Wizards has thrown their lore in the trash
Lore forum
Posted on Feb. 19, 2023, 7:35 p.m. by Ohnoeszz
The decline in quality has been long but with the last story release I feel it was a death knell for the lore of mtg.
These stories have become bland superhero tripe with little disguise. It is easier to resurrect than come up with new ideas.
They went back to the most meat in mtg's lore with the phyrexians and it has still just been one cutscene of action after another. The gatewatch, an enemy, a battle, the end.
These characters have no time to develop so it is attempted in the flow of stories that seem to get 2/3rds of their paragraphs lifted in editing.
I have whiplash from the amount of times they've yanked a character from one pole to another. Jace had no character by the end - whatever the writer needed out of him was what he was.
In this last batch it felt like characters were simply dropped from the list of events they called a story once they no longer partook in one of the bullet points the "story" covers.
It feels pretty apparent that whoever put this garbage together has no respect for the actual content or those consuming it and I have little to no hope for improvement based on how they are set to continue shoveling content out.
I remember reading the story of the Gitrog frog and loving it. Mtg doesn't need a comprehensive lore that encyclopedicly links together the multiverse... it needs pictures painted with such fine detail that your mind picks out things you dont realize you care about until you're wistfully reminiscing about the story.
You don't need to constantly climax off the greatest enemies in magic (Bolas>Phyrexians) if you would just simply set a human scene and setting rather than superhero expectations.
Anyone else feel this way?
You are about three decades late to the party if you are only just now realising Magic’s lore is often told through poorly-written tripe. Bad pacing and mediocre character development has always been common within Magic’s stories - it is an inevitable problem when you have dozens of writers all trying to work on their own little portion, without perfect knowledge of what the others are writing. That means you have to have a climax within your own work - since you can’t build to someone else’s climax you do not fully know - while also meaning you cannot develop the characters too much, lest your changes suddenly make the next person’s story no longer fit into the narrative.
February 19, 2023 11:48 p.m.
Daveslab2022 says... #4
I’m going to actually disagree here. I think the lore of this set/ the Phyrexians in general is really fleshed out and interesting.
You have to remember this is a game about casting spells and summoning fantasy creatures. The story is going to be nothing but action set pieces. Those are the cards that they are designing, and they choose to implement a story that features these designs.
It would be pretty boring to have a set where no action happens. Would that just be a set of defenders and counter spells?
February 20, 2023 12:30 a.m.
I'm going to somewhat disagree that Magic doesn't need a comprehensive, encyclopedic lore. (I do agree with the rest of that sentence, about the fine details.) That level of world building is what's missing right now, in my opinion. Either one tiny little section of a plane serves as a backdrop for whatever heroics JaceCo are up to (Amonkhet, New Capenna, War of the Spark Ravnica, Strixhaven with Liliana and the Kenriths), or so much gets jammed into one set that there's no room for development (also New Capenna, Kaldheim, Ikoria, Eldraine). There's no feeling of exploration or discovery on any plane, now. It's just waiting for a good guy planeswalker (usually from outside the plane) to show up and stop the evil plans of the bad guy planeswalker (also usually from outside the plane). The plane itself barely matters as a setting, and the natives are often completely irrelevant, except as they relate to the planeswalkers. There's either not enough description of the plane and its people to feel important, or there's too much for a single set.
The other thing bugging me right now is the way the Gatewatch story has developed, and the dissonance between the ostensible stakes and what I expect to actually happen.
March of the Machine early spoiler Show
Basically, I'm not convinced there's any stakes in the story. (I've ranted about this before, and I'll probably do it again.) In Amonkhet, JaceCo faced Nicol Bolas, a millennia-old supergenius and master manipulator at the point of his greatest in-story power to date, and they suffered a "crushing defeat." This doesn't mean they were killed, or driven insane, or made into Bolas's personal servants. It means they were temporarily separated from each other with mild bruising, mostly to their egos. Between Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nissa, the long-term repercussions were exactly zero. Jumping forward to the War of the Spark, none of the main cast again survived unscathed except for Gideon, who didn't have much to live for at that point anyway. Domri Rade, Dack Fayden, and a couple of unnamed planeswalkers were basically the only casualties worth mentioning, and Dack didn't even get a card mention, not even flavor text. Nicol Bolas was completely defeated and humiliated, stripped of his powers, and imprisoned for pretty much forever. Not so good for said millennia-old supergenius and master manipulator at the peak of his power...
