it’s very easy to declare something dead prematurely. Or for that matter, to just assume that something is dead based on it becoming something you don’t like as much. On some level I’m maybe doing all that here. Well, okay, I don’t think Magic: The Gathering died in 2024. But someone certainly tried to throw it off a bridge then.

One thing I learned from a certain massive new YouTube video is that corporate thought players would be experiencing a type of “Phyrexia Fatigue” and wanted to skip right past the aftermath of the invasion. Funny, they did that in the early aughts and they were wrong then too! This also explains these choices, at least on some level. The video does a lot to discuss why Aetherdrift is such a hard set to have any positivity toward; many extremely cool stories, including the Indigo Revolution (freeing the India-inspired plane of Avishkar from its previous racial-slur-laden name) were buried under a goofy-ass car set because major American media isn’t allowed to say anything that might make the audience think better things are possible if they cast off the shackles of their Capitalist oppressors.

Anyway.

Magic: The Gathering started off the year with Ravnica Remastered, a release compiling several cards from all of the then-three visits to the world of Ravnica, one of the most beloved worlds in all of Magic history. Personally, I would guess that Ravnica was so beloved not necessarily for any super-amazing worldbuilding (because on paper it sounds very basic; the details are pretty good, but I’m always unsure as to just how much people actually care that deeply about Magic lore) but for its mechanical significance. Even as far back as Ravnica: City of Guilds, the first Ravnica set, Ravnica’s greatest asset has been fleshing out the color pairs, especially the “enemy” color pairs - a concept Magic R&D was finally softening on by the point except for all the ways in which they were still dragging their feet and continued to even after for at least a decade. As a result, Ravnica Remastered doesn’t necessarily work super-well since there’s such a blend of mechanics, but they did their best to make it a viable set for limited (i.e. sealed and booster-draft) play. As such, the mechanics work well together. There’s also a lot of nice cards in it. It doesn’t have much new art so I’ve skipped over it in my main thread. But I do have one remark on the subject.

Wizards of the Coast used an AI-generated ad to market the set.

I’m not sure why people don’t remember this. I guess it’s pretty low down the list of priorities - Wizards had just called literally the fucking Pinkertons on someone over some cards, and the next two sets would all be absolute hot-dog water - and I suppose I’m assuming your average Magic fan has an actual anti-AI stance (they probably don’t). But they did. The ad was supposed to depict a series of cards from the set displayed, but some of them were the exact same card. It was easy to spot if you looked closely at all. Somehow, though, WotC seemed to worm out of this one pretty easily, basically giving a baseline nuh-uh to the suggestion that it used AI, and that hasn’t even left so much as a blemish on the company’s reputation. There have been other brushes with regurgitative AI usage against some card art (one card in that new ATLA set supposedly looks the part (I don’t remember); the earliest shown image of a Sephiroth card for Final Fantasy was scrutinized and some folks said it used AI, and the art mysteriously never showed up in print), to such a point that I don’t even want to continue this project sometimes. But again, nothing has stuck to WotC. People were more concerned about their precious Products™ being not-fun, I guess.

Speaking of which, we should look at this New Capenna set they decided to set on Ravnica instead for some reason. And the other set afterward that was half of a New Capenna set that they decided to set on a much-clamored-for new plane idea and turn the set into an excuse to be about Magic’s rogues gallery (minus the ones people care about, plus a few new ones).

Murders of Karlov Manor is not the worst Product™ WotC has ever committed to cardboard, but it is pretty embarrassing. The card design is infamously bad, but it does at least have a real land base, so it’s not Homelands II. I’m more concerned about the lore issues, however, so let’s dig in.

Following the Phyrexia story arc, Magic has embarked on a new story arc known as… er, known as “Metronome.” It has no further name yet collectively as a three-year story (the unit of time they’re using for these now). Each year has nicknames: the “Omenpath Arc,” the “Dragonstorm Arc,” and whatever they eventually reveal the third one to be called once they’re done pretending anyone actually likes Marvel Comics in their game based off of fantasy TTRPGs. If you tried to play a superhero at a Dungeons and Dragons game I DMed, I’d force-feed you a bag of d4s.

