My biggest issue with planeswalkers was that they made stories less "Oh, look at this cool plane and it's inhabitants" and more "Hey, look at what the planeswalkers are doing."
Totally, I think Planes walkers should be a vehicle for exploring the Plane, not something that the world is warped around. I still really like how they did it in amonkhet.
The focus being on the denizens of a plane rather than the planeswalkers is where most of the best writing happens. Teferi is one of my favorite characters and he has some of the most organic development from bratty prodigy to humble master. Kamahl is also another compelling hero even though he never gains a spark. Frankly the change is a welcomed one and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
@ICantThinkOfAFunnyHandle Thiiiiiiiis. This is 100% my biggest issue with planes walkers. If I have to see Jayce ONE more time, I am going to scream. I am already screaming preemptively. An entire universe and beyond of possibilities, entire alternate frames of realities and standards. Dozens if not hundreds of myriad forms of life, perspectives, the possibility for entirely and utterly alien constructions of worlds and their denizens And yet something like 80-85% of all this potential follows these like six or seven jabronis. No weird species with weirder perspectives, almost no self contained narratives following a particular being from a particular setting thrust into others. The closest thing to variety is goddamn Nichol Bolas because at LEAST he shakes things up and offers a perspective besides the usual suspects of color coordinated teenagers with attitude rangers.
I feel ancient now. I remember "planeswalkers don't appear on cards, because you, the players, are the planeswalkers". (That was back around Mirage block or so, it feels like they were only just moving towards overarcing coherent settings; though Urza and Mishra and Phyrexians go waaaay back. I never did manage to play that Phyrexian Dreadnought 12/12 goodness.)
The problem with planeswalkers stems from a deeper underlying problem Wizards has -- the tendency to take something special and DRIVE IT INTO THE GROUND until it's not anymore. They lack zero subtlety or self-restraint. "Oh, you kids like this shiny cool thing?? Let's give you endless amounts of it and keep pushing it far past the point you're actually still enjoying it." Planeswalkers were completely fine -- they just crazily overdid them. Now they're doing the same exact thing with legendary creatures and "everything is Commander" and all that. They're also way overdoing it with bling. I wish they'd go back to the philosophies they used to espouse about holding back and only giving us certain things once in a great while. I remember articles by Rosewater emphasizing how important it was that they only very rarely printed full-art lands.... What happened to THAT conviction, Mark?!
Simple; that conviction never existed in the first place. Mark Rosewater is a marketing mouthpiece; he will say whatever he thinks he needs to say, or is told to say, in order to sell product. He is a professional liar, and should always be regarded as such.
Agreed. There never should have been an uncommon Planeswalker or Legendary. As far as bling, the crazy thing to me is there are cards that are only bling and no regular version. I'm OCD and hate having my card styles all over the place.
I feel planeswalker bloat exists in part due to the rule change about them. The original planeswalker rule was that you couldn't control two planeswalkers that shared a type. Was rather easy to do in the beginning. Now they're legendary and follow that rule.
My main issue is not with planeswalkers losing their spark, is with omenpaths which basically make every character a “mini-planeswalker”, I really wish we can go back to planeswalkers being powerful demigods so that they feel different from the rest of the cast
Yeah I actually think a shift away from representations of the planeswalkers in game makes sense. They've always fit in a weird place + they've always been super vulnerable. They can be powerful but I'm not sure if I like them as a card type.
That’s a great way to put what I’ve also been feeling. Now that anyone can travel to any plane through Omenpaths, Planeswalking isn’t even special anymore. “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”
I think making Planeswalkers unique again is a good move, but now we need to close the Omenpaths a bit and lock down on the trope planes. We need to put a little love into the worldbuilding again rather than giving out cowboy hats, fedoras, and retro headbands to classic characters from other worlds.
Well you see, that requires actual effort. Why work hard when you can just pull out the trope jar and roll around in money?
4 місяці тому
The big issue now is with the omenpaths, the secret of planes is no longer a secret, let's use the House Dimir as an example, how can they be ok knowning that there are plenty of planes and potential secrets available not only on Ravnica but on hundreds of new worlds. The omenpaths is not a smart idea, they are pretending that every tyrant in the multiverse is frozen in time not dispatching armies to conquer other planes, imagine Baron Sengir, while the gang was cosplaying detectives on Ravnica or playing Wild West on TJ, Sengir would and should be sending armies to conquer other planes
@ICantThinkOfAFunnyHandle Long-term profit over short-term fatigue? Ah, who am I kidding. Hasbro knows it's on a sinking ship and want to milk everything as fast as possible before the fat rats scurry off. Ah well, I can still go back to old books and cards and enjoy the good old days.
3-set blocks my beloved. Even with trope planes like Theros, the block structure meant that the plane had to have some meat on its bones if it wanted to keep people engaged for the entire year. I don't think that it's any accident that nearly all of the fan favorite planes originate from before Dominaria and the removal of the block structure. Even the 3 new planes we got during the brief timespan of 2-set blocks have become more or less iconic parts of the game's history. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone gush about Eldraine or Capenna or even Kaldheim. If it weren't for Luka being a joke to surpass Tybalt, I don't think anyone would even remember Ikoria. The only new plane that I think will Live on fondly in player's memory from the last few years is Bloomburrow, the world that feels like it was crafted by a group of deeply passionate writers who wanted to try something new and interesting and were given a chance. I am...not optimistic when it comes to Duskmourn, the most theme park feeling plane since Thunder Junction and Capenna before it.
