No joke, when you said you spent money on Magic Arena, I thought you meant you bought the Magic novel Arena by William R. Forstchen starring Garth One-Eye.

I mean, that would be way cooler.

...thinking now about how I can use a copy of that book and some careful wording to pull a prank. I bought you Magic Arena! Yep, the whole thing!

I'm stuck at work because there's a cat in my car.

House cat I hope. Car cat I guess.
Just some random dude's cat?

It was clearly a missing pet. I gave him some food, but even when he wasn't in the car, he really didn't want me to go anywhere for a while. He... Didn't technically get completely bored of me, but he finally ignored me enough that I managed to slip away.

Hope he's okay.

Well, I figure we could use some good news around here, so I'll tell you all what's been going on with me.

I'm getting married!

Crazy, I know. Life-long bachelor like me finally settling down. But it's true.

I asked the woman I love to marry me and, in a moment of what I can only assume was extreme confusion, she said yes.

The wedding will not be for quite a while yet, hopefully next summer, but I am very happy about it, as you can imagine.

So...yay!

Oh wow!
Congratulations guy!
That seemed like a quick courtship, but I'm so happy for you!


Well... Guess that just leaves me holding down the bachelor fort.



Eh, knowing you like we do, she was probably waiting for the punchline. Must be a really good one coming because you still haven't done it yet.
Oooh, this'll be funny!

Congrats!

Thanks! We've been "officially" dating for about six months, which is fairly quick. But we've been good friends for 20+ years, so it's a bit different.



That just means it's your turn!



Well, I did propose to her by reciting a poem I wrote, so that's at least in character.




Thank you!

!!!!

Congratulations, Raven! I'm so happy for you!


asdfnjgbkfgjn



Aww, that's so sweet

Thanks, Huey! It's been an eventful year for me, that's for sure.

Okay, too quiet round these parts

Everyone tell me what you did over summer vacation.


Recently I've been sleeping like absolute trash. Kind of a vicious cycle too, but I'm going to try to break that.

Otherwise, mostly just been watching anime and playing video games, if I'm not working.
Been a long time since I sat down to write, but those creative juices are mostly going into hypothetical RP campaigns (I have no players, and I must scream)

Been a second since I've painted much either, but that's mostly holding pattern kind of stuff. Can't figure out the initial approach on a few figures.


I've kinda poked at some magic decks lately too and if anybody is interested, I'd like to see thoughts about them.

That's interesting? Arranging gaming with the family. Looks like Warhammer 40k's going to be on the menu. Dealing with family medical stuff, but that's no fun.

Could look at some brews but we all know how I am on communication >.<

*dramatically steps out of the shadows*

Happy to help with that


About sums up my year so far, yeah. It's been getting back on track lately, though, at least to some extent.


Hey, that's awesome, congratulations! I hope you'll have a great future together!


Well, out of curiosity, what are they about? I've been super out of the loop lately, but if it's a concept that resonates with me, maybe I could help you come up with some thoughts and ideas.

Speaking of Magic... On the one hand, every new set that comes out further reassures me that turning my back on this mess for good was the right call. On the other hand, it looks like 1.) my stubborn retreat into Cube building is starting to pay off, 'cause I've been able to drum up more interest in drafting them lately than ever (we've drafted them before occasionally, but apparently it's starting to resonate with more and more people as they are getting tired of current Magic), and 2.) I might join a Commander night sometime soon for the first time in more than two years. One of the guys I used to play Magic with has also come around to really being fed up with Universes Beyond and apparently has assembled a small army of folks who are also vehemently opposed to it, and he recently asked me whether I'd be interested in joining them for a big round of Commander as soon as he can make the time. I guess Commander is better than nothing, and while UB is far from the only problem I have with Magic, its absence at the table at least makes me willing to join in the first place. Maybe I'll be getting my favourite hobby back after all, at least in some shape or form. That would be awesome.

It's certainly just good to see you around these parts friend.
Hopefully things continue on the track towards positive.



If I'm honest, given a sentiment below, I kind of doubt that you'd have much interest in it.
Of the ones I'm still working on, the only ones that might qualify are a pair of Legend of Zelda themed commander decks I'm piecing together, and possibly a few of the Legends of Runeterra based expression decks that I need to revisit to hash out numbers and swap out new tech.

