Magic: The Gathering Thread XXV: 3 Vorthoses barely clinging to sanity and 45 Spikes

[LaZodiac]

I really enjoyed The Garden of Flesh, it was delightfully creepy. Plus, if Ashiok's going to be screwing around giving people nightmares, I'm sort of ok with targeting Elesh Norn.

Incidentally, I've just started getting back into the game after a few years (I lost interest around Ixalan). How is Wizards telling the story these days, outside the cards themselves?

Quite well, now. We had a minor hiccup in War of the Spark, where they wanted to get a big ole set of two books to explore the war and the fallout of it, but due to extreme time constraints rushed the **** out of it- so much so that the pretty important prequel novella (which is much better written because it was allowed to take slightly more time) released like, a handful of months after the initial book.

The fallout of this led to a complete restructuring of the story team and how it does thing. As a consequence, Elspeth's return story was never seen, which sucks because she's the current primary protagonist of this entire story arc aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah god that sucks so much doesn't it.

On the plus side, the small novels done for Eldraine and Ikoria are good (Eldraine's got some shaky writing at points but it's good, Ikoria is more solid but also has a massive disconnect with the cards and also is a villain origin story so if you don't like those you're **** out of luck).

Following that they returned purely to web fiction, five short stories within the set and five plot stories. This has led to having much more refined stories over all, but stories that are a little light in content. Zendikar Rising was fun, Strixhaven was certainly enjoyable, the twin Innistrad series started good and eventually ramped up to actually pretty incredible, Kamigawa was executed wonderfully but suffered most from the "trim all the fat" style. New Capenna was great except a lot of people who aren't quite adept at reading comprehension didn't understand the big finale which led to it kinda flopping for some.

Over all we're now fully back on track, with great story content. I'm really excited to see where Dominaria United goes, especially since after that we're getting the Brother's War revamp, which means... well, what're they going to do? That's already a story. So it'll give them more time to work on future stories, potentially!

EDIT: STRAIGHT UP FORGOT ABOUT KALDHEIM LOL! It was good too and was the actual start of the current major story arc, showing Vorinclex doing his nasty business. I completely spaced on it though oops!