The thing that makes planeswalkers special is also the thing that made each plane unique. If now any creature/person could show up on any plane at any time, none are actually special.
I felt this in the Duskmourn reveals. It's a rare opportunity to do a uniquely themed plane, but instead of the set being populated by peculiar demons and original characters who are invested in the stakes of the world, it's just random characters from other planes coming to Duskmourn to play around, who all have to be able to walk away unharmed by the time the next set comes out.
And its entirely possible to make a story about the unique interactions between planes if they wanted to. Capenna starts running guns in Ravnica, ducking the Azorious' rules, and the sudden burst in the capacity of the unguilded to fight back is causing a serious problem for the guilds, for example. Its even possible to kill of characters because its not like we've seen every moment of thier lives until now. If you really want to bring a character back, they can reprint an older card, or print a new card that shows an earlier part in their life or even (if you're willing to allow a disconnect between story and card), a "what if" version of themselves. They just need to see thier characters as characters and not as brand representatives and marketing anchors, which they won't because one of those two options prints fat money...
Honestly this is probably why bloomburrow felt so special to me personally Almost every legendary Creature was an import character, building a deck around them feels like connecting to that character And yes Ral was in that set, but hes not the focus, and when he is there doing his stuff it feels epic, like the part with the dragonhawk
@@DiceTry yeah and honestly I think that's mainly why the change happened, for the designers it was becoming more of a chore coming up with new stuff for these characters to do or threats for them to fight While at the same time creating those new worlds and characters that the game is known for
@@Rucarlos yeah I agree, I won't say every crossover has had issues I think Hunt/Vow was good at both, and duskmourn seems to be doing okay from what we've seen But I absolutely loved how bloomburrow unashamedly through its world and characters at you, there wasn't a single character I could say was badly written or interesting Also it was just such a nice pace to have the villain not be some multiversal threat, or cosmic entity, but a person who started with noble intentions turned power hungry I seriously hope we get more of that in the future The cross overs can be fun, and some planes are perfect for it, but having an interesting plain, bring new mechanics, and it's own loveable characters is just so refreshing after years of team up stories
@@DiceTry Its about MAKING MONEY. Nothing in magic is authentic anymore. None of the Bloomsburrow crap was made passionately to connect a story and players... It was made just well enough so people like you would do exactly this and drool over some pseudo connections that only exists to sell a product. Absolutely insane that the average MTG player has been dumbed down enough not to realize this.
Without detracting from your overall argument, I would point out that Planeswalkers don’t need to be playable, any more than any other card type. Neither do planeswalkers need an ultimate. At their core, they’re enchantments that can be killed by creatures.
I do not want planeswalkers to be demigods again, but i do want them to be used like Ral was in Bloomburrow. Ral's role in bloomburrow's story was perfect. He was an outsider like us players to the plane but he got transformed and had to adapt to this new plane.
I hope they keep the trend that they did with Bloomburrow. Sure Ral was there, but he wasn’t the main focus. That was Mabel and her quest, Ral just happened to appear at a point
@@Kool212 They set out to make a MTG Cinematic Universe, and shoved the Gatewatch down our throats. And now it's the same thing, but with Legendary Characters. The only reason this change was made was because of Commander. They took the one thing that made planeswalking special, traveling the planes, and made it so that anyone can do it. Why even have planeswalkers anymore?
Planeswalkers should be powerful side characters who could help, but either provide a momentary aid or don't really do anything to help the heroes. Like Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings
The real problem with magic is the same with most superhero media. Over emphasis of individuals in grand tales. What really made magic for me was seeing planes for what they were. Planeswalkers play on a wider multiversal field, they still function as an vocal point for the narrative. Since we know established planeswalkers, they can go through catharsis and grow on planes. Show new aspects of themselves, through design and the story. What magic truly lacks is the balls to go into the nitty gritty personal stories of people on whichever world. Innistrad was great for this since we had a multitude of non"main" characters, which fleshed out the plain. With how the omenpath's are looking they will just make the same mistake they did with planeswalkers. Keep cranking out set after set with random casts of recurring characters. It truly does baffle how Hasbro's has the fantasy equivalent of marvel, and they are just making the narrative smaller and samey(Though arguably so has disney, and that is general shape of superhero stories). I don't understand why multiversal stories aren't made multiversal, are the rights holders just too afraid that they'd have to hire an actual fulltime writing team to manage all the thread's?
6:53 sure they can, just add "this planeswalker can be your commander". It's been done. Commander players don't want planeswalkers to be legendary creatures instead. There's already too many legendary creatures per set and too many sets per year. Commander players also don't want card specifically designed for commander, they want regular cards that can also work in commander if used creatively enough
Many people like me love playing with their 40 or 60 cards low power modern or even old standard decks and playing EDH at the same time. Not the same context, and sure there are problems with Commander dominance, but also helped the game gaining a bigger audience (singleton / epic / multiplayer format is fun!). Many undercurrent problems could and probably would've happened without Commander, like power creep, design fatigue, thematic dilution through constant crossovers, combo cards requiring bans, design mistakes...
yeah to much yapping when the obvious answer is 'planeswalker don't sell a set to our whales, commander players'. Theres plenty of design space in planeswalkers, plenty of cool things you can do, but the audience you cater the most don't care about them so is easy to just axe them and use those slots to juice up even more the legendary count. Remember when Legendary creatures where very special subsets of units from the lore?, now even the tailor in the local village is a legendary creature for the consoomers.