The others are all using cards outside Magic's purview.


I've ended up moving in the opposite direction. Originally, I reviled the Universes Beyond stuff, and to a certain degree, I maintain that I feel that way.
But if I want to actually play Magic, I'm willing to build around things OUTSIDE the lore because WotC has actual guardrails up that means they can't abuse and misrepresent the brands they're playing with (mostly) and consequently can't DAMAGE them the same way they've been flogging the good graces out of their own property for the better part of nearly a decade. Magic as an IP has degraded to the point that about half of the Universe Beyond stuff is preferable to ANY of what Magic is creating on its own and I feel kind of disgusted by that.
Consequently, I've been working on a Lara Croft deck, still have all my various 40k decks, and have a couple of the Street Fighter decks that all need polish.
Because at least I still enjoy those things enough compared to the slop sluicing out of Wizards creative dredge pipe.

(I'm seriously tempted to do a retrospective on the last ten years and unpack how I feel about each and every set and setting to come out. There's going to be a steep plunge at some point and I don't foresee any recovery on the horizon.)


Well, truthfully, you've probably seen the majority of them as it stands anyway.

They tried to shut me down on MtG, but it feels so empty without me! *drops mic*

In all seriousness though, thank you for the warm welcome. Always feels good to poke my head in.

Thanks, and for you guys too! As a matter of fact, yeah, they do, I got some tremendously good new just this Friday! Looks like my life is getting back on track again



Fair enough, but as far as Zelda and Runeterra are concerned, those are themes that I genuinely would have nothing to contribute to either way.

When it comes to UB in particular and the state of Magic in general, personally I've just reached a point where the complete exclusion of anything UB would be the minimum requirement to even get me to sit down and play the game at any given table. Until recently, this seemed unrealistic enough that I simply stopped playing at all* (apart from gathering enough people to draft my Cubes every once in a while). But yeah, even Magic's own current... stuff (I hesitate to even call it an "IP" anymore, because I consider Magic as an IP to be dead and beyond redemption) would probably be enough to just make me die inside while playing, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see what cards people are using overall. If nothing else, maybe I'll at least be able to recruit some more potential Cube drafters.

I'll even acknowledge that at least some of the outside IPs have been treated fairly well when translating them into Magic (mostly thinking of Doctor Who here, I thought the D&D stuff was fairly meh, LotR was an abomination but had some decent use of mechanics, and the others I either haven't looked into or wasn't too familiar with the IP in the first place). But even a property like Doctor Who that I really used to like and that has been well adapted into MtG isn't something that could ever make me happy as a Magic player. Partly because it simply isn't Magic, partly because the very premise of the game and its rules system is ill-suited to adapting other IPs, and partly because it just makes me mad that they used so many resources on someone else's IP that would have been better spent on their own one (including some new design space as well as returning mechanics I've been wanting to see for ages). At the very least, some people I've talked to in person have come to the realisation that mixing different UB franchises with each other and with regular Magic is detrimental to their enjoyment of the game, which is why there are now things like UB-free Commander nights again and folks who want to draft Cubes etc.



*Then again, I actually stopped playing due to a combination of factors around the time when Streets of New Capenna and Neon Travesty came out (my brain refuses to call it anything else even in my own head, least of all "Kamigawa", sorry, not sorry). WotC releases lots of different kinds of Magic products, but it just feels like every kind just got infuriatingly bad in its own way. Reprint sets? Overpriced. New planes? Terrible. Returning planes? Treated with nothing but disrespect and ruined forever in the process. Crossovers with other IPs? Unacceptable. Duel decks? Cancelled. Commander decks? Always tied to the current main set now. Un-Sets? Never been a fan of those, and now they are black-bordered...
WotC has thoroughly killed any fun I had playing Magic, and there is no IP or, god forbid, story left for me to be fan of... I certainly agree that the rot started creeping in pretty much exactly 10 years ago, in 2014. It almost seems unreal to me in hindsight that we got high points like Dominaria (as far as sets are concerned) or Children of the Nameless (as far as stories are concerned, though ultimately it went nowhere) about halfway through in 2018, and I even enjoyed sets like Core 21, Kaldheim and Modern Horizons I+II well enough. But wow have they done their damnedest to drive me away with almost everything else.

