I feel bad for Ethan. As for playing, Amonkhet should feel pretty good to play, but creative decisions for the plane took away my enjoyment of it. It's bad enough that the plane was meant to have a culture built around a planeswalker, but that could theoretically work in same way Mercadia treated Ramos. Instead, we got a plane that purposefully had an unsustainable culture. Mercadia's world building had some issues, but ultimately it was more along of "Why should I care?" as opposed to "How can this place even work to function this way?" On top of that, the main planeswalker's purpose for the place continues in the line of questionable objectives for the character (When remerging Alara for the energy released is by far one of your more understandable plans, there's an issue.). The end result for Amonkhet just ends up making me not liking the plane simply because it was built to have the issues I have with it on purpose.

Yeah, I really am hoping that the Magic Story articles help make more sense of this and that the artbook spoilers are either being mis-characterized or are just wrong. Because right now, this is what I'm seeing:

Original Problem: The Mending happened and Bolas needs some ways to regain his Old 'Walker powers because he doesn't like not being an omnipotent god-being.

Maybe not first solution: Alara.
-Make the Conflux happen and reap the rewards by consuming the energy and supercharging your spark. (Partially successful.)

Another solution: Amonkhet.
-Go to the mostly desolated Amonkhet in the waning days of your powers Post-Mending.
-Conquer the last remaining city on the plane, kill everyone old enough to have thoughts, bend the local gods to your will.
-Corrupt the local traditions in order to create a supply of greatest warriors that will make up a zombie army when you return. (This does not solve your original problem.)
-Return and immediately set your localized zombie army on the remaining populace. (Reducing the size of your army and razing your only source for more greatest warriors for said army. Again, not solving your original problem.)
-Beat up some 'Walkers that show up to stop you.
-Leave?
-Claim it was all a ruse to lure other 'Walkers to the middle of sandy-crotch nowhere in order to "test" them, even though most of them weren't even born for decades before you started this mess? (Yes, you control the sun and can spring this honey trap whenever you feel like it, but was this really what you had in mind when you were desperately grabbing for power so long ago?)

Side plan: Zendikar
-Trick some 'Walkers into releasing plane-devouring Eldrazi in hopes that a "team" develops to stop such a threat, so that you can gauge their effectiveness at maybe stopping you one day. (If this plan fails, you have unleashed a power that you may not be able to stop on the Multiverse. Luckily it sort of didn't fail. However, it turns out you did fail to kill some other dragon 'Walker you thought you killed.)

Like, I'm really at a loss here. Bolas should be smarter than this.

I feel exactly the same. I feel bad for the card designers whenever creative decisions kill my enjoyment of a set or block and make me skip it (Tarkir block, Magic Origins, Kaladesh block, the first set of Amonkhet (probably)). Well, and BFZ block was a mess on pretty much every level, not just creatively. Ethan in particular has made some cool Vorthos stuff happen and shows interest in older lore. But Amonkhet isn't the Egypt plane that I wanted at all, and the unsustainable and unnatural approach to the culture is one of my biggest issues with it. Okay, I'm not exactly happy with some aspects of Amonkhet's mechanical identity either, and while I'd love to draft it if I had the time, it looks like it makes for awesome gameplay in Limited but has little that would interest me in the long run. The way they handle Bolas' plans has been an issue for years, and if the artbook stuff on him releasing the eldrazi is true, the writers might as well admit they've given up.

Then again, there are awesome planes like Kamigawa and Ulgrotha that have been hampered by terrible card design and that we haven't seen again ever since, so this goes both ways.

Ugh,

Off topic BfZ rant: Maro shouldn't be allowed to work on returns to places with things he didn't like the first time around. He calls BfZ too close to RoE, but it really isn't. Rise was all about building your sides for an achievable, but set goal where the first creatures you play could have an important impact later. You could level a critter up to its ultimate level; get that critical mass of defenders to end the game; or you could finally reach enough mana to go from casting the bush league colored eldrazi to the colorless ones. In BfZ, he just took the mechanical notes and missed the big picture of the set. Instead, we got a weird, slow resource engine machine that didn't set set-wide expected game play climax points and hamfisted attempts to make Eldrazi matters cards that were "backwards compatible" with colorless things nonsense that made templating look horrid. I'd expect a return to Tarkir or Kamigawa to be equally terrible if left in his hands.