EDH. We are back to where we started with Character Focus. Since Magic story started following Legendary Creatures. Granted WOTC could have just printed Walkers as Legendary Creatures. They are not mutually exclusive.
Remember when the only representation where the 5 Enchantments from Planeshift for 5 of the Planeswalkers? Yeah they could have simply slotted them into any other Permanent type instead of creating a whole new one and having to rewrite the whole games rules just to work.
1 per set isn't dead, it's endangered lol Though it's hard to feel like anything is missing when you have 6+ characters we know walking from one plane to the next every set, like we're seeing in Thunder Junction and Duskmourn.
For real, they took the wrong lessons. "Oh, you don't like the same 5 planeswalkers showing up every set making the story all about them? Ok, we'll cut down the number of planeswalkers, but we'll also make it so that any character can travel the planes like a Planeswalker. And we will still focus on the same 5 characters, making the story all about them, but they aren't all planeswalkers. There, that's what you wanted, right?"
I had some hope for the omenpaths but they squandered that instantly by having the exact same, now desparked, characters have the whole universe revolve around them.
The one good thing that came out of giving us so many Planeswalker cards is the feasibility of planeswalker-themed decks. or "Super Friends" decks. With there being a lot of them, that means you can craft something interesting and unique. But yeah, when you take all of your points into consideration, the downfall was inevitable. Now to those who might say that just because it was bound to happen, so why try in the first place, is foolhardy. It was a fun time, but it is time to change.
Planswalkers are not fun at all. In standard they all had the same ability of "the game isn't technically over but i have already won". In commander and especially with stupid friends decks they all have the ability "you are now archenemy".
Man back when I played, I had a B/W Control deck around Eldritch Moon that I topped an IQ with. Sorin, Gideon AoZ, Lilliana the Last Hope, and Ob Nixilis. One of my favorite decks.
What I like about the new planeswalkers is they fit well with their home plane just as well as the one they’re in. Point in case: Ashiok sucked in standard, but was playable with Theros cards.
As someone who took a break from Magic right as Throne of Eldraine was coming into standard and only just got back into it as Duskmourne is on its way, I'm not surprised that this is happening. This feels like Maro and Gavin Verhey conceding that planeswalkers as a card type are just *weird*.
9:01 …I knew who all three were, mainly because I think Jared Carthalion and Basri Ket are hot, and Calix because his existence reminds me that we STILL haven’t gotten the actual story for Theros: Beyond Death.
I somewhat agree that by limiting their numbers WotC is making planeswalker special again sadly they made a big mistake by giving other (legendary) characters the ability to traverse the multiverse planeswalking makes planeswalker special if everyone can planeswalk then no one is special and limiting the number of planeswalker will not help them become special, WotC simply turned them to another "kind" of legendary characters as seen in Modern Horizon 3 If I'm not mistaken the termed used to call them was flipwalkers they're legendary creatures on one side and a planeswalker on the other. WotC should simply go back to basic focus on one plane at a time with a fixed set of characters (probably with one planeswalker) made specifically for that story after they've done all of their adventures then move on to the next plane and repeat the process they did that before with Urza and then with Gerrard they don't need to keep on plane jumping for every set.
I always felt like the gatewatch was a real problem for the story department. Unlike the weatherlight crew they weren't really on the same quest most of the time. There also wasn't one set protagonist so they'd split time between everyone as best they could but this meant that anyone who wasn't in the gatewatch barely showed up in story. The amount of time we had to spend updating each of them meant that most planes never felt like they were a different place because so much of the story was just those same five characters taking turns.
The issue is that WOTC has gotten extremely lazy with the storytelling. They had awful writers and can't come up with interesting worlds anymore. They need to hire actual writers again and make compelling stories that they can sell as novels. Remember when there was a book series about the Weatherlight Saga? Do that again.
Call me a contrarian, but I think War of the Spark, being an actual Planeswalker-centric event set, solved the design space problem by stripping back the design standards for the card type to the barest of bones, so you could have over 3 dozen Planeswalkers in the same set without a lot of redundancy.
War of the spark was the breaking point for planeswalkers. Too many of them got pushed to the broken side of the broken/boring dichotomy. The effects of a Narset, Teferi, or Karn hitting the battlefield and warping the entire game around them really drove home that planeswalker fatigue.
@@thomasodom4038 Sounds like you have a problem with Control decks to me. Yes, the prevalence of efficient semi-static Control effects in War of the Spark, let alone in Magic in general, can feel like a systemic problem, but that's less than 1/10th of the Planeswalkers in that set alone. The core challenge of designing around Constructed Formats is not making a card so powerful it has to be an auto-include in most decks, and generally, WotC fails at least once per set at that goal. Even with the hard counters built into that set (Despark, Price of Betrayal, The Elderspell), imbalance isn't a card-type problem, it's a card-specific problem.
@@Feralhyena um, no. I stand by statement. Don't put words in my mouth or try to twist my opinion into your liking. I could write a novel on why planeswalkers have had more of a negative effect than a positive one. The reply section isn't the place for that novel.
@@thomasodom4038 stating my understanding of your opinion is not putting words into your mouth. I thought I was emphatic that that reply was my opinion of what I had read.
Although I was never a planeswalker fan, with Serra being the sole exception. I liked how they made the game feel. They gave it continuity and familiarity. The current way they adopted is too much like fortnight for my taste.