Ironically, only the last few years have gradually made me fully realise the exact and specific psychological ways in which I used to enjoy Magic when it was at its best, and why that stopped working for me with the ways the game has changed. I'm kinda tempted to make a write-up of that, but not tonight

________________



On a more positive and completely unrelated note, man am I excited for Robert Egger's Nosferatu remake. A good, old fashioned vampire film is exactly what I want to see in cinemas this year. Plus, the director seems like the perfect guy for adapting the material.

This talk does kind of remind me of something I became fully aware of recently.

I've been getting into Warhammer 40k (because my family seems to have finally settled on it for our wargaming desires), and was surprised to learn that there are over 600 related novels, with new releases pretty much monthlyh. Even more surprising is that the novel line is evidently less than 1% of Games Workshop's 525.7 million British pounds annual tier of revenue. By comparison, Wizards, which *had* a novel line that they killed for not making enough, is closer to 6 billion USD per year. But GW, whatever other problems they may have (and they are many) is stated to see investment in their lore and world building as something that pays dividends in interesting and maintaining the fanbase and creating the foundation for their other sectors to build upon. That the expense creates the IP that can then be monetized in everything from their tabletop game to the recent videogame outing that everybody seems to be raving about but I have no interest in playing because it's not my genre.

I was then terribly sad thinking of what might had been, had Wizards thought the same way. I'm sure plenty of those Black Library novels are schlock, or even trash. Given the shortlist of titles that seem to be repeat recommendations, the way we do (or did) continuously recommend the likes of Brothers' War and Agents of Artifice, there's certainly a much more constrained number of probable good reads among them, and there are even some titles I've heard whispered in tones like we would say "Quest for Karn", albeit for different reasons. But that doesn't matter. What matters is a company proving that the route of creation and creativity can be rewarded, even if the technical dead tree and digital file sales are a tiny drop in their bucket.

Thank you! I am very happy about the whole thing.





Excellent! I am very happy that you got some good news and that everything is looking up. Here's to good times to come!



________________



Sorry I haven't been around much lately, everyone! With the new semester, the long-distance relationship with my fiancée, preparations for the wedding and the move and, well, everything, I've been pretty distracted lately. I hope everyone is doing suitably well, or will be soon, at least!

I feel I should come back to respond more fully to everybody, the posts have just gotten a bit long

In the meantime, couple things unrelated:
My poor poor wallet. They're releasing a few game remasters come next year of 1) some of my favorite games 2) games I never expected to get remastered

Besides that, I was dreaming. And in that dream I remembered a webcomic I hadn't seen for 20 years (give it take). And I woke up going "oh man! I remember that, I should go check that out, I loved that one, it was called... The name was... It... Well, ****."

I've had this exact conversation several times with various people in real life (because I know plenty of Warhammer folks who are also familiar with the novel line), and yeah, there is just no good explanation for that other than a shift in mentality at WotC/Hasbro. I guess the corporate entities behind Magic are simply unable or unwilling to recognise those dividends you mentioned as long as they can't be measured clearly and objectively with a bunch of KPIs slapped onto them. And whether you compare Magic's approach to its lore with Warhammer or not, it just seems like a really stupid business decision even in a vacuum to completely ignore or actively undermine all of those assets they've spent time and money to build over the course of decades (especially novels, anthologies and comics) instead of building on them. Most of the time, it feels like they don't even treat their accumulated lore and worlbuilding as an asset, more like a dead, rotting albatross that's dangling from their neck. No wonder they don't even bother to properly maintain the archives on their website, to just give the most trivial example of their negligence.

