so baseless speculation which is against the rules in here, i see
Baseless speculation is making wild guesses based on nothing and is strongly discouraged. Supported speculation in which historical evidence is leveraged to create plausible theories about future events is generally welcomed.
In this case, the idea that a new PW character introduced in D12 will appear as one of the new characters in the upcoming block is a very reasonable supposition, given how Nissa's appearance in D10 worked out. It's not proven, or confirmed, but in terms of assumptions about the future it's not a bad choice, especially compared to the quite implausible idea that the character won't be appearing in a future set at all.
just curious, why do you think that Kiora will be in INN?
Because the Creative time isn't going to waste their time inventing new PW characters they have no intention of using and INN, like all blocks preceding it since the introduction of PW cards, will assuredly have multiple new planeswalker characters introduced.
I wouldn't count it out of being in innistrad yet.
It 100% will not be in Innistrad. The #1 standard for picking the coreset returning mechanic (based on what we were told when they explained to us about scry last year) is that the mechanic they pick isn't being used in either of the upcoming two blocks and works well as a self-contained flavorful mechanic they can use on just a few cards.
Wasn't the last set Richard Garfield work on was the amazing, extraordinary Ravnica, if memory serves correct.
Garfield's Magic history is Alpha, Arabian Nights, Tempest, Urza's Saga, Odyssey, Judgment, Ravnica. I'm not going to say that's a perfect record but it's a heck of a lot better than any other single designer.
It's also due to the fact that once MaRo took over, block design drastically altered.
Yeah, that's a good point. Originally, every block theme was easy to break down into pure mechanical terms, but lately we've had a lot that are more abstract. In a sense, Scars of Mirrodin is another "artifact block," but it doesn't have a strong artifacts-matter theme and a lot of its mechanics (like infect) don't interact with artifacts at all. Even with more aggressively mechanical themes like "lands matter," we see a lot of top-down worldbuilding mechanics to help convey the feel of the plane.
Thanks to one of Rosewater's articles we actually know specifically that Innistrad was designed from a flavor-first perspective -- that they wanted to create (apparently) a gothic-horror setting and that the mechanical identity of the set flowed from that. So on the one hand, they might have decided that such a theme was the perfect opportunity to return to a full-on graveyard theme -- but on the other hand, it might have wound up with a much more diverse set of mechanics and a more diffuse "horror" theme because that's the way the design happened to bend.
Can you tell by Sunblast Angel that Scars of Mirrodin was about the Phyrexian War in Mirrodin?
Well, no, but people did actually pretty much completely identify the "Phyrexians vs. Mirrodin" storyline from the name, image, and the leaked trademark of "New Phyrexia."
Similarly, it's a lot easier to draw storyline conclusions than mechanical ones here, I think. The image combined with the tagline makes the gothic-horror theme pretty apparent, which begins to suggest a lot of specific ideas, many of which will probably turn out to be accurate. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to speculate along the lines of "will they use werewolves in this block? will it have ghosts? what sort of horror themes are appropriate to blue?"
But I really have to scratch my head in confusion when people are screaming that Delve will come back, because this is a flavor-driven block and I don't see how Delve fits Gothic Horror.
One of the regrets that Aaron Forsythe has spoken of repeatedly is that Wizards did such a poor job of integrating flavor and mechanics in their first attempt at a graveyard block: Odyssey weds a post-apocalypic world with a graveyard theme where most of the colors have no thematic relationship whatsoever to the mechanics (which in turn gives the whole block theme an awkward and artificial feeling.)
When he's spoken about this, he's talked about how what would make much more sense would be a graveyard block with a classical horror theme. When you take that, and combine it with the degree to which another graveyard block is "due" (we've had two artifact blocks, three or four multicolor blocks, and two tribal blocks; graveyard is currently the oldest block theme that's never been revisited) it seems plausible that such a theme might be coming. (And of course a graveyard theme would synergize well with all the sacrifice shenanigans the Phyrexians are up to.)
All of this should be viewed with the skepticism due to all theme predictions, of course; as a community we have a pretty bad record of predicting block themes, mostly because we don't actually have enough information in most cases to make accurate guesses.
Now, there's nothing wrong inherently with a Spike-mechanic, but R&D, to my recollection, have pointed out that one of the problems with Odyssey (other than the complexity of board states) was that it was full of spike mechanics that rewarded you for doing something you normally wouldn't do, which is fill your graveyard.
I think that's oversimplifying a bit. They've done other mechanics that have the same effect of making it good to put stuff in your graveyard since. The problem in Odyssey was less the specific mechanics (which have played well in other contexts), it was all of them in combination creating an environment where normal "rules" didn't apply, combined with lots of crappy cards that were good enablers of that environment, and then both layering over a set design that heavily emphasized persnickety incremental-advantage scenarios and gotchas over normal play.
