Quote from headminerve »This thing can have... reach ??? I have in mind a picture of a ceratops chewing a dragon's leg in midair.
I assume it climbs trees bear style
Must really hate birds
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Quote from headminerve »This thing can have... reach ??? I have in mind a picture of a ceratops chewing a dragon's leg in midair.
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Quote from Igzex »I really hope it has the planeswalkers and all but it's actually them playing the game itself just so people can make youtube poops where everyone is a horrible cheater.
Jace: "I play Divination. It allows me to draw two more cards! *Footage loops to make him draw 4 cards*. Now I summon my Guard Gomazoa-Guard Gomazoa attack his lifepoints directly! It allows me to draw two more cards!"
Nicol Bolas: "My move. I play a-
Jace: "My move! I draw two-THOUSAND more cards!"
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Quote from Gutterstorm »I’m just going to say that most works of fiction that are considered great do not just kill large numbers of characters. They use death sparingly and impactfully. I don’t know how others feel about it but it didn’t take long before death became a joke in Game of Thrones. Killing well liked characters too often can be a great way to lose a ton of your fans. They killed Gideon and if their Facebook poll is to be considered it had a great impact on people because he rolled over arguably better characters in all of his rounds so far. Just because you don’t like the gatewatch doesn’t mean they need to die. And not to mention the only reason you know any of this is because of leaks. Had it not been for that you would go into reading the novel still thinking that almost anyone could die and it would be way more satisfying. You’re only complaining because you recurved an incomplete version before having the opportunity to consume it as it was meant to be.
And people wonder why WotC gets so upset about leaks.
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There are two big reasons for this. Firstly, the Gatewatch from its inception has never felt like an organically put together team for many people. As evidenced by characters like Nissa recieving retcons explicitly so that they can fit into a market-friendly team of face characters. Along with the slapdash way that the team was assembled. Secondly, the Gatewatch's plot armor is noticably thick. Things happen to the team seemingly because the plot requires it, they have over thrice now come into contact with beings noted by the writers to be far beyond their league and have either prevailed or come out otherwise largely unharmed in ways that many see as unearned and contrived. Destroying two of the most powerful known beings in canon when their god-like predecessors stated that they would have great difficulty in doing so seemingly because they are the main characters. Also the plane those beings were destroying is going to be mostly fine. Also one (arguably three) member(s) of the team was to blame for those beings being unimprisoned in the first place and saw little in the way of consequences. Then the third being just decides to be defeated my our MCs for reasons that are just left for some kind of "future mystery" that likely won't be touched on for another half decade. Not to mention that if anyone else comes close to these beings, they are met with any combination of: A. Being disintegrated immediately, B. Losing their minds, or C. Being horribly transmogrified. The Gatewatch is immune, though. Because main characters. They also defy the most powerful existing planeswalker sans maybe Karn or Ugin and all get off pretty okay (Jace literally becomes a better person because of this). Because main characters, again.Quote from Wraithe »Quote from Xeruh »Quote from Manite »Well, there's your ****ing Gatewatch death, folks. And of course it was my favorite member of the team, continuing Magic's long-standing tradition of killing off its coolest heroes. Happy now!?
Quote from Simto »Damn Gideon didn't deserve to go down.
The heroes most willing to sacrifice themselves for others are usually the ones who least deserve to.
I'm guessing this takes place right after Bolas "LOLNopes" Gideon. At least Gideon still has a hand in Bolas' downfall.
Nah, people are still griping about the story. Nothing would be a good story except a complete rout of the Gatewatch it seems.
Yep. It seems like it has to be some sort of Game of Thrones level of deaths, or the story just sucks. Including the death of the villain.
I mean, ffs. In Lord of the Rings, exactly one major face hero dies in the second act (Boromir), and one in the third act (Theoden). And the BBEG doesn't even die in the end. Sauron does NOT die in the LotR. He simply has all his power stripped from him, and is doomed to wander Middle Earth as a shattered fraction of his former self. Clearly, half of more of the Fellowship needed to die, and Sauron needed to die, or the story is garbage, right?
Same with a great many pieces of fiction, including some of the very best out there. Where there are major wars or the like, and virtually none of the heroes die. But many background characters die all around them, and it is the deaths of the many background characters that show the high stakes, not the deaths of the heroes.
