yeah, I was skeptical of Bloomburrow before it came out because I was worried "Redwall set" was gonna go the same way as "cowboy set" but it turned out to be great - there is definitely a lot of room, even Edge of Eternities is like... mostly Magic-feeling. definitely closer than DSK/OTJ/DFT, though I think it's too far out there for me personally
General [TLA/TLE] [UB] Avatar: The Last Airbender
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This guy might make it into my Multivalent cube over Gloomfang Mauler. I'd love one more source of Food for my Bushy Bodyguard, and this weird creature isn't exactly drenched in radioactive IP juice.
I think Avatar specifically works because the way it does its worldbuilding fits really well with how Magic has historically done worldbuilding, which is that it tends to revolve around broad factions with most legendary characters being exemplary of the faction they're from.
Take Stitcher Geralf as an in-universe example - within the context of Innistrad, he's not terribly exceptional in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he's good at stitching corpses together into zombie monsters, but that's something that people can just do on Innistrad (to the point where you can make "necromancer" a backup job). What makes him a fun character is his incredibly catty relationship with his sister - both of their styles of necromancy are involved in their spat, but you're given a sense that "two siblings squabling over the best approach to making walking corpses" is just a thing in Innistrad.
Similarly, Iroh isn't a fun character because he can conjure and control fire using kung-fu, because that describes a large portion of the culture he comes from - no one in Avatar is remotely surprised that firebending exists. What makes him fun and endearing is that he's a wise old man who loves tea and acts as a counterweight to his more fiery nephew. So you end up with a fun character that people like that also tells you "hey, cool fire powers are just a thing that people have".
Why this is important is clear if you think about it from a draft perspective - if you draft some firebenders and then see Uncle Iroh in a pack, you go "oh, look, it's a special fire guy!", which gets built on by seeing cards with quotes from him or cards showing him doing stuff that isn't an expected Cool Fire Dude thing (like running a tea shop). It also works in reverse - if you run into Iroh first and then see firebenders, you get the "oh wow, being a cool fire dude is normal here, that's cool" vibes that help sell you on the setting. Having repeated setting details helps build the whole thing into a more cohesive whole.
Contrast that with Spiderman, where the specific characters you're presented with are either a mass of "spider heroes" that you're assured are all super special but don't have a benchmark for if you aren't a pre-existing spider-fan or are a one-off villain that doesn't connect into anything else. If you don't go into the set with spider knowledge, the mechanics are left to carry everything because the themes simply don't cohere, because every single legendary creature is trying to be a special snowflake when a draft set can only really handle a couple weirdo outliers. "Oops all the legendary creatures!" should be a precon thing, where people can skim through the cards and see everyone in context.
tl;dr: Magic traditionally uses characters as the flavor/vibe equivalent of a draft signpost, and Avatar happens to work pretty well in that style.
...
That said, I feel like they kinda shot themselves in the foot by deciding to give each major character multiple legendary creature cards showing them at different points in the story. I kinda get why they did it, but I feel like it'd be much more effective if, say, The Art of Tea replaced Iroh, Tea Master in the main set. Show me that Iroh loves tea, WotC, don't tell me!
Take Stitcher Geralf as an in-universe example - within the context of Innistrad, he's not terribly exceptional in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he's good at stitching corpses together into zombie monsters, but that's something that people can just do on Innistrad (to the point where you can make "necromancer" a backup job). What makes him a fun character is his incredibly catty relationship with his sister - both of their styles of necromancy are involved in their spat, but you're given a sense that "two siblings squabling over the best approach to making walking corpses" is just a thing in Innistrad.
Similarly, Iroh isn't a fun character because he can conjure and control fire using kung-fu, because that describes a large portion of the culture he comes from - no one in Avatar is remotely surprised that firebending exists. What makes him fun and endearing is that he's a wise old man who loves tea and acts as a counterweight to his more fiery nephew. So you end up with a fun character that people like that also tells you "hey, cool fire powers are just a thing that people have".
Why this is important is clear if you think about it from a draft perspective - if you draft some firebenders and then see Uncle Iroh in a pack, you go "oh, look, it's a special fire guy!", which gets built on by seeing cards with quotes from him or cards showing him doing stuff that isn't an expected Cool Fire Dude thing (like running a tea shop). It also works in reverse - if you run into Iroh first and then see firebenders, you get the "oh wow, being a cool fire dude is normal here, that's cool" vibes that help sell you on the setting. Having repeated setting details helps build the whole thing into a more cohesive whole.
