected” at my locals when we saw the whole block and played it. Duskmourn has a cool hook (demon can’t escape his prison so he’s just gonna embiggen the prison) and we’ve seen like 5 cards. Give it a chance.
I don't have a problem with sets having a more modern aesthetic, but they've been hitting that well a bit too much for what is meant to be a fantasy game
I think the difference is between "science fantasy" and "science fiction". Phyrexians run off magic oil. Urza mechs run on powerstones. Kaladesh mechs run on aether. Kamigawa tech runs on power from the spirit realm. But when you start throwing technologies that the players recognize, that illusion breaks down, and you start losing the "fantasy" aspect. Maybe duskmourne tech runs on nightmare fuel according to lore, but I *know* a CRT TV runs on electricity and chainsaws run on gasoline. Because they are technologies so close to my time that I am familiar with how they work.
Well put, and this is kinda what kills it for me as well. Kamigawa has tech and computers and stuff, but they are also jellyfish creatures and looks like a Japanese temple. Kaladesh has cars and airships, but they are all in a filigree gear style, and padded out by plenty of fantastical steampunk gizmos. Urza built mech suits and robot soliders, but he had whole books of buildup where we watched him go from simple wood and cloth ornithopters, to basic clockwork powerstone robots, to implementing all sorts of magic/interplanar tech/etc... into the designs. The tech on duskmourn looks like knockoff Ghostgrabberz™ toys, or some stuff that my grandpa has lying around in his garage. The characters look like my parents when they were in college. And there is no background to justify it. With the other high tech plane of kamigawa, you at least got a few sets to establish the through line of relatively standard feudal Japan setting -> overlay with the spirit world introduces more magic -> spirit-energy based tech evolves and begins to incorporate mechanical tech. So when you finally see the jellyfish temple usb stick, you can at least understand how you got there. Duskmourn is looking like a set that I won't engage with financially. I also echo the sentiments that I will probably be engaging with magic less going forward if this is the aesthetic direction that things go in the future. If this is your thing, I'm glad for you. But I find this highly unappealing.
Exactly, the people who always wax lyrical about [[Urza's Power Armor]] existing meaning that Magic should have modern aesthetics make no sense whatsoever.
I think it's something to dip the game into for a change of pace, not something to revisit over and over and over.
Duskmourne has ghosts, demons, living nightmares, big furry monsters, and TVs that bleed static. It is in no way shape or form "science fiction". Not that boundary between "science fiction" and "fantasy" is really that solid anyway.
My only issue with the “too close to home” elements is that they really, really are too close to what we, humans on Earth, would recognize as mundane objects, when, supposedly, these artifacts - though superficially similar - are meant to be products of magic and advanced technology whose purpose/function eludes not only Duskmourn’s survivors but might even dumbfound someone from the real world as well. As in, “Woah, that looks like a camera, but is very clearly something else.” Which, were that the case more often (as with that one piece of promo art I’m alluding to), I’d be completely fine with the nods to 80s and early 90s tech. But, like, Toby is straight up wearing headphones. And those are more or less televisions in most cards. You can give both some new finagled, vaguely magical utility - sure, but they’re so close to the real thing that it’s impossible for me to not immediately go, “Well that’s very clearly a TV, that’s obviously a pair of headphones, all from our reality.” If the art swung closer in the direction of “familiar but not what you think” then the 80s inspirations, at least I personally believe, wouldn’t have been so poorly received. Imagine, say, a card with what looks like a toaster, but there are subtle clues as to its actual function in both its design, rules text, and flavor text. Then in another card you see the “toaster” being used and go, “WOAH HEY! THAT’S WHAT IT DOES! HOT DAMN!” I also feel that, with the above approach, some interesting worldbuilding could have been done. Imagine, through the glimpses we get of these relics, being able to discern and intuit WHY the plane swung towards the aesthetic it did and more about the plane in general - its people and its culture. You know…before it was subsumed by the House. Unfortunately, what we have at the moment is 80s Americana with no real explanation other than the blanket statement that, prior to the imprisoned demon’s shenanigans, the plane was rich with magic and advanced technology, melding the two to great effect. Fine, I suppose. BUT MORE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE. Oh, and a small gripe. Could the clothing be more consistent at the very least? You’ve got some survivors in clothes that blends 80s fashion and urban fantasy quite well. Then you’ve guys that look like they stepped out of an 80s aerobics class. This is all coming from someone who actually quite jives with the set, by the way. I personally love the lore we’ve been given about the House, and I’m a sucker for walking horror tropes like the Razorkin and Wicker Folk.
