This page says it was only a century.

Although there were some (imo) weird directions for the guilds in the books (Golgari as having competing elves and bestial races factions, Dimir as a secret counterweight against Azorius rather than secret intelligence branch), one of the reasons I really liked the books originally was that black was as much a color of pragmatism as anything else. Teysa and Jarad were selfish but not pointlessly evil and were thus effective protagonists.

Fair enough. That entry is wrong then.

Jarad and Teysa are awesome.

I was writing up a long post about my continuing impressions of the rebels but the Postatog got it, so here's the Cliff's Notes version.

So apparently the renegades are weaponizing Gremlins now. And by the Renegades, I mean all the way up to Pia, who I at least had a little personal sympathy for. [[Like in an alternate universe telling of this story that didn't have the massive dissonance in Kaladesh thusfar she could be a great tragic character blinded by her loss and letting the campaign for vengeance get the better of her, turning a basically good individual into an agent of destruction and sorrow.]] This strikes me as an EXCEPTIONALLY bad move, beyond the basic bad move of sabotaging the infrastructure that EVERYBODY relies on, as it's rolling sabotage you can't even really control. At the same time we get our precious renegades coming out with "Aether is the world's soul and needs to be free". Yeah, you doofus, are you planning to stop imprisoning it in artifice and set the world back to where it was before the Aether Boom, or do you just mean "Free for ME"? Neither answer is really sympathetic here: the first is a myopic stand that's going to result in a ton of lost lives and lost quality of life across the board, the latter could have been understandable if, again, the consulate had actually been a problem for Kaladesh and not just a very small sector of disaffected and often pre-revolt criminal elements. There are some bad folks on the other side: Tezz, Gonti, Kambal, and Baral are all despicable. But I really feel for Sram and Dovin here, and all the ordinary people who are going to suffer and die when what those two and their predecessors built falls. This is a story that BADLY needed a middle path that WotC doesn't want to walk.

The consulate seizing everything at the inventor's fair seems a little... Bond villain. I mean, how is that an actual plan? It could go wrong in a lot of ways and it's not really clear how it benefits them more than hiring the inventors, buying their inventions, or just copying down the designs during the judging. Now they just have a mishmash of one-offs that they barely understand and really bad PR.

I don't think Tezzeret is playing for the long term, and he seems to have an inordinate amount of influence.

So he's just going to nab the shinies and run? Or was this about destabilizing Kaladesh?

This sounds like what would be tumbling out of Dovan Baan's mouth as he runs after Tezzeret, who is maniacally cackling to the sky and shoving inventor babies to the ground while he takes their candy.

I think it's reasonable for a relative minority's displeasure to motivate open rebellion and it's reasonable for people to want more independence regardless of if a government improves objective measures of quality of life. I don't think the story is inherently nonsensical, an escalating push-pushback-punch dynamic make sense. I feel like we want utopias to be toppled by one horrifying revelation (aether is babies!!) but the discontent of a few marginals bubbling up into more open, widespread anger as the governmental response is too harsh makes sense. Rebellions that break out seemingly out of nowhere make sense.

The problem is just there is a little bit missing for it to click for me. It doesn't read like a gray-gray morality situation, nor does it read like a off-white-dark-gray situation. Again, it feels like it's supposed to rest on just sympathy for Chandra who was legitimately persecuted by the Consulate and antipathy for Tezzeret who is legitimately crazy and evil.

Or, again, this is WotC's critique of the Tea Party movement.

From what I can gather about the story and its setting, I think they are trying to accomplish two different things that are extremely hard to reconcile. On the one hand, they want Kaladesh to be this bright, optimistic utopia full of beauty, fun and creativity, which is also a deliberate change in tone from the three or so blocks that came before it. On the other hand, they want to tell a story about an oppressive, unjust regime that's being toppled by a revolt of the sympathetic people fighting for their freedom. And I think there's a very similar problem with the way they are using Chandra's parents as characters (the post-Origins version). They are supposed to be the bestest pawents in de world who are super understanding and supportive of their pyromancer daughter so that we feel with the model family that has been torn apart by the Consulate. But that doesn't change the fact that they used her eleven year old daughter as a courier for stolen aether and repearedly dragged her into their own selfish, illegal activities that almost got her killed in the end. And it's not like they were starving and had to rely on criminal actions just to survive or anything, they endangered their daughter simply because they wanted more than their fair share of resources. That doesn't exactly help with making Pia more sympathetic.