I think ignoring the standard card design would be a great way of making planeswalkers. Imagine a 1 loyalty planes walker with only +1s all of which are pretty ok instead of underwhelming. or a planeswalker thats a creature. giving loyalty to itself when it attacks. maybe it doesnt have any +1 and only has 3 ults of different power. maybe a really weak effect for an ult an ok one and an emblem. breaking the design conventions and finding new ways of making them work would be the best thing. or even going weird like haveing the frount face be a planeswalker and having a flip ability that turns them into an encantment. breaking the confines of the current "rules" would be the best thing for planes walkers and i hope to see some cool ones come out of this new era
Opening the omenpaths hasn't really made anything different. We still get the same walkers in sets. I don't think the emperor of kamigawa has spent more than a week actually ruling her empire since she's constantly in random sets for seemingly no real reason.
The wanderer has been in Kamigawa since the end of MOM and just temporarily left it to rescue Nashi in the latest story, but to be fair she also said that she has not been rulling the empire because she doesnt feel ready yet
Yeahhh her lore has been "multiplanar demigod not ready to do her job" since Ravnica Allegiance. She could have just sent someone for Nashi, actually using the omenpaths we have now.
@@ruttokyrpa3472 but duskmourn wasnt really accesible through omenpath. They accesed by a door Niv-Mizzet had in possesion and that was originally sent there by Valgavoth. Also of course the wanderer wanted to rescue Nashi personally since she feels guilty for slaying Tamiyo
TECHNICALLY it does. Reason? Anyone can now be a planeswalker. Its the same thing as the kid at the end of The Last Jedi with them just effortlessly pulling the broom. Being a Planeswalker, like being a Force User, is no longer special. OG Planeswalkers where RARE, was maybe a dozen to a few dozen OG Planeswalkers. They where the pinacle of Magic users in the Magic multiverse. Now? Well now any tom dick or harry that finds a Omenpath can just move from one plane to another. THATS the problem with Omenpaths.
I really hope the one planeswalker approach leads to more settings like bloomburrow, with us being able to explore and learn about a new plane through a single planeswalker. I hope we don’t just get the same sort of storytelling as planeswalkers but with their de-sparked counterparts instead
I agree, I think the design part could be overcome by taking some risks on how we define what a Planeswalker card has to be, but the oversaturation and writing are hard to get past. Sometimes you just need a bit of a reset button.
4:30 - I strongly disagree that Planeswalkers are any more or less limited than the other card types. What makes a 'Walker "playable" is not any more or less than a checklist we have for the other card types as well. Lands shouldn't enter tapped; Creatures often need EtB triggers now; and so forth. Bad argument.
You bring up a lot of excellent points, but the thing that I think ultimately led to its death was its play pattern. The Planeswalkers that saw play immediately protected themselves; either by creating tokens or removing creatures, and in the most egregious cases, a single planeswalker did both. Liliana Dreadhorde General is a great example of this extremely toxic gameplay pattern. Comes down, can immediately remove an opponents threats and then build up an army of tokens to protect her, only to -4 again and then be rewarded with card draw. And given that Planewalkers did not exist until 2007-2008, you're missing about 15 years worth of cards that can effectively interact with them; i.e. removal spells or etb triggers. Planewalkers ended up being extremely oppressive in 1v1 formats and borderline useless in multi-player formats because of this play pattern.
One planeswalker per set might actually mean something if they also didn't print five legendary creatures who used to be planeswalkers in every set, or who somehow got to this plane, even though they're from another one and we saw them in the last three sets. Why are Niko and Zimone and Aminatou and Nashi on Duskmourn? If they are, and you're already making a card out around them, why not keep Niko and Aminatou as planeswalker is, which would at least make them interesting? Rowan and Will had such a unique thing going for them, and then they got turned into two separate legendary creatures, no different than the 40 other in WoE
My issue with the new focus on legendary creatures stems from two places. 1. A good chunk of them WERE planeswalkers/blood related to walkers, and still have this warping effect on a plane's story with "well why is Kellan here now, whats the point" or "oh goodie Niko is back, why? Why do i care?" Which wotc then has to justify just like they did with PWs being there. And 2. With that, it definitely feels far more corporate in reasoning than "we wanted to diversify our character's for sets" when Im seeing the a new group of the same 5 people just now with much less character development or growth. I actually dont even care about the flavour or story anymore due to this, it feels like a 3rd round afterthought at best when before it felt important to give us a story on top of the game pieces themselves.
6:15 - This is more an admission that nothing has changed other than the quantity and suggested/implied quality of them. The lore is the #1 reason why players don't want [were not happy with] common and uncommon 'Walkers in War of the Spark. There is nothing about the card type that prevents them from being as plentiful as crestures. It is the lore that does.
I think the main problem is that it has to sell to commander. Not sure why they couldn’t include “can be your commander” on more planeswalkers instead. I, like many others, think the omenpaths are not that great and instead throws an over importance on Legendary Characters which is an insanely over bloated category that they just added a bunch of desparked planeswalkers. When everyone can do the special thing, then it isn’t all that special.
Just some more things I've also seen around; 1- Development wanted a rough color balance of planeswalkers in standard so lead to things such as characters like Nissa getting random colors and not having a BR for year in-between Sarkhan the Mad and Angrath. This meant they had to forced colors or character into sets just to meet this requirement. With 1 pw card a set this is lessen. 2- Many characters where made planeswalkers to be a mascot/ face for the plane (Kenirth twins, Saheeli) and they decided those character can work as legends for this. Under the old marketing I think characters like Proft, Annie and Mabel would have been pw. 3- From a writing point of view they always had to make conflict around pw just being able to peace out. With omenpaths they can make sure most characters don't have this to avoid conflicts.
