Magic: The Gathering (Unreleased Sets)

...when the cult of a Demon reminiscent of two Chaos Gods seems lovable and plucky in comparison you know you're in for something.

I mean, the Azorius maintain freaking brainwashing / labor camps. The Orzhov enslave your soul and body if they can manage it.

The Azorius at least is as easy to play heroic as villainous. After all, most of the time "we're gonna make rules to keep the murderclown demon cult from using voodoo dolls on you for funzies" isn't a hard sell.

New story.

See, I'm a bit torn over these last couple stories.

On the one hand, I can't help but genuinely like and empathize with the characters — they're well-written, their immediate plights are genuinely sympathetic, and their opponents easy enough to dislike and root against.

On the other, it's also kind of difficult to ignore that one belongs to a faction with no higher ideology than "killing people is really fun" and the other to one that razes and pillages entire blocks of cityscape and turns their inhabitants into homeless refugees as a matter of routine.

I think that that'd be a problem with a member of any guild. Like that's just how Ravnica is - they're all horrible, and the cards just happen to show us better sides of some of them. If we read about a good-hearted Azorius cop, the brainwashing camps are in the background. If we're following a Selesnyan healer, we have to wonder if they know about the life leeching. (Doesn't seem like white magic, but there it is.)

I'm actually a little frustrated by the fact that we'll probably never see a story about the guildless throwing the breaks on all of this nonsense. I don't even mean destroying the guilds, just... removing some of their ability to prey on everyone else.

Not sure how much pushing back the guilds would help the average schmoe. They'd still have to deal with folks like Plaguecrafter and Passwall Adept and Immolation Shaman and every other asshole whose card lacks a watermark. And that's just the people, not the wildlife. Ravnica: Kind of a shitty place to live!(TM)

On the life leeching thing, I don't think that's white magic. It sounded to me like just straight yoinking the green mana out of the area, which I assume would be green itself.

TBF, the MTG Multiverse is a supremely crappy universe to live in for almost everyone who is not a God or Planeswalker, and they have their own issues; namely, each other, and a vested interest in managing or eliminating rivals, potential rivals, and interplanar threats. Ravnica may be towards the bottom of the shit heap for planes in general, but that is not saying much.

Quick rundown on planes worse off than Ravnica off the top of my head.

Inastrad, Shadowmoor, Pharaxia, New Pharaxia, Amonkhet, Dominaria (What with them having to deal with a literal apocalypse's every 100 odd years), Tarkir (now the dragons are in charge at least). So yes Ravnica is still a awful place to live, but far from the worst.

You realize you just listed damn near every other plane that got featured in storylines.

Edited by M84 on Feb 1st 2019 at 12:53:39 AM

I note that we're probably not getting a representative slice of the multiverse through the story. The story is going to focus on places that are shitty to live on, because that means problems that can require protagonists to solve. It's like how Red is the color of love and joy and so forth, but for the purposes of the conflict-based card game it tends to manifest more in rage and smashitude.

Side sets are the place to go to find planes that aren't beset by war or apocalypse or general unpleasantness. Kylem's a fun time if you're at all into sports, and Planechase has some places that seem nice.

Oh, no argument there. My thing is just that with most guilds, there's at least a pretense of serving some higher ideal or of providing a service of some sort.

Like, the Boros and the Azorious may be oppressive, heavy-handed, overly zealous and far too quick to hand out jail sentences for trifles, but insofar as most of them are concerned they do genuinely want to make Ravnica safer and spread justice. And they do serve as the main thing blocking certain other guilds from razing half of Ravnica into rubble and killing millions.

The Golgari may be a bunch of worryingly nihilistic, isolationist necromancers, but they do put a lot of work in keeping everyone else fed.

The Izzet and Simic may place worryingly low value on laboratory health and safety and their screwups regularly cost everyone else big, but they provide most of Ravnica's maintenance and scientific progress. The Izzet maintain and improve the machinery and infrastructure that keep the city running; the Dimir provide most of Ravnica's biotech and medicine.

My point is, the guilds do regularly harm people, and they're far from good institutions, but most at least try to do some sort of useful service for the city.

The Rakdos cultists, though, don't even have that. Like, there's no attempt to even mask that the entire point of the whole organization is to indulge in revels that usually end up with people dead. I think there was something about them working Ravnica's heavy industry and mining in early sets, but everything we get about them lately focuses on the murder parties aspect. Which wouldn't even be that much of an issue if they kept it to themselves, mind, but from what I read of them it doesn't seem like they... really do that. There's being a very hypocritical and oppressive branch of the government and then there's being a crowd of uncontrolled revelers regularly spreading death and destruction through a city for the hell of it, you know?

I mean, at least the Gruul have the idea of having been screwed over again and again and wanting revenge and their land back — they don't attempt to contribute to the city because in their minds, the city is in and of itself an enemy that wronged them. They've got some form of ideology beyond destroying things for fun.

I believe that off-camera the Rakdos run the less homicidal side of the entertainment industry as well, and we don't see that part because Bob, Rakdos-Certified Bar Owner doesn't fit nearly as well into a combat-centric game as Barbara the Barbed, Spiky Whip Performance Artist.

The Rakdos does both menial labor and entertainment, which makes me want to see an interpretation of the Cult as a super intense labor union.

I'm imagining a reprint of Lightning Strike that shows lightning elementals actually going on strike.

The Rakdos do fulfill a rather crucial function in Ravnica. They provide the Bread and Circuses that keep the populace distracted from how shitty life in Ravnica often is.

The problem is that the bread and circuses are being provided by a hedonistic violent demon.

Edited by M84 on Feb 2nd 2019 at 2:30:43 AM

Yeah - Rakdos is also one of the five loyalist guilds, which kind of says that as bad as they are, they do care about Ravnica.

After all, if Ravnica gets destroyed by Bolas, who'll be there to attend their huge raves?

Rakdos likes his big bloody parties. And parties need partygoers.

Look, if the Cult wanted to spend their lives kow-towing to the whims of some draconic tool, they'd call themselves the Izzet.

It is kind of ironic that two of the three Guilds that you can make from just Bolas's colours want nothing to do with him.

Just read the story. While I'm no big fan of Gruul anyway, the climax was very well done. I'm always surprised that these stories tend to show more about the other guilds than the one we're supposed to follow. We see here a side of the Selesnya that's not usually talked about and that taints their behavior quite a bit...

I also like that we see so many different races in minor or major roles. Many minotaurs, ogres, demons, that are usually second or thrid fiddle to the human-elf-goblin main characters we're used to. Please more.

A barbarian ogre saying, "Your services are no longer required" is pretty funny.

They do have twice the brain to work with, after all.

New (Simic!) story.

Magic Story: The Ledger of Hidden Fortunes

Somehow I'm not surprised that the Orzhov story is all about how the protagonist doesn't really want to be a part of the Orzhov.

Unlike the protagonists of the other stories, her story doesn't end with her having a better understanding of her Guild. Or rather, she does understand it better — enough to realize that she ultimately doesn't belong there. It is only her obligation to her family that keeps her there. What makes it slightly better is that she's also almost literally branching out.

Edited by M84 on Feb 21st 2019 at 5:16:00 PM