One could say he has a trapp for that.


I'm sorry, I'm not Raven. He would pun much better.

Tezzeret almost gave the whole plan away, but fortunately he managed to shut his trap in time.

Urza himself came to admire the Phyrexians, becoming corrupted however briefly by the glory of Yawgmoth's creation. It would be no stretch if tezz came to serve the Father of Machines.

It's been clear in no uncertain terms that Tezzeret despises Phyrexia's "imperfections", and that he was kicked out by Elesh Norn to boot. He would not help them.

Unless he's trying to kill off Kaladesh for the sake of being evil (very likely, given Baral's characterisation).

You mean mother of machines. (Yawgmoth is a washed up scrub)
And both Bolas and he himself put in safeguards to prevent brainwashing. But even then, Tezzeret disdains the Phyrexians. He thinks their fetish for flesh is ludicrous and their with sloppy.

Don't talk about Ral putting Jace in shackles. We don't want to give Moppi ideas.

To be fair, so did Roxith

Too late B...



I'm more of a Garruk/Jace randomshipper... but I like Ral, so we'll see what my mind can concoct down the road... hurr dee hurr.
____________________________________________________

On a more serious note though, AzureShade, please to have permission to use your post as a strip idea?

Yeah, that's a thing that keeps happening to me...

On a more serious note...

While my first reflex is to just agree with that, I think the roots of the problem run much deeper than the question of who the individual writers are. I can't say anything about the last couple of stories because I stopped following the... I believe people still call it a "storyline"? after 'Homesick'. But it's their whole new approach of treating perfectly non-obscure post-revisionist material like some old pre-rev stuff that nobody knows or cares about that ultimately put me off. To me, the complete lack of continuity is the surest sign of low quality, and I think they should fix that before fixing anything else would even be any use. It's not that they couldn't get it right if they wanted, it's just that they won't because they have to follow that New Era of Storytelling crap where they have to stick to a marketable central cast of charcters that they have to shape into new marketable heroes with marketable values (thus the retcons in Magic Origins) that somehow have to run into each other to swear marketable Oaths and drive along a contrived plot that's easy to follow and doesn't 'punish' people for not knowing things (whatever that means). Of course that gets in the way of good ideas on the writers' part. Well, okay, the writing in 'Homesick' was absolutely terrible and I really wouldn't mind if the new guy who wrote it got sacked sooner rather than later. But even the bad comic book script/immature sitcom/saturday morning cartoon kind of characterisation he was going for is probably due to them aiming at 13 year-old kids that they want to spend their pocket money on cards. So, yeah, I don't even consider myself a part of this fandom anymore. My days were numbered when Magic Origins came out anyway, and after 'Homesick' accidentally erased pretty much everything that happened from the first Zendikar block onwards from canon (by contradicting the climax of The Purifying Fire) and was just generally an awful story, I realised I can't bear to engage with any of this any longer. I still kinda lurk because I'm really fond of this community, and I might pop in once in a while to geek out about some of the old lore, but that's about it.

Oh wow, this was a lot more about me and my bitterness than I intended, but there we go.


Literally the first thing I thought after reading this line was "Why would Azure care how you choose to undress?" before I realised you were talking about your webcomic

One of the primary problems that seems to have cropped up is that they were aiming for an avengers style team, but fundamentally misunderstand one part of marvel's success:

After the Avengers came out, the next movie wasn't another Avengers movie. We're now two arcs past Gatewatch. It starts out as a solo story and then turns into a story about the Gatewatch.

People prefer the solo movies guys. It's what makes it special when they all come together again.

Yeah, well, oversaturation is a thing, too. But I wouldn't even care anymore if, say, Kaladesh was just a Chandra solo-adventure, knowing that she isn't the character anymore that was introduced to us as Chandra. None of them are. Well, I guess Liliana is still pretty much the same, which is why she's the only one of the five I don't hate. But I frankly have no idea who any of the others are anymore or what their relationship to each other is. We are two full blocks past Magic Origins and yet they're still retconning fundamental stuff about what happened between Chandra and Gideon. Just when I thought there would be no bad surprises anymore...

To be far they did have a point about the story needing a group of protagonists. Episodic events for each block are fine, but do tend to make flavour a bit esoteric.

That said, I think they narrowed said protagonists enough with just being the planeswalkers. To have the exact same neowalkers over and over is a bit tiring.

The other thing about superhero teams is that you only call on them for the mega ultra universe ending missions. While those aren't happening you get more individual stories about each person. I mean comics have known this for 30+ years why can't wizards.

There's also the uncomfortable way they're ignoring the fact Gideon and Chandra should be the closest and instead we're getting this horrendous cringeworthy ship baiting between her and Nissa.

Swear to gods if they end up making chandra gay...
I want a gay character, I really do, but we've known Chandra for more than ten damn years now. That revelation would be kind of ridiculous to come out now.
I would say similar about Nissa, but they tore her character down and erected something new in its place anyways.

Three things:
1.) You have a web comic? How did I not know about this?
2.) Heck yes you may use it.
3.) Can I have a link to said comic?

I'm still waiting for them to aknowledge that the Gatewatch is them just literally going back to their weatherlight style storytelling that they claim was as failure yet it somehow now a roaring success. Because I am and probably still will always be bitter about that.

That would be weird given that the ones who spend most on this game are adults. But it’s not like this is something that I would put past Wizards.

Gross :<

Probably, but I guess that means there's more room to expand with the younger audiences, and the stories seem like a good place to get them hooked from a marketing perspective. Why else would they remove all mention of forced marriage and not-really-racism and hint it had something to do with "Magic's values"? It feels like a step fifteen years back, like when demons were suddenly a problem and they would cater to angsty parents. Also, the "Chandra forgets her pants and then falls on her face, hahaha" kind of humour speaks volumes. Can you imagine Jeff Grubb writing drivel like that? And even if it's not primarily aimed at kids and young teenagers, they're still trying to get as many people as possible into Magic by aggressively marketing the story (basically forcing it down people's throats who don't even care) at the expense of the longtime fans who DO DID care and who'll bloody notice the disrespectful treatment the story gets these days. If they want everyone to care about the story, then they'll have to live with people leaving over the story, too (I'm sure they can, but just saying).

Very much agreed. On a related note, with Kaladesh in particular I’ve got the feeling from the flavor that they made sure to have everything be cheerful, even things that just aren’t. This goes for both the flavor text and the card art. Take Mind Rot for example and compare the Kaladesh art to this or that. Maybe part of this is that I’m subconsciously comparing it to the previous block with its gothic horror plane of Innistrad but even so Kaladesh seems unusually ... I don’t know ... tame? And don’t even get me started on the avoidance of “politically incorrect” themes ...

It's on my signature. I'm sort of wanting to jump start the comic again after a two year lull.


I guess to them it works now because Planeswalkers have a "reason" on being able to be on many different planes. If only they could work on tightening their handling of continuity... I wonder if they have internal guides made for each Neowalker at the moment.


K