Nissa didn't get "random colors". Nissa dabbling in in black mana was always a part of her backstory, and her move into blue was a part of her character arc over the duration of the Gatewatch era... before WotC higher-ups had her kicked out and started outsourcing their writing with Dominaria.
3 - Maybe instead of adding omenpaths, the best idea would be to heavily nerf pw's abilities to shift planes? Maybe make it take a good while or require a certain condition so they can't just do it to escape any danger?
@@JediMB Her dabbing with black mana was retcon out with origins and while the blue was explained with her arc, they needed to do half blue pw character so I doubt that was the plan going in. Also a writer of the original gatewatch saga said it was always the plan for Nissa to lose faith with the gatewatch and leave at the end of wots while breaking up with Chandra (the biphobia was not planned however).
@@ElfosDeMordor I mean there are ways they came up with, the main thing was as @dicetry said tho this was just one many factors that lead into the desparking and omenpaths.
Wizards of the coast had an opportunity close a door on four eras of magic completely and lore wise they had every piece set up. When the omen paths opened up, and pherexia invaded all the other planes of existence, Bolas could have been set free. The omen paths could have alterted the eldrazi in the moon leading to them freeing themselves to fight the pherexia menace. Slivers could have been brought back, allowing them to gather again, adapting into pherexia slivers and eldrazi slivers. We could also have had a sliver Planeswalker as well. One last major fight to end all fights, deaths on all ends with no victory. The end of an era, alliances rising and falling. An eldrazi Planeswalker. Nico bolas falling to pherexia corruption. His brother unable to save him, resulting in both their deaths. Pherexian eldrazi obliterating everything. A multidimensional war to end all wars, Planeswalkers losing their lives left right and center. Then they release a four deck special called "finale of an era" and it is four rainbow decks. Rainbow eldrazi, rainbow Walker, rainbow sliver, and rainbow pherexia. Then the players can play out the final battle of the era. The next set "new era" we follow the story of a child and his two pet dogs. The kid was a human named Nico Bolas. His pet dogs are eldrazi, and sliver. We follow the life of his home plane of zendikar hundreds of years in the future. The past multidimensional war has become nothing but stories told to children. Even he was named after someone from those stories and so he named his dogs after two of the clans. You can now make sparks extremely rare.
Do you honestly think that WotC has the ability to write something like this? They can barely test the new cards to see if they are broken, let alone create a final battle scenario. The game from now on will be "this is cowboy Jace, next is pirate Jace, next is chef Jace and 2 years from now you'll get teacher Jace". It's a joke, really.
@@Izelor they should write the story first, and then make the products. However their design philosophy is completely backwards and it results in terrible products. They do not have the writers they need, in order to write a story that has a bunch of cards in it like 1000 story prompts. Also with naming the kid after Nico bolas, we can have a "reincarnation of sin" story where the children embody some of the aspects of their name. Nico bolas for example would be a child that wants to learn and grow and "be a god" or "king" due in part to idolization. You can boil down every Planeswalker into a reincarnation child and the few traits they had. Oko would be a child into pranks. Garruk would be a kid that loves animals and lives on a farm. This also would allow them to target a younger generation as well. The kids could play a game of "plane chase" tying in other MTG products. Or they could play "archenemy" as another game. However despite their "we plan things seven years ahead" it seems like they don't.
@@TheKillerman3333 they don't really care about the story. I remember 15 years ago, they did a poll and players voted for the Phyrexians to win the war against the Mirrans. Current day WotC doesn't have the balls to do something so cool and that's exactly what is missing from the game. Passion from the developers that in turn will ignite passion from the players.
0:55 - It wasn't inevitable, but the result of decisions made by WotC. There are many directions that they could have chosen, which would have seen 'Walkers as vibrant to this day.
When I heard they were doing one planeswalker per set I was pretty happy bc we would actually get to see the plane and its inhabitants but then I heard about the omenpaths I was immediately taken aback also pre-mending planeswalkers I believe the term is were basically gods but yes in recent years they’ve become more just people who can move between planes
What would a good fan made planeswalker replacement would be? By that I mean what kind of new "special character type" card xan be made to servw as a replacement or a counterpart to planeswalkers and what would their mechanics would be ?
I think it was a good idea for the card balance idea of the game. But in terms of the stories, omen paths are just becoming, insert random character into set so we can have a diverse cast of legendary creatures. And as a reader of mtg, I feel like it's just becoming any legendary creature can show up anywhere now. And it kinda looses its luster. Except bloomburrow. That was a set that was very self contained and it was hinted that there was an omen path but nothing so crazy to where raktos is enjoying being a cowboy.
Yeah a lot of us older EDH folk have said for years that they probably should all be allowed, same with the cards that make legendary creatures when they enter
You can if the planeswalker card specifically say that it can be used as a commander you can use it as a commander Daretti, Scrap Savant and Dihada are examples of that and in modern horizons WotC made "flipwalkers" they're legendary creatures on one side and a planeswalker on the other WotC found a way to make planewalkers relevant in commander and made them not special at all.
They allow it in Brawl since that format is controlled by wizards. since commander is controlled by the RC wizards doesn't force then to allow planeswalker as commander.
