List of retcons?

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Jman22

Post subject: List of retcons?

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:51 pm

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I'm just curious, has anyone ever made a specific list of all the retcons that have happened?

If not, there should be.

Pavor has been keeping a list of retcons, farther down the thread Pavor Nocturnus"]

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Last edited by Jman22 on Mon Jun 12, 2017 11:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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AzureShade

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:59 pm

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I don't think anyone has ever made an official list because it usually devolves into semantics and personal grudges over ill-defined details.

Starting things off with the most obvious current retcons:

Origins
-Nissa went from being something of a racist who spent much time among the elves of Lorwyn to something of a wholesome nature girl who was repulsed at the way the elves of Lorwyn treated the goblins that they saw as eyeblights and fled the plane as soon as she got there because it flipped over to Shadowmoor and that scared her.

-Chandra used to have a brother and did not have a good relationship with her parents, who were going to marry her off in hopes that having a husband might calm her down a bit. Instead, Origins gave us Chandra who loved her parents deeply, was an only child, and had to watch them killed by an overbearing government and be blamed for their deaths.

-Liliana didn't really have much in the way of retcons. It was more a clarification of her past.

-Jace was pretty clear of retcons as well. Again, just some clarifications.

-Gideon's story was all new, and as far as I know, retcon free...ish.

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Barinellos

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:22 pm

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Gideon's origin was matched to a lot of the details, but the circumstances of them were pretty radically altered. While the details aren't really contradicted, per se, they don't match the spirit most of those details.

The biggest thing was that he was supposed to be given his sural by his teacher, who was given it by HIS master who was killed by a pyromancer and was a planeswalker. They completely removed that.

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theamazingsquid

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 12:27 am

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Didn't jace lose chuncks of memory he previously had before? Also, the entirety of the teeth of akoum

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The GammaMage

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 1:19 am

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I would just find such a list depressing.

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Moppi

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 6:49 am

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The GammaMage wrote:

I would just find such a list depressing.

There totally should be one. Kind of like a Magic Retcons version of the Has DC done something stupid today? website.

Let us not keep MTG Creative be lax on their work, all it's doing is just make them prone to committing retcons over and over, and even making the Gameplay people just accept that it's just another day in the office when they do so.

They promised of better quality for Magic Stories right? Then they should work better honoring what they have established and not just rely on retcons, the "rule of cool" and that "we're inspired by the comic book industry's procedure" shenanigans as reasons when they do so.

______________________________________

Speaking of other retcons, IIRC, Elspeth had some right?

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Pavor Nocturnus

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 5:01 pm

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Did someone say retcons?

Spoiler

I might have missed a few, and I simply covered each of the origin stories as a single retcon in order to not open a huge can of worms again. I also didn't cover visual redesigns, minor inconsistencies in novels that are obviously due to having different writers (e.g. some stuff in the Mirrodin tilogy, or inconsistencies between The Thran and The Brothers' War). I also don't think counting retcons related to the Revision is really fair or reasonable, so I skipped that, too.

Edit: Oh, and actually Magic Origins blatantly misportrayed things about Ravnica and Lorwyn that would be huge retcons if we took them at face value, but I'm kind of hesitant to do that...

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Last edited by Pavor Nocturnus on Wed Apr 12, 2017 2:49 pm, edited 6 times in total.

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Jman22

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:48 pm

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Pavor Nocturnus wrote:

Did someone say retcons?

Spoiler

I might have missed a few, and I simply covered each of the origin stories as a single retcon in order to not open a huge can of worms again. I also didn't cover visual redesigns, minor inconsistencies in novels that are obviously due to having different writers (e.g. some stuff in the Mirrodin tilogy, or inconsistencies between The Thran and The Brothers' War). I also don't think counting retcons related to the Revision is really fair or reasonable, so I skipped that, too.

Edit: Oh, and actually Magic Origins blatantly misportrayed things about Ravnica and Zendikar that would be huge retcons if we took them at face value, but I'm kind of hesitant to do that...

I think you should go for it.

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The GammaMage

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:04 am

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Are we including older stuff, like changes to the World Spell between the comic and the later novel?

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Pavor Nocturnus

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 6:32 am

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@Jman22: Go for what specifically? The Revision or the Magic Origins stuff?
@Gamma: I guess we could, but that would be stuff related to the Revision, which probably is a huge can of worms in its own right...

Oops, and I meant Lorwyn, not Zendikar. I'll go and edit that...

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LilyStorm

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:54 am

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Well this wpuld essentially be creating a history of the entirety of the story of magic which would be really cool and probably useful. You could even have a little time-line with each story released and each change in another story.

