Magic: The Gathering (Unreleased Sets)

Well there are also likely a ton of other cities besides Naktamun that Bolas destroyed when he first arrived on the plane.

Actually I think the flashback story revealed that Naktamun was already the last city on the plane even before Bolas arrived. Something really awful happened on the plane that turned everything but Naktamun into a desert.

The Flashback was a bit vague about that. It wasn't explicitly statedwhether or not Bolas had been there before to fuck Amonkhet up and then just returned one last time to set his plan in motion.

I think it's ambiguous. It depends on whether what we see in that chapter is Bolas's arrival on Amonkhet or simply the end of his campaign there.

The ruins outside Naktamun that Samut, Djeru, and their aven friend discovered warn of the Trespasser, so I'm inclined to assume the latter. Bolas was active on Amonkhet long enough for a non-Naktamun civilization to have learned of his actions and inscribed warnings against him before Bolas arrived to claim them as well.

From this, I think it's a reasonable assumption that the thing that scoured Amonkhet before Bolas's arrival was also Bolas.

New story.

So which troper thought that Samut would awaken her spark through a feeling of hope and triumph as opposed to pain and torment? They called it.

They also called the happy ending - or at least as close as can be for Amonkhet - aspect of Samut immediately returning after her spark ignites so she can be a planeswalker but also stay here, be with her people, and not do anything planeswalkers do. Which I still think is stupid and, unless Samut actually has a role to play in the Bolas fight, unnecessary to boot. Between this and Tarkir, I feel like the writers are trying to cop-out the "stranded in another world" aspect of a Planeswalker ignition more and more because being lost in the Multiverse for god knows how long is fundamentally irreconcilable with the goal of making the conclusion happier.

As things stand right now, she's a planeswalker because f*ck you, we needed another PW card for the set. Not because they're actually doing anything with the concept.

One way I could see this being justified is the different circumstances. If a Planeswalker spark is ignited via great pain and suffering, the fledgling Planeswalker is likely in no state of mind to figure out how to return to their home plane any time soon.

Yeah, it's really thin. But the writers should at least give us something to avoid breaking our willing suspension of disbelief.

edited 19th Jul '17 10:11:19 AM by M84

I was assuming God-beacon until it didn't happen.

Which is odd because a Planeswalker who ignited in a moment of pure joy and is just looking for a way home sounds like they would make an excellent view point character for some more low key stories or as a character that can serve to fill in a roster when you need them because they will work with other walkers for information they think will lead them home. It would even have a logical conclusion where they finally find their way home just as some crisis is occurring and get to be the big damn hero because of everything they've learned on their journey.

Eeyup. They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot for the sake of...well, nothing, really. An awkward, ham-fisted Esoteric Happy Ending to Samut's personal arc while the Downer rages around them.

Hey, as long as this isn't a relative Downer Ending like some of the last few blocks have been, I'm happy. Yes, Bolas got his army and thrashed the Gatewatch but Amonkhet is still inhabited and Hazoret is still alive.

Quoi?

Which of the last blocks were complete Downer Endings? The time the Gatewatch impossibly slew two Eldrazi Titans and everyone on Zendikar lived happily ever after? The time when Emrakul was stymied at Thraben and imprisoned in the moon, ultimately ending her threat to Innistrad in, like, an afternoon entirely through improvisation and luck? Or the unconditional defeat of the Consulate, destruction of the Planar Gate, and liberation of Kaladesh from Tezzeret?

Ever since the Gatewatch became a thing, Magic's story has made this weird shift towards more light-hearted, upbeat stories in which the good guys always unambiguously triumph over evil. It didn't used to be like that. Victories tended to be bittersweet and heroes gave their lives, sometimes fruitlessly. On occasion, entire blocks would go by where the villains straight-up won.

That's actually why I've been looking forward to this arc for so long. Since their formation, the Gatewatch have been, like, this inverted Knight of Cerebus sweeping through the setting, ensuring that nobody important ever dies anymore and nothing bad ever happens and impossible villains are always thwarted before they can do too much damage.

As much as I love the characters, the impact they've had on the setting is obnoxious, and Nicol Bolas kicking their teeth in is long overdue. As weird as it sounds, that's the most appealing aspect of this block: the promise that at long last the Gatewatch is actually going to lose for once.

edited 19th Jul '17 4:11:33 PM by TobiasDrake

It's not the Gatewatch who are the factor there. It's that Wizards wants to build engagement with the game and the story.

