Having played through the previous Kamigawa block back in 2004/2005, I never really expected or much wanted to return to the plane. There were cool elements - I liked Ninjas, for example (man, I am such a Dimir at heart) but in particular, the introduction of Ravnica the following year left Kamigawa in the dust, and I was happy to see decks that didn't revolve around Umezawa's Jitte, which might be the card I hate the most in all of Magic (though I think these days I'd be much better equipped, strategically, to handle it).
But, as readers of this blog will know, one of the easiest ways to excite me about a work of fantasy fiction is to introduce technologies and social systems that extend beyond Medievalism and maybe come up to modern day (or even surpass it in a speculative future). So, when they announced that we'd finally come back to Kamigawa 18 years later (and dear lord how am I this old?) that we'd be seeing a Cyberpunk, futuristic Kamigawa with cyborgs, holograms, mechs and robots, I was suddenly very intrigued.
Of course, Magic is a game where flavor has to serve the mechanics, and even a top-down world needs to have mechanics that feel fun to play.
And folks, it looks like it's working.
In all honesty, on a mechanical level, we're not seeing anything too profoundly revolutionary. The Mech theme is simply achieved through Vehicles. Cybernetics is accomplished through equipment (and creatures that can turn into equipment).
Gone is the kami-versus-mortals narrative from the original set, which it seems was sort of built out of a misreading of Japanese Shinto (as I understand it). The conflict here is instead between tradition and modernity - which the game represents through Enchantments versus Artifiacts, respectively. However, the two aren't really in direct competition - instead, they're just themes of "artifacts matter" and "enchantments matter" that you can choose to build around - or not.
And here, we start to see something that I think really makes for a good Magic set - a sense that you can pick what themes interest you. Ravnica felt good because, after a lot of samey deck archetypes in the original Kamigawa, we suddenly saw a lot of different archetypes arising (even if, say, Golgari was a bit overrepresented).
Now, the metagame is even more important on Arena than it was/is on MTGO given that you can simply pick the cards you want to craft rather than having to potentially spend event tickets at a bot to buy that one rare for like fifteen dollars. We're early enough in this process that I can't say that some archetype isn't going to become super-dominant.
But I have noticed that the people I'm playing against seem to be trying out new types of decks, and I've had fun building my own. Oddly, my homebrewed Mech-based deck seems to be my most consistent winner, which is a bit validating for someone who doesn't often have a lot of confidence in his deckbuilding skills.
Anyway, I think most times a new set comes out, we see slight tweaks to old dominant decks - maybe a card or two added in to an old archetype, but now it looks like a lot of people are feeling eager to try new stuff, which I think means we've got a success.
Also, as someone running a D&D campaign set in the Magic multiverse (though I did have a friendly Green Slaad show up tracking a Beholder that had found its way into Ravnica's undercity from the Far Realm in the D&D multiverse, so we're taking the Ravnica-based Acq Inc games as canon) my imagination has been set alight with the possibilities of having my players fight cyborg ninjas in Towashi and have to get in a 50-ft tall mech suit to fight some villain.
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