When Innistrad came out people also complained that it was too dark and would ruin magic. But alsothey only made the set because of the Twilight movies and that twilight fanbase would ruin magic. When Lorwyn came out people complained about how Planeswalkers didn't make sense and how complicated they were. Players are walkers, this isn't magic anymore! Completely ruining magic for ever! When zendikar came out and brought with it the level mechanic, people complained that Magic was becoming too much like Yu-Gi-Oh! That would ruin magic!! (This was literally the worst argument I ever heard in person) When New Phyrexia was revealed, people complained about how the lore of magic got ruined and how dare they destroy mirrodin! No respect for the background would surely ruin magic forever!!! When Theros came out people complained that it was too much based on real world mythology and it ruined the fantasy of magic! Classic Greek does not fit the mideaval fantasy aesthics of magic! It's not magic any more!!! Duskmourne is just the newest version of this story. The change is too much! And it isn't magic anymore!
Some of us still remamber when Planer Chaos was "too much outside of the color pie", Future Sight "too complex", Rise of the Eldrazi "too alien" and the list goes on. Some things never change I guess.
To be fair, Future Sight *was* too complex. It took over a decade for us to get a set so mechanically diverse again.
I mean, I agree that it was too complex, but now it is regarded as "one of the good ones". Most sets (barring stuff like Born of the Gods and Dragon's Maze) are contested and debated until they "magically" become good in Reddit's eye.
I don't think many people think all of the egregious color pie breaks from Planar Chaos, other than Prodigal Pyromancer, were a good thing for Magic.
Certainly not a good thing for r/custommagic or discussions on cards that end up with "It's fine because (Planar Shifted card) did it"
Planar chaos *was* too much outside the color pie. Even internally at wotc its considered a mistake.
Opposed to every other set, I would say Planar Chaos was actually a problem. But what can we take from that? Planar Chaos was recognized as a problematic direction and we never got a set like it again. And Mark Rosewater implied as much with all future concerns, if they do cross the line some day, they can always pull back.
Planar Chaos was *terrible* design. It still has awful implications on the color pie. For example Harmonize is still in practically every single green commander deck because of how blatant of a color pie break it was. It's why they never did that concept ever again. Future Sight *was* too complex. It had a ridiculous number of mechanics that didn't work well together and a lot of them were complexity for complexities' sake rather than actually being good designs. There's a reason a ton of Future Sight mechanics basically never got used again. I don't think Rise of the Eldrazi was "too alien" but I do think it was an awful lore twist that stripped Zendikar of its identity for decades and turned it into "the Eldrazi plane".
I still hate Planeswalkers. And with how strong/essential they are, they're hard to ignore.
So, two things. "People" is tantamount to "nothing and everything." Of course someone is going to dislike something. That's a given. That's not a basis for arguing a specific point about some attribute of a product. The specific complaint about Duskmourne leaning heavily into TV/film tropes and a "modern" aesthetic is just that. Specific. It very much *is* a sharp turn that would have seemed even sharper if it wasn't for all the Universes Beyond products. There are categories of aesthetics, and 80s horror simply isn't comparable to whatever has come before it in MTG history. Do I think it will "ruin" Magic? I already ignore a vast amount of cards that I already find doesn't fit into my idea of what MTG should look like, so this is just a few hundred more that I will (most probably) add to that pile. I will keep on playing and ignoring. If this trend continues, eventually there will be nothing for me in MTG, and that's fine. I'll have 30 years worth of cards to play with, and I'll simply disengage completely with anything current and official. The kitchen table will always be there. Will it make me even less interested in the story and the canon? There's a high probability of that. Simply because it introduces problems I take issue with as a writer. Yes, MTG is silly and gets sillier by the minute, but the writers have managed to largely make sense of the tools they've been given up until this point. I fear a larger shift in tone and aesthetic will eventually make it non-functioning. By all means, keep on liking MTG in the midst of people complaining, but argue the actual points brought forward.