But ultimately, this era should be known as the “Genre Fiction Period.” Only a very few sets cannot be summed up this way. People have derisively called this the “hat era” or something similar, because so many of these sets can be boiled down to “your favorite Magic lore in a funny hat,” but so many can’t, but can be looked at as an archetypal piece of genre fiction or a setting for a 3D collectathon platformer or similar. In fact, I think Gex may have literally visited all but two of these setting archetypes in his 3D outings. We’ve already started with fairytales (Wilds of Eldraine) and Indiana Jones-style adventure (The Lost Caverns of Ixalan), after all.

So we come… to Murders at Karlov Manor. The murder mystery set. On… on Ravnica for some reason. This type of detective story does not work on Ravnica because it does not suit the aesthetic of the plane. Yes, it’s a big, bustling, magical city, but there’s more to this style of story than simply an urban setting, something which a detective story doesn’t even require. Ravnica’s focus is on ten guilds of varying levels of good and bad, some of whom often do not fit solely into such categories (for example, the Rakdos - murderers who also provide a lot of Ravnica’s manual labor and also entertainment; the Dimir - spies and also the press; the Golgari, who are often ruthless and prone to doing various horrible things, but also supply the city with food), and the political intrigue between them. There isn’t no place for a murder mystery there, but when you have another city-world, with a more modern style that suits the archetypal detective novel, whose setting revolves heavily around five major crime families… yeah, one of those works a little better, to put it nicely.

Now, on some level, I understand why they didn’t return to New Capenna. Players found the factions a little samey - and yeah, when your options are “the Mafia,” “the Mafia,” “the Mafia,” “the Mafia,” and “the Mafia,” I dunno, that feels a little bit like distinctions don’t make much difference and why are the five branches of the Mafia fighting. But also, this is a setting oriented around five major factions, and changing them (including how much in-focus they are) will, to some players, fundamentally change the nature of the plane. It reminds me a little of how the shift from Khans of Tarkir to Dragons of Tarkir really peeved people off. Sure, the Dragons version is okay (though also a huge feel-bad setting because practically every look at non-dragon creatures seems to be about how the dragons are oppressors, and being that most players of Magic are human, the prospect of a world where your entire race is considered inherently lesser sounds like it sucks - but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that none of the many white people who play this game gave this any thought whatsoever), but to get there, we had to throw out the Khans, their Clans, and the cool and unique “wedge” color identities.

But your other option is… to defocus the five families because the mechanics for MKM are not the sort of thing you can stick to any of these bozos. You have Disguise, Cloak, Suspect, Collect Evidence, and Investigate. That is five mechanics (well, Disguise and Cloak are very close, but let’s be generous here), but spreading them out among five factions aiming to be distinct in both flavor and mechanics is not a very simple task. And there is a fair bit of identity to the Capenna crime families, so flattening them all down to “by the way they’re investigating this murder” would be pretty bad! The Guilds do exist in the background of MKM still! Wait, you could just have that setup on Capenna, too. Never mind any of this.

See, the real problem here is that this not only involves a disproportionate amount of one creature type - “Detective,” introduced to non-Universes Beyond Magic special for this Product™ - to such a point that it drowns out the beloved setting of this world (meaning, it would have been better to place it on a new plane entirely than on Ravnica), but what original-world lore exists here - i.e. the characters - are simply wrong. Quite a lot of these characters seem far off from their original personalities and this entire story doesn’t make a lot of sense. In short, Murders at Karlov Manor is a bad Ravnica set, but it would be bad anywhere there was established lore already. However, they might not thought themselves able to get interest in the new lore if they had done that, so here we are.

Then, of course, the follow-up. Outlaws at Thunder Junction is a slap in the face in just about every way.

