"Not Usually How Decisions are Made"
General forum
Posted on Dec. 18, 2018, 10:53 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
In this Tumblr post, Mark Rosewater said that complaints from players are not usually what influence the decisions that WotC makes, but it seems that he forgot that players complaining is what led to WotC creating the Reserved List, so I wonder if complaints from players may lead to a return to Lorwyn or Kamigawa at some point in the future? What does everyone else say about this?
To add to the above, it's also possible for WotC to do European-style fairy tails and Far-East Asia in other planes without the baggage of planes from before if they so chose to.
However, I think Dominaria, a set that was long thought as impossible to return to properly, proves that return sets to problematic planes can go over well. The issue is that WotC, as a company driven by profits, has no real reason to take that risk.
December 19, 2018 10:43 a.m.
There is a chance as I see it to have some flavor thrown in from those planes in core sets and a low chance of a single set block making a showing to throw people a bone and see how it goes. with there new system this allows WoTC to experiment with less popular planes as a return.
December 19, 2018 11:39 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #5
Arvail, first, why did WotC previously think that it was difficult or impossible to return to Dominaria, and, second, given how successful that return was, what reason is there to not think that a return to Kamigawa or Lorwyn would be successful, as well?
December 19, 2018 5:16 p.m.
So back in the early days of magic, world design was a lot different. We didn't get worlds like Khans that are cohesive and thematically unique. it wasn't even sure if magic were to survive. Initially, it made sense for magic to just add continents to this super plane of a continent. You needed deep jungles? New continent! Volcanic Regions? New continent! Eventually, Dominaria got to have tons of different regions that were incredibly hard to put together into a whole.
To make matters worse, the entire timeline of Dominaria spans roughly 25,000 years, 10,000 of which are covered regularly. There's so much to Dominaria. The plane has gone through multiple world-ending calamities and somehow got through in one very broken (and time-distorted) piece. That's just story-wise. The plane has been in the hands of countless art directors and story-tellers and some of the lore isn't considered cannon and even accessing 20-year-old uncharted realms stuff is a nightmare.
To put things lightly, Dominaria has baggage.
Nonetheless, the return to Dominaria expansion that we just got was insanely popular to veterans and new players alike. Part of the success was honing in on what made that plane popular and what made early magic tick. Recodifing the plane's visual look and choosing to focus on key factions with relatively few mechanics allowed Dominaria to give a surface-level look into the plane's various characteristics.
Returning to Dominaria was a huge risk. Still, WotC felt the risk was worth taking for Magic's 25th anniversary. The plane was an integral part of the game for such a long time that letting it fall to the wayside would be ignoring prime intellectual property and discarding elements of the game many had come to love. That return set was ambitious, but returning there made sense in the greater context of the magic storyline as well as the game itself.
Working on a return to Dominaria set was akin to trying to restore your granddad's '67 Impala that's sat in the family garage untouched for 10 years while working on Kamigawa or Lorwyn is more like trying to restore a salvage yard 90s Supra.
A return to those two sets presents a whole different set of challenges. At their best, the MtG team is phenomenal and you rightfully recognize that they could probably pull off a return set to those two planes. However, a return set to those planes would have the team discard large parts of those planes. Fans might not appreciate losing large chunks of their favorite planes for the sake of more mass appeal.
How much Lorwyn can you axe before it stops being Lorwyn?
Finally, it all comes down to money. Maybe you're a member of the dev team and you're feeling like truly flexing your potential. You know you can pull off a return set. Great! Now you've go to convince the rest of your team this is possible (including your lead) and then go and pitch this idea to a hasbro executive who's going to eye the sales figures for that past expansion and think you're a well-intending nut job.
The risk-to-reward ratio just isn't high enough to make returning to those planes worth it on a corporate level.
December 19, 2018 5:51 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #7
Arvail, that makes sense, and I do appreciate that detailed explanation, but I do have two things to say about it; first, many planes in recent years have felt like "one-trick ponies" in that they have a clever gimmick or central theme, but feel too limited by and focused on that gimmick/theme, whereas Dominaria's great diversity and versatility are why many players (including myself) are fond of it. Second, it has been an entire decade since the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block was released and thirteen years since the Kamigawa block was released (wow, has it really been that long? I feel old, now!), so the game, its players, and the general atmosphere/environment are very different from what they were, before. I personally feel that allowing a failure that far in the past to hold back a certain action in the present is a weak and flimsy reason, and I am certain that the nostalgia for those planes would be sufficient to make returning to them successful.
