Lorwyn is back for the first time since it debuted in 2007.
I actually missed it the first time. I've played Magic the Gathering in kind of three distinct periods: one from Fallen Empires through Tempest Block when I was an elementary school kid (and I guess my first year of middle school,) again briefly in college for Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral (before a certain MMO took over my online gaming interest) and now my current era in MTG Arena once it came out for MacOS and iOS in 2020, which actually makes this current period the one in which I've played the most continuously (though I think there have been some gaps there).
Anyway, while Ice Age and Alliances had the beginnings of a block structure (much later they'd release Cold Snap to finally finish the trilogy off) Tempest, I think, was the first true Magic block, with three sets released over the course of a year that told a singular story (that of the crew of the Weatherlight journeying across the plane of Rath).
Subsequent years would hold to a similar structure, with Urza's block, then Nemesis block, then probably the most famous of them, the Invasion block (MTG's first giant climax storyline, which killed off nearly all of its important recurring characters - something WotC seems utterly allergic to nowadays - I don't think killing off characters is always necessary to establish the stakes and import of a plot, but boy did the March of the Machines really pull its punches after feinting toward killing off a number of planeswalker characters - frankly, it feels kind of weightless, even if I'm glad to have a post-post-Mending ability to see non-planeswalkers go to other planes).
Invasion block was followed by Odyssey and Onslaught block, establishing a new cast of characters and sticking with the bold mechanical themes established in Invasion (where Invasion was the multicolor block, Odyssey was the graveyard block and Onslaught was the first major tribal block,) the next block, Mirrodin, which coincided with the new card frames that technically debuted in 8th edition (and MTG's 10th anniversary) gave us a new plane that was connected to its central theme: artifacts.
The next several blocks had this recurring concept: a new plane, and on that plane, a new mechanical theme, with Kamigawa's legend-focused mechanics and Ravnica's two-color guilds.
Most blocks were three sets - you had the initial establishment of the mechanics, and then an evolution of those mechanics perhaps with a few more added in, and then a third set that often remixed the mechanics that had been brought in.
Lorwyn came in following Time Spiral and took the tribal theme from Onslaught block (Fallen Empires did it first!) and actually came in as a four-set block, which itself was two smaller two-set blocks. Lorwyn, we discovered, was only half the plane, while Shadowmoor was its dark reflection. The same tribes existed in both halves of the plane, and so there was cohesion between the sets, but there was a dramatic shift in tone - such as the tight-knit Kithkin, who were basically like Hobbits in Lorwyn, becoming xenophobic hive minds in Shadowmoor.
Cut to 19 years later, and we get a return to this plane, with an excellent Jim Henson-company-produced puppet music video. But for the past several years, Magic has not done blocks. Instead, each set is essentially independent. Even in cases where there have been sets taking place on the same plane one after another, like Innistrad's Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow, there weren't really any mechanical throughlines that held between the two.
I've talked in the past about how I think this leads to a homogenization of the standard format over the years. In the next three years, you can be pretty confident that there's not going to be continued support for a Kithkin-themed deck to grow and develop. Indeed, within this same standard format season (which was expanded to three years a couple years back) we had Bloomburrow, a world of anthropomorphic animals that also had a tribal theme, but it's not like there are a lot of "Mouse matters" cards that have come out since then, so if you've got a Mouse tribal deck, it probably hasn't changed a lot since 2024.
But I also think that a world like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor kind of demands to be represented in multiple sets. As someone who didn't play the block back in the day, when I look through my cards, I don't really register which side of the divide they're on. Yes, there's a cool cycle of legends who will swap which half of their world they're on each turn if you spend a little mana, but it all kind of gets lost in the shuffle.
And, again, because we've got so many other sets (including a number from other IPs - I was excited for the Final Fantasy set but in retrospect feel like that was a devil's bargain) it further dilutes how much immersion I feel in any given plane, from both a mechanical and flavor standpoint.
I will say, we've gotten some amazing original settings, and we wouldn't have seen so many of them had it not been for this shift. But there's a part of me that also would love if we had spent, say, a year in Eldraine, a year in Ikoria, a year in Duskmourn, and maybe we were still looking forward to the space opera of Edge of Eternity.
I realize I'm shouting into the wind here: MTG apparently has been raking in tons of cash with the influx of Universes Beyond into the standard format - I think the game made something like a billion dollars in the past year or something.
But the older I get, the more I wish that companies weren't motivated purely to maximize profits. I think the world we live in would be a lot better if the endeavors (business or otherwise) that people took on were to make the thing that was truest to their creative goals. I've always been blown away by the Magic creative team's ability to come up with all these exciting fantasy worlds and characters to populate them, and I just wish that they got the time they needed to breathe.
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