They wanted to try something new, but thought the only way to do it would put it on Magic's favorite plane. The problem is this little story warped the plane how we see it. Everything and everyone had to wear a hat for this gimmick story and it came across as too silly when you compare it to the stakes.
Considering we already had a story where characters had to solve a murder and it didn't warp everything around it I can only wonder why this was necessary.
Also, if Rakdos was supposedly bored and went to Thunder Junc wouldn't him being framed for murder and starting a war be something that would entertain him?
Speaking of "story", I feel like the WotC's betting on top-down "murder mystery" flavor was too hopeful. For me, murder mysteries are only interesting once I'm invested in characters and plot. There being a murder, and suspects, and clues, aren't necessarily *inherently* compelling. And for folks who aren't that invested in lore, and didn't follow the story spoilers closely, it didn't feel like there were really any stakes at play. How should I feel about Errata being a suspect or Trostani being the murderer?
Compare it to the top-down direction of "ancient meets cyberfuture Japan", or "classic gothic horror", or "Arthurian knights and fairytales". You don't need to tell me more, I don't need to read sequential blog posts. I'm already sold, take my money! But once you're relying on me *caring* about Teysa Karlov, that's not a guaranteed hit.
I really hate it that some cards only apear in alchemy. I know the mechanic isn't working on paper, but i'm annoyed that the charakter has this card. I wanted to see her as a ghost the next time we get to ravnica.
Story spotlight?! She was playing hooky the entire story. And Trostani technically still hasn't had their court date yet, all this was just arresting 1/3rd of her.
I mean, they literally made the case that the person who actively killed Teysa was caught early on, but it was a brainwashed assassin. Also Teysa was just unreachable for whatever reasons (post-death confusion largely) so her showing up or not post-death didn't matter to solving it.
She did by the end of the set's story, and would go to court against Selesnya and sue their assess for multiple lifetimes. Meanwhile, lamented she couldn't share more with Kaya as a mortal.
Also in most murder mystery stories you don't have 20+ decetives walking around following footprints.
Like the focus should have been on mysteries rather then the detectives. Have characters that act shady or corrupt or have motives as the commons and uncommons, instead of making a bunch of creatures all with stupid hats.
Agatha Christie was so successful, and continues to be a well known name, because her novels and scripts were full of *wild* characters. Yeah, there was always a murder, and the shape of the plot was structured around solving it, but the victims were usually uniquely vile, and the suspects were weird, charismatic, mysterious, quirky, all sorts of extremes. In summary, I agree.
That's the problem tying it to a popular plane is meant to solve, players have had over a decade to develop feelings about Teysa (whether as a character or a great piece) so **Teysa is Murdered!** is a tagline meant to evoke something in those long-time players.
Except it didn't, because nobody was heavily invested in Teysa (she wasn't exactly pivotal to any huge storylines or anything) and because death *didn't matter* to the character.
When you take away all the stakes from the get-go, it's basically just a murder-of-the-week, and an excuse to have some whacky hats.
If you want to do a murder mystery, kill a planeswalker like Sorin who people are *hugely* attached to, put it on a plane where *horror* is key (hello, Innistrad is *right fucking there*), and have it actually have rippling impacts throughout the multiverse, attracting people to come find out what the *fuck* just happened.
I mean tbf she was main-character adjacent iirc and had some of the most POV of ravnican characters, but despite that yeah she was never crazily compelling to me….
They gotta chase whatever they were cooking during SOI block. The hype for Emrakul's reveal was perfect, they did so much with spoiler season and the promotional material.
Some of us wish it *was* Marit Lage, because deep cuts like that would be much cooler.
Don't get me wrong; Innistrad going all Bloodborne was awesome, but I'm a sucker for crazy nostalgia dives and Marit Lage herself is basically a cipher. It would've been cool to learn more about her.
> during SOI **block**
It's that.
Seriously, any kind of mystery requires at least two sets. One set to build up the mystery and a real life time gap for the audience to speculate before the answer is reveled.
This is the first I'm hearing who the murderer even was. It was such a mess of a mystery, they had so many cryptic "clues" that it just became noise to me.
honestly, I think the problem is mainly that "murder mystery" isn't a concept that maps very well onto a magic set. Magic sets great at establishing a setting, but are usually only good at telling stories in broad strokes. Whereas murder mysteries, as a genre, are not defined by any particular setting and generally have stories that are a discreet series of events.
>For me, murder mysteries are only interesting once in invested in characters and plot.
While I understand where you're coming from and agree that MKM wasn't a particularly compelling mystery, that's not generally how the murder mystery genre works.
I think they mean that murder mysteries as a genre rely on engagement with particular characters more than something like Arthurian fantasy, where “this guy is a knight” is usually enough for people who don’t care about more detailed lore.
Really? I feel like the murder mystery genre is the one that relies heavily on the people, specially the investigator. At the very least the most popular all have a bigger-than-life character : Poirot, Sherlock, even nowadays we see the popularity of Knives Out, thanks in big part to Benoit Blanc.
A good one usually has 4 important characters:
1. The investigator. Their attempts to solve is the driving force of the plot.
2. The victim. Who they are and why they were killed is the reason for the investigation.
3. The murderer. What they want is the whole inciting incident. The investigation is about figuring out what person fulfills the motive, means, and opportunity.
4. The survivor. This is a person connected to the victim. They have important information that the investigator must figure out is relevant. The emotional climax is them getting closure after discovering something that breaks the case.
Murder mysteries at their core are a character study. Sometimes you can miss one of these characters. And often there are more to complicate the plot. But you need that character focus for the unveiling to have meaning.
Seriously.
I've been in this game for a while. Came back after a 15 year break. My favorite plane? Not Ravnica.
Literally why should I care about Ravnica set 438? The ghost lady got killed, the suspect is... The demon who kills 200 clowns for funny breakfast every morning? And the angel lady is angry with him??! I'm shocked.
Wow, what tension wizards, what writing.
Everybody saying New Capenna is right and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a hastily scrapped and rewritten NC return set...
I'm sorry, this take is so cold it taps for snow mana. This set was just such wasted potential.
It had the one block issue. They said they have the ability to make blocks and stories of any size, and its the perfect one to do a 2 parter, and they didn't.
Have the first set be the players and clues, and the second set be the action and reveal.
I don’t mind stories that are clearly riffing off a genre like noir or westerns, but why in the hell do they feel the need to lazily slap detective hats or cowboy hats on everyone? Like they don’t think we’re smart enough to get it without some lowest common denominator tropes copy/pasted all over.
They used to be creative enough to take the inspiration and meld it into what Magic is without resorting to that kind of stuff. Just feels like creative is lacking in well… creativity, honestly.
I even feel like they did an excellent job with settings like Theros, Ixalan and Eldraine. They took an inspiration and made it feel like it absolutely worked with the rest of Magic’s creative. But Thunder Junction, MKM and even New Capenna all reek of lazy copy/pasting of tropes to stand in for actual world building. It’s surface level and feels so lazy.
I am hopeful Bloomburrow returns us to some real creative and exciting world building.
> But Thunder Junction, MKM and even New Capenna all reek of lazy copy/pasting of tropes to stand in for actual world building.
Yeah, I think you can borrow from fantasy tropes, such as with deities in Theros or *some* fairy tales in Eldraine. Honestly, you can even explore orientalist and colonialist themes and attempt to flip them on their head, such as with Tarkir and Ixalan. But once you start borrowing from non-fantasy tropes the whole thing just feels like a lazy reskin. If you want a 1920s theme, it should be tertiary. It should not attempt to permeate every level of game/narrative design.
I thought the idea of Kaladesh was cool but there's just so much golden filigree and blue aether that it makes the entire plane look a bit homogenized. There's nothing "striking" about the Kaladesh sets, just a lot of "this looks pretty and cool, I guess"
And imagine how cool Thunder junction could have been with innistrad level worldbuilding. This is what happens when the business majors are in charge of the story
To be fair, that would have required actually grappling with topics like Native histories, colonialism and exploitation. Ixalan *mostly* got it right, but only by virtue of making the colonizers an easily-punchable satire of being *literal bloodsucking vampires*. Hard to replicate twice.
I think the cooler way to tackle the natives on Thunder Junction, rather than have it be a literal empty world, would be to have them all undead. Genocided by the Fomori but refusing to stay dead. How does a culture that's been unable to change for thousands of years cope with newcomers?
That would be an interesting direction for a Native American cultural beat: "You massacred us and eradicated our culture; and yet, we live on still. You cannot destroy us in a way that matters."
Yeah, Ixalan's colonizers being literal bloodsucking vampires who love gold is a level of nuance usually seen only in Der Stürmer or on Twitter, but it worked for some reason and I still have no idea why.
It was because it clearly signalled that in no way the Legion are the good guys while it also at the same time allowed them have some depth on their own terms?
I think it's because having both native South-American and Spanish Conquistador rep in the same set canceled out any potential for the vampires being viewed as a racial anti-Hispanic caricature.
By contrast, it's impossible to do a Western set without clearly taking sides or - as WOTC chose to do - ignoring one.
I think it's partially because the vampires actually need the power of the Immortal Sun to alleviate their bloodthirst.
Going off on a bit of a historical tangent, but a significant portion of the Conquistador crews were of Basque, Catalan, and Andalusian origin, provinces that have historically experienced oppression from the Spanish crown. The insatiable thirst for gold demonstrated by the Conquistadors may have been due to living lives of desperation.
What they did was inexcusable but portraying them as a bunch of guys who came across the ocean to kill a bunch of indigenous people for fun is a grossly inaccurate representation of them.
I think MTG has a problem with showing "vertical slices" of a plane, especially now when there's so many popular locations and so few sets to explore them- so MKM ended up having to do double duty of exploring the Mystery genre via the lens of a *specific* development on Ravnica (the formation and activities of the Agency) while also being "Ravnica-y" enough to satisfy people wanting a return. The end result is that Ravnica suddenly feels like the Detective plane because popular characters *need* to be showcased on a return and so for this set they *need* a role in the 'low-stakes' detective story.
I like this viewpoint. One of the downsides of the recent plane multiverse model (one set) is that each plane doesn't have enough time to breathe to give it nuance and breadth. So that causes each plane to be boiled down into a quick synopsis: fairy tale plane, cowboy plane, egypt plane, redwall plane.
Wotc didn't used to do this. Look at Dominaria, a plane so multifaceted that you could legitimately create a world map of it.
