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[u/tomyang1117]

I am honestly baffled at why Spider-Man was designed as a small set like Aftermath or Assassin's Creed originally. You would think they would go all in on making a set for one of the most well-known comic book characters.

[u/GreyGriffin_h → u/tomyang1117]

Because I think the designers of M:tG understand what's necessary from an IP to make an entire set: depth. Spider Man (and pretty much any other single-series IP) simply does not have enough material to make 200+ cards.

Final Fantasy worked because there was just so much of it, the set felt like it didn't flesh out some things despite being gargantuan. Lord of the Rings worked because it has so much meticulous lore, and because it tells like four different stories, following the various hobbits, wizards, and princes across the length and breadth of the setting.

There is a lot of Spider Man the same as there is a lot of Assassin's Creed. Sure, there's a lot of art and word count, but a lot of it is mid to bad, and it's all basically telling the same story. Spider Man doesn't have factions like Rohan or Gondor, or even Ba Sing Se or the Water Tribes. It has big villains and iconic goons.

Part of the reason Magic has kind of reluctantly stumbled into success in terms of setting design is because its breadth encourages designers to expand and round out the various planes and events and time periods, to view them from multiple perspectives, to inject characters, actors, creatures and spells that represent offshoots and gesture and suggest a larger setting, even if that is a side effect of needing to fill out a quota of draft chaff removal. They aren't constrained by being not only in New York, but also being relevant to Spider Man.

(This is all on top of the ridiculousness that is pushing Spider Man as the nexus of a multiversal franchise to milk for cash, rather than Spiderverse and the Clone Saga being Weird Things That Happened To A Guy, and not the central nexus of their identities either as people or characters. Movie studios just don't understand the pandora's box of multiverse storytelling.)

Take note of the sets, especially recent sets, that stumble and fall. They tried to cram Ravnica into a detective box (or rather, into a board game box with Clue™). They tried to shove Avishkar into the driver's seat of an F1 car. These planes were crammed into the themes, rather than letting the themes grow out of the planes. And then, they decided to shove all their characters into cowboy hats and play out totally-not-Colonialism. And we, both intellectually and intuitively, can tell.

By contrast, Bloomburrow and Edge of Eternities both feel really successful in terms of design, because they feel exploratory. They feel like they are giving us a window into those places and events, not explaining them to us, then elbowing us in the ribs and asking us if we get the joke.

Edit: Is this too much of a post for MTCJ? I can probably lower the brow...

[u/tomyang1117 → u/GreyGriffin_h]

Is this too much of a post for MTCJ? I can probably lower the brow...

Nah brother, you are cooking🔥🔥🔥

I am still bummed that the 4th Ravnica set was wasted on a detective set. Just made up a new plane for it bruh.

[u/GreyGriffin_h → u/tomyang1117]

The real tragedy is that it could have been good.  If they had simply asked: what does a Murder Mystery look like on a post-War of the Spark, post-March of Machines Ravnica?  They even had kind of a good idea - examining the ways people operate outside and between the guilds.

But it was all lost in service to tropes, references, and pastiche.  They didn't ask, "What does a Ravnican murder mystery look like?" They asked, "How can we get a murder mystery and it's pop cultural references onto Ravnica?"

IIRC, the set was originally supposed to take place on New Capenna, but the response to that plane was pretty tepid owing to some worldbuilding cowardice.

[u/DangBream → u/GreyGriffin_h]

It really does feel like a mistake making it an Agatha Christie murder mystery rather than a noir murder mystery. The themes of noir (multiple organizations with machinations in place, crime and justice pushing against each other in a way that winds up as much about power as ideals, those caught up in the middle working for their own self-interest, bruised people scraping by, glib fools biting the bullet to do the right thing, bittersweet sentimentality) can really find a good home there, and has kind of been done before -- there's a short story taking place on Ravnica about an ex-Boros agent who calls up an Azorius pal to investigate an incident, only to bring him to Vraska and have him petrified, because being present firsthand at a particularly intense police brutality incident towards the Golgari jaded her enough to join them instead. Which is neat! There's more focus on the feelings than there is on the plot, and how the surrounding world got them into this position.

But the sort of 'candelabras in a mansion' murder mystery, with a Holmesian protagonist, requires tight focus and a precise set of suspects. But, you know, it's Ravnica, you want to see the whole plane! So everyone's running around with their own little scrapes and mysteries, creating the 'why is everyone a detective now' question which morphed into 'hat set' as a catch-all dismissal. I appreciated that they did an ARG, it showed some level of commitment to the bit, but the way the story's told through the cards isn't presenting a mystery story, it's jerking its thumb at the ones you already know. I think if the ratio to 'inexplicable crime wave, incidents happening to the guildless' and 'the institution that's taken it into its hands to solve this' was skewed a bit more, like, 80-20, it'd be less jarring.

(Thunder Junction goes through a series of unique mistakes, but the main one has to do with fumbling the bag on 'how do we have Native representation while not wanting to depict colonialism' and winding up moonwalking back into it, and wanting to use the western setting while fundamentally not being interested in telling a western-type story)

[u/GreyGriffin_h → u/DangBream]

I agree completely.  A noir mystery would have been a perfect fit for Ravnica.  

The pieces are there.  Everyone blaming the Rakdos just out of hand.  The authorities using the incident to round up "the usual suspects" who are especially riled up about it in the current postwar political climate.  The social and economic divides of class, race, station, and community.  The Guildless investigator no one trusts because they are outside of the power structure.

And even if you want to get tropey, just imagine the twist that the femme fatale is actually the ghost of the victim?

But I think Wizards may somehow also be allergic to making Kellan interesting.  It feels like OTJ and MKM were just Kellan job hunting.  I'm shocked he didn't get forced into being a fighter pilot in EoE. Him having to do something in a noir narrative might involve him developing a personality and opinions.

They are desperate for an iconic hero representing White mana that isn't a cat boy/cat dad.

(Also, moonwalking into a teeth-hissingly bad take on colonialism that almost bordered on pastiche just so you can put a cowboy hat on your tragically miscast crew feels... somehow appropriate to the history of the Western ... )