As for Bolas's plans... they could've linked Lazotep, Sangrite and Bismuth as potentially useful resources for some crazy device. They could've said that the Eldrazi process unleashes large amounts of energy into the Blind Eternities. They could say that deep in the desert, Bolas diverts a large portion of the plane's energy into a research lab for modeling plans on less cooperative planes. They could say that the trials are just Bolas's guilty pleasure tv show for binge watching after a long decade of maniacal laughter. But everything is about testing the Gatewatch? That just doesn't work.

That's not what he's said. He's said that RoE was the wrong starting point for BfZ. He tried picking up the loose (plot, not mechanical) threads left by RoE and sticking to them very closely, then didn't change that plan when it started to fall apart on him because he (like everyone else in R&D) was dealing with the fallout from the shift to the Two-Block model.

(Am I the only one in this thread who listens to his podcast? He owned up to all of this in a fairly recent episode.)

Well, one of those is definitely never happening, so no worried there. As for the other one, he loves Tarkir. He acknowledges that the underlying hook turned out to put much more stress on the system than he expected, but that's just means they probably won't do a time-travel-inspired structure again. What is he not supposed to like there that would doom a return?

(Also, Shadows over Innistrad probably shows they've learned their lesson about returning to the popular version of a world.)

If I remembered the context of what he said wrong, then he's still wrong about starting with RoE. Zendikar's a world that had the Eldrazi imprisoned in it for hundreds of years. I'm sure there could've been plot-line quests for digging up key components for re-imprisoning them. Having the Eldrazi be a large a proportion of the set is overkill; they should've just been the top end of the curve. Having the set design be essentially focused on the combat part of defeating the Eldrazi was a horrid idea. Just focus on correcting the Zendikar limited speed issue and allow there to be ways to slow down the game for the decks that want Eldrazi. In OG Zen is super speedy and RoE is battlecruiser, make a format where you can decide which to play (Like 3xCHK did).

Maro releases so much stuff that he repeats stuff a lot. I'd been reading his stuff for over ten years now, and the podcasts are a lot of repeated material. The main things to read from him after awhile are the State of Design articles and things like Metamorphosis 2.0. Some things can be missed that way, but overall, it really stops being worth the effort to follow him closely after a while.

Maro doesn't hype Tarkir like he does everything else. He was excited about the initial draft format idea, but he never seemed too hyped about anything else. It wasn't until recently that he actively hated on Kamigawa (calling it poorly designed is one thing, but comments like this is a relatively recent thing.) It was a slow decent for his verbal hate to match it. His talk of Tarkir matches the beginning stages of his talk about Kamigawa.

This is literally what he says.

So the extent of Bolas' corruption was switching their necklaces?

Could you spoiler-tag that? I don't mind hearing info from the book, but I don't want to see actual pages until my copy arrives.

Wow, I can't believe Maro said "Yet another reason to dislike Kamigawa", I don't even care how much he qualified it with colour pie reasons. Maro seems to hate everything I used to like about Magic and like everything that I've come to hate about it. On top of all the bloody misinformation he spreads. And for the record, I agree with the person asking the question, I think the orochi-creature-freeze-mechanic was cool.

"OMG we're breaking the color pie by giving all colors access to utter GARBAGE mechanics!"

To be honest I don't think freeze blockers should be left out of any color. Red, white, and black already have removal therefore it's redundant, blue does it, and green has deathtouch.

I mean seriously, reprint Wall of Frost.

Did anyone notice that mill decks were thrown out the window btw?

They probably think Mill is "unfun" so it goes out the window along with land destruction.

I've been seeing some serious speculation among a few pros (on Twitter) about a possible tier-2 mill deck in Standard, so that seems completely incorrect.

