Is WotC insane? they killed the phyrexians!!!! ever since the introduction of a M:tG storyline Urza and the Phrexians had been locked in battle. It was an inteligent and interesting battle. now, the fools killed them all!!!!!!!!! I think Oddesys story is dumb. I want my phyrexians back...snivle...sob...I WANT MY PHREXIANS!!!!!!!!!
Who knows maybe they will make a return never count yawgmoth out but until then its cool having different charcters introduced.
It'd be much cooler withOUT any characters introduced whatsoever. Actually, the right thing for WotC to do would be to snip everything since Alliances out of the official storyline and continue from there... "Never mind the b.s. about Weatherlight and all that - that never happened. So, where were we? Oh yes, the Sarpadia..."
amen
Praises be to the man who loves the Sarpadian Empire! Can I get an amen?
TESTIFY!!!
Curses . . . you are the man just for suggesting that. I meant about the "no weatherlight" idea, as I really don't care what Gerrard does in his spare time. 
Gerrard and company can do whatever they want as long as they never grace another magic card with their repetitive visages.
I liked magic better when it was arcane and mysterious . . . at one point I believe every card was supposed to be from a different plane of existance.
Sarpadia was awesome . . . I'll testify to that. Even if the set wasn't the best, it was still a good idea thematically speaking.
-HengeWolf
I haven't read Odyssey.
Is the new storyline better than the wussy Weatherlight one?
The old stories like Arena and Ashes of the Sun were good, so I really wonder why the storyline went to pieces.
Even Weatherlight picked up till I read it ended when Urza and Gerrard sacrificed themselves to kill the gigantic blob being.
I thought the minotaurs were boring, but the Fall of Oneah was interesting. Arena was...odd. The guy(Garth, right?) won an awful lot of matches with Craw Wurm.
I remember one of the old books was absolutely atrocious. It was the one with Giant Badger in it, 'Shattered Chains' perhaps. In this book, all the wizards are evil manipulators, their summoned monsters are innocent creatures held against their will: all in all, a really negative portrayal of the game. The one 'good' wizard had her mind erased by magic at an early age, only after leaving the 'magical' forest where she grew up does she become conscious. Of course, she's trying to destroy all the other wizards and put an end to magic. What a way to endorse the game, right? I might not have all the plot points exactly correct (I read it about 5-6 years ago), but the book was rubbish. I don't want to think about summoned monsters as oppressed slaves, sheesh!
I always thought of summoned monsters as my friends and allies, how naive was I.
Arena was indeed an odd book. It was written a little better than the later books, but I wouldn't consider it good literature or anything.
-HengeWolf
Hengewolf i remember that book. Shattered chains was it, i read only that and Arena.
It ruined the whole magic concept. Wizards could do some spells without the amulet domahickies, and that Benalish Hero from Arena is Garth's wife, Garth is kidnapped and all the traslocated monsters go on a crusade under Garth's wife to stop the wizards summoning them 'cause they don't put them back, and in the end Garth escapes on his own and translocates him and his wife home, leaving the rest of the crusade behind.
Run on sentances suck, but that's how it was.
I DREAM OF ONLY ONE THING.
THAT THEY BRING BACK LIM DUL AND LET HIM GO ON A KILLING SPREE WITH NEVINYRRAL...
Larry Nevin
Spree? Don´t you mean Squee?
Disk destroyes, you should use Plow on Squee and send him farming!
Quote:Praises be to the man who loves the Sarpadian Empire! Can I get an amen?
I agree that magic cards should totally come independent from eachother. I don't like similar stories, creature types, mechanics, races, common properties.. Except maybe funny ones like fungi or the all-so-serious-looking killer homarids.
If they printed an old card today, say wheel of fortune, probably they would name it "meshif's hand discarding 7 mana drawer revard candy present" or something. Enough of those names. Enough cabals and kefals and their mechanics. Don't dim people's imagination so much.
Torment is about to come, I did not buy a single odyssey card yet. There are very, very few single cards which fit my definition of a magic card in the expansion.
Puschkin, I -hope- you are joking.
They should take the storyline at a much slower pace.
A few themes here and there are okay, but they take it too far now. I was happy with Shivan Dragon, I didn't need the entire history and ecology of "Shiv". I actually LIKED not knowing what 'Shivan' was. Magic was once a game of imagination, now it's all prepackaged plots and prepackaged deck ideas. Sucked a lot of the fun right out of it.
The new dual lands are all proper place names, "Karplusan Forest", "Llanowar Wastes". How can I have multiples of the same specific geographic area, are there really that many Llanowar Wastes in all of Dominaria? It's little stuff like that . . . A Taiga or a Bayou could exist anywhere in any multitude of planes, that used to be the nature of the game. All your lands were connections to different UNIVERSES. Notice how the game has definitely shrunk in scope.
Having said all that, I really like Deserted Temple. Good artwork, great flavor text. Now if only I had a use for the card. One thing I've noticed about Odyssey if that the art seems a little better than past sets. Maybe it's just me?
-HengeWolf
Well, it was designed by Richard Garfield, I believe.
But when you take it at a slower pace, you have a larger card pool for Brian Weissman to look at and (maybe; 1/100 chance) pick a card for 'the deck'. Plus it leads to more deck variety instead of just keeper (just kidding).