Delve already does a few things to make it better on those angles than the Odyssey mechanics:
It doesn't force your opponent to track extra gamestate information like Flashback and Threshold.
It consumes the graveyard as a resource rather than just wanting it to be big like Threshold, so it's more self-correcting.
It's a cost-reducer rather than a card-improver, so it's "virtual vanilla" friendly and doesn't add as much to board complexity.
It isn't tied to a single value like Threshold, so you don't have the same incentive to explosively shoot to achieve that value immediately.
So, now you have a set, with a different resource: exiling the graveyard. Players will want to use that resource, so you want to have enough instances of that so they can build decks around. But if you do that with delve, the mechanic starts to works against itself.
Only in the sense that, say, building a ramp deck with tons of X spells "works against itself" because each point of mana you spend on spell A can't be spent on spell B. Yes, it's not straightforwardly brain-dead linear, where you always want more more more, but in most contexts it should not be too difficult to use effectively.
They are functionally flawed and both will never appear again, at least not in this form.
Given that R&D have talked about how Fateseal was really just a stretch elaboration of scry to fill their new mechanic quota whereas they've consistently said that they love Delve, they think it's a good mechanic, and that it might return someday, I certainly wouldn't take your side in a bet.
While this is certainly a valid chunk of Delve's design space, I challenge you to go one step beyond and think about how Delving for one, two or three mana may impact a game.
This is a succinct summary of your points about why Delve is a good mechanic, I think. It looks problematic compared to some other mechanics because it fights against itself and isn't well-suited to huge, explosive uses, but that's very much the point of the mechanic -- it's not intended to be explosive most of the time, but rather to provide small tempo boosts more frequently with the possibility of an explosive result in certain rare circumstances.
I see your point to an extent but these cards do have a problem: although delving for 1 is the easiest way to solve all of delve's problems, it's not exciting at all.
90% of cards with every mechanic aren't exciting. Most delve cards in a block that uses the mechanic extensively will be stuff like 2G, +4/+4 to target creature, delve.
Please, people. Let it go.
Delve will never come back. It's a flawed mechanic by nature, and can't be brought back in great numbers greater then 4 or 5. That's why it was printed in FS.
Errr... really? Go back to the period around the release of Future Sight (and the discussion of a similar mechanic from the GDS1.) Quite a bit of discussion from R&D about how Delve was their favorite new mechanic in Future Sight, how it was designed to utilize the graveyard as a resource in a less explosive and abusive way than past mechanics, and how the tension of the mechanic played well -- none of which, as best as I'm aware, have any of them gone back on afterwards. It's probably the single most likely of the remaining "future-shifted" mechanics to come back as a real block mechanic in the future.
This is interesting. Do we know that Homelands *was* intended to be gothic horror overall, as opposed to just using it in some components? Do we have a source for that?
Good question! I'm not sure we have any firm source for this; I guess what I would say, instead, is that the Transylvania-style setting implied by the black and green cards in Homelands (and a very few of the white) is flavorful and evocative (and most of what people remember about the set if they ever remember anything fondly), whereas the red/blue/most-of-white cards are basically lame and incongruous.
However, while some people might not give the set a fair chance if it was on the same plane as Homelands, there was nothing wrong with Homelands' flavor.
The black (and many of the green) cards in Homelands are actually pretty good at expressing the horrific Transylvania-style setting, but the rest of the set fails to keep it up. The modern WotC can -- and, I think, will in Innistrad -- do a lot better with the same theme.
I honestly don't buy that argument, considering that people said the exact same thing about hoping to yet another plane after the first Mirrodin block, yet we still ended up on Kamigawa and then Ravnica.
Not really comparable at all, given that WotC were quite explicit at the time that Mirrodin was the start of a new "planeswalking" trend for future sets, while this time they've been just as explicit that Scars of Mirrodin is a one-off experiment that they want to see the results of before following up.
Anyway, about the "return to Homelands?" idea, I don't believe it. This is another block, like Scars, which is being driven by the creative team rather than design. (Zendikar was an example of the other way around.) Although returning to Homelands is a popular idea, I don't think they'd do it immediately after revisiting Mirrodin. More likely, I think they asked themselves "What was it that we liked about Homelands?" and went for that instead. Answer: the setting.
Precisely. The reason people want to go back to Ulgrotha isn't because it was the location of a great set (it certainly wasn't) or even because it has a great setting (most of it was pretty poor, actually); it's because the idea of a gothic, Hammer-film horror setting is really appealing to people. The obvious solution to that isn't to try to fold, spindle and mutilate Ulgrotha into being a good setting with a good set attached; it's to start over from the beginning and design a new setting of that type and build a block around it -- which seems to be exactly what they're doing.
This isn't going to be set in Ulgrotha. If the name were English words ("Dark Ascension" or what have you) I'd lean towards that possibility strongly, but it's a fictional place name, and big Magic sets named (partially or completely) after fictional places are always telling us the name of the plane they're set on.