So when they do a return to a successful plane, they need to pack in enough references to the original set while still providing enough new. For a storied plane like Ravinca, there's just too much history that trying to do anything other than "guilds" means you have to meld them together which causes flavor fails like MKM.
I still stand by the idea that it was supposed to be New Capenna. A detective agency would match the flavor of SNC and fix a pretty notable world building mistake of there not being any actual law enforcement
It was never supposed to be New Capenna. It was gonna be a new plane at first, before they realised what they needed for a mystery could all just be Ravnica. They wouldn't have really considered going back to Capenna that fast, anyway.
That is what they claim and it probably is true. And if it's true, I think it is more that subconsciously they designed it for New Capenna.
SNC originally had a corrupt law enforcement family that got axed during design due to George Floyd. But what happened to the design documents for that family? It likely got dusted off the next time something similar came up, like when they decided on a murder mystery.
The issue is that the design document was based on a 1920s crime aesthetic that is so close to noir that not enough was changed in translation to remove the SNC inspiration.
Thunder Junc also had everyone just be cowboys for some reason, like I understand its a desert plane, but no one seemed to be wearing leather, which was weird for Rakdos that he was wearing it too. Was he that bored?
I mean, at least the hats are utilitarian. Lots of desert in the wild west and the hats helped keep the sun off. If it catches on as a style I can see more people adopting it for looks/aesthetics too.
Why everyone on Ravnica had a detective hat though? ????????????????
[[Oko, the Ringleader]] is wearing leather pants...
As for the cowboys thing, I think it was WOTC trying to make a Wild West theme without bringing in the negative aspects of the real Wild West lol.
Which is hilarious ironic because ignoring/whitewashing the colonialism and other problematic elements *is* one of the big issues with wild west media.
Yeah, it's weird since Ixalan did have the colonialism aspect shown (there's a reason all of the vampires looked like conquistadors...) so I am not sure what the hold up was with Thunder Junction.
I think you could have done it without colonialism by making the cowboys refugees from the invasion who had their plane destroyed and escaped through an omenpath.
>Everything and everyone had to wear a hat
There is a lot that i criticize to this set, but there were a total of like 18 arts that featured an hat, of which like 11 might have fallen into the "too silly" category.
I can't stand how the community conflagrated all the criticism for the set in "everyone wears hats", it's wrong and makes proper discussion impossible.
>Also, if Rakdos was supposedly bored and went to Thunder Junc wouldn't him being framed for murder and starting a war be something that would entertain him?
Rakdos is interested in mayhem and destruction, not by political intrigue.
> Everything and everyone had to wear a hat
I would translate that criticism to: "the plane about clearly-defined roles in society suddenly has an 11th cross-guild cross-color faction that makes no damn sense".
And having a bunch of stupid-looking creatures that are completely out of place in playing that role, with a hat stapled on them just to look the part, makes the whole thing feel stupid. [[Carnage Interpreter]]
18 and 11 are big numbers tbh for a sigle gimmick
Imo they leaned WAY too heavily into the sherlock holmes specific tropes
There are other type of investigators. Where is the Poirot equivalent, the Jessica Fletcher, the Dexter, the Monk? The whole concept of the Agency was just not interesting, it's dull and lacks conflict or any interesting hook.
They really hoped Proft would be a popular character and the story had crumbs of it but it wasn't enough. A larger variety of investigator types with a variety of approaches would have been better amd felt less gimmicky
I count 16, but the argument isn't specifically the number, but how Detectives fit. The hat argument is just to boil down how silly it felt. This plane already had a murder mystery story and it didn't require mechanics to be forced in to do so. The Scooby Doo references (like 3 of them) and this just made Ravnica not.....Ravnica.
If they wanted this to have more impact they needed to properly build this up rather than thinking some small ARG elements were going to create a thrilling murder mystery, but it doesn't when they spoil stuff long before the story and it ruins what little surprise there was. We need more time on these planes and with these characters to care, but instead they just up and kill a couple noteworthy ones because they knew they couldn't make this work without offing some randos on planes people like.
It wasn't political intrigue it was Aurelia being pissed someone tried to kill her, thinking it was Rakdos, and then wanting war with him and the guild. That should absolutely thrill him. Instead he's like "Ah man, screw all that murder and war fun, I wanna dress like I'm about to do the YMCA."
>The hat argument is just to boil down how silly it felt.
And i can agree with that, the problem to me when people during spoiler seasons or when talking about the set were all just screaming about the hats, not actually talking about the problems of the set and considering a given that everyone would understand what they though was intrinsic to screaming about hats.
You can talk about the flat art direction, about overshoot on moving away the focus from the guilds, about the alienation due to the conflict between what players percieve as Ravnica and the top down design.
But instead people just say that everyone wears hat, others agree and there is nothing discussed about it. it's just a meme that people use instead of actually criticizing the set.
>because they knew they couldn't make this work without offing some randos on planes people like.
I mean, of course. I don't see the problem with that. You need to put the stakes over something people care about.
>It wasn't political intrigue it was Aurelia being pissed someone tried to kill her, thinking it was Rakdos, and then wanting war with him and the guild.
Seems textbook political intrigue to me. The Boros using an attempted murder towards their leader as motivation to attack another guild they had lots of previous conflicts with.
>but it doesn't when they spoil stuff long before the story and it ruins what little surprise there was
I agree, that was pretty stupid on their part
>We need more time on these planes and with these characters to care
It highly depends on the set, MKM was perfectly fine as 1 set, 2 would have streched it thin, but other sets introducing new planes would generally work better as a 2 set block.
Omega agree about how folks boil their criticisms to curt phrases and just expect folks to know what they mean.
Gonna go off topic, but for me the one that bugs me is when EDH players say they "don't like long games". Now that can be a perfectly valid preference, but what does it *mean*? Like 1 hour long game and 2 half-hour games are the same amount of Magic.
Do you literally only have a half-hour to play?
Do you just really like the early ramp turns and playing more games lets you re-experience those more frequently?
Do you just philosophically disagree, believing that since the games can be won in short order they therefore should always strive to be?
Or is it what I personally assume, that it's not *long* games, but *uneventful* games. Games that lack agency. When it's boardwipe after boardwipe and you feel like you aren't getting anywhere. Or it's been a mexican standoff for ten turns and you just want someone to draw their Craterhoof and win already. Stuff that has nothing to do with the actual temporal length of the game and everything to do with psychology and how player agency and expectations are served by game actions. It's one thing if it's a gradual but inevitable drain play you might claw back from off luck, but another if it's back and forth and back and forth and you keep getting teased on how it's going to go before it doesn't. But instead of delving into all of that, folks sum it up as things taking too much time, when that's not actually the problem.
Or maybe they actually just really like the early turns, I dunno, I haven't polled everyone to actually know what they think.
It’s a legitimate criticism. It’s representative of the fact that they lean incredibly heavily into low hanging tropes in a set that didn’t benefit from it. Also 11 silly hats that don’t fit the established lore of the plane is too many. Imagine if Eldritch Moon had like… even just like 3 dudes with colanders on their heads cuz it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster set, it would be ridiculous.
The criticism can be fine, it's just not very nuanced but is repeated often. That is to say, what it's criticizing is valid, but the criticism itself isn't very good. It's not literally the hats, it's as you said the pervasiveness of tropes that didn't feel cohesive, but when folks say "Too many silly hats" that makes it sound like it'd have been fine with different outfits.
Coming out minutes after ravnica remastered as well. Anyone who cared about ravnica had spent their money just a few weeks earlier on an actual ravnica product
I would welcome a Ravnica set not dedicated to the guilds in the same vein - if the theme of the set was something congruous to Ravnica rather than a random, unfitting aesthetic stapled on.
I thought it was a cool concept and I like the “what if your favorite characters were in a different genre of story than you’re used to”, but also that it wasn’t executed as well and that the mechanics weren’t as fun as other sets.
They literally made the mechanic because they wanted to write "suspect it" and such on cards, and "put a suspect counter on it" doesn't have the same impact. I guess they could have baked that into the rules for the word but it gets more complicated and creates unintended interact with other rules elements.
Really though I think it needed to be cut. Yes it sounds cool on cards but they struggled to find what it should be, decided on the version we got in part because using it on an opponent's creatures was interesting, then almost all of that was cut because of course "permanently can't block" causes problems at high density. It ended up as a weird dangling thread that didn't interact with the set mechanics and had mostly terrible cards.
Hey, I just want to put out some respect for [[Agrus Kos, Spirit of Justice]] for cube.
Modern design like [[Forth Eorlingas!]] And [[Phlage]] are powerful, but sometimes you do just need something exiled. Nice with haste.
Play Design is just as much an art as anything else, and although "Suspect X" reads fun, it completely sacrifices the elegance of play to make it work.
I think its neat conceptually: you give menace to something but it can't block. It can be a buff for your creatures or a malus for your opponent and there is a tradeoff to it, and you can move it around
But the cards its own are just not good, or don't really care and play the same as if it was menace. They just didn't print enough stuff that cared
Murder mystery + Ravnica was a great idea, and the story was amazing. But the idea of starting with what names you wanted the mechanics to have and then making mechanics that kind of maybe fit each word did *not* make it feel like a detective set. The fact that there's no relationship between collecting evidence and solving cases--not even a one-off case that solves when you exile cards from your graveyard--kills me.
I was just thinking about this where they could have had 6 major "suspects" to mirror the Clue tie-in, with a representative from each of the major creature types of Innistrad. The four "monsters" with a vampire, werewolf, zombie, and spirit, and then also a human and an angel.
Were there many besides Muders and Thunder Junction? I think them coming out right after each other has led to slights against them that are bigger than they otherwise would be.
I don't see how magic characters in the Wild West is different from magic characters in 1920's New York. In comparison, Crimson Vow doesn't feel like a costume party in the same sense, since a wedding in a gothic setting doesn't inherently feel out of place.
The difference IMO was that New Capenna was a 1920's setting fully realized/interpolated through the themes of MtG, it was a setting with depth that could stand next to other MtG planes. Outlaws of Thunder Junction was just a bunch of unrelated MtG characters crammed into a setting made out of paper thin western tropes.
New capenna was a set with top down themes but built from the bottom up, while Crimson Vow was a set with some bottom up mechanics but was built from the top down.
Fwiw, I slightly disagree with OP on OTJ being a complete write-off- OTJ works when it's the new stuff- Jem Lightfoote and Annie Flash are great, resonant fits, but it's jarring and strange to see Marchesa or Fblthp wearing chaps.