So, to service that goal, they:

• Introduced a cast of, mostly, likeable characters (the neowalkers), as opposed to the old planeswalker crop (many of whom were insufferable pricks - looking at you, Urza).
• Formed a team from the most likeable of those characters to serve as persistent protagonists, allowing greater audience engagement than "and suddenly this guy we haven't seen since his time as an antagonist in 2010 is not only relevant but the main character" (*cough*Sarkhan*cough*).
• Wrote stories that were, for the most part, fun and heroic and upbeat, because it turns out people quite like fun and heroic and upbeat stories, especially in the context of a game that is supposed to be fun to play and not a lengthy parade of "also, this card represents my favourite character, who was crushed by a giant chunk of wurm shit pushed off a cliff by Doom von Darkbad and that's why this other card here is his very short zombie".
• Presented those stories in an accessible way to ensure people actually knew what was going on and didn't need to assemble the story from isolated bits told online or spend money on books that weren't selling because people would honestly rather buy the cards anyway most of the time.

The first, second, and fourth of which are fine. But the third is obnoxious and only appears to have started being a thing with the advent of the Gatewatch. We've had complex, ambiguous, and downright depressing stories since the neowalkers became a thing. Both original Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin basically closed on, "And then everyone died and it f*cking sucked." And people loved Scars of Mirrodin. New Phyrexia was met with thunderous applause from the playerbase.

Theros straight-up killed its hero in the aftermath.

Even right up to the edge of Battle for Zendikar, the very block before it was Tarkir which ended on a kind of awkward ambiguity where, like, it's cool that dragons are a thing and now roam the plane again, but everyone else has been forced into subjugation to them and it's not really entirely clear whether or not that's a good thing? It's complicated. The world's changed, it's not for the worse, but not necessarily for the better either.

But then BFZ hit, the Gatewatch formed, and it's been sunshines, guaranteed victory, and upbeat heroism ever since. It's harder to get invested in that, knowing that any time the Gatewatch goes up against a new conflict, they will ALWAYS win, they will not have to pay any major costs to do so, and everyone we meet will be fine.

Except now, because Nicol Bolas is going to kick their teeth in and it's going to be awesome. They'll all probably be fine, no worse for wear over it, but they'll have actually failed at something and right now, that's the most challenge for this cast that I can hope for.

edited 19th Jul '17 4:43:02 PM by TobiasDrake

While I too found Samut's return to Amonkhet suspiciously quick and easy, the one moment that stood out for me was the lone khenra. With the context this story provided, Gift of Strength is now right up there with Savage Punch in the book of awesome moments. She should get a Legendary Creature card.

edited 19th Jul '17 4:53:50 PM by Lightblade

@Tobias: While your main examples are "a cliffhanger that took like half a decade to resolve, neatly explaining why they don't do cliffhangers any more" and "a block where they could have basically done anything and still made a profit because everyone was sold at 'the Phyrexians are back'" I want to unpack one thing in particular:

I would hold this up as the last thing "arbitrary and unsatisfying deaths of well-liked characters" pulled before it died a well-deserved death. (It got away with Venser because he died in the midst of Phyrexia making its return, at which point, again, they could have gotten away with basically anything.)

People liked Elspeth. People wanted to see Elspeth's story continue and hopefully find some kind of closure or a satisfying resolution. Having it abruptly truncated at the hands of an asshat character nobody particularly liked, at the end of a block that outstayed its welcome, was neither satisfying, nor a thing that led to a sense of closure, nor even a particularly good execution of Greek tragic narrative tropes.

If you wanted an example for how storytelling was better back before they started letting the good guys actually win more than once every few years...yeah, Theros block isn't helping your case, because the dark bits of Theros block were also the shitty bits.

OTOH, that may have been the Intended Audience Reaction. That feeling of frustration and anger, of believing this shouldn't have been the way her story ended, that she was meant for more things...that's part of why Ajani is so heartbroken. They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste...or maybe I'm just giving the writers too much credit.

By and large, in my experience, frustration and anger are not things people deliberately seek out except in small doses (such as hate-reading something - side note, my life got a lot better when I stopped doing that), so any decision that boils down to "we should attempt to induce frustration and anger in our audience" is best examined carefully. Frustration and anger with payoff can work - see also the Dark Souls franchise, or I Wanna Be the Guy - but stuff that's just frustrating and unrewarding without payoff, not really, and there wasn't a lot of payoff to Elspeth's death.

Though I don't think that Elspeth's story is necessarily over, given that she died on a plane with a for-realsies afterlife.

