Probably the poster child of planeswalkers inserting themselves and making the overall flavor feel worse

Looking at the comments, I was actually (happily) surprised about how much people disliked the music. I really hope WotC stops with using old pop/rock songs for their trailers. I'm not sure which is worse about killing the mood: this one or War of the Spark

The new trailer is cringey af, but I unironically think the music in the War of the Spark trailer was a stroke of genius and I love it. I don't know if they will ever be able to top that trailer in terms of emotional impact, at least for me (although I want nothing to do with the story it was connected to).

WOTS trailer was pretty awesome. Eldraine's was basically Shrek. This one could have been great if Vivien wasn't trying too hard to be a New Warrior.

I'll have to agree here about In the End.
It actually did feel like it carried some emotion and fit the tone.

The weird backwards gimmick probably hurt WOTS worse.

Agreed, the backwards gimmick was kinda confusing at first.

The things that came together to make the song in WOTS work were the great female cover with its melancholic vibe, the lyrics that fit Liliana's story (or what was left of it) perfectly and, finally, the nostalgia the song evoked in many viewers.

"Bad Reputation" is just very overused. I think another fast-paced rock song would have been fine, but when I hear "Bad Reputation", I remember a Rugrats movie scene with Angelica. It's just everyone's go-to "badass girl" song and it undercuts any actual badassness we were supposed to feel about Vivien.

Wtf is this set

I don't know but I'm loving it. Although I don't want to hear the excuse that Kamigawa is too weird for a return set when things like Nethroi, Apex of Death exist.

It definitely feels pretty cringe-y and like things are going in a Pokemon/yu-gi-oh direction with the Planeswalkers summoning their big scary pets that are actually just cuddly creatures. Also getting a bit of a digimon vibe (Digimon had the large scary monster thing). Part of me enjoys the campy aspect as I started playing during Invasion, but at least Invasion was furnished with a whole world and backstory. Ikoria is just like...big monsters and that's it. When everything's big, it loses impact. Sorta like eating a four-course meal where everything is steak.

Gotta say I'm overall kind of fatigued from the one-off sets. Where Magic used to feel like one unified world, now we have all these random planes like Eldraine, Theros and now this. It just feels like WotC is desperately burning through every fantasy archetype and then tying it together with the thread of "Oh, Vivien Reid travelled here once."

Just for technicality sake, it'd be Kaijudo rather than yu-gi-oh.
But part of me isn't really that upset about it either.
After what we've gotten, I can use a little camp and craziness.


I agree and disagree.
The entire Gatewatch story ended up being pretty awful, but that wasn't because we were jumping around, so continuity, in that sense, doesn't necessarily mean it's beneficial.
But I do miss something about the older settings. Maybe it's just because even when they were different, they had more total consistency. Rath, Mercadia, and Dominaria all had more in common than Eldraine to Ravnica to Innistrad.

To expand on what Barinellos said, I think the problem is not that the planes are different, but that the planes don't have a common internal thread.

Rath, Mercadia, and Dominaria (as well as Phyrexia and Serra's Sanctum to lesser degrees, everywhere visited in the Weatherlight Saga) were all slightly odd Fantasy-punk settings. Some skewed one way or another but they had a kind of 80's fantasy vibe where high concepts existed alongside fairly simple themes, integrating magic's 'hallmark' of Artifice as part of the setting. And Rath was the Dark World and Dominaria was "big" and Mercadia was all about treachery but you could see them being parts of the same story. Recent sets, though are more complete genre shifts from each other. Ravnica and Kaladesh match with all the old stuff, but Innistrad, Theros, and Eldraine feel more like Arabian Nights than like entries in a the consistent multiverse.

I guess, yeah, the "fantasy-punk" thing is what I missed that I couldn't put my finger on. I think there was a conscious effort among the designers to move away from that. Change is inevitable, I guess. But not always good.

