Magic Gnomes are robots. That's their identity.

It's super unintuitive.

How are mobile lawn gnomes unintuitive?

Because they are literally the only fantasy property treating them tart way, which clashes majorly with audience expectations.
While it's good to innovate, you have to play with expectations, not against them.

Both World of Warcraft and Hearth Stone play in this thought-space; and those were the first two major properties that came up on a simple Google search. I'm nearly positive that mechanical gnomes pop up in other non-Magic properties dating back further than that.

EDIT: Oh, and Everquest.

Warcraft plays with it in CONTRAST to regular gnomes who work on mechanisms, which far far outweigh any mechanical gnomes. Then there is the major contribution of DnD.

I'm not saying mechanical gnomes are verboten, but they have to have something to compare against and that's totally missing. Gnomes need a baseline if type going to otherwise be weird.

Well outside of the Quarum Trench Gnomes, I'm not sure.



That being said, I'm pretty happy with Gnomes as-is; an adorable robotic race.

I kinda like M:tG's gnomes. They're kinda different in having "gnome" be a small, humanoid construct rather than the makers of constructs as we've seen since at least Dragonlance.

And any of that is pretty far away from elemental spirits of earth, able to move through the ground as easily humans through air (via Paracelsus)

In Ari Marmell's The Conqueror's Shadow (and possibly also The Warlords Legacy, though I haven't read that one yet), gnomes were evil little clockwork-y mysterious people and it worked well.

Saying Magic is the only IP treating gnomes as mechanical constructs is way off-base, and using "audience expectation" as an excuse sounds like a poor argument to me. If you're going to point at anything, point to the fact that gnomes have a total of 7 cards across the entirety of Magic. That's a pretty poor sample size that really says nothing.

Aside from bottle gnomes being pretty consistently reprinted in supplementary products, the very age of how old those gnomes are is a big contributing factor to that. They've buried them for a long time now, and I want to point out the parallel with a similar scenario as the chimera prior to Theros. Everybody swore the established identity would prevent them from doing what they did, and I view gnomes as being in the same boat.

Like the argument or not, but expectations are a MAJOR contributing factor to design. That's why we got the guilds back, that's why Innistrad did so well, that's been the heart of a lot of their decisions.

Warcraft and Hearthstone should be considered the same property for this discussion. Hearthstone does not have its own story-elements at all. In Warcraft, baseline gnomes are annoying little tinkerers. Although the mecha-gnomes might be their predecessors.

And now I'm wondering if Magic even really needs Gnomes or Dwarves. I mean, I'm not against having more creature types to play around with, but is there anything Gnomes give us that can't be gotten by giving a Kithkin a screwdriver?



They also have this extremely creepy, unnatural way of moving around. I can't quite remember how it's described, but I remembered being totally creeped out by them.

So, wait, are you arguing that gnomes wouldn't make a return such as they are now because of their age? I mean, I agree with you and would even go as far as to say that gnomes don't have an established identity due to the aforementioned small sample size that is also a mixed bag visually speaking. But to say they couldn't keep them as a clockwork race I don't agree with.

Unless it was as a throwback, I wouldn't predict them coming back as a clockwork race. If they were to bring back gnomes, they'd get a treatment similar to chimera and orcs, with an overhaul to their identity and characteristics more in line with the vision marketing could play towards, instead of the weirdness passed to them from previous creative teams without a unifying concept.

Like or not, mecha gnomes are weird. I like them, but the zeitgeist leans away from that concept heavily.

I don't believe that since mecha gnomes are one of the two most-common gnomish interpretations I have come across, with the other one literally being the garden gnomes just... real.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if they copied WoW (especially with Hearthstone reaching a huge amount of people lately) and made gnomes a race so into clockwork that half the race are robots.

I do think Tinker Gnomes are mildly more popular than Mechagnomes since every setting I can think of with Mechagnomes also has Tinker Gnomes and some with Tinker Gnomes lack Mechagnomes.

What we really need are (miniature) Giant Space Hamsters.

I am now imagining Hamtaro in space.

Pretty much this. Tinker gnomes are a bit more broadly spread and mecha gnomes are rarely present without the other.

Of course this makes me sort of question where the mecha gnome concept even started. The tinker gnomes came from gygax, so that's at least clear.

Honestly, the answer might be M:tG. Homelands (which IIRC introduced Magic's first artifact Gnomes) was in the 90's. WoW/Hearthstone's mechagnome lore is absolutely later.

The zeitgeist doesn't mean much if you do it right.

Looking back into WOTC's releases, I present to you Drizzt Do'Urden. He bucked the trend of evil dark elves and went on to earn Salvatore a pretty decent career as an author. Quality of the novels aside - I liked the Dark Elf trilogy and more recently the Neverwinter run of Drizzt stories, the rest of the series has its peaks and troughs - Drizzt has become an extremely popular character that defied the audience expectations of the dark elf. Beyond WOTC, you have people like Joe Abercrombie and George Martin, whose characters also buck audience expectations.

Mecha gnomes could work if you could build a believable enough culture with them.

Wow, I don't remember the gnomes from The Conqueror's Shadow at all. And I keep forgetting there's a sequel--the first book really stood so well on its own. I gotta reread that one of these days.

I've always gotten the impression that mecha gnomes were part of Magic's fan lore--it was something that players really enjoyed and were enthusiastic about. I feel like seeing them come back in that same form would definitely be a solid nostalgia play.