Contrast that with Spiderman, where the specific characters you're presented with are either a mass of "spider heroes" that you're assured are all super special but don't have a benchmark for if you aren't a pre-existing spider-fan or are a one-off villain that doesn't connect into anything else. If you don't go into the set with spider knowledge, the mechanics are left to carry everything because the themes simply don't cohere, because every single legendary creature is trying to be a special snowflake when a draft set can only really handle a couple weirdo outliers. "Oops all the legendary creatures!" should be a precon thing, where people can skim through the cards and see everyone in context.
tl;dr: Magic traditionally uses characters as the flavor/vibe equivalent of a draft signpost, and Avatar happens to work pretty well in that style.
...
That said, I feel like they kinda shot themselves in the foot by deciding to give each major character multiple legendary creature cards showing them at different points in the story. I kinda get why they did it, but I feel like it'd be much more effective if, say, The Art of Tea replaced Iroh, Tea Master in the main set. Show me that Iroh loves tea, WotC, don't tell me!
It's weird that you are such an UB hater, dude, you even made some Pokémagic cards yourself as well.
Still wouldn’t be a fan even if they hit the nail on the head with some cute memes or excellent designs or even with settings that look very Magic-like.
UB doesn’t move the story forward. Zero lore. Just a cash grab and nothing more. This game is not for the fans anymore. It’s for the next fans.
UB doesn’t move the story forward. Zero lore. Just a cash grab and nothing more. This game is not for the fans anymore. It’s for the next fans.
Now that the spoilers are all (?) out for Avatar, looks like Aang just edges Peter Parker at 9 to 8, although there's a few non-Peter Parker Spider-Mans as well.
If you're curious
vs
And I'm not sure if Superior Spider-Man should count as it's Doctor Octopus in Peter Parker's body.
I'm kind of becoming used to UB now (although I'm still not really putting any in my cube), but this is the aspect that annoys me the most. It's so difficult to talk about the cards when so many of them have the same name, and off the top of your head are you going to remember the difference between Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-man, and Ultimate Spider-Man? Or Ghost-Spider, Gwen Stacy vs Gwen Stacy//Ghost Spider, or Toph Earthbending Master vs Toph Greatest Earthbender? Those might as well be the same name!
easily, that last one's Miles Morales and not a Peter at all!
...I know this because of non-Magic knowledge and I still can't tell the other three apart. I didn't actually know that the backside of the flip card wasn't named "Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales" until drafting this post (even though it obviously would not fit on the card)
haha wait, long dormant comics neuron fired. he's Amazing when he's hitting other people, and Spectacular when he's hitting you
surely they couldn't release eleven sets in a 12-month year, you must be mistaken
Aang also has the excuse that those 9 cards are technically split across two sets, but still.
(I feel like spoiling TLA and TLE together was just too much.)
easily, that last one's Miles Morales and not a Peter at all!
...I know this because of non-Magic knowledge and I still can't tell the other three apart. I didn't actually know that the backside of the flip card wasn't named "Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales" until drafting this post (even though it obviously would not fit on the card)
haha wait, long dormant comics neuron fired. he's Amazing when he's hitting other people, and Spectacular when he's hitting you
surely they couldn't release eleven sets in a 12-month year, you must be mistaken
You’re absolutely right and I’m sorry about that!
It’s 4 vs 3
You're not representative of all (old) fans. I am an old fan and I prefer a rich UB world to many of magic's original settings, which are sometimes super one note (even older ones, like theros being a whole plane looking like a single place from our world in the past, same culture/architecture/fauna).
You know, I wasn't completely sure you had the numbers wrong. Like, I remembered "UB majority by 1", but given how fast these sets have been coming I was more hoping than actually sure there weren't going to be eleven sets next year.
sigh (lmao)I'm not surprised you hadn't realised because there's also:
Agree with this to at least some extent, UB not fitting and feeling lazy is a symptom of many sets' designs feeling lazy* (OTJ etc) and... proooobably not an inherent failure of the concept? I mean I would still prefer to not have it. But I think it's partially the accelerated set release schedule and not hiring way more people to compensate, and so on.
*example: actual Spider-Man Fans (afaik) don't think the Spider-Lore is lazy and incoherent most of the time, but the associated Magic set feels incoherent. this is not a fault of the comic books writers!
You’re simply arguing that you aren’t one of the fans I was speaking about. You might be old but you’re not pro Magic like it used to be appearently. If enough people would give a fuck then the game wouldn’t have taken this turn.
Let's look through the premiere Magic sets of the last 4 years.