And now and then, someone sacrifices themselves for the good of the others, becoming one of the only major deaths in the whole overarching story.
Because we're following the story of the survivors, in the end. The stakes didn't just disappear because most of the heroes lived to the end of so many top-notch fictional stories. We could have followed the story of one of the many background characters, watching them die tragically, but that does not, in fact, a better story make.
But yeah. The nonstop griping because *gasp* most of the heroes lived through to the end, except for those who heroically sacrificed themselves at a key moment, as the "only way the story could have been redeemed/good" doesn't remotely mesh with the vast majority of top-notch fictional narratives. Note: this is not a statement by me about the quality of this story either positively or negatively. Simply a statement that the assertion many seem to be making that a lot of planeswalkers printed in the set "needed" to die for the story to be good or the stakes to be high, while the dozen or more definitely dead planeswalkers whose sparks we see floating around indicating they definitely DIED (along with countless citizens of Ravnica) don't count as high-stakes-enough, comes across as absurd on its face. A massive number of fantastic narratives do not, in fact, have all that many heroes die. Not even during a great war/battle in the final act. Yet somehow manage to remain both high-stakes and great stories with most of the heroes themselves surviving.
It's quite astonishing, really.
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Your grannies threw explosions of fire into your face when you went to visit them when you were little?Quote from Guardman »I teared up a little when I saw Jaya's Greeting. It reminded me of my grandmothers. Bless their souls.
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There's a big difference between Masters sets and Deluxe Editions. There's a little less of a difference between Masters sets and Mythic Editions, but still a significant one. While I disagreed with the execution, Masters sets were created for the purpose of getting reprinted cards into the hands of people who wanted them. Do the unopened packs have value? Yes, but that wasn't the express purpose of the set - except possibly for Ultimate Masters, which is probably the product that started WotC down the road they're currently on.
While Mythic editions had some desired reprints (the only real similarity between Masters and Mythic) Mythic and Deluxe editions were created to sell product to people who bought product in order to later resell product. Mythic and Deluxe are WotC's way of getting a piece of the secondary market pie, which they are otherwise unable to truly take advantage of. It could be argued that Mythic editions could be drafted, and I'm sure some were. But you can't do that with any of the Deluxe edition product, it's purposely not built that way. The Deluxe edition, and even the Collectors Boosters themselves, are truly not meant as a playable product, even on a single-card level. They're literally more valuable unopened, for the same reason (although not to the same extreme) that a sealed Revised booster/deck is valuable - the potential of what's inside. And WotC is pricing them accordingly. Yes, I know there's no MSRP but WotC *does* set the price they sell the product to distributors, who then have to set a price to make a profit while selling to stores, who also have to set a price to make a profit themselves, which is why the Collector's boosters are in the $25-35 range, depending on how much profit each LGS is willing to lose.
You can choose to only blame the buyers if you want, but WotC DOES bear responsibility in that they are choosing to make a product that only exists to be bought and sat on, even if WotC will never admit that.
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Urza won't become a noble because Urza was never a noble. Same issue for Yawgmoth, Warlock doesn't fit him. Yawgmoth was never an "evil magic-user".
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As for the get woke, go broke argument... Well, there's this that leapt out at me:
You're not going broke for being woke, you're going broke because you're losing money selling booster packs for $3. If the neon-haired girlfriend in your example dropped MTG from that store because of that, she did the store owner a favor. Their margins clearly sucked.
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That's how I'm seeing it.
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You're right, they should just go back to their original system of not publishing a schedule and just having people scour the internet looking for the previews on their own. That's how it used to be. The current way is much better.
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Mark says maybe to a lot of things, mainly because the asker specifically asks for a maybe. I wouldn't read too much into it, as the alternative is probably Mark saying no to a lot of things. And considering Sagas fall under the "Historic" banner and Eldraine is a new-to-us plane, it's unlikely the set will include much of its' history on the first go-round.
Also, it's probably also unlikely they'd do two different alternate-layout cards in the same set.
I do like the idea of the Storybook cards being a Monstrosity variant.
My speculation for the set is that the timeline is concurrent with GRN/RNA/WAR. Not too significant, but it might explain the sudden change of focus and the lack of Gatewatch.