The Eldrazi Titans don't fare much better. They're literally incompatible with organic life. Everything they come near corrodes into nothingness. They are remorseless, pitiless, and completely unstoppable. Two of them were killed, again with not so much as a chipped tooth among the named characters, and the third willingly exiled herself as an apology for making such a mess. No apocalypse, no casualties, just "Oops, I shouldn't be here. I'll go away now."
So we're now on the third major threat to the planes, and our JaceCo casualty list has one name on it. The Phyrexians are popping up everywhere, and they seem to be winning some key battles. They've managed to corrupt multiple members of the main cast. Still, I won't be convinced it means anything unless someone actually irreversibly dies. The Phyrexians are on their home turf, they have several planeswalkers on their side, and they have a habit of "recycling" people. There's no excuse for everyone to survive, but I'm now more sure than ever that none of this will stick. Either March of the Machine is basically a big continuity reset; it's not actually supposed to be part of the canon; or it's somehow going to be reversed, the Phyrexians are defeated, and someone cracks a joke, ending the story on a big jolly laugh from everyone.
Those are my biggest problem with the story at this point: 1) something gets hyped up as a near-omnipotent threat to all of reality, but gets shut down by Our Heroes without really doing anything to any named characters, and 2) The planes are treated as backdrops and statistics, and don't feel like they have any independent presence of their own.
February 20, 2023 3:12 a.m.
It's not all bad imo... kinda like before/after school cartoons I used to watch as a kid they arnt aren't exactly paramount in character development and story telling but it gets the job done and is entertaining.
My biggest complaint I think is my lack of interest in the characters anymore... once upon a time I thought Liliana Vess was super cool and interesting... a dark priestess trying to hunt down and kill demons that had a contract over her... going to innistrad to get the chain veil it was just really compelling to me for a long time.
But since Magic origins in particular I just have struggled to get attached/care about the characters in the same way...
Again comparing it to cartoons they still have teenage mutant ninja turtles and spiderman/xmen cartoons like i used to watch but they are rebooted drawn differently characters have different quirks and such.... it just makes me wonder is it really that bad or are we just an older and harder to please audience?
February 20, 2023 9:08 a.m.
SteelSentry says... #7
I think there's some good bits here and there, but in a collaborative corporate work like this, like comics as well, you have to dig around for the good parts.
However, I do not think this is an excuse for Wizards to justify putting their name on bad stories and hand wave it away when they're criticized. The War of the Spark novels have been excoriated online, but the worst offence was the Chandra chapter. After building the connection between Chandra and Nissa for multiple sets, having the payoff be Chandra looking directly at the camera and telling everyone she's not gay and she's very straight and attracted to Gideon... only to put Chandra and Nissa together on the Pride secret lair on Collective Voyage.
I'm not upset that Chandra doesn't represent me the way I felt she did anymore, it's the unabashed gaybaiting that really annoys me, and makes me second guess getting attached to any character in the future.
February 20, 2023 10:41 a.m.
I mean, I think that the writing is just another symptom of product push, and I feel a little bad for the people who have to make sense of it all. Like, if someone came to me and said, we want you to write this story with these 12 characters, and these 17 critical things happen, and we want it done as fast as humanly possible, and here is a very strict outline of what you can and cant do...that would be insane. Just the speed that these things have to come out combined with how strictly they have to fit the cards that have been designed years in advance, and the fact that the story is absolutely an afterthought for wizards, and it's honestly surprising it's not more of a mess : )
That all being said though, and this might just be me, but I really don't like the blogy style writing that they have been going hard with. Most of their recent writing has been quick paced, heavily punctuated, and it's so trying to be punchy that it actually takes away from the scale of things that are happening. I think it works okay for something like a blog where the story that's trying to be conveyed is very small, so a curt writing style works, but when you are trying to build big worlds with big things happening, you need someone who has done more long form writing, and dare I say, someone who will just pontificate : )
Just a random bit I looked up, but a good example from Kami Neon: "With the mochi still clutched against his chest, Kaito threw out his free hand to hold the dishes mid-air. They hovered in place, but the footsteps in the hall were close. Too close.
