I'd love to hear your take on why March of the Machines is good from a storytelling perspective; I've got a friend who really hates it and I don't really know enough about that set to disagree with him but I often find his magic storytelling opinions are judged a bit too much from a "does this set have good supplementary stories and planeswalker guides" perspective
i mean, i just think it's perfect at doing what it sets out to do: showing a huge multiversal war with plane-wide stakes. there's a bunch of ways it does so, but i think there's three elements that land the set's storytelling for me:
the battles are a masterful piece of storytelling -- not only does having cards like 'invasion of ravnica' and 'invasion of alara' really sell the phyrexian attack as something happening across the whole magic multiverse, but each of these cards is also a carefully crafted love letter to that plane. like, look at the invasion of innistrad:
first of all, the -13/-13 is pure innistrad, calling back to tragic slip from dark ascencion specifically and the whole host of cards that care about the number 13 from magic's three visits to that plane, most notably blasphemous act and triskaidekaphobia. then, the art: we see the plane's humans and werewolves, usually at odds, fighting together against phyrexianized versions of the very same. having heroes and villains team up to establish the threat of an external danger is a classic storytelling maneuver and this is far from the firs time we're doing to see it here. but then it flips into:
this card also pays mechanical homage to innistrad in a big way, being a 'graveyard matters' card that makes 2/2 black zombies. but it also--flipping when the battle is 'defeated' does a lot of narrative work explaining how innistrad repels the invasion. these battles are a piece of storytelling genius for that--you can't fully tell a story of dozens of planes, each complex and rich enough to have had their own set (i mean, there are a few fun invasion cards for planes that haven't had a set, but focusing one hte ones that have) all individually repelling the phyrexian invasion, unless you have a george rr martin wordcount to do it in. trying to do this is one of the reasons the Magic Story accompanying this set was terrible. '
but this? this is brilliant. it, and the other invasions, tell you with spectacular economy of storytelling 'this thing that's iconic to the plane, this thing that's an inseparable part of its identity and why people love it, they brought that to bear and fought off the threat'. like, innistrad is the gothic horror plane, it's the plane where there's three distinct factions of sinister undead walking around, and saying 'yeah, that's how they win' on a card that also celebrates the plane's mechanical themes is a triumphant and cool-ass moment!
a lot of other other battle reverse sides feel like similar payoffs to huge elements of a plane's themes or story: special shout out to the backside of 'invasion of mercadia', which pays homage to classic magic character squee while also being a quasi-spellshaper, probably the iconic type and mechanic from that--frankly--not very beloved set
i'm also a huge fan of how these get to show some known characters being, in effect, the heroes of their own story. seeing the students from strixhaven unite to invoke the power of the elder dragons that founded their school, or queen marchesa standing bloody but defiant amid the ruins of her palace: it's hype as fuck!
(these are also fun mechanical references to the instants/sorceries matter theme of strixhaven and to the monarch mecahnic from conspiracy)
finally, some of the battles show the immense cost of the war. one of the big complaints about the set's stroy is "the phyrexians were defeated too easily" -- but again, i think this is a complaint founded in the Magic Story, where elesh norn kills two praetors and two more die in comically anticlimactic ways and we don't get to see much or any of the actual War happening. but the flipside of 'invasion of kaldheim' and 'invasion of vryn' don't convey that, they convey "this is a hard-fought war and huge sacrifices are being made"
so, like, the battles--while managing to fit fairly cohesively into the set and its limited archetypes as a whole--are these amazing homages to the game's entire history, each of them telling what feels like a huge epic story while being only a fraction of the set and its conflict. big love for the battles.
2. the transforming cards
phyrexia has always been Transformation Horror. the terror of phyrexia is not that they'll kill you, but that they'll make you One Of Them. now--let's take a brief sidebar and acknowledge that the root of this genre of horror in 50s scifi is anticommunist myths about brainwashing, and one of the driving forces behind it in the modern day is cultural fears of disability and gender transition (read the excellent transformation, horror, eros, phyrexia). but yknow, i don't think you can lay this at MOM's feet when it's kind of an original genre sin, and an inevtiablity of massculture udner gender hegemony more generally. so with that as a given, MOM rules because it's the first set to use transforming cards to show phyrexian, well, transformation:
fun fact: some of these transforming cards (the ones without portals clearly visible) include a hidden phyrexian 'phi' symbol in the art. can you spot the one in order of the mirror?
umm but anyways not only do these cards rule, showing phyrexianization as a process, as a before and after, really inviting you to dwell in the horror of that (and also managing the nearly impossible task of brigning back phyrexian mana in a non-gamebreaking way--here being used in such a way that the loss of life implies a painful, difficult transformation) -- they also help make the set feel less one-sided. yes, we see phyrexia driven back on all the battles: but on these cards we see the invasion pressing onward, turning eldraine's knights and amonkhet's khenra, professors at strixhaven and imps on innistrad. they tell you 'it's everywhere, everywhere you look people are turning, transforming into monsters and fighting their own plane'. and best of all are the legends:
heliod and etali are pretty big deals to the metaphysics of the planes they're from! these are like, characters who were on powerful, beloved cards, with real meaning, phyrexianized permanently until their erstwhile allies have to take them down. gaining the color of the specific faction of phrexians that got them is a really neat bit of mechanical storytelling on all of these, by the by.
but, yeah, if the battles sell the resistance against the phyrexians, the compleated cycles sell the threat and the damage they've done. and speaking of selling the threat...
the teamup cards are the final set element in the trinity that makes MOM land for me. each one consists of two legendary creatures from the same plane, fighting against the invasion together. just like the battles, they're celebrations of planes, harkening back to iconic characters and those characters' mechanics--in a really neat touch, they all have alternate art treatments with a frame that was unique to the plane they're from. some of them, like errant and giada or zimone and dina, are culminations of the characters' arcs and bonds from their own sets:
others, and these are even cooler to me, are characters who are an extremely unlikely teamup, deadly enemies who just this once have to fight a threat that's bigger than either of them. it's a classic narrative beat, and one that does so much to sell the scale of the conflict.
and then, leaving all that aside, even just random draft chaff commons and uncommons are telling this story, of everything on every plane coming together when it counts the most, of things we've seen and know and understand being changed and twisted
like, uh, i understand a lot of criticisms. despite generally disagreeing with the idea that blocks are good or desirable for magic storytelling, i too think it could have benefited greatly from having two sets, one 'darkest before the dawn' with more phyrexian victories, and then a more triumphant one. the 'all the oil stops working when elesh norn' dies is a much smaller element of this non-linear, vertical-slice narrative (only being mentioned on one card) than it is as the climax to the linear Magic Story narrative, but it's still a lame as fuck retcon. but i don't know, i just think there's such a depth of storytelling here, drawing so masterfully on so much of the game's history--and i didn't even mention how good the bonus sheet was!
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