The less is more approach for planeswalkers is a good one but I think they might want to try that with legendary creatures too. It's seems like with every new set, they release a least a dozen new legendary creatures and I think this could lead to the same fatigue that Planeswalker where if every creature is special then none are special
I played Magic back in the 90s, didn't play for a couple decades because I was poor, then came back with Magic Arena giving me a free to play way to play. Planeswalkers were possibly the most obvious change from the first time I played to when I started playing again, and let me say this: I hate them. I hated them, and I still hate them. They're almost impossible to balance, since they tend to warp the game around themselves. Trying to get creatures to be relevant in the era of Planeswalkers is, I think, a major contributing factor to power creep in the last decade. Baneslayers are a joke in the era of Planeswalkers, they don't just die to removal, they die to a card that sticks around and keeps accumulating value, so the only way to make medium to expensive creatures even close to relevant in the era of Planeswalkers is to make them all Mulldrifters. There are other factors that go into the power creep, of course, like Wizards realizing that, as people have moved away from Standard (both because of the rise of Commander and because rotation makes Standard so expensive), making cards relevant to older formats is important to their bottom line, but I think Planeswalkers have played a critical role in Magic's mistakes. I'm glad to see less Planeswalkers, because if I could go back in time and erase the entire card type, I would, and at least cutting back on them is a step in the right direction. Of course, there's no putting the power creep genie back in the bottle, Baneslayers might never be relevant again, but at least we'll be getting less of the obnoxious Planeswalker play pattern if they become less prevalent.
I dont have too have to much to say, but I will say I that I am slighlty disapponited with the omenpath arc (Wilds of Eldraine - Outlaws at Thunder Junction), while in hindsight I now though it was a stiryline that focuses on Kellan, my original thought was that after each set I guess one of Kellan's I guess group would be the omenwalker for the set, for example Kellan woukd be the omenwalker for Caverns of Ixalan, the vampire girl from Ixalan would then be the omenwalker for Murders at Karlov Manor and so forth, untill it would conclude with all the omenwalkers to team up against some bigger threat. Also as I side note, I am confused on why they kept on changing Kellan's magic color despite his personality not really changing or really only changing slightly. It felt they just kept changing his mana colors for it's own sake.
This is why I LOVE Nicol Bolas, the Ravager. It fills both the Planeswalker want AND the Legendary need for a commander. I wish they would do more "flip" style planeswalkers. Every time I "spark" him in an EDH game it just feels SO satisfying.
4:45 I mean War of the Spark proved those requirements aren't actually needed. 10:14 I don't think this really solves the issue, merely delays it if that. On the memory issue now the 'relevant' cast for the multiverse has expanded to every legendary creature still alive and the presence of a planeswalker on a plane is still mandatory and mundane. The only surprise is which one it might be, and that's the same as before, except that now if there is a specific planeswalker with ties to a plane that are too strong it may not even have that. 10:35 No, the fact that half the planeswalkers are mid-tier superheroes or random barely developed characters instead of the epic grand personas of oldwalkers and some of those that came after isn't changed. Add to that the fact that now literally anyone can go to other planes and planeswalkers find themselves diminuished. You made many points which I think are largely correct but this is the only one in which you're probably getting backwards: Wizards doesn't want to enhance the planeswalker they want to diminish the importance of the planeswalker. I think Commander and wanting to pull characters from different planes that aren't planeswalkers probably make up about 95% of the reason for the reduction in planeswalkers. The design limitations also play a factor but I don't think they are nearly as limited as was suggested. In my view the change isn't entirely wrong but would have been made better by rather than having a single planeswalker, having an uncertain number - down to having 0 in most sets. Both in lore and in gameplay this would make more sense. In addition I think Wizards could solve a lot of issues if they could at least cut off some planeswalkers. Some of the old ones should probably go, but those are harder for marketing reasons. On the other hand, there's likely a whole bloat of them that could be given one last heroic moment or big role in a story and then get cut off.
They are also not good for a story in general - most planeswalkers are static, one-dimensional characters and by making room for Chandra and her flaming puns and predictable humor you have less time for plane itself and his habitants.
Ultimates especially were always a flawed concept. MtG is the card game I play the second most, the card game I play most is LoR. In LoR, during their third set, an issue the devs and and playerbase mutually discovered was an issue with Aurelion Sol. Sol was a champion card who cost 10 mana and when he levelled up (think transforming a transforming double faced card after a condition is met) he made all of your celestial cards (extremely powerful cards counterbalanced by having to first create them, they didn't start in deck) cost 0. The problem, the playerbase discovered, is that when you flipped Sol, the game was effectively over. It only made sense to scoop and go next. So the Sol player never really got to do their gameplay and engage with the power fantasy the character is supposed to facilitate. The big take away was this: you want to make the point where the player effectively wins the game and they *actually* win the game are as close together as possible. Because the period between effectively and actually winning the game is just playing out a formality. Almost every planeswalker's ultimate effectively says win the game. Yes they're all different, but almost all of them win the game once used. This leads to one of three outcomes: -the ultimate has to be totally unattainable, making it an effective non factor the card may as well not even have it -the ultimate is attainable, but what it does effectively doesn't matter because it just wins the game, not producing any interesting gameplay decisions or board states -the ultimate doesn't win the game immediately, but ironically this makes it not even worth using in the first place because if your deck is meant to facilitate using a planeswalker ult you want one that *does* immediately win the game Like Ral in BLB. His ultimate is that your instants and sorceries have storm. The amount of times you're getting this ult off and then *losing* the game are practically nonexistent. You're not losing the game in a red blue spells deck if all of your instants and sorceries have storm. But you're also not making any interesting gameplay decisions or novel mechanical interactions either. You're going to draw your whole deck, give your prowess creatures +10/+10 and one shot your opponent with face damage. If your effects are too powerful, the specifics of those effects don't matter because they really just say "win the game".