I really don't think the guy on the floor is a vampire; pretty sure he's just a normal dude that Liliana offed.
In the past, Aaron Forsythe has regretted that they did their first graveyard block with a totally unrelated theme (post-apocalyptic barbarians) rather than situating it in a gothic horror scenario where it made sense. Curious if that's the route they're taking here or if this block will be doing something entirely different.
Also: 264 cards, noticeably larger than a normal "large" set these days.
It's a return to Homelands. Or at least a return to the gothic themes of Homelands.
Yeah, it looks to me (and many people predicted this when we first discovered the name) like an attempt to execute the gothic-horror style that Homelands aimed for, without the baggage of reusing the setting of the least popular set of all time.
Set Name:Innistrad Block: Set 1 of 3 in the Innistrad block Number of Cards: 264 Release Date: September 30, 2011 Prerelease Events:September 24-25, 2011 Launch Parties: September 30-October 3, 2011 Magic Online Release Date: October 17, 2011 Game Day: October 29-30, 2011
Design Team
Mark Rosewater (lead)
Richard Garfield
Jenna Helland
Graeme Hopkins
Tom LaPille
Development Team
Erik Lauer (lead)
Mark L. Gottlieb
David Humpherys
Tom LaPille
Adam Lee
Kenneth Nagle
Baseless speculation is making wild guesses based on nothing and is strongly discouraged. Supported speculation in which historical evidence is leveraged to create plausible theories about future events is generally welcomed.
In this case, the idea that a new PW character introduced in D12 will appear as one of the new characters in the upcoming block is a very reasonable supposition, given how Nissa's appearance in D10 worked out. It's not proven, or confirmed, but in terms of assumptions about the future it's not a bad choice, especially compared to the quite implausible idea that the character won't be appearing in a future set at all.
Err... which things, exactly?
Fish has actually been an eternal-format staple archetype for like over ten years now.
Because the Creative time isn't going to waste their time inventing new PW characters they have no intention of using and INN, like all blocks preceding it since the introduction of PW cards, will assuredly have multiple new planeswalker characters introduced.
It 100% will not be in Innistrad. The #1 standard for picking the coreset returning mechanic (based on what we were told when they explained to us about scry last year) is that the mechanic they pick isn't being used in either of the upcoming two blocks and works well as a self-contained flavorful mechanic they can use on just a few cards.
Garfield's Magic history is Alpha, Arabian Nights, Tempest, Urza's Saga, Odyssey, Judgment, Ravnica. I'm not going to say that's a perfect record but it's a heck of a lot better than any other single designer.
Yeah, that's a good point. Originally, every block theme was easy to break down into pure mechanical terms, but lately we've had a lot that are more abstract. In a sense, Scars of Mirrodin is another "artifact block," but it doesn't have a strong artifacts-matter theme and a lot of its mechanics (like infect) don't interact with artifacts at all. Even with more aggressively mechanical themes like "lands matter," we see a lot of top-down worldbuilding mechanics to help convey the feel of the plane.
Thanks to one of Rosewater's articles we actually know specifically that Innistrad was designed from a flavor-first perspective -- that they wanted to create (apparently) a gothic-horror setting and that the mechanical identity of the set flowed from that. So on the one hand, they might have decided that such a theme was the perfect opportunity to return to a full-on graveyard theme -- but on the other hand, it might have wound up with a much more diverse set of mechanics and a more diffuse "horror" theme because that's the way the design happened to bend.
Well, no, but people did actually pretty much completely identify the "Phyrexians vs. Mirrodin" storyline from the name, image, and the leaked trademark of "New Phyrexia."
Similarly, it's a lot easier to draw storyline conclusions than mechanical ones here, I think. The image combined with the tagline makes the gothic-horror theme pretty apparent, which begins to suggest a lot of specific ideas, many of which will probably turn out to be accurate. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to speculate along the lines of "will they use werewolves in this block? will it have ghosts? what sort of horror themes are appropriate to blue?"
One of the regrets that Aaron Forsythe has spoken of repeatedly is that Wizards did such a poor job of integrating flavor and mechanics in their first attempt at a graveyard block: Odyssey weds a post-apocalypic world with a graveyard theme where most of the colors have no thematic relationship whatsoever to the mechanics (which in turn gives the whole block theme an awkward and artificial feeling.)
When he's spoken about this, he's talked about how what would make much more sense would be a graveyard block with a classical horror theme. When you take that, and combine it with the degree to which another graveyard block is "due" (we've had two artifact blocks, three or four multicolor blocks, and two tribal blocks; graveyard is currently the oldest block theme that's never been revisited) it seems plausible that such a theme might be coming. (And of course a graveyard theme would synergize well with all the sacrifice shenanigans the Phyrexians are up to.)