Murders at Markor Manor didn't suck because a whodunnit set was a bad idea, it sucked because it was poorly executed. Modern aesthetics won't make or break a new set, but if it's sloppily handled, yeah, why wouldn't it spoil it?
I didn't realize this was an actual set until this post. I thought it was a Stranger Things collab commander deck.
I’ve been playing for decades and only recently have sets really been a turn off/cringey, OP is definitely not alone. MaRo is right though, you just take a break. I wish the power creep would stop though so fair magic can work its way into at least one format.
At this point you stop and come back to a totally different game. How many cards are going to blow their price floor in that time? How hard will power creep? It’s kinda sprinting lately. Leave for a few sets and the game is very different. Leave for a few years and it’ll be unrecognizable
Mark and the person giving feedback are having two different conversations. The original message, and his follow-ups, are about their individual experience. Mark only responds in what works or doesn't work for the community. Without paraphrasing, this can be summed up in these two statements. OP in the beginning: "the current approach seems to bring in more people than it drives away. But it still just makes me sad" Mark at the end: "Will we someday hit the line that upsets enough players that we pull back? Maybe?" In other words Mark knows that these decisions DO upset some players and push them away, so he could have just said "you're right" from the start and left it there.
Call me crazy but I’ve been playing magic for like 20 years and I like Duskmourne. I really don’t get ghostbusters vibes from it, feels more like a world where someone made a pact with an eldritch god or demon and it really went sideways. It’s cool and unique and everything MKM wasn’t. The modern aspects really don’t bother me as long as there’s a shitload of magic. Like I don’t think I would enjoy, “Jace and Vraska go to time square New York and get hotdogs” the set, but a world that is sort of modern that has been deeply contorted by a demons magics to be a horror house is pretty rad. As long as it’s rad I don’t care if it’s sort of modern, and frankly this set feels like magic still the tone is there the design is still there it feels like it’s supposed to, something that MKM and Thunder Junction completely missed.
I want Jace and Vraska in New York now. Each Burrough is part of the colour pie. The big bad is from Jersey. It's perfect.
I think it should be ok to voice concerns over the direction the art style and aesthetics of Magic are going. Seems like brigade downvoting those opinions is the current trend on this sub. I am super hyped about Bloomburrow. Like truly hyped as a young kid I loved Redwall and read several of Jacques’ books. Duskmourne is definitely a set I’m skipping due to the aesthetic. I am just not feeling that one. I think it’s ok to skip sets but also cite concern over where Magic is heading. I think the territorial lines of high fantasy and reality are gone but I’d love to see old traditions stay within the core “world” of Magic and keep these kinds of sets to UB
Not to mention all the upvoted comments of “I will never understand people who [opinion]”… Like… that’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing to not be able to understand people having different opinions. It’s okay to disagree with them! But it feels like a weird collective lack of empathy that’s going on here.
I get it, Magic evolves. And I'm excited to play even with Universes Beyond! But still, there's a sting somewhere when I play [[Nuka-Cola Vending Machine]] in a [[Sam, Loyal Attendant]] deck.
Big "You made the sandwich" energy
I can be excited about Universes Beyond where it legitimately feels Magic-adjacent. I think Lord of the Rings was a good fit, as was Dungeons & Dragons, even if they don't want to admit that D&D is UB. I love Final Fantasy, and I think there's a lot of good potential for most of it to feel like Magic. But I am dreading seeing cards depicting the car or the clothes or the gas station from Final Fantasy XV. If they could downplay or omit those modern-looking aspects, I would be a lot happier with the art.
Idk I personally find the idea of Sam and Frodo cracking open a cold one to be kinda hilarious
I really appreciate the tone the first person worded their query. Maro's thoughts on the matter ring true to me but I understand that isn't much comfort for people who feel that a line has been crossed.