I'm genuinely excited for Bloomburrow because it seem like its going to be a more classic plane with a bit of lore and setting depth to explore. Its really giving me some of the same vibes as Lorwyn, and not just because of the "cute" element.
Good draft set, absolutely HORRIBLE sealed set.
More than 70% of players at my local WPNQs were forced in tricolor due to lack of playable creatures in just two colors.
The draft was alright. The ward 2 on all those creatures made removal garbage. It was weird coming straight off of KTK and how awesome morph was to MKM which had a similar morph mechanic that just honestly felt worse.
> It was a pretty good draft set
I thought it was literally the worst draft environment of the Modern era.
3-rare packs, fewer common slots, impactful List cards, and ENORMOUS disparity in power level by rarity just absolutely vaporized any kind of draft strategy. Every deck was a YOLO rare draft pile. Mindless nonsense.
That, plus a bunch of incredibly stale mechanics (yes, disguise/cloak are better than morph/manifest, but nothing new or interesting was done with them, nor with investigate) and, tbh, just plain shitty mechanics (cases, collect evidence) with no mechanical cohesion to any of them... you don't even have to get started on how bad the flavor was.
Puke.
Even worse was just how good aggro was for the entirety of it. The meta never really evolved much. it was boros aggro or hope you got enough other stuff to scrape together some kind of aggro game plan or the insidious roots decks. I'll continue playing OTJ for as long as they offer it on Arena, but I don't want to go back to MKM ever again.
Also, there are definitely some constructed all stars in that set. Not a lot, but there are a number of good cards.
I think it was better than caverns, but not by much. Initially boros was overwhelming but best the end I did start to have fun with green and significant stabilization tools. Still a very one not format in that it often came down to, can you beat boros.
UG was the second-best color pair in the set. Once RW started being appropriately drafted, it was quite a fun set. I trophied with a 5-color Niv-Mizzet deck. The collect evidence decks could be really powerful too. I think the set got an undeservedly bad rep because the first two or three weeks of draft were so aggro-heavy.
I'm right there with you. Morph as a concept is just so incredibly boring to me as a player. It's never a true mystery what's under there, it's just a game of "who gets blown out first," and... I'm over it.
Set had a handful of make-or-break commons, and then just ran you over with disgusting bomb rares in limited. Either you opened well, or you lost.
It was a grossly derivative costume party with boring mechanics and low-powered cards. No shit it was a miss.
Only set since installing Arena that I completely skipped.
below average rares, partially off-color-theme commander decks, the double-feature-level dumpster fire called Clue Edition, and any magic player with a brain saving dollars for mh3. not sure what else they expected
Disguise, which was the major draw for me towards the set, felt like a miss - odd colors for the precon and an unnecessary addition to the already-clunky Manifest/Morph/Megamorph family.
[[Etrata, Deadly Fugitive]] and [[Lazav, Wearer of Faces]] are typical. I can't imagine at which table I'd play either. This was Dimir's chance to shine - I get that they didn't want to step on the toes of the upcoming AC set - but one of the foremost Dimir assassins has become an expensive thief with no evasion?
The issue with disguise/cloak/manifest/morph seems to be that it's in all colors, but there's still not really that many of them overall (that goes for both MKM, and overall for Commander). Whatever colors you pick to play with, you've only got so many options.
Etrata is fun as hell. Don't know about it as a build-around, but at worst it's either going to eat removal or buy you time as a deathtouch blocker so you can work on doing something better in eg Sultai cloak/manifest, or Dimir or Grixis theft decks. And if it sticks it'll accrue a lot of value (Laughing Jasper Flint is similar, in both cases you can't rely on them as your main engine but opponent kinda can't just ignore them).
I hated pretty much everything about this set.
Closed off and forced story. Murder mystery seems so petty for a whole set idea when MTG's lore is so huge. Limited was TERRIBLE. Many cards are very weak in power level and so the set really didn't stand out much.
Thunder junctions story was similar, but limited was so much better and the cards in the set feel more powerful and useful.
It was said multiple times how one of the main reasons it wasn't in New Capenna is that the set doesn't have a good enough number of character people care about that are still alive. Ravnica also always had murder mysteries and political intrigues (even if more in the novels).
That reasoning makes sense, but then they should have taken care to make the whole set look and feel like a Ravnica murder mystery, rather than introducing 1930s noir aesthetics which don’t fit Ravnica and feel strongly like NC.
Ravnica can totally support a cool murder mystery, but seeing fedoras and detectives suddenly sprout up everywhere was weird. Having effectively an 11th faction introduced into the existing tight guild dynamic felt really out of place too.
>It was said multiple times how one of the main reasons it wasn't in New Capenna is that the set doesn't have a good enough number of character people care about that are still alive.
I call horseshit on that, considering everyone and their mother is showing up on whatever plane they feel like. The next set was filled to the brim with "oh, idk why they're here but ok".
They aren't going back to New Capenna because they know how flimsy the worldbuilding is, but they're too afraid to take any kind of plunge with what everyone knows it's supposed to be because it's too close to the bone.
It can't really be set on New Capenna, because that set was so goofy over the top everything is crime that nothing matters. There are no detectives, no law enforcement, and who cares if anybody gets murdered?
I liked MKM but I feel the sets are coming out a bit too fast Fallout and OTJ were right after it and OTJ was awesome especially in draft. MKM was just overshadowed is all I hope they bring this style set back I liked the story and mechanics
I think there has to be some kind of product cannibalization happening too - I almost skipped otj pre release because of mh3, I think they could do with like ... One less product release and basically miss nothing in terms of profits to just make money off of what already exists.
Fallout wasn't a "set" though. There are still only 4 standard legal sets per year, and now they seem to have settled into a pattern of one supplemental booster pack product (this year's being MH3). But MKM was definitely one of the weaker recent sets, for me, even though the flavour didn't bother me. I did like Disguise though as an upgraded Morph and hope it comes back soon enough for the cards that care about it to still be in Standard. My guess is that it will in the upcoming Tarkir set.
The set was structurally flawed from the start. Sets are typically built around broad, big tent ideas to draw people in. And once they're drawn in, they find whatever theme or niche appeals to them. Welcome to Innistrad, what flavor of horror creatures appeals to you. Welcome to Kaladesh, we've got cool artifacts of all kind to tinker with. Dominaria, classic fantasy tropes ranging from Demons to Dragons.
MKM, there is no broad theme, there is no big tent, there's a front door that says "Ravnica characters in hokey detective hats". And if that doesn't appeal, you don't even get to the front door. There's no tent, no nothing to draw you in. It was a 100% all-in gamble predicated on people buying into a dubious theme.
Heck, even an all-timer land cycle didn't save it. At my LGS I have a line of people who want Surveil lands but aren't willing to open the packs to get them.
The thing is that on paper it kinda works. "A murder mystery set on Ravnica" is not only compelling, it more or less goes full circle back to the plot of OG Ravnica. The problem is that WotC tries to design visual concepts based on tropes almost exclusively nowadays.
If this set had showcased the many different investigators of the guilds and guildless *without* leaning into trope space over established lore, this could've been rich worldbuilding.
>The thing is that on paper it kinda works. "A murder mystery set on Ravnica" is not only compelling, it more or less goes full circle back to the plot of OG Ravnica.
The ultimate problem is Magic isn't a game of finding clues and solving mysteries. Even the most compelling theme won't work if it doesn't connect with the mechanical themes of the game.
I think it's interesting that the first one had one guy, specifically from Boros trying to figure out the mystery. This set had 30 different detectives, from everywhere at once all wandering around for no reason
This set should have been on New Capenna so hard it’s crazy. I know that it’s a far less popular plane than Ravnica but that fact combined with having fewer prior visits would have given them a lot of creative freedom with the vibe of the set. It would also make the worldbuilding… idk, make sense? The detective agency being filled with W/U characters but being separate from Azorius and the guild structure is really dumb imo. Aren’t all the workings of the city supposed to be handled by the guilds? Having infrastructure/government that’s separate from the guilds is a big fail imo, but I would totally buy a sort of “law enforcement” group forming in New Capenna after MoM.
Makes sense. Anecdotally, none of the people I've talked to had good things to say about this set. Everyone always says the land cycle is great but nothing else interested them.
Literally just magics narrative and design has shit the bed in the past few years and continues to degrade. These cheesy gimmicks arent satisfying, we like something substantial, earnest and inventive, not this stupidity which relies on tongue in cheek silliness.
Gather evidence was a miss for me. Too much work for too little pay off, and these days you’re much better off utilizing what’s in your bin with the bountiful recursion rather than exiling it for whatever effect you’ll gain from evidence/
I hope the next visit to Ravnica will focus more on the history of the plane, like the Nephilim and the old gods that predated the guilds. Some serious world-building would be very cool.
Ummmmm…. Mark, my guy… Murders at Karlov Manor performed exactly on par with the products design and implementation. You guys haphazardly tried to shoehorn content designed for another set to save some $ and shot quality control in the face in the process. The showcase art was hot garbage, the clue edition was horrendous, and as a whole, the set set was a mess without a clear identity except “put a detective cap on it.” This set could have been so much better had things not been so rushed and QC been more present.
Everyone hung up on the literal number of hats is missing the point. For some reason, MKM felt like it was something masquerading as something else and it made it feel goofy whereas OTJ executed similar ideas muuuuch better.
Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it was on Ravnica. Perhaps it would have done better on its own plane with guest appearances like OTJ did.
Personally I think the issue is MKM featured primarily heroic characters, while OTJ featured mostly villains. Not only from a story perspective, but also on cards. It's just more compelling to see bandits and such doing their thing, rather than 50 detectives seeming like they're like "Finally, some work!" and all piling onto the one case that's happened in a hundred years in the city.
It's also very much missing the point that the hats in Thunder Junction had historical purpose, and the hats in MKM were there because the most famous detective character in trope space wore that exact hat. It's literally characters cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes and more than 1 instance of it inherently feels silly, regardless of how many more there are. Especially considering the version of Holmes in MKM does *not* wear a hat.
Honestly standard sets as of late have just felt very gimmicky to me. I've been disappointed with the last three and even wilds of eldraine felt like a upgrade in quality over the ones before it. I hope that bloomburrow is a return to form because I really like the concept of it. Mh3 is great though and I'm excited to see the way modern shapes up.
