When you have four or five primary releases a year in a game that is mostly about narrative-agnostic gameplay but that nevertheless has deep lore and stories, things get weird.
March of the Machine is the grand climax to the Phyrexian storyline that, at least in its current chapter, started perhaps with the arrival of Vorinclex on Kaldheim. The Phyrexians were the big bads in the earliest days of Magic, and while the notion of a grand, ongoing story that would go on for many years, rather than more thematic visits to periods of time, places (mostly on Dominaria,) and such, the first real lean-in to Magic as a storytelling (rather than vibe-promoting) medium came with Tempest Block (sort of Mirage Block before it, which introduced many of the key players).
The thing is, there's a kind of compression that happens. This is particularly true given the shift in recent years away from year-long block storytelling and to largely standalone sets.
As an example, the original Kamigawa block introduced a world where spirits were at war with mortals, and how that conflict shattered what had previously been a comfortable status quo. We then had two sets to see that conflict escalate and then come to its conclusion.
Perhaps more specifically relevant to the current story, Invasion Block took three sets to play out the invasion of Phyrexia, with the initial victories and defeats, the, again, escalation and ultimate climax of that war playing out over a year of releases.
But in recent years, Magic has tended to only get to the "war" part in a single set. War of the Spark was certainly built up to - the seeds of Nicol Bolas' plan were planted over the course of a few years, with elements like the Immortal Sun and the Planar Bridge seeded in earlier sets.
But Bolas' arrival on Ravnica and his defeat all took place in a single release, meaning a story that was temporally compressed such that you were getting the beginning, middle, and end all at once.
War of the Spark came out the same year as Avengers Endgame, as well as the final season of Game of Thrones. 2019 was a year of grand finales (little did we know that it would also be the beginning of a plague of epic proportions, though at least in the US, we didn't really see much of it until 2020.)
But once the cards were previewed, every moment of that eponymous war was on display, from the initial invasion, the terrifying dreadhorde invaders, to Gideon's heroic sacrifice and Nicol Bolas' banishment.
We're getting exactly the same thing here.
Indeed, the parallel with the MCU is rather fitting. Phyrexia: All Will Be One was something like the Infinity War to March of the Machine's Endgame - the story in which we find out heroes are outmatched and they suffer their worst failure before they can turn around and find a victory.
The thing is, we have to ask a question: what is the unit of Magic storytelling?
Invasion Block in its entirety, which included the Invasion, Plane Shift, and Apocalypse sets, I'd argue, was a singular story, with the sets representing the beginning, middle, and end. The larger saga had been continuing for some time - Tempest Block, with its own parts being Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, was a story that was part of that grander narrative. Urza's Saga focused more on the past as a kind of backstory-filling-in flashback/prequel. Mercadian Masques continued the story of the modern heroes, and then Invasion Block brought that story to a conclusion. I can't tell you how successful it was, because this mostly took place during what I think of as my first "Magic Interregnum." Tempest Block was the last set I played primarily with physical cards during my first foray with the game from ages eight through eleven. I wouldn't really play again until Kamigawa's block in 2005/2006.
The thing is, I sort of get the sense that, in the rush to showcase new planes and the game mechanics of those planes, Magic kind of rushes through the story.
This is particularly noticeable with March of the Machine. The trailer for the set shows us a literally broken and dismembered (but still alive) Karn lying helplessly before Elesh Norn, only for a newly ascended Elspeth, who has become an angel, to come down and fight her. The trailer ends with a card preview - Mirrodin Avenged, which shows a restored Karn holding Elesh Norn's severed head up.
So, perhaps my very first exposure to the plot of March of the Machine is what I imagine is its climax and ultimate victory.
And sure, it's possible the story will be more complex - that killing Elesh Norn doesn't put a full stop to the invasion. But... it must, right? The way this is presented, this moment is clearly meant to show that yes, the good guys win.
And I love it when the good guys win. Phyrexia is a great, creepy villain, but we like scary villains because it makes it that much more satisfying when our heroes take them down. I never doubted for a second that this climactic clash with the Phyrexians invading basically the whole Magic multiverse would end with the Phyrexians defeated.
But it's jarring to see that moment before I get a sense of basically anything else that happens during the war.
See, I think that only a few years ago, March of the Machine might be released in the fall as the first set in the "War of the Machine" block, and maybe we'd get something like "Triumph of the Machine" as a second set where things look particularly bleak, with a conclusion in the spring called "Fall of the Machine" as the heroes manage to turn things around and finally defeat the invasion.
Now, to be fair, this year has been set up as the Phyrexian conflict year. Dominaria United put their threat front and center, and the modern-era story of Brothers' War was a continuation of that. And Phyrexia: All Will Be One could be said to take the form of that first, failed attempt to solve this issue.
But I still feel that, in the old block-based design, this would be at least two blocks - one focuses on the looming, insidious threat as a kind of mystery, ending with the unleashing of the multiversal conflict, with the next focusing on the conflict itself.
This also has a mechanical aspect.
On a mechanical level, blocks historically (Mirrodin onward) focused on a new plane, and those planes tended to have unique mechanics or themes. Mirrodin was the artifacts-matter plane. Kamigawa was (at the time) the "legends matter" plane. Ravnica was the "two-color deck" plane.
And so, in each block, the first set would broadly introduce the themes they were working with. Then, those themes and mechanics would be played with in subsequent sets.
Say, for example, you had a mechanic called "Fubar 2." During your upkeep, you can spend two mana to create an artifact that has "at the end of your turn, this artifact deals 1 damage to any target." You play through the first set and every card with Fubar specifically has Fubar 2. But then, in the next set, you get cards with "Fubar: pay two life." Now, the mechanic starts to become more interesting, and might work in decks that couldn't really make use of the old Fubar 2 cards. And then, in the third deck, there are now spells that do something when you Fubar - "when you pay your Fubar cost, discard a card and then draw a card."
Because we hop between stories and settings with nearly every set these days, we don't tend to see these mechanics develop and evolve.
What's even stranger is that even when we do stick around, they still don't.
Consider our most recent trip to Innistrad. As someone who loves the aesthetics of Gothic Horror, but never played during the original Innistrad or the Shadows over Innistrad blocks, I was very eager to play those. And to be fair, I liked Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow a lot (I think probably leaning more toward the former). But it was strange to me that in some cases, mechanical ideas that were introduced in one were absent in the other. Midnight Hunt created "decayed" as a zombie keyword that was a penalty, but allowed (in theory at least) much cheaper creature token creation.
But, in the next set, which was set on the same plane and took place right after Midnight Hunt (as far as I know,) rather than expanding upon this mechanic, they simply used a different mechanic for zombies, Exploit.
Are the two synergistic? Absolutely - getting cheap creature tokens that you can use as sacrifice fodder for exploit cards works great. But there are no exploit cards in Midnight Hunt and no decayed cards in Crimson Vow.
Now, I realize that there might be some element here of being an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not as if I can complain that some new designer is ruining everything - Mark Rosewater was lead designer during my second Magic heyday such as during Ravnica's original block, and he still is.
But I do wonder if this direction for the game has undercut it both mechanically and story-wise. When I look at the most popular decks, they tend to fall into classic archetypes, scooping up all the most efficient and powerful cards that fit in a certain array of colors. It's rare that any of these put a strong thematic focus on any interesting new mechanic, because the likelihood of such a mechanic being strong enough on its own in a single deck to beat out some strategy that just picks all the best cards from the scattered sets in the Standard format is low - you're only going to find cards that care about that mechanic in one out of eight sets in Standard.
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