All of this should be viewed with the skepticism due to all theme predictions, of course; as a community we have a pretty bad record of predicting block themes, mostly because we don't actually have enough information in most cases to make accurate guesses.
I think that's oversimplifying a bit. They've done other mechanics that have the same effect of making it good to put stuff in your graveyard since. The problem in Odyssey was less the specific mechanics (which have played well in other contexts), it was all of them in combination creating an environment where normal "rules" didn't apply, combined with lots of crappy cards that were good enablers of that environment, and then both layering over a set design that heavily emphasized persnickety incremental-advantage scenarios and gotchas over normal play.
Delve already does a few things to make it better on those angles than the Odyssey mechanics:
Only in the sense that, say, building a ramp deck with tons of X spells "works against itself" because each point of mana you spend on spell A can't be spent on spell B. Yes, it's not straightforwardly brain-dead linear, where you always want more more more, but in most contexts it should not be too difficult to use effectively.
Given that R&D have talked about how Fateseal was really just a stretch elaboration of scry to fill their new mechanic quota whereas they've consistently said that they love Delve, they think it's a good mechanic, and that it might return someday, I certainly wouldn't take your side in a bet.
This is a succinct summary of your points about why Delve is a good mechanic, I think. It looks problematic compared to some other mechanics because it fights against itself and isn't well-suited to huge, explosive uses, but that's very much the point of the mechanic -- it's not intended to be explosive most of the time, but rather to provide small tempo boosts more frequently with the possibility of an explosive result in certain rare circumstances.
90% of cards with every mechanic aren't exciting. Most delve cards in a block that uses the mechanic extensively will be stuff like 2G, +4/+4 to target creature, delve.
Errr... really? Go back to the period around the release of Future Sight (and the discussion of a similar mechanic from the GDS1.) Quite a bit of discussion from R&D about how Delve was their favorite new mechanic in Future Sight, how it was designed to utilize the graveyard as a resource in a less explosive and abusive way than past mechanics, and how the tension of the mechanic played well -- none of which, as best as I'm aware, have any of them gone back on afterwards. It's probably the single most likely of the remaining "future-shifted" mechanics to come back as a real block mechanic in the future.
Good question! I'm not sure we have any firm source for this; I guess what I would say, instead, is that the Transylvania-style setting implied by the black and green cards in Homelands (and a very few of the white) is flavorful and evocative (and most of what people remember about the set if they ever remember anything fondly), whereas the red/blue/most-of-white cards are basically lame and incongruous.
There was quite a bit wrong with Homelands' flavor. Why was something intended as a gothic-horror setting full of aboriginal minotaurs and dwarf sea pirates? Why did this setting have Giant Oyster and Aysen Bureaucrats? What's the deal with cards like Koskun Falls and Mammoth Harness that look like they're leftover from Ice Age?
The black (and many of the green) cards in Homelands are actually pretty good at expressing the horrific Transylvania-style setting, but the rest of the set fails to keep it up. The modern WotC can -- and, I think, will in Innistrad -- do a lot better with the same theme.
Not really comparable at all, given that WotC were quite explicit at the time that Mirrodin was the start of a new "planeswalking" trend for future sets, while this time they've been just as explicit that Scars of Mirrodin is a one-off experiment that they want to see the results of before following up.
Yes, I too am confused why people are excited that the architect of the nigh-universally-agreed-upon best block of all time is working on a new set.
Precisely. The reason people want to go back to Ulgrotha isn't because it was the location of a great set (it certainly wasn't) or even because it has a great setting (most of it was pretty poor, actually); it's because the idea of a gothic, Hammer-film horror setting is really appealing to people. The obvious solution to that isn't to try to fold, spindle and mutilate Ulgrotha into being a good setting with a good set attached; it's to start over from the beginning and design a new setting of that type and build a block around it -- which seems to be exactly what they're doing.
I really don't think the guy on the floor is a vampire; pretty sure he's just a normal dude that Liliana offed.
Also: 264 cards, noticeably larger than a normal "large" set these days.
Yeah, it looks to me (and many people predicted this when we first discovered the name) like an attempt to execute the gothic-horror style that Homelands aimed for, without the baggage of reusing the setting of the least popular set of all time.
Horror Lurks Within
Set Name: Innistrad
Block: Set 1 of 3 in the Innistrad block
Number of Cards: 264
Release Date: September 30, 2011
Prerelease Events:September 24-25, 2011
Launch Parties: September 30-October 3, 2011
Magic Online Release Date: October 17, 2011
Game Day: October 29-30, 2011
Design Team
Mark Rosewater (lead)
Richard Garfield
Jenna Helland
Graeme Hopkins
Tom LaPille
Development Team
Erik Lauer (lead)
Mark L. Gottlieb
David Humpherys
Tom LaPille
Adam Lee
Kenneth Nagle