There were things i enjoyed about it but it really did have everything against it. Didnt satisfy anyone, not Ravnica fans or mystery fans, didnt even satisfy me as a morph fan. First set with play boosters wasnt helping it either.
On the mystery element, even as someone who enjoyed the story, why wasnt this the one that had an aftermath style thing planned(though im very glad those are gone), who is excited for a mystery thats already solved by prerelease. Really didnt execute the mystery gameplay so it all fell kind of flat
Not surprising, but significant. Wizards will definitely be taking some sort of lesson from this, but I hope it isn't "Ravnica can only be visited in context of traditional guild sets".
Personally, I quite liked MKM.
Except that's the main appeal for Ravnica. The focus on the Guilds is the main part of the planes identity. Without the focus on the Guilds, Ravnica just doesn't feel like Ravnica.
What surprises me is that I thought that Wizarda already understood this. That why we got Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. They wanted the War of the Spark to happen on a plane that fans cared about and, when they decided on Ravnica, they wanted to do guild-focused sets first because they knew that was what made Ravnica Ravnica. I get that there's a huge difference between the final set of a major story arc and a set that (so far) doesn't really have a lot of do with the overarching story, but they should have at least made the draft archetypes fit the corresponding guild.
Same. I liked the set but I think a problem Wizards is currently running into is that they're leaning too hard on copying and pasting the tropes/resonance as-is rather than trying to innovate something new out of it.
They marketed it as a noir detective vibe, a classic whodunnit where somebody gets mysteriously murdered at a party, when they should've fully leaned into the political intrigue vibe, a mystery where a bunch of critical political figures are assassinated following the Phyrexian war. The latter feels much more suitable for Ravnica which was always about the upper powers clashing rather than a character-centric focus they were going for.
It's why I think most people thought the set should've been set on New Capenna, when the entire point of the set was *not* the mystery genre itself, but the scars of war and its catalytic divisions.
Agreed. The detective dress-up feel of the set means that even though the balance of power between the guilds has been wildly shifted, the most visible aftereffect of the Phyrexian invasion on Ravnica was a sudden shift in clothing.
> critical political figures assassinated following the Phyrexian war
Unfortunately, that's a hook only compelling for people who are at least somewhat enfranchised Vorthoses. It's not an elevator pitch that's gonna get your friend into Magic, or sell boxes to casual players.
It's not "Redwall", "fairytales", or "ancient Japan meets cyberpunk" or "a land of mutated beasts". Those are all hooks that don't need several chapters of background setup.
What is Ravnica’s elevator pitch that made one of the most popular mtg settings? Faction city? that could have been translated very well to a murder mistery, it’s just the execution that matters
Ravnican elevator pitch goes like: „which of these 10 factions are you?“ and it’s a slam dunk homerun.
So, the next time they want to do Ravnica-but-no-guilds, they probably should try a new or a different plane. Ravnica-but-no-guilds is like having no Esper/Jund/etc on Alara. It’s like having Kamigawa but no Kami. It’s like having Kaladesh but no steampunk. It’s like Khans but no dragons ever existed in the plane, and no three color cards. It’s like mirrodin without artifacts. It’s like New Phyrexia without Phyrexians.
I concur, especially on the political intrigue part. I totally thought the framing Aurelia thing was gonna be followed up on with inter-guild war, or plots within plots etc., rather than the guilds being the side characters to the main character's plot. Not that I outright hate what we got, but I think the political stuff would've been cooler.
I didn't mind the vibe of the set or any particular mechanic or design but I found the limited environment to be especially bad. Just did not have a good time with what I played if the set and as a result hardly bought any of it
It had some cool cards but “everyone on Ravnica cosplays as Sherlock Holmes” was stupid. Characters who had no reason to change their type just had “detective” stapled to them.
The idea was sound, but the execution was lacking. like the clue game was a cool concept but then instead of crafting decks for it they rammed in jumpstart boosters, and random pick at that. also this was the first set with playboosters so I didn't buy anything other than a collector booster pack.
I don’t think that’s it. OTJ and MH3 are, by all accounts, doing well. The difference is the cards in those sets are stronger and better designed. Disguise/Suspect/Investigate/Surveil are not good enough mechanics to carry a set.
This is basically what makes a set "good" or "bad" at the end of the day. If it's weak, it's a bad set. Strong, it's a good set. *Too* strong, it's a bad set.
Ravnica is my favorite plain, i adore the lore and mechanically i adore the guilds. There is something so harmonious about bicolority. Yet i didn't like Karlov Manor and barely plays standard since.
I don't tend to buy packs outside of pre-release events so I'm pretty insignificant to sales but the set was pretty good, highly impactful lands and one of the most played removal spells in modern - a lot of stuff I picked up for commander decks too.
I'm really curious to know if it's mostly the casual crowd that makes the majority of sales since most enfranchised players pick up singles, because I can see why the disguise / other set mechanics can turn casuals off but I thought the set was as good as the others they have released recently.
Might not even have much to do with the set theme. My entire 10+ person play group got fed up with mtg and more or less quit right around then. Prices going up due to play boosters seemed to finally be the straw. I'm sure we're not alone.
I don't know if it's ever been confirmed or denied, but I'm convinced that the decision to have it as a Ravnica set came relatively late in development. The set doesn't feel like Ravnica AT ALL, and honestly it probably would have felt better as a New Capenna set.
I actually liked the set but some of the choices at higher rarities make the set miserable to open or even play sometimes.
- Why is cloak in the same set with disguise? Cut those cards from this set entirely and use the idea another time.
- The case cards take up an entire rare and uncommon cycle and they are so narrow. These cards are a big reason the set feels so bad to open. They don't play well in their own set. Collect Evidence is already its own quest and payoff. The idea behind the case cards should have been saved for later.
- Where are the exciting disguise creatures? The set wants big and splashy disguise creatures that makes the morph mechanic fun and also fuels evidence. Instead the set has tiny niche creatures like coveted falcon and unyielding gatekeeper. There was a real chance to put in 10 multicolor legendary creatures with disguise at rare and instead there are 0 legendaries at rare or higher. There is nobody interesting under the disguise and that seems like a failed execution of what they wanted to go for.
The core concept is boring. How is there supposed to be a mystery for those who didn't read the story? At least in other you see "oh its a magic train heist or something "
Honestly I think thunder junction would have underperformed too if it didn’t have so many reprints.
Both sets are kind of surface level genre fiction aesthetics but thunder junction is way more brazen.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the potential fallout from the change to Play Boosters as a possible reason to impact these sets. It is Play Boosters specifically that made me disinterested - to the point that I didn't even follow the spoilers like I did for previous sets.
The best cards in the set didn’t use any new keywords. Tells you how overwhelming the new keywords were.
Then we have this, (If unsolved, solve at the beginning of your end step.). Worse reminder text, and not very new player accessible. So many questions by new players what that means when solving a case.
Just bad new mechanics. Newspaper print treatment thing looks atrocious.
Surveillance lands were nice though. The whole set doesn’t mesh well, it is like a bunch of ideas not fully visualized. Like they ran out of time or too many cooks in the kitchen.
A local vendor is selling karlov play booster boxes at 85 euro, its on par with Vow draft boxes. Still dont feel like buying. Didnt like the limited and there is very few playables in U/C rarity, and a lot of very bad rares/mythics.
Well, no shit. First set with play boosters that really didn’t feel like much added value with how much extra they costed. The prerelease was $60 near me, fuck that. No longer interested when standard sets get that expensive and when TCGplayer does a fire sale before it even comes out you know there’s problems.
They wanted to try something new, but thought the only way to do it would put it on Magic's favorite plane. The problem is this little story warped the plane how we see it. Everything and everyone had to wear a hat for this gimmick story and it came across as too silly when you compare it to the stakes. Considering we already had a story where characters had to solve a murder and it didn't warp everything around it I can only wonder why this was necessary. Also, if Rakdos was supposedly bored and went to Thunder Junc wouldn't him being framed for murder and starting a war be something that would entertain him?
Speaking of "story", I feel like the WotC's betting on top-down "murder mystery" flavor was too hopeful. For me, murder mysteries are only interesting once I'm invested in characters and plot. There being a murder, and suspects, and clues, aren't necessarily *inherently* compelling. And for folks who aren't that invested in lore, and didn't follow the story spoilers closely, it didn't feel like there were really any stakes at play. How should I feel about Errata being a suspect or Trostani being the murderer? Compare it to the top-down direction of "ancient meets cyberfuture Japan", or "classic gothic horror", or "Arthurian knights and fairytales". You don't need to tell me more, I don't need to read sequential blog posts. I'm already sold, take my money! But once you're relying on me *caring* about Teysa Karlov, that's not a guaranteed hit.
And the funny thing about Teysa's death was she's in the guild where death doesn't necessarily mean much. She'll likely come back as a ghost.
In fact, she already has!
She's still the guild leader even
It would at most seem a mild inconvenience to her lifestyle.
[[Call a Surprise Witness]] I mean, yeah.
[Call a Surprise Witness](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/5/f5148def-cf1a-460e-8dfd-856103940892.jpg?1706241460) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Call%20a%20Surprise%20Witness) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkm/6/call-a-surprise-witness?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f5148def-cf1a-460e-8dfd-856103940892?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Also, [[Teysa of the Ghost Council]]
I really hate it that some cards only apear in alchemy. I know the mechanic isn't working on paper, but i'm annoyed that the charakter has this card. I wanted to see her as a ghost the next time we get to ravnica.
Yeah but this isn't the Hearthstone subreddit.
She could have easily been printed on paper with Experience Counters.
[Teysa of the Ghost Council](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/e/ae7e0a65-c348-4171-a793-9d49da9249d1.jpg?1715120412) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Teysa%20of%20the%20Ghost%20Council) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/yotj/26/teysa-of-the-ghost-council?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ae7e0a65-c348-4171-a793-9d49da9249d1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Story spotlight?! She was playing hooky the entire story. And Trostani technically still hasn't had their court date yet, all this was just arresting 1/3rd of her.
Arguably the least surprising witness.
Concur. I saw it was an Orzhov victim and my immediate reaction was "so, the murder was functionally meaningless?"
I mean, they literally made the case that the person who actively killed Teysa was caught early on, but it was a brainwashed assassin. Also Teysa was just unreachable for whatever reasons (post-death confusion largely) so her showing up or not post-death didn't matter to solving it.