Yes, but it's an afterlife where you turn into a zombie, some of which are more than capable of forming armies and slaughtering the living.

As for Downer Endings I mean things like Mirrodin, Theros, Tarkir, stuff like that.

Even in death, Elspeth can't catch a break.

edited 19th Jul '17 8:56:34 PM by M84

In general, I also feel like Hour of Devastation is doing an apt job demonstrating the exact issue Maro was talking about when he said that "third set fatigue" is actually "last set fatigue". Amonkhet was fantastic. It was full of intrigue, mystery, character development. There was a lot to see and do and experience as we built tension towards the centerpiece of the arc, the thing that's been advertised since Kaladesh: Gatewatch v. Nicol Bolas.

Problem is, that centerpiece is not a premise you can stretch into an entire eight-chapter arc. So after Amonkhet, we got Hour of Devastation. One of Liliana's demons had to be inserted into the story for the sake of being able to put a couple chapters into him. We got a chapter about Hapatra, Vizier of Who Really Gives a Shit somehow poisoning zombies. A chapter about various random people getting slaughtered to drive home that people are dying after watching a lot of people die. The Scorpion God stabbing the gods to death was even a thing that got padded out to three chapters.

In short, there just isn't enough material in the one thing Hour of Devastation is supposed to be doing for a story, so this second set has miserably failed to follow up on the first by just being filler after filler after filler, padding out its chapter count until we can finally get to the end and the Gatewatch can finally face Nicol Bolas.

And to that end, nobody's suffered more than the Gatewatch themselves, who have basically spent these last seven chapters faffing uselessly about the city, occasionally popping up to intersect somebody's story or another before prancing away like magnificent poofs to pop up randomly in someone else's. Never before have they seemed so arbitrary. "Hey, guys. It's not time for our thing yet, so I just wanted to let you know we still exist. Cool? Cool."

Nearly all of this arc feels like it's just trying desperately to milk a very thin, shallow premise for as many chapters as it can, because ultimately the premise of one fight is not a lot of material to work with. Hour of Devastation didn't really need to be a set. It just needed one or two chapters at the end of Amonkhet.

edited 20th Jul '17 6:25:14 AM by TobiasDrake

I kind of felt this Hour of Devastation could have been shortened by a chapter at least. Razaketh in particular was filler-ish — he more or less served as a reminder of just how ruthless Lilianna is despite her quasi Heel–Face Turn.

Musing on this in the drive into work, even the non-PW characters seem weirdly misused. I've criticized Hapatra, Vizier of No You Cannot Poison Zombies Shut The F*ck Up With That before. But Djeru gets it just as bad in the opposite direction. During Amonkhet, a large fuss was raised over his importance. It was critical that he survive to lead their people in the Hours.

Now the Hours are here, nearly up even, and Djeru has been completely devoid of worth. He has done nothing. His entire narrative role has been uselessly following Samut around like a lost puppy, occasionally going, "What she said," whenever she says anything. Had Hazoret killed him at the end of the Trial of Zeal, literally nothing would change.

Oketra's death, a moment that should have been profound and impactful, just wound up awkwardly anticlimactic. When describing the death of the most significant member in a character set, "forced" is generally not a good label.

Remember Temmet? That kid vizier suspicious of the Gatewatch? Whatever happened to him? We've seen nameless mook after nameless mook fall which is fine because extras are an infinite supply, but Temmet promptly f*cked off the face of the universe once Hour of Devastation began.

Samut, of course, is the rock star. She does all the things, takes up everyone's roles, and even becomes a Planeswalker before immediately returning because f*ck you, that's why.

But the big thing that bugs me - apart from this being an apocalypse exclusive to only a small handful of nameless extras, with seemingly not even enough casualties to even hinder the people's hope for future generations because as noted, nameless extras are an infinite supply - is the stark segregation of A and B plots. The Gatewatch do their thing, we do our thing, and never the two shall meet.

Everyone just generally agrees that involving themselves with the God-Pharaoh who is actively murdering their world is a silly proposition. Even Hazoret, God of Zeal, is like, "No, my children, we are a worthless filler plot and must never intersect the main point of this story. Pissing ourselves and fleeing for our lives is the only sane and reasonable course of action." A proclamation that would make more sense coming from literally anybody else.

Every time someone brings up taking the fight to Bolas and is immediately shouted down, it just serves to highlight that despite all the screentime they're given, not only are these characters ultimately irrelevant to the grand narrative, but they know it.

edited 20th Jul '17 7:09:07 AM by TobiasDrake