You know what would have been cool? Having Pia go all in on that divide. Have her be a convicted, violent, even cruel force of anarchy... who also really loves her daughter and honestly wants Chandra to be happy. Let Chandra face the decision between the good of the world and her mother who loves her in terms not created by the dissonance between the tone of the setting and the tone of the plot. Make the Consulate ineffectual at worse and Pia and her faction even darker without changing the fact that she has an honest human attachment where she ought to have an honest human attachment. Bad people needn't be sociopaths, and while it would potentially be even more of a retcon having Chandra have to face up to that and try to find a solution that's neither turning her mom in nor tearing the world down could have been really powerful.

Pavor I think I'm going to quote that and use it the next time I need to explain why Kaladesh is a dishonest ****.

@ Tevish: That definitely sounds like an improvement. At least it would be a more honest story and take Chandra in a more interesting direction than keeping her in her "authorities bad!" comfort zone forever. I don't even think I would consider any other version of Chandra's mum more of a retcon than the one we got. Her mum in TPF was a completely different person anyway, and she was dead for crying out loud.

Yes! Mission accomplished!
Heck, I don't even read the damn stories anymore, but it seems like the flaws are just really easy to spot. Thanks for nothing, Magic Origins.

Honestly this set is the final nail in the coffin for rebel narratives for me.

And it's even more lame considering the rebels aren't even Rebels.

We got pilots and gremlins for gods sakes, they could have at least gone the extra step.
They really need to overhaul the creature system again.

But that would confuse the mongoloids. I'm sorry I mean new players.

You could even have Dovin Baan as someone that wants Kaladesh to be a beacon of safety to the Multiverse. A well-travelled planeswalker who's seen the worst the Multiverse has to offer, and weighing that against the ethics of harvesting/hording aether and cutting deals with someone like Tezzeret, decided its a price worth paying. So long as Dovin gets a plane whose people are free to experiment with sorcery and artifice, taking pleasure in the pristine refuge that is Dovin Baan's Kaladesh.

As always, the artbook has been spoiled. Though the same caveat as EM could apply, it's probably safe to say that:



and

What do you mean by "overhaul the creature system", though? The way I see it, the absence of Rebels isn't a problem of how creature types work in general, it's a problem of card designers and/or creative people not using a type that would have been available to them. In fact, the current system is supposed to give a creature a certain creature type if it's in the creature's name, so offenders like Qicksmith Rebel are due to WotC not sticking to their own system. But yeah, with them introducing new types like Pilot, Servo and Aetherborn and even giving Pilots, Servos and Artificers a bit of tribal support (I think?) AND Revolt being an ability word, Rebels not being there is hard to justify. Especially as Rebel tribal was already a thing and would have been happy with some more support. And it would have helped moving Rebels from being mainly more into where they'd feel more at home.

Jivan, you know I'm not one of the people who will drum up drama over political correctness, but you might want to consider not referring to people as 'mongoloids'. Just saying. I don't think the "they're dumbing down the game for new players" narrative really applies here anyway. Killing regeneration in favour of indestructible, on the other hand... Don't even get me started.

Edit: I still can't believe they're doing artbooks now but the novels supposedly didn't sell. I'd rather have a proper Planeswalker's Guide for free and pay money for a decent novel. I kinda hope the artbooks are going to fail spectacularly in the long run, just out of spite.

I'm still not convinced the lack of success of the novels can be completely attributed to low quality or an uninterested playerbase. It's hard to tell without having actual numbers, but I think things are improving in terms of story recognition and such because Wizards finally decided to market those products (Uncharted Realms and the Art Books) properly.

The Art Books are much more complete than the online Planeswalker's Guides ever were, so I'm happy to have them. Price is an issue for me, but that's due to priorities.