The thing is, of course, the fantasy-punk aesthetic was Magic's hallmark. It was the look and feel that nobody else had.
It was their IDENTITY. So, moving away from that is moving away from a core aesthetic of what made Magic distinct.
I have hopes we'll end up on Vryn soon, just to go back to that feeling.
Or if we'd ever be so lucky, Alara.
Gods I miss Alara...

Vryn, Iquatana, and Equilor are all high on my wish list. Belenon and Kyneth also look promising.

Future Sight and Planechase are treasures.

If the gameplay is still good, I'm still on board. Some of these creatures are super wacky, tho it's hard to tell how that'll pan out gameplay-wise without actually playing.

I am warming up to the theme the more I think about it. As someone who watched tons of Godzilla films as a child, it'll be interesting to see how this folds into the Magic universe.

Cursed MTG idea: since as far as we know only humans are excluded from Ikoria's mutations non-human planeswalkers like Ajani, Nissa and Kiora would turn into deviantart fetishes there.

I'm liking it more than not. While you can tell there's reference material, it's not falling into the Innistrad/Theros trap of "flavor is pop reference." There is a Sharknado and all that, but it's not like everything corresponds to an on the nose reference. It's a world that looks like, to get it, I have to somewhat delve into as opposed to being able to immediately flaunt that I get everything at first glance because my third grade teacher made me read a mythology book. Innistrad is the only plane that can get away with that because pop reference of horror tends to actively try to draw people into learning more about the world (uncovering the mystery and all that), whereas in most everything else it's optional at best.

I like to think that Innistrad gets away with it because it did it well by integrating its influences in a way its successors haven't. Innistrad to me is inspired by gothic horror, while Theros references greek mythology. The references in Theros and especially Eldraine break the realism of the setting because my primary impression of them are associated with real world concepts. While I understand that Delver of Secret references The Fly, it also meshes with the setting in a way where True Love's Kiss and Trapped in a Tower to a greater extent rely on being tropes in order to make sense in the first place.

I like the broad strokes of Ikora as a setting, but I don't feel like the designers are taking it seriously. There's an aspect of "lol what if xd" that takes me out of it, creating a disconnect that the trailer itself really embodies perfectly. The sharks are really the prime example here, all looking really goofy, with a sharknado reference to top it off.

I think part of Innistrad is also that the works it references aren't connected. True, there have been gothic horror crossovers, but on their base level Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, The Exorcist, The Haunting... these don't naturally exist in the same world, each is "our world" (a baseline, typically earth at the time the story was written) modified by a singular event of supernatural horror. So a base had to be created that all these templates could be applied to, and then the interactions between the templates worked out. By comparison, Theros is greek mythology, which is a singular worldview of antiquity as told by a couple authors. They exist in the same time and place, removed from our own and connected to each other. Eldraine I felt fell somewhere in the middle -- I didn't have as much trouble with it as I did with Theros but I didn't find it as good as Innistrad. I think that's because they integrated a take on the Arthur myth with which they took a good deal of care with the works of the Brothers Grimm, and a lot like the gothic horror staples those don't naturally go together but do feel related to modern audiences.

There is, indeed, something very silly about Ikoria. Like a lot of settings dedicated to particular color combinations (Mirrodin 1.0 in particular) there's a degree of artificiality to it where the divisions feel forced without being an explicit exploration of the nature of mana like Alara. Throw that in a blender with Tarkir and Zendikar parts and... surprisingly, I like the result better than any of those except Khans-phase Tarkir. Ikoria doesn't feel like a living and breathing world, but some of that could well be because our narrator doesn't care. She's just here for the monsters. As insufferable as she is, I feel like that does kind of reflect at least what Wizards expects out of the audience, which isn't entirely unfair.

For my part, it feels like if Ikoria was being told from a native perspective it would be the kind of setting that I'd lose over a hundred hours to in a JRPG, which is good, but viewed from above like this there's not the same investment... so I'm kind of holding off on a true final verdict.

Yeah, the mythos cycle is perfect to demonstrate that disconnect. They have weight that simply isn't there with any word vomit Vivien spouts.