#magic creative

They beat Tezzeret.

Out of the 5 origin stories of the planeswalkers, only 1 of them features no retcons, and coincidentally, only that 1 story is something that is of the level of quality that Magic should be held to.  Kytheon Iora of Akros is the only story that can be considered a well-written, well-thought out story, sadly.

Chandra: her backstory lacks the impact of the one Laura Resnick wrote out in The Purifying Fire. It is extremely weak, and her backstory now in no way justifies the carefree, wantonly destructive person she’s become.

Liliana: her story was essentially a checklist of points the writer felt he/she had to address. Not a good story, and Liliana is simply an unsympathetic character that the Creative Team seems to forget is a villain.

Jace: well-written story. The STORY/PLOT is painfully generic, however, and Jace’s character continues being what Jace’s character is. 

Gideon: spectacular story. Little more could be asked of it outside of showing Hixus handing him his sural or mentioning his planeswalker master or warning Gideon of the dangers of fire magic.

Nissa: possibly the second worst story and character. If you completely remove all character traits from a character and replace them with the opposites... why the not just make up a new character? Because all of this sure is a new character that happens to share the same name and species as “Nissa” from the Zendikar block. I’d also like to add that “In the Teeth of Akoum” mentions she’s never been to Akoum.

Magic’s rich story is what keeps me invested in the game. I spend more time on the story and characters than I do actually playing with the cards (that isn’t to say the game is’t great; it’s the best card game out). The Creative doing in the block novels was a blow, but one that I could take since Uncharted Realms promised a tighter, more controlled story, as we’ve seen that outsourcing the novels results in... less than stellar results quite a few times.

With that in mind, it’s extremely saddening that with such a controlled environment where you post maybe 2-3000 words a week, Creative can’t keep control of its story. This week they broke continuity rather carelessly when they said vampires weren’t on Zendikar, but back in the original “The Lithomancer” story posted just 6-7 months ago, it clearly said Nahiri warned “even the vampires” of the coming Eldrazi threat. The zendikar Block novel “In the Teeth of Akoum” also says Vampires have always been there as Sorin sent them into slavery by the Eldrazi.