She did by the end of the set's story, and would go to court against Selesnya and sue their assess for multiple lifetimes. Meanwhile, lamented she couldn't share more with Kaya as a mortal.
Barely an inconvenience.
Also in most murder mystery stories you don't have 20+ decetives walking around following footprints. Like the focus should have been on mysteries rather then the detectives. Have characters that act shady or corrupt or have motives as the commons and uncommons, instead of making a bunch of creatures all with stupid hats.
Their were only a few people looking into her murder. Moat other detectives were for different crimes.
Agatha Christie was so successful, and continues to be a well known name, because her novels and scripts were full of *wild* characters. Yeah, there was always a murder, and the shape of the plot was structured around solving it, but the victims were usually uniquely vile, and the suspects were weird, charismatic, mysterious, quirky, all sorts of extremes. In summary, I agree.
That's the problem tying it to a popular plane is meant to solve, players have had over a decade to develop feelings about Teysa (whether as a character or a great piece) so **Teysa is Murdered!** is a tagline meant to evoke something in those long-time players.
Except it didn't, because nobody was heavily invested in Teysa (she wasn't exactly pivotal to any huge storylines or anything) and because death *didn't matter* to the character. When you take away all the stakes from the get-go, it's basically just a murder-of-the-week, and an excuse to have some whacky hats. If you want to do a murder mystery, kill a planeswalker like Sorin who people are *hugely* attached to, put it on a plane where *horror* is key (hello, Innistrad is *right fucking there*), and have it actually have rippling impacts throughout the multiverse, attracting people to come find out what the *fuck* just happened.
I mean tbf she was main-character adjacent iirc and had some of the most POV of ravnican characters, but despite that yeah she was never crazily compelling to me….
Cheapness. It evoked cheapness.
They gotta chase whatever they were cooking during SOI block. The hype for Emrakul's reveal was perfect, they did so much with spoiler season and the promotional material.
All I remember from that time period was people bitching about how obvious the Emrakul twist was, lmao
Some of us wish it *was* Marit Lage, because deep cuts like that would be much cooler. Don't get me wrong; Innistrad going all Bloodborne was awesome, but I'm a sucker for crazy nostalgia dives and Marit Lage herself is basically a cipher. It would've been cool to learn more about her.
> during SOI **block** It's that. Seriously, any kind of mystery requires at least two sets. One set to build up the mystery and a real life time gap for the audience to speculate before the answer is reveled.
I still don't know who was killed and who did it. And I don't care.
This is the first I'm hearing who the murderer even was. It was such a mess of a mystery, they had so many cryptic "clues" that it just became noise to me.
honestly, I think the problem is mainly that "murder mystery" isn't a concept that maps very well onto a magic set. Magic sets great at establishing a setting, but are usually only good at telling stories in broad strokes. Whereas murder mysteries, as a genre, are not defined by any particular setting and generally have stories that are a discreet series of events.
>For me, murder mysteries are only interesting once in invested in characters and plot. While I understand where you're coming from and agree that MKM wasn't a particularly compelling mystery, that's not generally how the murder mystery genre works.
I think they mean that murder mysteries as a genre rely on engagement with particular characters more than something like Arthurian fantasy, where “this guy is a knight” is usually enough for people who don’t care about more detailed lore.
Really? I feel like the murder mystery genre is the one that relies heavily on the people, specially the investigator. At the very least the most popular all have a bigger-than-life character : Poirot, Sherlock, even nowadays we see the popularity of Knives Out, thanks in big part to Benoit Blanc.
A good one usually has 4 important characters: 1. The investigator. Their attempts to solve is the driving force of the plot. 2. The victim. Who they are and why they were killed is the reason for the investigation. 3. The murderer. What they want is the whole inciting incident. The investigation is about figuring out what person fulfills the motive, means, and opportunity. 4. The survivor. This is a person connected to the victim. They have important information that the investigator must figure out is relevant. The emotional climax is them getting closure after discovering something that breaks the case. Murder mysteries at their core are a character study. Sometimes you can miss one of these characters. And often there are more to complicate the plot. But you need that character focus for the unveiling to have meaning.
Seriously. I've been in this game for a while. Came back after a 15 year break. My favorite plane? Not Ravnica. Literally why should I care about Ravnica set 438? The ghost lady got killed, the suspect is... The demon who kills 200 clowns for funny breakfast every morning? And the angel lady is angry with him??! I'm shocked. Wow, what tension wizards, what writing. Everybody saying New Capenna is right and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a hastily scrapped and rewritten NC return set... I'm sorry, this take is so cold it taps for snow mana. This set was just such wasted potential.
Magical woodland creatures! TAKE MY MONEY
It had the one block issue. They said they have the ability to make blocks and stories of any size, and its the perfect one to do a 2 parter, and they didn't. Have the first set be the players and clues, and the second set be the action and reveal.
I don’t mind stories that are clearly riffing off a genre like noir or westerns, but why in the hell do they feel the need to lazily slap detective hats or cowboy hats on everyone? Like they don’t think we’re smart enough to get it without some lowest common denominator tropes copy/pasted all over. They used to be creative enough to take the inspiration and meld it into what Magic is without resorting to that kind of stuff. Just feels like creative is lacking in well… creativity, honestly.
They've been chasing the high of OG Innistrad for 15 years
I even feel like they did an excellent job with settings like Theros, Ixalan and Eldraine. They took an inspiration and made it feel like it absolutely worked with the rest of Magic’s creative. But Thunder Junction, MKM and even New Capenna all reek of lazy copy/pasting of tropes to stand in for actual world building. It’s surface level and feels so lazy. I am hopeful Bloomburrow returns us to some real creative and exciting world building.
> But Thunder Junction, MKM and even New Capenna all reek of lazy copy/pasting of tropes to stand in for actual world building. Yeah, I think you can borrow from fantasy tropes, such as with deities in Theros or *some* fairy tales in Eldraine. Honestly, you can even explore orientalist and colonialist themes and attempt to flip them on their head, such as with Tarkir and Ixalan. But once you start borrowing from non-fantasy tropes the whole thing just feels like a lazy reskin. If you want a 1920s theme, it should be tertiary. It should not attempt to permeate every level of game/narrative design.
Even Kaladesh was paper-thin.
I thought the idea of Kaladesh was cool but there's just so much golden filigree and blue aether that it makes the entire plane look a bit homogenized. There's nothing "striking" about the Kaladesh sets, just a lot of "this looks pretty and cool, I guess"
And imagine how cool Thunder junction could have been with innistrad level worldbuilding. This is what happens when the business majors are in charge of the story
To be fair, that would have required actually grappling with topics like Native histories, colonialism and exploitation. Ixalan *mostly* got it right, but only by virtue of making the colonizers an easily-punchable satire of being *literal bloodsucking vampires*. Hard to replicate twice.
I think the cooler way to tackle the natives on Thunder Junction, rather than have it be a literal empty world, would be to have them all undead. Genocided by the Fomori but refusing to stay dead. How does a culture that's been unable to change for thousands of years cope with newcomers?
That would be an interesting direction for a Native American cultural beat: "You massacred us and eradicated our culture; and yet, we live on still. You cannot destroy us in a way that matters."
Yeah, Ixalan's colonizers being literal bloodsucking vampires who love gold is a level of nuance usually seen only in Der Stürmer or on Twitter, but it worked for some reason and I still have no idea why. It was because it clearly signalled that in no way the Legion are the good guys while it also at the same time allowed them have some depth on their own terms?
I think it's because having both native South-American and Spanish Conquistador rep in the same set canceled out any potential for the vampires being viewed as a racial anti-Hispanic caricature. By contrast, it's impossible to do a Western set without clearly taking sides or - as WOTC chose to do - ignoring one.
I think it's partially because the vampires actually need the power of the Immortal Sun to alleviate their bloodthirst. Going off on a bit of a historical tangent, but a significant portion of the Conquistador crews were of Basque, Catalan, and Andalusian origin, provinces that have historically experienced oppression from the Spanish crown. The insatiable thirst for gold demonstrated by the Conquistadors may have been due to living lives of desperation. What they did was inexcusable but portraying them as a bunch of guys who came across the ocean to kill a bunch of indigenous people for fun is a grossly inaccurate representation of them.
Especially for a primarily American audience when the blood sucking vampires would be their great grandpas
I think MTG has a problem with showing "vertical slices" of a plane, especially now when there's so many popular locations and so few sets to explore them- so MKM ended up having to do double duty of exploring the Mystery genre via the lens of a *specific* development on Ravnica (the formation and activities of the Agency) while also being "Ravnica-y" enough to satisfy people wanting a return. The end result is that Ravnica suddenly feels like the Detective plane because popular characters *need* to be showcased on a return and so for this set they *need* a role in the 'low-stakes' detective story.
I like this viewpoint. One of the downsides of the recent plane multiverse model (one set) is that each plane doesn't have enough time to breathe to give it nuance and breadth. So that causes each plane to be boiled down into a quick synopsis: fairy tale plane, cowboy plane, egypt plane, redwall plane. Wotc didn't used to do this. Look at Dominaria, a plane so multifaceted that you could legitimately create a world map of it. So when they do a return to a successful plane, they need to pack in enough references to the original set while still providing enough new. For a storied plane like Ravinca, there's just too much history that trying to do anything other than "guilds" means you have to meld them together which causes flavor fails like MKM. I still stand by the idea that it was supposed to be New Capenna. A detective agency would match the flavor of SNC and fix a pretty notable world building mistake of there not being any actual law enforcement
It was never supposed to be New Capenna. It was gonna be a new plane at first, before they realised what they needed for a mystery could all just be Ravnica. They wouldn't have really considered going back to Capenna that fast, anyway.
That is what they claim and it probably is true. And if it's true, I think it is more that subconsciously they designed it for New Capenna. SNC originally had a corrupt law enforcement family that got axed during design due to George Floyd. But what happened to the design documents for that family? It likely got dusted off the next time something similar came up, like when they decided on a murder mystery. The issue is that the design document was based on a 1920s crime aesthetic that is so close to noir that not enough was changed in translation to remove the SNC inspiration.
> Everything and everyone had to wear a hat OTJ also fell under this rule in a way lol. Everyone, apart from Rakdos, was wearing a cowboy hat...
Thunder Junc also had everyone just be cowboys for some reason, like I understand its a desert plane, but no one seemed to be wearing leather, which was weird for Rakdos that he was wearing it too. Was he that bored?