Speaking of killing the novel line for not making enough, it drives me up the wall how inconsistently they apply that principle across their product lines. You'd think, for example, that Un-Sets would have gone the way of the novels (or Duel Decks and even Core Sets, for that matter) and simply been cancelled for not being profitable. It's no secret Maro had to fight his fair share of battles to keep getting them made. But nope, instead of cancelling them for having a small target audience and focussing their efforts on more broadly appealing products, they simply forced them down everybody's throat at the expense of the look and feel of the IP as a whole and to the detriment of black-bordered gameplay by making parts of the latest Un-Set legal in black-bordered Magic. Feels like everything that isn't Maro's pet project is getting the axe at the first sign of trouble. And I know Maro gets a lot of flak for all sorts of things that aren't his fault simply by virtue of being "the face of Magic" or whatever. But when you look at the last decade of Magic, I think the ways in which he has used his influence to force his will on certain aspects of the game that aren't even within his competence is more than concerning. For example (and I apologise for the digression):

- We know Maro came up with the idea for Tarkir block's innovative draft structure (which is fine and certainly a decision that concerns him), but we also know that he then demanded said structure should have to be reflected in the storyline (which really shouldn't be his decision to make and resulted in a complete disaster for the story).

- We had to listen to Maro's rants about how much he hates Kamigawa for 10+ years, and when the stars aligned and they were planning a return to Kamigawa, he seized the first opportunity to lead the set design and make sure the plane would be completely different from the Kamigawa we had known.

- The decision to bring back Ertai in DMU with no in-universe explanation and for no narrative reason was simply due to Maro's original unused idea for his version of the Weatherlight Saga (apparantly Ertai was going to time travel to the future and turn out to be the old man in the frame narrative of Rath and Storm, which wouldn't line up with the fact that he died in Apocalypse in the final version of the story). The thing is, this is purely Maro's own headcanon, there are no real clues - let alone concrete evidence - for this in the text of Rath and Storm itself. Yeah, I get it, Maro, you were still mad after 20+ years that they took creative control of the Weatherlight Saga away from you (and they probbaly did so for good reason), so you tried to make your headcanon happen just because, and then you strongarmed Ethan into gaslighting the audience for you or something. I hate to say it, but if we look closely at the frame narrative of Rath and Storm and assume that Ertai Resurrected will eventually become the old man telling the stories, then the text heavily implies that only one Phyrexian Invasion of Dominaria ever happened, and that the Weatherlight also never came back after Yawgmoth's defeat. So the text they used to justify their storyline makes it so that the storyline they are trying to justify can never have happened. Well done everybody.

- Another hot take that Maro used to repeat over and over again was that "Dominaria was a mistake" and that the setting of Mirage and Visions should have been its own plane that was completely separate from Dominaria. Look at the fate of the phased out parts of Jamuraa in March of the Machine and tell me with a straight face that's a coincidence...


@Barinellos: I actually find it fascinating and perhaps slightly confusing that we always seemed to have a lot of common ground in what we like and dislike about Magic, and yet we also engage with deckbuilding and the cardgame as a whole in completely different ways. From what I know about your preferences, you seem to be building mostly (or even only?) theme decks, and I guess you only play 60 card casual Magic? I can certainly see how your attitude towards Universes Beyond would fit with that. My approach is completely different... Even though I'm a diehard Vorthos (or used to be one or whatever), I'm pretty sure I've never consciously built a theme deck in my entire life. And in addition to Cube, I also used to play 60 card casual Magic, Commander, Oathbreaker and Tiny Leaders (as far as constructed formats are concerned). Sure, some of my decks are more "thematic" than others, e.g. tribal decks or the ones that only use cards from a certain set or block, and I've had the occasional deck where flavour and functionality happened to go beautifully hand in hand (especially that Assembly Worker deck with Mishra, Artificer Prodigy). But I've never built anything centered around a certain character for example. I'd say I'm just more concerned with how each individual card at the table resonates with me on its own, so I largely separate that experience from my deckbuilding projects and just try to make decks that are functional and fun to play. I'm not looking for "immersion" when playing the game (hence, no theme decks required), but I'm certainly looking for the connection that Magic as a cardgame makes me feel with Magic as an IP. I've built a lot of investment in that IP over the course of more than two decades, and I want to experience a connection to that IP when playing the game. This is also why it irks me when individual cards misrepresent an aspect of the IP or when I'm exposed to cards from a completely different IP. You can think of it like some kind of Vorthos synaesthesia, or maybe some kind of augmented reality.