Exactly. I wish they continued to experiment with War of the Spark type planeswalkers (that only had one ability and could only spend loyalty) and static abilities, making them into a sort of value box that gives you stuff every turn, but your opponent can deny it via dealing damage. Maybe also effect that trigger if walker dies, so it's actually beneficial to lose loyalty. I don't know, this whole "limited design space" just looks like a poorly thought out excuse to flood us with even more commander cards.
@@kindlingking I keep thinking about how Planeswalkers are supposed to be "on the level of players". Might be better to go the other way, with "You can only have one planeswalker enter the field under your control, total, for the entire game", and make them harder to kill with better regular abilities (the equivalent of an actual decent deck in the hands of a teammate casting a spell every turn) but with no 'ultimate', unless the spells one can normally cast for 6 mana would be considered 'ultimate'.
7:05 - This is why, for 12+ years, we have seen people ask about planeswalker commanders, which we got for the first time ever in Commander 2014, and a few more since then. Still, this is a lore issue more than card type issue.
Yep. All of the decisions Wizards make are due to Commander at this point because it's where the money is. That is their only insentive to print more legendary creatures than before. Has nothing to do with lore or planeswalkers, they just want to be able to pump out new commanders every set.
Planeswalker cards are the worst thing that happened to the game (at least before 2020). Ever since their introduction, they always warped the formats around themselves. Desparking them was not the solution though. They could easily cut down on the number of planeswalkers that are available, by having the majority of them die during crucial moments in the story (looking at you Liliana). However, WotC doesn't want this. What they want is more legendary creatures because that's what Commander players ask for. Take Thunder Junction, for example. Out of the 156 creatures of the set, 43 are legendary. That's more than 25% of the creatures. You said that they overprinted planeswalkers and that's true but what they are doing now with legendary creatures is outrageous. Magic was never about legendary creatures. Sure, there were a few in every set but they were never the focal point. They were there just for flavor. Back in the day, the game didn't need beatiful teenagers to promote itself. They just put a big, scary beast on the front and it was enough. WotC thinks that players want to see characters in comic adventures. What players want is to take a dragon and a demon and have epic battles with them.
Nice video! Though we may run into some of the same problems with legendary creatures: where there are so many that you think, "Really? You're 'Legendary?' They're just handing that out now, huh?" Or the characters we see repeatedly just feel like their iterations have the same words re-arranged (or even the opposite problem, where they do something entirely different but then that makes it feel too unrelated to the past version(s) of that character - can be mitigated with good flavor/character development).
Just want to say that you have amazing editing skills! It looks really professional. :) Also, I think I pretty much never played planeswalkers. The problem for me as a Commander player is that I have to defend my planeswalker not only against one player, but THREE players with a bunch of creatures on their boards. I think the only planeswalker I play is Minsc&Boo as a commander, but they are super fun haha.
Got a video suggestion. Yu-Gi-Oh has lore behind their instant win Exodia the Forbidden One, so how about all or some of the MTG instant win cards had some lore explained, made up, or theorized.
I like the idea of making Planeswalkers unique again, but depowering them a third time isnt the correct way. It removes the uniqueness by making them more like everyone else. If anything story wise sure some walkers get desparked again, but with a return to the still sparked ones getting close to having premending powers to help combat multiversal threats that inevitably will show up in the future.
Just to say I really enjoyed this video. :) I think I am going to miss the Planeswalker era, but the cards have a limited design space and shrinking down and only having 1 per set means we'll get more get more unique and thoughtful designs for years to come.
I only just got into MTG recently and I was extremely confused as to why Planeswalkers weren’t usable as commanders. It’s especially weird because to me the structure of the planeswalker card feels like it should be a ‘player ability’. Something you’re always building and discharging at different rates in a similar way to a Commander, but that isn’t targettable in the same way.
As much as I agree with some of the story related points, they also apply to legendary creatures Too many to remember, even if you are focusing on one plane/block there are legendaries in there that don't even get mentioned in the official story stuff Main characters of the multiverse still happens with the Omenpaths expanding the possible cast, but what's stopping Kellan and Simone and Niko and co from becoming the new Gatewatch? Coming up with new ones dilutes the "special-ness" of planeswalkers isn't necessarily one that translates to legendaries, but considering a planeswalker's first planeswalk is nearly random with no concious control over it as some event ingnites their spark, and they learn most, if not all, other destinations from interacting with other walkers it would make sense that almkst every plane we visit should have one walker, who brought the others there or who added their plane to the shared pool of "safe places to land" that our core cast knows Desparking walkers also removes some of the flexibility in design space, I can't imagine a Chandra that cares for artifacts (much to her parents' chagrin), but Daretti is a mono-red planeswalker that cares about them, Koth cares about mountains in particular, Chandra cares for burn, impulse draw and ritualsn Jaya cares for instants and sorceries And if they want us to play them as our commanders they can make flipwalkers, some are amazing (Ajani is great, though I only have him in the 99), or they could just make creature versions, say that the invasion lead to the development of spells that could temporarily lock out sparks from walking, or say they are undercover, or just say we can make these nown Vraska having her spark wouldn't make me feel any different about her OTJ card I don't mind that they are printing less planeswalker cards and putting more care towards the ones they are making, the set-design argument is perfectly valid and I see why after WAR they may need to take a step back from printing as many, it's the justifications storywise and mechanically that bother me
Even after only a year of Omenpaths, I honestly already miss having planeswalkers be the focus. I much rather have just a few characters reappearing as strangers on strange worlds than have every character from every world show up what feels like everywhere else. It seriously detracts from each new setting's own unique personality and waters it all down to just trope over trope.