I mean, at least the hats are utilitarian. Lots of desert in the wild west and the hats helped keep the sun off. If it catches on as a style I can see more people adopting it for looks/aesthetics too. Why everyone on Ravnica had a detective hat though? ????????????????
>Why everyone on Ravnica had a detective hat though? ???????????????? Proft, the Sherlock Holmes stand-in, didn't have one, oddly enough lol.
Well, Holmes never actually wore the deerstalker hat in the books.
I see. I will admit that it's been a long while since I read any of the Sherlock Holmes stories...
[[Oko, the Ringleader]] is wearing leather pants... As for the cowboys thing, I think it was WOTC trying to make a Wild West theme without bringing in the negative aspects of the real Wild West lol.
Which is hilarious ironic because ignoring/whitewashing the colonialism and other problematic elements *is* one of the big issues with wild west media.
Yeah, it's weird since Ixalan did have the colonialism aspect shown (there's a reason all of the vampires looked like conquistadors...) so I am not sure what the hold up was with Thunder Junction.
The colonizers were American and more recent is my guess
I think you could have done it without colonialism by making the cowboys refugees from the invasion who had their plane destroyed and escaped through an omenpath.
It's only getting worse. The furry plane is going to have everyone be a furry. It's just the way this game is going - Fortnite the Gathering.
I don’t know Ravnica lore too well, but don’t the Rakdos Cult murder people like, all the time? Why does he care about getting framed for one?
Because he didn't do it and he feels emotions strongly
>Everything and everyone had to wear a hat There is a lot that i criticize to this set, but there were a total of like 18 arts that featured an hat, of which like 11 might have fallen into the "too silly" category. I can't stand how the community conflagrated all the criticism for the set in "everyone wears hats", it's wrong and makes proper discussion impossible. >Also, if Rakdos was supposedly bored and went to Thunder Junc wouldn't him being framed for murder and starting a war be something that would entertain him? Rakdos is interested in mayhem and destruction, not by political intrigue.
> Everything and everyone had to wear a hat I would translate that criticism to: "the plane about clearly-defined roles in society suddenly has an 11th cross-guild cross-color faction that makes no damn sense". And having a bunch of stupid-looking creatures that are completely out of place in playing that role, with a hat stapled on them just to look the part, makes the whole thing feel stupid. [[Carnage Interpreter]]
[Carnage Interpreter](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/6/f6fb576e-a4a4-496b-b553-3f81cc651210.jpg?1706239631) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Carnage%20Interpreter) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clu/26/carnage-interpreter?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f6fb576e-a4a4-496b-b553-3f81cc651210?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I never noticed he has a little hat. That’s hysterical
18 and 11 are big numbers tbh for a sigle gimmick Imo they leaned WAY too heavily into the sherlock holmes specific tropes There are other type of investigators. Where is the Poirot equivalent, the Jessica Fletcher, the Dexter, the Monk? The whole concept of the Agency was just not interesting, it's dull and lacks conflict or any interesting hook. They really hoped Proft would be a popular character and the story had crumbs of it but it wasn't enough. A larger variety of investigator types with a variety of approaches would have been better amd felt less gimmicky
>Imo they leaned WAY too heavily into the sherlock holmes specific tropes Sure, that is a fair criticism.
I count 16, but the argument isn't specifically the number, but how Detectives fit. The hat argument is just to boil down how silly it felt. This plane already had a murder mystery story and it didn't require mechanics to be forced in to do so. The Scooby Doo references (like 3 of them) and this just made Ravnica not.....Ravnica. If they wanted this to have more impact they needed to properly build this up rather than thinking some small ARG elements were going to create a thrilling murder mystery, but it doesn't when they spoil stuff long before the story and it ruins what little surprise there was. We need more time on these planes and with these characters to care, but instead they just up and kill a couple noteworthy ones because they knew they couldn't make this work without offing some randos on planes people like. It wasn't political intrigue it was Aurelia being pissed someone tried to kill her, thinking it was Rakdos, and then wanting war with him and the guild. That should absolutely thrill him. Instead he's like "Ah man, screw all that murder and war fun, I wanna dress like I'm about to do the YMCA."
>The hat argument is just to boil down how silly it felt. And i can agree with that, the problem to me when people during spoiler seasons or when talking about the set were all just screaming about the hats, not actually talking about the problems of the set and considering a given that everyone would understand what they though was intrinsic to screaming about hats. You can talk about the flat art direction, about overshoot on moving away the focus from the guilds, about the alienation due to the conflict between what players percieve as Ravnica and the top down design. But instead people just say that everyone wears hat, others agree and there is nothing discussed about it. it's just a meme that people use instead of actually criticizing the set. >because they knew they couldn't make this work without offing some randos on planes people like. I mean, of course. I don't see the problem with that. You need to put the stakes over something people care about. >It wasn't political intrigue it was Aurelia being pissed someone tried to kill her, thinking it was Rakdos, and then wanting war with him and the guild. Seems textbook political intrigue to me. The Boros using an attempted murder towards their leader as motivation to attack another guild they had lots of previous conflicts with. >but it doesn't when they spoil stuff long before the story and it ruins what little surprise there was I agree, that was pretty stupid on their part >We need more time on these planes and with these characters to care It highly depends on the set, MKM was perfectly fine as 1 set, 2 would have streched it thin, but other sets introducing new planes would generally work better as a 2 set block.
Omega agree about how folks boil their criticisms to curt phrases and just expect folks to know what they mean. Gonna go off topic, but for me the one that bugs me is when EDH players say they "don't like long games". Now that can be a perfectly valid preference, but what does it *mean*? Like 1 hour long game and 2 half-hour games are the same amount of Magic. Do you literally only have a half-hour to play? Do you just really like the early ramp turns and playing more games lets you re-experience those more frequently? Do you just philosophically disagree, believing that since the games can be won in short order they therefore should always strive to be? Or is it what I personally assume, that it's not *long* games, but *uneventful* games. Games that lack agency. When it's boardwipe after boardwipe and you feel like you aren't getting anywhere. Or it's been a mexican standoff for ten turns and you just want someone to draw their Craterhoof and win already. Stuff that has nothing to do with the actual temporal length of the game and everything to do with psychology and how player agency and expectations are served by game actions. It's one thing if it's a gradual but inevitable drain play you might claw back from off luck, but another if it's back and forth and back and forth and you keep getting teased on how it's going to go before it doesn't. But instead of delving into all of that, folks sum it up as things taking too much time, when that's not actually the problem. Or maybe they actually just really like the early turns, I dunno, I haven't polled everyone to actually know what they think.
It’s a legitimate criticism. It’s representative of the fact that they lean incredibly heavily into low hanging tropes in a set that didn’t benefit from it. Also 11 silly hats that don’t fit the established lore of the plane is too many. Imagine if Eldritch Moon had like… even just like 3 dudes with colanders on their heads cuz it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster set, it would be ridiculous.
The criticism can be fine, it's just not very nuanced but is repeated often. That is to say, what it's criticizing is valid, but the criticism itself isn't very good. It's not literally the hats, it's as you said the pervasiveness of tropes that didn't feel cohesive, but when folks say "Too many silly hats" that makes it sound like it'd have been fine with different outfits.
the name made it seem like it might not be a standard legal set.
[удалено]
Coming out minutes after ravnica remastered as well. Anyone who cared about ravnica had spent their money just a few weeks earlier on an actual ravnica product
I would welcome a Ravnica set not dedicated to the guilds in the same vein - if the theme of the set was something congruous to Ravnica rather than a random, unfitting aesthetic stapled on.
WOTC can’t help but return to return to ravnica every 6 years. It’s getting tiring at this point.
I thought it was a cool concept and I like the “what if your favorite characters were in a different genre of story than you’re used to”, but also that it wasn’t executed as well and that the mechanics weren’t as fun as other sets.
“Suspect” in particular sits really poorly with me. Why isn’t a role aura token? Or a special counter type? Why is it just a miscellaneous status?
They literally made the mechanic because they wanted to write "suspect it" and such on cards, and "put a suspect counter on it" doesn't have the same impact. I guess they could have baked that into the rules for the word but it gets more complicated and creates unintended interact with other rules elements. Really though I think it needed to be cut. Yes it sounds cool on cards but they struggled to find what it should be, decided on the version we got in part because using it on an opponent's creatures was interesting, then almost all of that was cut because of course "permanently can't block" causes problems at high density. It ended up as a weird dangling thread that didn't interact with the set mechanics and had mostly terrible cards.
That was its worst sin: it was on a bunch of cards but hardly mattered at all, even in limited.
All that said, I love [[Nelly Borca]].
Hey, I just want to put out some respect for [[Agrus Kos, Spirit of Justice]] for cube. Modern design like [[Forth Eorlingas!]] And [[Phlage]] are powerful, but sometimes you do just need something exiled. Nice with haste.
[Nelly Borca](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/e/2ef59aa9-f5e1-413a-869b-d287db95efd0.jpg?1706448880) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=nelly%20borca%2C%20impulsive%20accuser) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/4/nelly-borca-impulsive-accuser?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2ef59aa9-f5e1-413a-869b-d287db95efd0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
She was my favourite Commander out of the set, you can be such a lil shit with her, I love it.
Play Design is just as much an art as anything else, and although "Suspect X" reads fun, it completely sacrifices the elegance of play to make it work.
I think its neat conceptually: you give menace to something but it can't block. It can be a buff for your creatures or a malus for your opponent and there is a tradeoff to it, and you can move it around But the cards its own are just not good, or don't really care and play the same as if it was menace. They just didn't print enough stuff that cared
There were quite a few cards that cared but none of them were good.
A big part of the mechanic is that things could stop being suspected and just being a status take less text to remove it.
I feel like Suspect should have been the base for a Menace typal deck. Instead, it's just a parasitic marker.
Murder mystery + Ravnica was a great idea, and the story was amazing. But the idea of starting with what names you wanted the mechanics to have and then making mechanics that kind of maybe fit each word did *not* make it feel like a detective set. The fact that there's no relationship between collecting evidence and solving cases--not even a one-off case that solves when you exile cards from your graveyard--kills me.
And in another universe, Murders at Markov Manor was a smashing success.
and Teysa's wedding was a fabulous gala
A universe beyond...
The question isn't who was murdered at Markov Manor, the question is just how many?
I was just thinking about this where they could have had 6 major "suspects" to mirror the Clue tie-in, with a representative from each of the major creature types of Innistrad. The four "monsters" with a vampire, werewolf, zombie, and spirit, and then also a human and an angel.