- Kaldheim
- Strixhaven: School of Mages
- Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms
- Innistrad: Midnight Hunt
- Innistrad: Crimson Vow
- Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
- Streets of New Capenna
- Dominaria United
- The Brothers’ War
- Phyrexia: All Will Be One
- March of the Machine
- Wilds of Eldraine
- The Lost Caverns of Ixalan
- Murders at Karlov Manor
- Outlaws of Thunder Junction
- Bloomburrow
- Duskmourn: House of Horror
- Foundations
- Aetherdrift
- Tarkir: Dragonstorm
- Final Fantasy
- Edge of Eternities
- Marvel’s Spider-Man
Looking at this list, I feel like Avatar (and Final Fantasy) feel more like traditional Magic than about half of these. Even beloved sets that do a reasonably good job of fleshing out there world like Theros proved to not have enough meat to them to fill out a whole block, and are a great case study for why single set visits are broadly an improvement. Midnight Hunt/Crimson Vow was another example of this -- two sets that showed that, poorly executed, Magic's worlds aren't deep enough to carry back-to-back sets.
As someone who does read most of the stories and follows/cares about the world of Magic quite a bit, I can't pretend that MID/VOW felt like they were moving the story forward, or contributing meaningfully to lore. They had about as much world building as I'd honestly expect out of a single standalone commander deck, and yeah, we've gotten more richness out of things like Doctor Who and 40k and Fallout with those. Do I prefer the visual aesthetic of the older Magic sets? Well, no, I mean, I think Avatar & Final Fantasy look visually better on average than Masques or Invasion block. I certainly prefer Ice Age or The Dark, but I'm in a minority there even amongst old heads.
Many Magic players rightfully criticize the hat sets, and they're right to, even if I think that EoE also falls for many of the pitfalls complained about in those sets. The only difference between EOE and OTJ is that we didn't get a bunch of Space Jaces running around, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm less upset about Marchesa wearing a cowboy hat and more annoyed at very surface-level tropes.
I think "cash grab" is a useless criticism. Doing what people want (represented in people parting with personal resources to purchase it), whether they realize it or not, is what a company is supposed to do. If people like something, they buy it.
If you want to call the Oil Slick bundle or the Chocobo Holiday bundle or the Avatar Commander bundle a "cash grab", sure, those products feel a little skeazy, but UB should theoretically give the WotC team more time to develop their own worlds and stories, force them to have it at a higher standard to stand out amongst the more popular established IP. I'm seeing more creative designs from UB than UW these days, Spider-Man excepted.
I'd love Magic to be "how it used to be" (but without blocks), but that kind of reactionary response is foundational incoherent, as no two old heads can even agree on what that means or when that line should be drawn.
Bro I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ravnic is one of the most old school pro Magic types I know XD
oh my god that guy was in every damn set, he was Loot before Loot, in that I can't even actively dislike him for a reason, I just have zero attachment to him and he keeps showing up and won't go away Poochy-style
I'd instinctively use "legal:vintage" to exclude art cards, but you get 35 that way because Hex, Kellan's Companion doesn't exist in paper. Assuming you want to keep that:
If you want to remove specifically just art cards, he says after five minutes on scryfall, what you want is
Code:
-st:memorabilianote 1: of the 35 paper cards, one is the Cowboy Bebop Standard Showdown Promo Lightning Strike as well, so you might also want to do "-is: promo" depending on how much of a stickler you are. I believe this would also remove a Secret Lair: Shirtless Kellan Swords to Plowshares if we get one of those like we just got for Dwight Schrute
note 2: if we ever get a token that's Kellan riding a beast you'd also have to do "-is:token", because tokens are not set type "memorabilia"
Resident scryfall master here - what you want is
because Scryfall uses the type "Card" for art cards, gameplay trackers, and other stuff that doesn't have an explicit type on its typeline.
Fun fact: there are exactly two tokens that get excluded if you filter out the Card type - the F18 Elemental token for Rekindling Phoenix and the L17 Gremlin token. The first one has the City's Blessing on the other side and the other one has the Energy Tracker on the other side.
because Scryfall uses the type "Card" for art cards, gameplay trackers, and other stuff that doesn't have an explicit type on its typeline.
Fun fact: there are exactly two tokens that get excluded if you filter out the Card type - the F18 Elemental token for Rekindling Phoenix and the L17 Gremlin token. The first one has the City's Blessing on the other side and the other one has the Energy Tracker on the other side.
I thought I was a pretty good Scryfall nerd, but this is a level up. Tip of the cowboy hat to you.
Not really interested in the no true magic fan fallacy aspect of this conversation, but
I did the same exercise with Bloomburrow, which I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about as the general magicverse, and I won't say it excels in the department, but I get a greater sense of the setting and culture. I don't know if any of this is true, but it seems like Valley is a high-trust multicultural society of good vibes, and their chief concern are calamity beasts whose lifecycle follow the four seasons, and have gotten more active as of late and are encroaching on Valley more aggressively. The Mice serve as the primary vanguard against the calamity beasts, supported by an aerial network of birds. Bats are deep into astrology, rats use snail shells as mnemonic devices, squirrels squirrel away the remains of calamity beasts because of their magical properties, and I think otters channel storms through pearls and maybe other seafloor detritus. I don't feel like I really know the world, but it captures the imagination to a much greater extent than Avatar, where I'm only left wondering what relationship each of these nodnescript named characters have with each other.