You guys have to realize that the more cards they print the more specific they have to get. When they created magic, it was more easy and imaginable cards weren´t invented yet. Wanna make a green/black dualland? Name it Bayou, which really is a cross between jungle and swamp. But how to name it next time? Same goes for card mechanics and flavour texts. All the good ones are already used. It´s like naming your website.
Amen to the dude up there. I loved the Sarpadia story line. I was gonna buy a set of Fallen Empires just so I could read the flavor text but other things took my attention away.
-Rico
Hmm strange they printed all those shitty card ideas. Maybe I should go work at WOTC. I think the biggest problem with the story-line is that they started including characters that had to many appearences on other cards.
Gerrard's Wisdom was ok. But I don't understand why he should appear on cards that don't even bear his name?
The other problem is the "american" style comic-heroes thing that started to appear in Magic. Maybe WOTC wanted to make us fans of the characters so we would buy shitty cards with Gerrard or Mirri on 'em. It's a good idea, but I don't understand why they invented losers on a flying ship.
In older expansions like Ice Age, character names were used as quotes (replacing Plato and other Real people) but the quotes were inventive and nice. My favorites are still the Femeref culture and Sarpadian history.
But with Weatherlight it went wrong, now we had to read bits of dialogue from a Magic Novel ???
Call it merchandizing.
From Weatherlight on I dislike the story. Flying airships and crew members behaving like movie´s heroes? Is this Star Trek or what?
My favourite set of flavour texts was in Antiquities. It was especially great if you know nothing about the brother´s war and/or the cards themselves.
I guess it just goes back to . . . too many damned cards. Actually, I think they could do a better job with names. A lot of the newer cards are looking like they took about 2 seconds to think up. What the hel is a Spiritmonger anyway? And I DO NOT want to read the novel to find out.
The distinct storylines started with Weatherlight; I swear they only did that because of a similar Storyline idea in the now defunct Legend of the 5 Rings. Back around '96 or '97, L5R, which was storyline based, experienced a flash in the pan surge in popularity. What does WotC do, they give us their own version of "story".
I agree it's like a bad version of Star Trek, or a bad version of every other american comic-book and movie cliche. Although I'm a big fan of fantasy, as a creative person I find very little in their "storylines" that rises above the level of a slightly above average high-school aged Dungeon Master.
It's trite, to put it another way. You have the goody-good guys, and the baddy-bad guys. Obligatory aliens, oops now they're fantasy creatures. Unstoppable mechanistic threats. Dialog that's been borrowed straight from other books and movies? Terrible . . .
Antiquities was my favorite too! Why, because I felt like an archaeologist unraveling a story from only meager clues. We didn't have any character legends (Urza, Planeswalker . . . no thanks). We had "named" artifacts, but that makes more sense to me than junk like "Urza's Guilt". Obviously the artificers named their creations, but did urza really sit down and say "This spell will be my rage, and it'll actually come from this thing I'm driving."
In the day I built a Mishra/Ashnod deck of mostly AQ cards, and wondered what the people were like. Antiquities is still one of my favorite sets, because it told a story without overdoing it, and without providing details. Were Mishra and Ashnod lovers? I'd rather not know!
I think the best sets for theme took an approach that either accessed a past history (AQ and FE), or were timeless like Alpha. Each card should be a world, or a small window into a forgotten age, not just another page in the latest hack-fantasy novel.
"Welcome to the shores of imagination."
At least Garfield will always have my respect.
-HengeWolf
The picture of Spiritmonger was from a contest, you can read it all on Wizards.com... It's not in the novel...
Hey guys, have you seen this thread?
http://boards.wizards.com/tcg/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=28&t=006119
(No, I'm NOT pimping my own post.)
"At least Garfield will always have my respect."
Bah, Garfield is a sellout, even if selling out was the financially reasonable thing for him to do (isn't it always?). He abandoned his game unto the cruel, short-sighted corporate world, and look where THAT got us.
I have seen that thread. Incidentally Curses, which one were you? I might just write something there . . . I wonder if they're actually ready to listen to people. Somehow I doubt it, it's all about appearances in the corpy world.
Garfield did sell out, but in his defense I don't think he envisioned the game becoming what it has. I respect his original vision of the game, how's that for a revision.
-HengeWolf
I just went to the Wizards site and got the lowdown on the Spiritmonger. Despite the creator's somewhat incoherent description (which I'll forgive, since it wasn't a writing contest), all I can say is . . . I actually like it. The card makes sense to me now, it's a very weird idea, but it's better than just another Djinn or Angel. I just found a replacement for Juzam in my casual deck of choice.
Long live Gwendyln Di Corci!
Anyone remember when Dakkon Blackblade was The Man? I bet a few people traded moxes for him.
-HengeWolf
I wish I'd known about the create-a-creature contest, I'd have submitted for sure. Damn . . .
I was the one with the handle "Curses/Foiled". >;) The thread's still active, you know. And will they listen? If 200 guys storm in and damn them for what they've done, possibly... And that's basically what's been happening there so far. A slim hope is still a hope.
Yeah, the Garfield's original MtG was a neat concept. We all got a taste of it, back when we bought our first starters of Unlimited or whatever, playing against buddies owning less than 200 cards, not even *knowing* what cards existed... No tournaments, no nuthin'. Now that I think it, it all was actually pretty sw33t. Innocent, in a weird way. I recall looking at things like Bog Wraith with almost religious awe...
Ahhh. Why didn't that magic last?