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| Format | Legality |
| 1v1 Commander | Legal |
| Alchemy | Legal |
| Arena | Legal |
| Block Constructed | Legal |
| Canadian Highlander | Legal |
| Casual | Legal |
| Commander / EDH | Legal |
| Commander: Rule 0 | Legal |
| Custom | Legal |
| Duel Commander | Legal |
| Gladiator | Legal |
| Highlander | Legal |
| Historic | Legal |
| Historic Brawl | Legal |
| Legacy | Legal |
| Leviathan | Legal |
| Limited | Legal |
| Modern | Legal |
| Modern Beyond Horizons | Legal |
| Oathbreaker | Legal |
| Pauper | Legal |
| Pauper EDH | Legal |
| Pioneer | Legal |
| Planar Constructed | Legal |
| Pre-release | Legal |
| Standard | Legal |
| Standard Brawl | Legal |
| Vintage | Legal |
Loan Shark
Creature — Shark Rogue
When Loan Shark enters the battlefield, if you've cast two or more spells this turn, draw a card.
Plot (You may pay and exile this card from your hand. Cast it as a sorcery on a later turn without paying its mana cost. Plot only as a sorcery.)
legendofa on Anyone else kinda.... really let …
8 months ago
Gleeock Why does Loan Shark serve no purpose? Yeah, it's a forced pun, but an animal-centric set and a horror-themed set are coming out in the near future, and I can imagine sharks fitting into one or the other of those. Island World/Fantasy Oceania coming out 2026? If a card seems out of place, what could it be setting up?
I agree with the article in broad strokes, but "obsessed with pop culture" isn't really the way I would describe my issues. "Everyone is inexplicably dressed up in trench coats and hats, crouching dramatically over pools of blood." There aren't really any cards that show this exact scenario. Homicide Investigator and Chalk Outline come close, though. Actually, looking deep at the MKM art, I'm not sure where the "too many hats" complaints are coming from. The Detective subtype does get oddly overused, but that's the only real concrete example of forced genre-ism I see. Everything else, as far as I can see, is exaggerated Tamiyo, Field Researcher vibes, or disconnect between expectation and presentation.
"To have noir-y detectives running around doesn’t feel natural for the setting, which has two guilds of law enforcers and a fairly rigid high fantasy setting already." The Planeswalker's Guide specifically mentions that the Ravnican Agency of Magicological Investigations grew to the size of a guild, as the Guildless realized they didn't have any security or protections. And the author seems to be suggesting that mixing genres is unnatural, that high fantasy shouldn't ever deal with murder mysteries, and murder mysteries can't take place in high fantasy settings.
I 100% agree with the paragraph
- "Part of the problem is that Magic doesn’t have time to develop its settings. The greats, like Innistrad and Theros, were often the focal point for a whole year of Magic, whereas these days we’ll go to four or five planes in that time. Sets only have one release to sell their entire theme to those looking at booster packs in a shop, which means it needs the grabbiest, most ‘resonant’ imagery possible, regardless of whether it serves the game in any way."
Unfortunately, that's what sales and market research have said people wanted. Assuming Mark Rosewater is telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe he isn't), second- and third-sets don't sustain interest among the customer base as a whole. As much as I don't like it, it's the business model that works for them.
So while there's a lot of specific genre tropes and references in the last, um, two sets (and probably some more coming next year), and I desperately want another fully original plane, I personally don't have a deep problem with with the genre mixing that these opinion articles are decrying (which, incidentally was not invented by Fortnite or Marvel).