Kamigawa block was terrible design built in service to deep, intricate, inflexible, and almost completely impenetrable flavor. I remember having to do multiple of hours of actual research at the library to understand what was going on there. Was it rewarding? Yes, absolutely. I also agree with Maro 100% that they should never, ever, ever do that again.

It's not like mill has ever actually been a problem, the playstyle has never been competitively viable, unlike counterspells or land destruction which are still prominent in competitive formats. Mill also suffers from being disproportionately better in limited, which makes it more difficult to support at lower rarities.
Fraying Sanity is also probably one of the better cards the archetype has ever gotten, so I'm not really sure where you're coming from.

I think "almost completely impenetrable" is a stark exaggeration, though. Sure, the kami weren't that resonant at first glance, but the novels did a great job explaining what they are and why they look the way they look, and a lot of the flavour text gave you a pretty good idea of what was going on. It also prompted me to do some amount of research on the real world source material, but only because it spoke to my curiosity, not because I felt it was needed to understand Kamigawa. For me personally, the rewarding aspect of learning something new about a real world culture outweighed the initial alienness of some of the flavour by far. I'm not going to defend the absolute spirit-overkill and the way it warped the block around itself, and a lot of the kami artwork is just plain ugly even when you understand what they are. But I think the intricacy of the flavour was just about right. And a return to modern day Kamigawa would have to severely reduce the number of kami and their overall mechanical significance anyway because of the current status quo in-universe. There's also a new mechanical identity suggested for them in the form of a lands-matter theme since they are connected to the land and its mana now (let's face it, Zendikar is dead and I hope we'll never see it again). All the problems Kamigawa had the first time around are already solved.

I got a pretty good jist of the Kamigawa story just from the flavor text of cards. I never bought a pack of it even, just recieved a ton of spirits from a guy who hated spirits. I always thought the designs were really neat because magic had nothing like it before. Of course there's tons of stuff I'm only just now learning about it as I occasionally look up stuff about Bolas or various commander cards, but it never really impacted my enjoyment of the set.

Zendikar is a dumpster fire, but it's successful in sales and therefore "popular"
Additionally, with 3 (THREE) walkers calling it home, as much sense as it would make to never go back, we're going back.

Dumpster fires are warm, at the very least.

I don't think Nicol Bolas would let out the Eldrazi if he didn't have a way to stop them. Of course, I have more faith in Nicol Bolas' power and intelligence than I do in whoever is in charge of the overall direction of the story.

And damnit, I was really hoping for Ixilan to not have any Gatewatch members. (Ok, I guess Ajani is Gatewatch now, but he's actually pretty cool.)

I am actually somewhat surprised that some people hold this opinion.
Especially considering that a member of the Gatewatch is roughly on the same moral level, she's just unable to follow through to the same extent.

Yeeeeaah, I know

Still, I think there's absolutely no way in hell they could make a return believable. Almost everything was destroyed, there's almost no fertile ground anymore, the vast majority of Zendikar's inhabitants died and I guess most of the ancient ruins for adventurers to go adventuring in are probably dust now. Realistically, the few survivors there were should probably have died of starvation by now. The fact that some of them were vampires doesn't help. Zendikar's 'core identity', to borrow Maro's phrase, went from 'Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies: The Plane' to 'All Is Dust'. And they'd have to give the native 'walkers something to do, because right now, the arcs that connected them to Zendikar have been resolved. I expect Amonkhet to have the same problems in regards to a return. They should either destroy a plane for good and never return there or not wreck it beyond recovery and then have it magically recover anyway for the return. Innistrad was handled much better in that respect, I didn't get the impression that the majority of the population died or that the stuff that got wrecked couldn't be rebuilt in a few years. And then there's always other parts of the plane that they could (but won't) explore...

And really, it bothers me that Zendikar is eating up a lot of cool mechanical space that I'd love to see reused in different contexts. The land theme in particular could find a new home on Kamigawa and Shandalar, Traps could be a thing on Ixalan, Quests could go to Shandalar, Theros or the core sets etc. Most of it is basically genric adventuring with an RPG feel, there's a place for that in a lot of settings.