Outlaws at Thunder Junction features a Wild West-inspired plane. This is something many fans have been asking for for years. I know this because I followed Mark Rosewater on Tumblr in the 2010s and I saw discussion about it with great regularity. Well, here it is in 2024, where the company’s attempts to remain racially sensitive with regard to the analogues of native Americans have just ended in WotC doing something even more racist, and they have thrown out the idea of building up a new universe by making the story be about a wide cast of Magic’s villains congregating on the new plane. Also, this was the 100th expansion set for the game, so perhaps it’s intended as a type of celebration. See, audience, you should be happy when we shit all over the thing you’ve wanted for eons. Several of these characters truly do not make sense out of their home contexts; you have Eriette from Eldraine here? You couldn’t find any other villains? Your Wild West heist crew has the evil queen from Snow White? Yeah, she fits in here perfectly! Put her right next to Kaervek. In fact, have her break Kaervek out of jail. Yeah, that’ll help sell how much this random mashup of characters doesn’t work that well for something that’s a piece of obvious genre fiction. Someone really just wants to write superhero comic crossover plots. Even as someone who thinks about crossovers a lot and how characters would interact with each other thanks to a history with journal RP, I think this is stupid; badly conceived and badly handled, just to underline. It’s all sides here.

(For once, I won’t dunk too heavily on the magic rifles that Thunder Junction uses being an instance of the team wanting to have their cake and eat it too by avoiding gunpowder, but also, yes.)

OTJ goes one further by retconning away the last piece of good in the infamous March of the Machine story. In one of the final stories of March, Ajani and Nissa are healed of being corrupted by Phyrexia in a complex process that cost Karn his spark (again) and Melira her life. But part of this story also focuses on Koth - one of the last remaining uncorrupted natives of Mirrodin - and his negotiating his emotions on the matter. His homeland, he feels, was ignored. Who the hell is this big stupid cat man? He felt his people were abandoned. But this was a monstrously difficult process that could not be repeated… at least in theory.

The problem is that one of the people who had been compleated was Jace.

They can’t let their poster-boy, the guy they named their specialized typeface after, stay dead.

So, here’s what happened with Thunder Junction’s plot: the writers pulled something completely out of their ass to claim that Jace preserved part of his and his snake girlfriend’s mind as they succumbed to Phyrexian Flu, then Jace took himself and his snirlfriend (apparently through pre-programmed actions…?) to his homeworld and literally had them ask mommy for help. Jace’s mom is a healer. Okay, fine. I don’t remember if this is established lore, but if it isn’t, it would make this feel like more of an ass-pull. It wouldn’t change that it is either way, because she pulls some apparently experimental healing technique out of nowhere and it somehow heals Jace and Vraska with this thing that they just decided worked. Jace then disguised himself as Ashiok and infiltrated the bad-guy gang on TJ, so he could crack open the vault and make off with one specific item. That part is fine, I guess, even if it does involve meddling with one of my favorite characters and the fact that what Jace was after specifically was Loot, yet another harbinger of how far this series has fallen. But wow, what we had to deal with to get here…

Basically, yeah, this set doesn’t really “fail at what it set out to accomplish” but it is still a massive perversion of a widely-hoped-for idea, to such an extent that I almost want to call it a betrayal of trust, not to mention a new low for the story. After a point like this you could really only hope they went back to more disconnected vignettes. Well, I guess wait for Edge of Eternities. At least Bloomburrow started off strong with Ral raging out about that blue-hooded asshole as he was about to become the story orbits around again. Why do you think I keep saying deranged things like "WotC is tanking the main story to make players wat to look forward to Universes Beyond Products™ instead of main-lore Products™" when they keep doing this bad of a job?

Oh, yeah, it’s a little ballsy of Wizards of the Coast to include an analogue of the Pinkertons in Thunder Junction considering what they’d just done with the March of the Machine set.