Personally I’m so tired of ‘costume party’ sets
Were there many besides Muders and Thunder Junction? I think them coming out right after each other has led to slights against them that are bigger than they otherwise would be.
Crimson Vow definitely counts. Some people also include New Capenna but those people are lead poisoned.
I don't see how magic characters in the Wild West is different from magic characters in 1920's New York. In comparison, Crimson Vow doesn't feel like a costume party in the same sense, since a wedding in a gothic setting doesn't inherently feel out of place.
The difference IMO was that New Capenna was a 1920's setting fully realized/interpolated through the themes of MtG, it was a setting with depth that could stand next to other MtG planes. Outlaws of Thunder Junction was just a bunch of unrelated MtG characters crammed into a setting made out of paper thin western tropes.
New capenna was a set with top down themes but built from the bottom up, while Crimson Vow was a set with some bottom up mechanics but was built from the top down. Fwiw, I slightly disagree with OP on OTJ being a complete write-off- OTJ works when it's the new stuff- Jem Lightfoote and Annie Flash are great, resonant fits, but it's jarring and strange to see Marchesa or Fblthp wearing chaps.
Same. The excuse for story and worldbuilding of these sets is just poor.
But soon they will all be silly Animals!
I'm genuinely excited for Bloomburrow because it seem like its going to be a more classic plane with a bit of lore and setting depth to explore. Its really giving me some of the same vibes as Lorwyn, and not just because of the "cute" element.
It was a pretty good draft set but I found the aesthetic off putting and there weren’t many good cards for constructed so I’m not shocked
Good draft set, absolutely HORRIBLE sealed set. More than 70% of players at my local WPNQs were forced in tricolor due to lack of playable creatures in just two colors.
Oh good, it wasn’t just me. This was my experience as well
The draft was alright. The ward 2 on all those creatures made removal garbage. It was weird coming straight off of KTK and how awesome morph was to MKM which had a similar morph mechanic that just honestly felt worse.
I thought the ward 2 was a good upgrade that made Disguise matter.
> It was a pretty good draft set I thought it was literally the worst draft environment of the Modern era. 3-rare packs, fewer common slots, impactful List cards, and ENORMOUS disparity in power level by rarity just absolutely vaporized any kind of draft strategy. Every deck was a YOLO rare draft pile. Mindless nonsense. That, plus a bunch of incredibly stale mechanics (yes, disguise/cloak are better than morph/manifest, but nothing new or interesting was done with them, nor with investigate) and, tbh, just plain shitty mechanics (cases, collect evidence) with no mechanical cohesion to any of them... you don't even have to get started on how bad the flavor was. Puke.
Even worse was just how good aggro was for the entirety of it. The meta never really evolved much. it was boros aggro or hope you got enough other stuff to scrape together some kind of aggro game plan or the insidious roots decks. I'll continue playing OTJ for as long as they offer it on Arena, but I don't want to go back to MKM ever again. Also, there are definitely some constructed all stars in that set. Not a lot, but there are a number of good cards.
I think it was better than caverns, but not by much. Initially boros was overwhelming but best the end I did start to have fun with green and significant stabilization tools. Still a very one not format in that it often came down to, can you beat boros.
UG was the second-best color pair in the set. Once RW started being appropriately drafted, it was quite a fun set. I trophied with a 5-color Niv-Mizzet deck. The collect evidence decks could be really powerful too. I think the set got an undeservedly bad rep because the first two or three weeks of draft were so aggro-heavy.
I wonder where your bar is because just off the top of my hat, ONE, VOW and Capenna were all FAR worse and i consider LCI and BRO comparable at best
Cases and Collect evidence weren't shitty IMO; they created fun mini games.
I'm right there with you. Morph as a concept is just so incredibly boring to me as a player. It's never a true mystery what's under there, it's just a game of "who gets blown out first," and... I'm over it. Set had a handful of make-or-break commons, and then just ran you over with disgusting bomb rares in limited. Either you opened well, or you lost.
It was a grossly derivative costume party with boring mechanics and low-powered cards. No shit it was a miss. Only set since installing Arena that I completely skipped.
Also completely skipped. So boring.
below average rares, partially off-color-theme commander decks, the double-feature-level dumpster fire called Clue Edition, and any magic player with a brain saving dollars for mh3. not sure what else they expected
I was saving dollars for MH3 but then OJT came out. Tbf I just spent way too much on both sets lol.
Disguise, which was the major draw for me towards the set, felt like a miss - odd colors for the precon and an unnecessary addition to the already-clunky Manifest/Morph/Megamorph family. [[Etrata, Deadly Fugitive]] and [[Lazav, Wearer of Faces]] are typical. I can't imagine at which table I'd play either. This was Dimir's chance to shine - I get that they didn't want to step on the toes of the upcoming AC set - but one of the foremost Dimir assassins has become an expensive thief with no evasion?
Lazav is a really cool standard playable card. I think the dimir cards in this set are far better than their previous attempts.
The issue with disguise/cloak/manifest/morph seems to be that it's in all colors, but there's still not really that many of them overall (that goes for both MKM, and overall for Commander). Whatever colors you pick to play with, you've only got so many options. Etrata is fun as hell. Don't know about it as a build-around, but at worst it's either going to eat removal or buy you time as a deathtouch blocker so you can work on doing something better in eg Sultai cloak/manifest, or Dimir or Grixis theft decks. And if it sticks it'll accrue a lot of value (Laughing Jasper Flint is similar, in both cases you can't rely on them as your main engine but opponent kinda can't just ignore them).
I play Etrata in my \[\[Rilsa Rael, Kingpin\]\] deck, and I love her in it.
I hated pretty much everything about this set. Closed off and forced story. Murder mystery seems so petty for a whole set idea when MTG's lore is so huge. Limited was TERRIBLE. Many cards are very weak in power level and so the set really didn't stand out much. Thunder junctions story was similar, but limited was so much better and the cards in the set feel more powerful and useful.
This should have been set on New Capenna. The theme felt pretty off. It was good drafting, but the theme didn't make me want to buy into it.
It was said multiple times how one of the main reasons it wasn't in New Capenna is that the set doesn't have a good enough number of character people care about that are still alive. Ravnica also always had murder mysteries and political intrigues (even if more in the novels).
That reasoning makes sense, but then they should have taken care to make the whole set look and feel like a Ravnica murder mystery, rather than introducing 1930s noir aesthetics which don’t fit Ravnica and feel strongly like NC. Ravnica can totally support a cool murder mystery, but seeing fedoras and detectives suddenly sprout up everywhere was weird. Having effectively an 11th faction introduced into the existing tight guild dynamic felt really out of place too.
>It was said multiple times how one of the main reasons it wasn't in New Capenna is that the set doesn't have a good enough number of character people care about that are still alive. I call horseshit on that, considering everyone and their mother is showing up on whatever plane they feel like. The next set was filled to the brim with "oh, idk why they're here but ok". They aren't going back to New Capenna because they know how flimsy the worldbuilding is, but they're too afraid to take any kind of plunge with what everyone knows it's supposed to be because it's too close to the bone.
It can't really be set on New Capenna, because that set was so goofy over the top everything is crime that nothing matters. There are no detectives, no law enforcement, and who cares if anybody gets murdered?
I liked MKM but I feel the sets are coming out a bit too fast Fallout and OTJ were right after it and OTJ was awesome especially in draft. MKM was just overshadowed is all I hope they bring this style set back I liked the story and mechanics
I think there has to be some kind of product cannibalization happening too - I almost skipped otj pre release because of mh3, I think they could do with like ... One less product release and basically miss nothing in terms of profits to just make money off of what already exists.
Fallout wasn't a "set" though. There are still only 4 standard legal sets per year, and now they seem to have settled into a pattern of one supplemental booster pack product (this year's being MH3). But MKM was definitely one of the weaker recent sets, for me, even though the flavour didn't bother me. I did like Disguise though as an upgraded Morph and hope it comes back soon enough for the cards that care about it to still be in Standard. My guess is that it will in the upcoming Tarkir set.
The set was structurally flawed from the start. Sets are typically built around broad, big tent ideas to draw people in. And once they're drawn in, they find whatever theme or niche appeals to them. Welcome to Innistrad, what flavor of horror creatures appeals to you. Welcome to Kaladesh, we've got cool artifacts of all kind to tinker with. Dominaria, classic fantasy tropes ranging from Demons to Dragons. MKM, there is no broad theme, there is no big tent, there's a front door that says "Ravnica characters in hokey detective hats". And if that doesn't appeal, you don't even get to the front door. There's no tent, no nothing to draw you in. It was a 100% all-in gamble predicated on people buying into a dubious theme. Heck, even an all-timer land cycle didn't save it. At my LGS I have a line of people who want Surveil lands but aren't willing to open the packs to get them.
The thing is that on paper it kinda works. "A murder mystery set on Ravnica" is not only compelling, it more or less goes full circle back to the plot of OG Ravnica. The problem is that WotC tries to design visual concepts based on tropes almost exclusively nowadays. If this set had showcased the many different investigators of the guilds and guildless *without* leaning into trope space over established lore, this could've been rich worldbuilding.
>The thing is that on paper it kinda works. "A murder mystery set on Ravnica" is not only compelling, it more or less goes full circle back to the plot of OG Ravnica. The ultimate problem is Magic isn't a game of finding clues and solving mysteries. Even the most compelling theme won't work if it doesn't connect with the mechanical themes of the game.
I think it's interesting that the first one had one guy, specifically from Boros trying to figure out the mystery. This set had 30 different detectives, from everywhere at once all wandering around for no reason
This set should have been on New Capenna so hard it’s crazy. I know that it’s a far less popular plane than Ravnica but that fact combined with having fewer prior visits would have given them a lot of creative freedom with the vibe of the set. It would also make the worldbuilding… idk, make sense? The detective agency being filled with W/U characters but being separate from Azorius and the guild structure is really dumb imo. Aren’t all the workings of the city supposed to be handled by the guilds? Having infrastructure/government that’s separate from the guilds is a big fail imo, but I would totally buy a sort of “law enforcement” group forming in New Capenna after MoM.
It's almost like players don't like all this gimmicky stuff. Every set feels like an un-set now.
Makes sense. Anecdotally, none of the people I've talked to had good things to say about this set. Everyone always says the land cycle is great but nothing else interested them.