Kaito had no choice."
If they are going to use a very punctuated style, I'd rather it come in ups and downs. Have a very long and detailed paragraph, really paint a picture in the mind, and then come in and cut it off with "Too close." As it stands what you get is what's supposed to be two paragraphs that do tell you the facts, but don't flesh them out any.
Sorry, I don't mean to rant, and I don't dislike the stories really, I just think that the style really does clash with what they are trying to do with it. To be big, it has to be written big.
February 20, 2023 5:20 p.m.
SteelSentry I couldn't agree more on Nissa and Chanrda : ) They actually had an FF romance organically built in and then squandered it, and then tried to still sell it later. Like, I want to see every romance, and I'd love to see people like me represented, but at the same time, there is a big difference between throwing in gay characters and building a world where gay characters can be just like everybody else, and I think the Nissa/Chandra situation really solidified in my eyes that they are not building that world.
February 20, 2023 6:06 p.m.
I do not think it is fair to blame Wizards for Greg Weisman's terrible portrayal of Chandra and Nissa in his novel--it is VERY clear that Weisman is a hack and a terrible author who gave exactly zero degree of deference to the lore when writing the book. Both novels were extremely poorly written and contain numerous lore errors and poor lore choices even beyond the Chandra-Nissa relationship. These include undoing character development from prior sets for multiple characters, ending the years and years long Chain Veil story by throwing the thing in a closet, and breaking a fundamental rule of Magic when Kaya planeswalks and brings others with her.
The entire thing reads more like fanfiction written by someone who read Magic's Wikipedia page during a bender and called that good enough. And, yes, Wizards had it published--but they also have to stick to strict publication timelines and likely decided to forego quality and their own canon to meet sometimes harsh production deadlines. After all, the entire thing needed to be rewritten--they almost certainly did not have enough time between delivery and publication to do a full work over, and just decided to call it a write-off and to send it to the printer in its half-assed state.
Overall, Wizards has been pretty clear in their condemnation of the book, going almost as far as declaring the entire thing noncanon (and explicitly declaring the Chandra-Nissa parts noncanon pretty quickly). Additionally, numerous staff members have talked about the abject anger the entire team at Wizards was when they found this garbage was rushed to production. Since then, the story has done decently with these characters--and some art from MOM looks like it'll have a heartbreaking reunion between the pair that hopefully will live up to expectations.
February 20, 2023 8:35 p.m.
They have a way of rushing things for sure... How can you relay the vastness of new Capenna when Elspeth runs down to the city bowels, on foot, without any chronology indicating that this was actually a long journey worthy of calling each section of a city-plane: "vast"... Name any true journey, you have nights/days, downtime, fatigue, grindy-stress, segways... Or you could be chased by vampires, then end up through 2 layers of Capenna, but assure us that it is "vast" without any literary mechanisms to paint a mental picture along the way
February 20, 2023 10:03 p.m.
TypicalTimmy says... #12
What killed it for me was a few years ago when each chapter was written by a different author, so the entire story became disjointed.
February 22, 2023 2:04 a.m.
Gitrog was one of my favourite stories and haunted my dreams for a while after. I agree that since then the story's have declined. The choice to almost completely stop telling the story through the cards didn't help either. Now cards are labeled story pieces go on the internet to have to dig up the bit it is related to and then be disappointed you wasted your time.
I would like to see a return to long arcs. War of the Spark was too soon of a climax to amonkhet.
FormOverFunction says... #2
I’ve never really invested anything in the plots, focusing on my own deck design. To be totally honest, I would much prefer slight references to stories and themes rather than railroading the card names and design alongside whatever weird book gets put out. I expect there will be some sort of giant [CTRL-Z] undo event, though, so I’m never going to escape these planeswalkers lol
February 19, 2023 9:54 p.m.