>But the source material is great
Yeah that doesn't really matter to me. I'm sure the three seasons of avatar gives it much more room to develop a setting than a single magic set would, but I'm judging sets against each other, and this one doesn't make me want to watch the show, just as I don't really care to read the magic books. If wotc wants to do storytelling, they should do it through the medium of the game—the actual cards—especially when it comes to the worldbuilding. Shadowmoor is my favorite magic setting, and I enjoyed its book back when it came out, because it's just a collection of small stories about how everyone is suffering. The actual overarching story for Lorwyn-Shadowmoor is kinda nonsense and doesn't add a whole lot to the setting. I've heard the Kamigawa books are great, but I think the set already does a great job of outlining the greater plot of the setting. I kind of lost interest in Magic settings with Theros henceforth, but even then I think the magic planes do a better job of worldbuilding than any UB set, because a lot of the cards are used to depict the actual setting, instead of isolated events in a story I know and learn nothing about.
I think the only UB settings I can agree to feel thematically at home with magic is D&D, 40K and LotR. Avatar and Final Fantasy have too many cards whose aesthetic are far too distonnected with Magic's general vibe, if we pretend that magic still has a visual identity after the bombardment of secret lairs and frame treatments. I'd still rather they weren't here though, along with bloomburrow and the detective and cowboy hats.
(Then there's also the licencing issues of UB and how there's no guarantee that we can revisit any of these settings, and potentially have to try and shoehorn reprints of these cards into another setting while tricking less informed players into breaking deckbuilding restrictions. At least modern deckbuilding sites somewhat alleviate that last issue.)
Honestly, probably all of the non-ub ones. I read the flavor text of every avatar card spoiled and my takeaway is that there are people with the power to wield the elements, and they live in a somewhat precarious world with a militaristic fire nation, and that's about it. There's some animal mashups as well. Probably 70% of the cards are just references to story events without any coherent through line. Zuko wants to get the Avatar for his father, but I don't know why. Zuko ends up conflicted at some point, joining the Avatar at some point, and leader of the Fire nation(?) at some point, and I don't know why. Zuko ends up confronting his sister and I think he dies, but I'm not entirely sure. The actual Avatar does some training here and there I guess but otherwise I don't really know anything about his adventure.
I did the same exercise with Bloomburrow, which I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about as the general magicverse, and I won't say it excels in the department, but I get a greater sense of the setting and culture. I don't know if any of this is true, but it seems like Valley is a high-trust multicultural society of good vibes, and their chief concern are calamity beasts whose lifecycle follow the four seasons, and have gotten more active as of late and are encroaching on Valley more aggressively. The Mice serve as the primary vanguard against the calamity beasts, supported by an aerial network of birds. Bats are deep into astrology, rats use snail shells as mnemonic devices, squirrels squirrel away the remains of calamity beasts because of their magical properties, and I think otters channel storms through pearls and maybe other seafloor detritus. I don't feel like I really know the world, but it captures the imagination to a much greater extent than Avatar, where I'm only left wondering what relationship each of these nodnescript named characters have with each other.
>But the source material is great
Yeah that doesn't really matter to me. I'm sure the three seasons of avatar gives it much more room to develop a setting than a single magic set would, but I'm judging sets against each other, and this one doesn't make me want to watch the show, just as I don't really care to read the magic books. If wotc wants to do storytelling, they should do it through the medium of the game—the actual cards—especially when it comes to the worldbuilding. Shadowmoor is my favorite magic setting, and I enjoyed its book back when it came out, because it's just a collection of small stories about how everyone is suffering. The actual overarching story for Lorwyn-Shadowmoor is kinda nonsense and doesn't add a whole lot to the setting. I've heard the Kamigawa books are great, but I think the set already does a great job of outlining the greater plot of the setting. I kind of lost interest in Magic settings with Theros henceforth, but even then I think the magic planes do a better job of worldbuilding than any UB set, because a lot of the cards are used to depict the actual setting, instead of isolated events in a story I know and learn nothing about.
I think the only UB settings I can agree to feel thematically at home with magic is D&D, 40K and LotR. Avatar and Final Fantasy have too many cards whose aesthetic are far too distonnected with Magic's general vibe, if we pretend that magic still has a visual identity after the bombardment of secret lairs and frame treatments. I'd still rather they weren't here though, along with bloomburrow and the detective and cowboy hats.
(Then there's also the licencing issues of UB and how there's no guarantee that we can revisit any of these settings, and potentially have to try and shoehorn reprints of these cards into another setting while tricking less informed players into breaking deckbuilding restrictions. At least modern deckbuilding sites somewhat alleviate that last issue.)