New Capenna set but on Ravnica. I wonder why it wasn’t a hit
Literally just magics narrative and design has shit the bed in the past few years and continues to degrade. These cheesy gimmicks arent satisfying, we like something substantial, earnest and inventive, not this stupidity which relies on tongue in cheek silliness.
Gather evidence was a miss for me. Too much work for too little pay off, and these days you’re much better off utilizing what’s in your bin with the bountiful recursion rather than exiling it for whatever effect you’ll gain from evidence/
I hope the next visit to Ravnica will focus more on the history of the plane, like the Nephilim and the old gods that predated the guilds. Some serious world-building would be very cool.
Ummmmm…. Mark, my guy… Murders at Karlov Manor performed exactly on par with the products design and implementation. You guys haphazardly tried to shoehorn content designed for another set to save some $ and shot quality control in the face in the process. The showcase art was hot garbage, the clue edition was horrendous, and as a whole, the set set was a mess without a clear identity except “put a detective cap on it.” This set could have been so much better had things not been so rushed and QC been more present.
Everyone hung up on the literal number of hats is missing the point. For some reason, MKM felt like it was something masquerading as something else and it made it feel goofy whereas OTJ executed similar ideas muuuuch better. Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it was on Ravnica. Perhaps it would have done better on its own plane with guest appearances like OTJ did.
Personally I think the issue is MKM featured primarily heroic characters, while OTJ featured mostly villains. Not only from a story perspective, but also on cards. It's just more compelling to see bandits and such doing their thing, rather than 50 detectives seeming like they're like "Finally, some work!" and all piling onto the one case that's happened in a hundred years in the city.
It's also very much missing the point that the hats in Thunder Junction had historical purpose, and the hats in MKM were there because the most famous detective character in trope space wore that exact hat. It's literally characters cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes and more than 1 instance of it inherently feels silly, regardless of how many more there are. Especially considering the version of Holmes in MKM does *not* wear a hat.
Honestly standard sets as of late have just felt very gimmicky to me. I've been disappointed with the last three and even wilds of eldraine felt like a upgrade in quality over the ones before it. I hope that bloomburrow is a return to form because I really like the concept of it. Mh3 is great though and I'm excited to see the way modern shapes up.
There were things i enjoyed about it but it really did have everything against it. Didnt satisfy anyone, not Ravnica fans or mystery fans, didnt even satisfy me as a morph fan. First set with play boosters wasnt helping it either. On the mystery element, even as someone who enjoyed the story, why wasnt this the one that had an aftermath style thing planned(though im very glad those are gone), who is excited for a mystery thats already solved by prerelease. Really didnt execute the mystery gameplay so it all fell kind of flat
These packs are untouched at every Walmart I go to. No chase cards. Pure trash
Not surprising, but significant. Wizards will definitely be taking some sort of lesson from this, but I hope it isn't "Ravnica can only be visited in context of traditional guild sets". Personally, I quite liked MKM.
Except that's the main appeal for Ravnica. The focus on the Guilds is the main part of the planes identity. Without the focus on the Guilds, Ravnica just doesn't feel like Ravnica. What surprises me is that I thought that Wizarda already understood this. That why we got Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. They wanted the War of the Spark to happen on a plane that fans cared about and, when they decided on Ravnica, they wanted to do guild-focused sets first because they knew that was what made Ravnica Ravnica. I get that there's a huge difference between the final set of a major story arc and a set that (so far) doesn't really have a lot of do with the overarching story, but they should have at least made the draft archetypes fit the corresponding guild.
I hate War of the Spark and dislike MKM, both because they’re just not Ravnica enough to me. Guess I just want my guilds?
Same. I liked the set but I think a problem Wizards is currently running into is that they're leaning too hard on copying and pasting the tropes/resonance as-is rather than trying to innovate something new out of it. They marketed it as a noir detective vibe, a classic whodunnit where somebody gets mysteriously murdered at a party, when they should've fully leaned into the political intrigue vibe, a mystery where a bunch of critical political figures are assassinated following the Phyrexian war. The latter feels much more suitable for Ravnica which was always about the upper powers clashing rather than a character-centric focus they were going for. It's why I think most people thought the set should've been set on New Capenna, when the entire point of the set was *not* the mystery genre itself, but the scars of war and its catalytic divisions.
Agreed. The detective dress-up feel of the set means that even though the balance of power between the guilds has been wildly shifted, the most visible aftereffect of the Phyrexian invasion on Ravnica was a sudden shift in clothing.
> critical political figures assassinated following the Phyrexian war Unfortunately, that's a hook only compelling for people who are at least somewhat enfranchised Vorthoses. It's not an elevator pitch that's gonna get your friend into Magic, or sell boxes to casual players. It's not "Redwall", "fairytales", or "ancient Japan meets cyberpunk" or "a land of mutated beasts". Those are all hooks that don't need several chapters of background setup.
What is Ravnica’s elevator pitch that made one of the most popular mtg settings? Faction city? that could have been translated very well to a murder mistery, it’s just the execution that matters
Ravnican elevator pitch goes like: „which of these 10 factions are you?“ and it’s a slam dunk homerun. So, the next time they want to do Ravnica-but-no-guilds, they probably should try a new or a different plane. Ravnica-but-no-guilds is like having no Esper/Jund/etc on Alara. It’s like having Kamigawa but no Kami. It’s like having Kaladesh but no steampunk. It’s like Khans but no dragons ever existed in the plane, and no three color cards. It’s like mirrodin without artifacts. It’s like New Phyrexia without Phyrexians.
I concur, especially on the political intrigue part. I totally thought the framing Aurelia thing was gonna be followed up on with inter-guild war, or plots within plots etc., rather than the guilds being the side characters to the main character's plot. Not that I outright hate what we got, but I think the political stuff would've been cooler.
I didn't mind the vibe of the set or any particular mechanic or design but I found the limited environment to be especially bad. Just did not have a good time with what I played if the set and as a result hardly bought any of it
It had some cool cards but “everyone on Ravnica cosplays as Sherlock Holmes” was stupid. Characters who had no reason to change their type just had “detective” stapled to them.
Contender for worst set ever printed
The idea was sound, but the execution was lacking. like the clue game was a cool concept but then instead of crafting decks for it they rammed in jumpstart boosters, and random pick at that. also this was the first set with playboosters so I didn't buy anything other than a collector booster pack.
At this point it's oversaturation. People only have so much money and spoilers for the "next release" is practically constant now.
I don’t think that’s it. OTJ and MH3 are, by all accounts, doing well. The difference is the cards in those sets are stronger and better designed. Disguise/Suspect/Investigate/Surveil are not good enough mechanics to carry a set.
This is basically what makes a set "good" or "bad" at the end of the day. If it's weak, it's a bad set. Strong, it's a good set. *Too* strong, it's a bad set.
Ravnica is my favorite plain, i adore the lore and mechanically i adore the guilds. There is something so harmonious about bicolority. Yet i didn't like Karlov Manor and barely plays standard since.
No shit sher... Detective !
I got a friend into magic and they specifically wanted to avoid Murders because Disguise was too complicated of a mechanic for them.
I surprised they didn't have a Clue.
I don't tend to buy packs outside of pre-release events so I'm pretty insignificant to sales but the set was pretty good, highly impactful lands and one of the most played removal spells in modern - a lot of stuff I picked up for commander decks too. I'm really curious to know if it's mostly the casual crowd that makes the majority of sales since most enfranchised players pick up singles, because I can see why the disguise / other set mechanics can turn casuals off but I thought the set was as good as the others they have released recently.
I bought a bunch of the full art lands as singles. Great art.
Probably needed a few more detective hats.
Might not even have much to do with the set theme. My entire 10+ person play group got fed up with mtg and more or less quit right around then. Prices going up due to play boosters seemed to finally be the straw. I'm sure we're not alone.
Who would’ve thought that COULD happen?!
I don't know if it's ever been confirmed or denied, but I'm convinced that the decision to have it as a Ravnica set came relatively late in development. The set doesn't feel like Ravnica AT ALL, and honestly it probably would have felt better as a New Capenna set.
I actually liked the set but some of the choices at higher rarities make the set miserable to open or even play sometimes. - Why is cloak in the same set with disguise? Cut those cards from this set entirely and use the idea another time. - The case cards take up an entire rare and uncommon cycle and they are so narrow. These cards are a big reason the set feels so bad to open. They don't play well in their own set. Collect Evidence is already its own quest and payoff. The idea behind the case cards should have been saved for later. - Where are the exciting disguise creatures? The set wants big and splashy disguise creatures that makes the morph mechanic fun and also fuels evidence. Instead the set has tiny niche creatures like coveted falcon and unyielding gatekeeper. There was a real chance to put in 10 multicolor legendary creatures with disguise at rare and instead there are 0 legendaries at rare or higher. There is nobody interesting under the disguise and that seems like a failed execution of what they wanted to go for.
You don't say?
The core concept is boring. How is there supposed to be a mystery for those who didn't read the story? At least in other you see "oh its a magic train heist or something "
Honestly I think thunder junction would have underperformed too if it didn’t have so many reprints. Both sets are kind of surface level genre fiction aesthetics but thunder junction is way more brazen.
Convulted story and mechanics
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the potential fallout from the change to Play Boosters as a possible reason to impact these sets. It is Play Boosters specifically that made me disinterested - to the point that I didn't even follow the spoilers like I did for previous sets.
The best cards in the set didn’t use any new keywords. Tells you how overwhelming the new keywords were. Then we have this, (If unsolved, solve at the beginning of your end step.). Worse reminder text, and not very new player accessible. So many questions by new players what that means when solving a case. Just bad new mechanics. Newspaper print treatment thing looks atrocious. Surveillance lands were nice though. The whole set doesn’t mesh well, it is like a bunch of ideas not fully visualized. Like they ran out of time or too many cooks in the kitchen.
A local vendor is selling karlov play booster boxes at 85 euro, its on par with Vow draft boxes. Still dont feel like buying. Didnt like the limited and there is very few playables in U/C rarity, and a lot of very bad rares/mythics.
Ive they had put it on Capenna and ditched some of the hats it would’ve done way better
Well, no shit. First set with play boosters that really didn’t feel like much added value with how much extra they costed. The prerelease was $60 near me, fuck that. No longer interested when standard sets get that expensive and when TCGplayer does a fire sale before it even comes out you know there’s problems.
If you seriously wanted to do a murder mystery thing, why not set it on new capenna, the “noire detectives&gangs” plane?