Lots of legendaries that long awaited a card.

I personally feel it's too flooded by Eldrazi junk and things that I otherwise just... not in love with. I'm pretty sick of Phyrexians in general, for example.
The legends -> Planeswalkers are a little more interesting, though I really don't care about Grist, so that was a waste.
The one card I really want to see is a new Orim card and they keep missing me on that. (I guess I want a new Hannah as well, but that's lower priority since she has a few reprints.)

On the subject of legendary creatures/ walkers, can anybody explain to me why WOTC felt the need to despark walkers to make creature cards out of them? I've heard that was part of the reason behinf that move, but why not just allow themselves to print characters as creatures or walkers as they choose?
And on a similar note, what happened to the no undead with sparks rule with Elspeth becoming an angel-walker?

Commander.
The characters they want the highest degree of exposure with are the planeswalkers, but Commander is the dominant format and it shifted priorities massively when the fan made subgame overtook the game meta. As a consequence, for them to actually hit the exposure, they need to be usable as Commanders.
Besides that, the roster of characters had gotten WAY the hell out of hand and it nuked the idea that being a planeswalker was actually unique. The statistics warped when every plane we encounter got 3 native walkers when the odds were supposed to be one in a million has a spark and one in a million of those actually ignites.


They basically just played the "well that's not REALLY dead" with the Theros underworld being a physical location.
I mean, it's disingenuous, but it's their excuse.

I can sort of buy into the Theros afterworld working in its own weird way. But, didn't she get exploded by the filigree sylex in MArch Of THe Machine?

Honestly, that dumpster fire was such a train wreck, I'm not entirely sure what they intended. They got really obtuse and abstract with the entire plot point.
I think, being extremely generous, she was forcibly planeswalked by the sylex and it scattered her essence to the four winds until we got the Serra BS hot gluing her psyche back together.

.... Gods below I hate the story these days.

I think the Theros Underworld stuff works in that the Underworld is a physical place you actually go to with your body and soul intact. It is only if you try to leave the Underworld that the two are normally torn apart, into the Returned body and the eidolon soul. So when Elspeth went to the Underworld, her soul did not leave her body (losing the spark). It's with Erebos's permission that she leaves the Underworld intact.

The stuff with Serra in MOM are much more hand-wavey. Jay Annelli has a thread here about it. I'm meh about it and doubt WotC will apply more in-world physics explanation.

She intentionally planeswalked away; that was her goal, to get away with it so it didn't blow up the Invasion Tree.

Mark and the new story lead Roy have talked separately on the massive deparking pws and it was a choice made by both design and story;

1- Planeswalker cards are limited spaced and they where cranking them out way too much so they decided to limit them to default 1 card per standard set vs default 3. Also many have "gimmicks" that start to wear thin as planeswalkers but have more space as legends to play with it. I do remeber seemly this was a factor in Gideons death.

2- Barinellos was right that both in story and as cards pws started to feel less special so they decided to cut them back.

3- PW where starting to have issues to center a lot of conflict around as many could just up and leave meaning each story about them has to have a reason why they didn't just leave.

4- Development wants a certain color balance around pw cards in standard (which is how you could guess what color(s) pw cards would likely show up ) which often meant creative had to put a X pw in a set/story that didn't really make sense for them and/or where given an additional color since development needed pw cards in certain colors to be in X set (like whenever Nissa got a second color). Related is why we didn't get a BR planeswalker card for years after Sarkhan the Mad.

5- A lot of pw where made as "faces" for planes and had little other reasons for being a pw character and could still be a face character of that world as a legend. Will and Rowan where used as an example and imo Annie from Outlaws or the mouse character in Bloomsburrow would like have been pws with the old marketing.

6- Now that they are 30+ years into their own lore they want to use some of the legendary creature character more then just 5+ years in-between sets/ know some planes are hard to return too and wanted a away to maybe at least have characters popular from there to be used else where. This lead to omenpaths and then later desparking pw into legends whom still could use omenpaths.

7- It is a way to retire some of the old cast without having to kill them all off and could be features (if not in the conflict) of whatever plane they now are living on.

8- Commander really wasn't a huge factor, they have found a number of ways to have planeswalker character as commanders. Personally if commander was a factor then the pick of pw vs desparked pw is odd since a lot of the desparked pw already could be commanders.