December 19, 2018 6:14 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #8
Arvail, that makes sense, and I do appreciate that detailed explanation, but I do have two things to say about it; first, many planes in recent years have felt like "one-trick ponies" in that they have a clever gimmick or central theme, but feel too limited by and focused on that gimmick/theme, whereas Dominaria's great diversity and versatility are why many players (including myself) are fond of it. Second, it has been an entire decade since the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block was released and thirteen years since the Kamigawa block was released (wow, has it really been that long? I feel old, now!), so the game, its players, and the general atmosphere/environment are very different from what they were, before. I personally feel that allowing a failure that far in the past to hold back a certain action in the present is a weak and flimsy reason, and I am certain that the nostalgia for those planes would be sufficient to make returning to them successful.
December 19, 2018 6:16 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #9
Forgive the double (now triple) post, but my web browser had a problem, which caused my previous post to appear twice.
December 19, 2018 6:16 p.m.
I would prefer wotc spent the next 5 or so years to resolve their story's loose ends as any revisit or new planes get sucked up into the gatewatch vs bolas story, there is a point where the ring should make it to mount doom. Then you can fit in these returned planes or new world building, essentially deescalate from those nukes of multiplane dooming conflict back down to simple fantasy (maybe even build sets around other fantasy worlds).
December 20, 2018 6:25 a.m.
People who post on sites like this one or Maro's tumblr are a vocal minority of mtg players. How many people regularly post on this site - a good estimate would be 200. Out of magic's 20 000 000 players (supposedly), that is 0,0001% of magic players. Out of those 200, maybe 20 are the ones that are vocal about returning to those planes. Should magic really cave in those demands?
Lorwyn is one of my fovorite sets in terms settings, but I understand that we are not going back there for any reason, let alone because 20 people said so.
December 20, 2018 11:29 a.m.
A vocal minority can do just that. Look at us getting a return to unglued for example. Yes we are talking about more then 20 people but it couldn't have been more then a few thousand (probably a few hundred). That took years of prodding and I'm sure a large percentile of them only did it because it was the "thing to do" not because they had a deep desire for it. A small groundswell of people can cause the change in direction as more and more people will jump on the bandwagon.
December 20, 2018 11:40 a.m.
Unstable happened not because of people clamoring for it, but because Maro had already started work on it and completed a good portion of it, whilst molesting his bosses about it for 5-6 years, and they only agreed once they knew a lot of the work was already done.
It was more due to 1 person with a lot of clout, rather than a vocal minority of players.
The reserved list is the only exception to the rule that vocal minorities can't change MTG. However, 20 years ago Magic was a lot different and was trying not to go the way of the dodo first. If the same thing happened today, Magic would be much more able to withstand it.
LordBlackblade says... #2
I think there are a couple of things to consider.
The first is context. The reserved list was created at a time when Magic was relatively new and fragile. A huge loss of consumer confidence could've tanked the company at the time. It was one of a handful (some would say the biggest) of the make-or-break situations that the company has had to deal with. Lorwyn and Kamigawa just aren't as big of a deal in the grand scheme of the health of the game. The threat of losing player base because of it is so much lower that there is really no impetus for WotC to give in to any demands to return to those planes.
Second is economics. WotC has the numbers of which sets have sold well and which have sold poorly. Regardless of how vocal some people may be on social media etc. it all comes down to whether or not such a product would sell sufficient units. From what I've seen online, it was unofficially confirmed that Lorwyn didn't sell all that well. With that in mind it becomes even less likely that the plane will be returned to. On the other end of the spectrum you have Ravnica. It sold like wildfire every time its printed. That increases the likelihood of a return to return to return etc. to Ravnica.
tldr: Reserved list was a big deal for the game at a crucial juncture, Lorwyn and Kamigawa are not. Wizards of the Coast is a company, and sales numbers affect future product. Lorwyn was on the lower end of sales, ergo much less likely to see a return.
December 19, 2018 1:47 a.m.