I just ignore the stuff I don't like, I don't get why that's so difficult. 25,000 cards with orcs and goblins and mages and whatever other fantasy tropes this guy in particular likes would be boring as shit.
>I just ignore the stuff I don't like, I don't get why that's so difficult. I think a big reason why it can be difficult is that formats outside of Commander exists. Like, a large part of deck-building in Commander is self-expression, so you can handicap yourself however you like, but it's not like I can just pretend Bowmasters or The One Ring doesn't exist, when I'm trying to create the best modern deck I can. At least in Commander, I only have to look at the cards when my opponent plays them.
if you play exclusively commander or kitchen table, ignoring what you dislike is easy, but if you play any other format it's literally impossible. and you can't decide what your opponents are playing anyway
"Judge, my opponent played a card I don't like!"
> I don't get why that's so difficult. Not everyone is a commander only player with 10s of thousands of card to choose from.
I don't remember ANYONE having actual issues with INN or ZEN because they didn't have stuff that broke immersion like a TV
He'd be the guy to know about the negative opinions, but Zendikar is a head-scratcher Gun to my head when I was getting into the game I could've accidentally thought the setting was what Jund was
He's such a reasonable guy, but there is zero chance that anyone looked at Zendikar and said "this isn't magic because it's too adventury". The 'world of adventure' thing was such an internal memo that did not come through. I saw someone open a dual land at the pre re and I never once thought it was anything to do with 'priceless treasures' even after I was told that was the intent.
I remember people saying it was just a thrown together D&D knockoff. I also remember people complaining it didn't make sense the Kor were there because they were from Rath, which was especially funny since no one was originally from Rath.
People have complaints about things, I’ve found
Yeah, you know what, legit, after going for a swim and reading this, I take everything back. For real. Of COURSE someone said they were quitting magic because the set was too much about adventuring. No deletions for posterity, but you are all right and I am wrong.
I feel so conflicted about Duskmourn. I love everything about it, except for the combination of 80s tech and being a canon magic plane. If it were a non-M:tG property, I'd love it. If it were exactly the same, but without the CRTs, it would probably be my new favourite plane. I just... I don't know, in my mind horror and fantasy are two separate things, and Magic has to be fantasy - and whilst you can combine the two to great effect (see: the first two Innistrad blocks) at some point if you remove enough fantasy elements it doesn't feel like fantasy any more. People bring up Neo-Kamigawa as a comparison, but even with all the futuristic tech it still had a fantasy feel. Duskmourn, even with all the monsters and magic and demonic influence, doesn't *feel* like fantasy. I'm not going to drop Magic or anything, and I think anyone who does is being overdramatic, but that one aesthetic choice completely killed my interest in a set which I otherwise would have been 1,000% on board for, and it's hard not to feel disappointed and maybe a little bitter about that. I'm glad so many people seem hyped for it, and I wish I did too, but I just can't.
I kinda agree with you in that I think the CRTs and 80s fashion gives the setting a vibe that doesn't quite feel fantasy even though I have to say I am not peeved enough by the fashion or concept to not be looking forward to the Set when so many of the Nightmares and Demons look amazing and hit my taste perfectly. People have a "spot" in their mind when they see media and they think "this is mundane, it could be happening out there" and it is different from where you put the stuff that makes you go "this is fantastical, this is entirely made up". It is why watching someone die in the news or even a relatively grounded comedy feels different from watching it happen in a fantasy movie or a cartoon, it is why the Simpsons usually avoids fantastical elements outside Halloween specials, and it is why most people would deem dressing as "Gale Weathers from Scream" for a Halloween party to be boring. The people of Duskmourne just look very mundane. 80s fashion isn't outdated enough for these people to really feel like they weren't pulled from our world, so it is a bit harder for your brain to not go "Have I seen this person?" Despite Cyborgs and Robots being more high tech, I actually think they feel more at home in fantasy than modern tech because they don't look nearly as mundane. Most people have never interacted with one, while there are probably many Magic players for whom a living room with a CRT and a couch looks like "My Parents' Living Room".
