I just felt we needed a threat to discuss Jace, in particular, his tendency to lose chunks of memory.

First time? Alhammaret final duel and Jace's ignition, these memories don't seem to have ever been recovered... well, he actually may have done a lot of smaller erasures as well that were one way against Jace.
Second time? Jace accidentally mind-swaps himself with his friend in Agents of Artifice.
Third time? Jace nonsensically decides to mind-wipe some info from himself in the Secretist trilogy because some weird investigation on Ravnica (leading up to the Dragon's Maze) is drawing bad attention.
Fourth time? Jace tries to brain-duel Bolas.



He also messed with his own head in order to prepare on Innistrad for detected/suspected crazifiying there, letting him hide away a chunk of his mind and memories and skills for sudden release later when under mental pressure and his sub-brain got pretty crazy and temporarily partially fixed by Tamiyo, if I recall correctly?

I'm surprised he still has a brain, rather than mush, at this point. It seems a seriously over-used plot element for Jace. I'm really hoping that this'll be the last time, and Jace will learn to properly defend his mind in this Ixalan arc, and decide for no more self-erasure, and realize not to bite off more than he can chew vs. eldritch horrors and ancient planeswalkers who outclass him and the like.

Anyone else feel like ranting a bit about Jace? Or discussing any other things about Jace?

Perhaps ideas for how WotC could have handled Jace better?

Or maybe ideas for a better design for a face-walker for the storylines in blue that would be easier to write with due to having less plot threatening of a power set?

complaining about a mind-mage messing with his memories too much is like complaining about a pyromancer using fire too much maybe

screwing with minds is jace's trade so its a given his mind is going to be screwed with, both by himself and by others who he engages in mind screwing with, due to the apparent nature of mind screwing.

Yeah, but Chandra doesn't respond to threats with "Gee, I guess I'd better set myself on fire!"

i feel like she does set herself on fire a lot actually

although she usually follows that up by setting her enemies on fire i guess

not that jace doesn't keep mindmagicking after mindmacking himself

Well yes, I guess she does set herself on fire. But only in ways which do not hurt her. If Chandra could get facial burns from her own magic, she would have stopped letting her hair burst into flames by now.

What if instead of planeswalkers the main characters were regular mortals. Then, to get from one plane to another they would have to use some kind of machine, like a ship that could planeswalk or something.

You're insane. That would never work. Are you feeling under the weather? Light-headed?

That's Our Jace! *laugh track*

You could do that, but it would feel pretty contrived when you already have established that some people can naturally planeswalk. Why not just use those?

Less easy for the writers to forget "oh, they can't actually do that at this time" and mess up planeswalking.

What if it was like a good show and people could actually die? Meaning the cast could actuwlly change. You could even have plots where you talk to ghosts of dead neowalkers or try and bring them bsck to life only to realize their spark is gone so you have to drag them around.

Nah that would be crazy

In the years leading up to his duel with Alhammaret, both Jace and Alhammaret would regularly erase parts of Jace's memories. Alhammaret would erase memories of missions that would let Jace realize that they were trying to keep the war going. Jace had a diary that he would read, add an entry to, and then erase all memory of, so that he could keep secrets from Alhammaret.

I guess it's part of having a mindmage as a good guy. Altering people's minds is generally seen as an evil thing (with good reason, don't get me wrong) and it's Jace's entire shtick. He can't do it on enemies (he tends to use illusions), so there's only one reasonable route to take with his powers: using it on himself.

Why isn't every story irl about rich and powerful jetsetters?

Can you fashion your snarky reply into a more substantive reply, or do you want me to make an argument against your strawman?

Apparently I didn't understand your original question. When your main characters are a team of some of the most powerful people that can exist per the definitions of your universe, you really narrow down the kind of conflicts they can face and therefore the kind of stories you can tell.

Kind of like a card set or a keyword has a certain amount of design space, a set of characters has a certain amount of story space. If you were to create a set of characters with the intention of serializing their adventures, but with the knowledge that external factors would be unpredictability constraining your decisions​ (set order being flipped, marketing wanting to focus on a specific character), then maximizing your available story space should be one of your concerns.

I think the planeswalker crew largely misses this mark, a problem exacerbated by having one of the characters be a mind mage.

I also hypothesize that the amount of retcons mtg issues is partially caused by lack of story space.

No, it isn't. I'd argue that most retcons kill as much story space in one place as they create elsewhere. Sure, sometimes you need some wiggle room, like when they ignored some established canon in order to reveal that Nahiri was in the Helvault all along. And as long as the changes are as minimal as that, have a clearly defined payoff, are quite rare and basically happen as a last resort, I'm okay with that. Resolving Nahiri's whereabouts and her surviving the Mending the hard way probably would have been really convoluted and would have taken another two years. But I think the vast majority of retcons in recent years was unjustified and not due to a lack of options. If anything, stuff like Magic Origins was due to marketing concerns more than anything else.

Isn't this why we had the mending? Previously, I'd agree with your sentiment. However, currently, planeswalkers are mainly defined by being able to planeswalk, although I think they some show higher aptitude for magic as well.
We've currently had a lot of high-scale threats in the form of Phyexia, Bolas and Eldrazi, but Kaladesh was a conflict that didn't feature a multiverse-threatening adversary. And even if the current cast featuring Chain Veil Liliana and Indestructible Gideon is too strong, it's entirely plausible to have a cast of less proficient Planeswalkers. If you want a cast of characters that travel from plane to plane, you can just use Planeswalkers for it; having a cast of characters that do the exact same thing except by use of a magic artifact would just feel bizarre to me.