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Pantera Canes

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:29 am

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So do you think the creative team tries to read the pre-existing stories but chooses to go different directions, or do you think they just feel its not worth their time to go over it?

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AzureShade

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:55 am

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Pantera Canes wrote:

So do you think the creative team tries to read the pre-existing stories but chooses to go different directions, or do you think they just feel its not worth their time to go over it?

It depends. I remember a few of them straight out admitting that there is some lore that nearly preexists them and that finding accurate accounts from primary sources is a daunting task. Also, some of the older lore is just dumb from today's standards and re-envisioning it for the modern audience could be seen as more acceptable.

So yeah, it's not like they have a coterie of historians on staff who review all their ideas and line-item all the conflicts and mistakes. They do what research they can and make a go at it.

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Pantera Canes

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:30 am

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It seems like a lot of the thing people mention as conflicting with pre-existing lore is from the novels. I can understand random article or piece of PR material would be hard to find as it wasn't archived correctly if at all. Though that is a lot older material and they don't even seem to want to interact with those characters and stories. It can't be that hard to get and read the books though?

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AzureShade

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:55 am

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Pantera Canes wrote:

It can't be that hard to get and read the books though?

Do you have all 50-some Magic novels? Like, if you got a job working in Creative today, and found out that they did not have a novel library on-site, would your personal collection be sufficient enough, and if not, how hard do you think it would be to find 20-year old books that didn't sell well about lore from a collectable card game that wasn't even a cultural touchstone for about the first decade?

Even I don't own all the books yet (I'm missing like 3), and I scour the web and used book stores constantly.

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Pantera Canes

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 12:47 pm

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So the retcons mentioned are in 20 year old books? The Zendika book(s), ones involving Chandra and Jace? You are talking old books they are not even touching in the story.

Its like asking if a mechanic knows how to work on your car and the response is how are they suppose to know how to find a book on a model-T. The 3 books you are missing, how much of that story, lore, or character have they brought up in the past 6 years?

I don't have all the books. Though to answer your question, if they made the poor decision of hiring me (because I am really bad at writing, my strong suits are more logical and facts like science and math) then I would try to get the books. It should easily be able to be expensed to the company as a resource. I am constantly doing research for my job. Also constantly looking at how we did things before to try and keep it consistent.

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Barinellos

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:03 pm

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AzureShade wrote:

Pantera Canes wrote:

It can't be that hard to get and read the books though?

Pre-revision notwithstanding, I have all the books.
And we really shouldn't count the revision with everything. That's a totally different situation.

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Jman22

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:17 pm

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Pavor Nocturnus wrote:

Well, ideally I'd like to construct a list of retcons in MTG, and from there categorize the extremity of each retcon. For example, something like "Battalion 5 was involved with this assault by the Boros Legion" compared to... Well, the Origins retcons. But stuff from, let's say, pre-Urza I think we could easily forgive. I'm mostly thinking Time Spiral (where they promised more story focus) forward.

Edit: Not to mention that this would help consolidate all the story in an easier to digest format.

AzureShade wrote:

Pantera Canes wrote:

It can't be that hard to get and read the books though?

A friend of mine has all 50, and I almost decided to start collecting them all myself.

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AzureShade

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:56 pm

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Pantera Canes wrote:

The 3 books you are missing, how much of that story, lore, or character have they brought up in the past 6 years?

I'm, missing Nemesis and The Moons of Mirrodin (I have read both, but they were not owned).

I'm just saying that not everyone has well stocked Magic library. People who do not horde Magic lore but are good game designers and great writers and story tellers do end up on the Creative team sometimes. People join the team with years worth of "blind-spots" and pressures to catch up to the current set designs and familiarize themselves with very recent sets that are not quite out yet. I can see where this sort of environment would cause some skimming errors or changes in story to ease current story concerns. Magic doesn't seem to have a MaRo "Guardian of the Color Pie" for story. And since, unlike comics, Wizards isn't resetting their entire universe every few years to retell the same stories in a fresh new way, sometimes things get the retcon scissors.

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Jman22

Post subject: Re: List of retcons?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 11:32 pm

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And sometimes, Mark Rosewater ends up on Creative because the entire team quit over business stuff, and we nearly get a sitcom for the Weatherlight Saga story.

And while I generally try to be leinient towards Creative, especially recently, it is hard to argue in their favor when it comes to BFZ block. A TON of stuff got changed, and they could have pretty easily gone back and gotten some more of the major points correct.

I have apparently lost my Ravnica and Guildpact novels. Sad day.

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