I think, even though it has often been considered a game set in a world of High Fantasy, that is changing. Personally, I like where Duskmourn is going - and Innstrad is my favorite plane. I also love Phyrexia - which is decidedly unlike anything you see in traditional High Fantasy settings. So, I really like the horror aspect of mtg. The modern-ish feel doesn't bother me as much as it might some others. What bothers me is the reduction in classic MTG creature types. My first favorite creature type was Viashino. Now, they're all lizards. Now, that's great from a gameplay perspective - it allows for more support and synergy. I just don't want to lose that specific and unique type of creature. Same with Cephalids. It seemed like they were going the right way by reprinting the humanoid slivers to look more sliver-ish, but deprecating the original creations in the worlds of MTG, I think, reduces some of the appeal. Just one guy's opinion.
> My only recommendation is don’t get rid of your cards. Many Magic players rotate in and out of the game, and the number one complaint I hear from players who rotate back in is them having gotten rid of everything when they rotated out. thats so 2010s lol in 2020s its *"sell your collection then get it back as proxies for pennies on the dollar, its quite literally having your cake and eating it too"*
The wider appeal is a nice thought and all but it's mostly to make the most money. They're making UB because it sells, they know what it does to the Magic brand and they accepted that tradeoff because it sells and attracts more customers. It's a bit of a cynical thought but Wizards/Hasbro has only shown to think this way in the past few years.
if you make money by gathering money from a base of people, and the base of people could grow or shrink, and had a fixed rate of shrinkage, appealing to a wider audience and making the most money would be very similar goals
"I'm very attuned to when people get upset and why" - that feels extra dismissive to me, like, "Look, I've been in PR for 30 years, so I *know* what you really mean when you say/write something." That really irks me, on a personal level. The rest of Mark's "Well the line is different for everyone/previous sets have been called 'too far from style'"-argument I can get, even if I disagree. If nothing else, it's safe, well-rehearsed, and has some truth to it. But when people start to say things that read like, "I have enough experience to never misunderstand someone or misconstrue their point," that's toxic, imo.
Also the fact themes that have mass appeal and universes beyond print money for wizards
I got into Magic right in between the Zendikar and Scars of Mirrordin blocks, and it was the fantasy and diversity that drew me in. I loved looking back at the previous planes—Alara, Ravinca, Kamigawa, etc—and was pretty consistently excited with each new block and setting. I don’t think I would have had any interest in Magic if the stuff that had been around then was Duskmourn and Universes Beyond.
I feel like if there's ever a set where I cannot stand the theme of it, I'd just not play it. Duskmourn is getting close to that border for me, but it's not ruining my enjoyment of magic, it doesn't erase all of the other worlds and characters that I like. It's one set, I can take a break, save up my money for something worthwhile, and come back to magic when it leans more towards the stuff I really enjoy. There's no need for people to be so "final" about things.
The problem, for me, is these "kitsch" sets have already hit that point; and their not being isolated to UB or whatever means I have to deal with them, which makes me want to play less and less over time. "oh look, Vraska in a cowboy hat, again, backed up by two guys with proton packs in front of a TV." Urza's Gundams from early days were annoying-yet-amusing, all of this new stuff just feels lazy.
If you want a catered environment build a cube. You control every element including the meta game. You can engage with any set you want. It doesn’t matter what happens, your cube will always be yours and you don’t need to look at any cards you don’t want to. There are many kinds of cubes. Mine specifically excludes UB cards. Cube will outlive magic.
One thing that makes me tentatively excited about the new Foundations product is that I think it's gonna make an excellent cube starter. Especially since it's closer to the Jumpstart style, which I think is much better for cubes that are typically played by two players.
I graduated high school with Mark and followed his career (I'm not a Magic player) but Mark's consistency and level of effort put forth in his role makes me proud. The man is legendary and we can only wish to possess his level of commitment and knowledge of his craft. Back in HS Mark was nerdy, kind, quiet, gentle, intelligent, and an all-around great guy.
I agree, it's all about taste When I was a kid I remember hating Mirrodin's artifact theme but loving Kamigawa's Japanese theme
Like I loathe the very concept of the Death Race set. Know what I am going to do. Not buy any or play with the cards. But there are plenty of other ways for me to get my MTG fix during those 3-4 months