Been rewatching Evan Erwin's old 'The Magic Show' videos, and it's nice to hear him talk about the first walker cards. When War of the Spark came out, it felt like an overload of Planeswalkers, Wish WOTC would have held back on them for a few sets after that...
I absolutely hate Planeswalkers and how they shoved a bunch of them in every set. They were fine when they were few and special, but we were getting so many I was sick of them. At the same time we're also getting a million Legendary creatures which make those less special as well. It all started in 2018, along with the Legendary Crown update for the card frame. That was also the time when the game shifted focus to Commander. It wasn't noticeable at first, but WOTC had been preparing the game for it since then. I would love for the game to tone down both Planeswalkers and Legendary creatures. Bloomburrow was a step in the right direction, with just 1 Planeswalker and 26 Legendary creatures. That's still a ton of Legendaries for a single set, but sets before it could have up to 50 Legendaries, which is insane (Dominaria had 64 o.o). So that was a good start.
I miss having more planeswalkers, I started after m12 came out and was here for the majority of the planeswalker arc of magic. It is absolutely my favorite type; but I understand them wanting to move a different direction.
In order of occurrence Oversaturation: too many introduced at once in a short period of time Overpowered: several decks in varying formats have them as win conditions almost by virtue of just existing on the field Overused characters: people are very tired of seeing liliana, jace, teferi chandra and ajani all the time
Having one planeswalker per set can be a good opportunity to create very interesting one-off designs. I think it's important to make that one card design be memorable to make planeswalkers still feel special even if they're no longer the focus. Let's look at the planeswalkers printed starting from Wilds of Eldraine: - Ashiok in Eldraine is an enabler and payoff for exiling your own cards but it feels too clunky. - Quintorius in Ixalan feels too simple (but I guess being the first Quintorius planeswalker card makes it special enough). And you can certainly attempt to break that discover 4 ability. - Kaya in Ravnica has a static ability, and no ultimate ability (a design pioneered by War of the Spark that's kind of become the norm). - Oko in Thunder Junction is a crime payoff so I guess that technically feels new. - Jace in Thunder Junction has a static ability only seen in very few creatures before, but the ability is a restriction. Also, it can plot your cards, so interacting with a set's new mechanics can feel fresh. - Ral in Bloomburrow has a pretty splashy ultimate ability, something that's been getting rarer nowadays, and he became an otter so that's cool. - Kaito in Duskmourn has ninjutsu so that's pretty cool.
Planeswalkers used to be unique, special. Then, they started popping a new planeswalker character every set and we got up to a point where we went from having these few main characters to 30+ planeswalkers who had no impact to the story. Meanwhile, the cards themselves kept getting nastier and nastier to play with. You get a planeswalker during draft and you've likely won the event just because of that one card, that's how powerful they are. So the reduction to 1 per set really helps the gameplay side.
8:59 Honestly? I remembered two of the three of them. Basri because I opened TWO of him at the pre-release and he carried me three rounds (split fourth) and Calix because the way in which he got his spark stuck with me. I'm not a big Commander player so I've never even heard of Jared before now so I can't remember someone I've never heard of. Thanks for the video.
Planeswalkers were strong in a 1v1 setting, where defending the PW to get value for multiple turns and/or earn a turn where the opponent does not hit your life points was a strong and novel idea. Commander absolutely trashes this design. You play a planeswalker, and you are almost guaranteed to lose it to any of the 3 battlefields you are fighting against. Unless you are playing a dedicated Superfriends deck, they act as a modal sorcery, which is normally overcosted for what they do. Simple as that.
An option for not having a protection minus ability is to give the planeswalker an attack score but not let the planeswalker attack. Or a defensive score that acts like a wall. There’s two ideas they’ve never explored, to my knowledge
I think the biggest mistake was Rare and Uncommon planeswalkers. That really let the genie out of the bottle with bloat. Having a cycle of 5 walkers per set (or even just per block when that was a thing) could have been more sustainable, especially if they weren't always new designs, but reprints when it made sense (no need to make yet another Chandra, just use the old one with new art when it fits the narrative). The flip walker cycle from Origins is till one of my favorite mechanical and flavor designs in magic. And the planeswalker gameplay that midrange decks were doing between Tarkir and Dominaria was also fun in-game.
Making the Planeswalkers legendary and adding them to an even larger pool did not help keep track of them in any way. The omenpaths are basically just any legendary creature can planeswalk now. Honestly miss the older style of block we had from back before war of the spark with basically one Planeswalker per color pie guild alongside the 1-3 legendary creatures for those guilds.
Honestly, I enjoy the desparking from a story perspective Making planeswalkers more special, something less common that only a handful of people, which is what I always imaged planeswalkers should be. Specific desparks (Mainly Calix and Aminatous) do remove the most interesting part of those characters, some desparks I'm completely neutral on, but most of them offer very interesting character changes. Especially the newest Duskmourn story, Tyvar, The Wanderer, and Niko all offer great new perspectives and character arcs. From a purely story decision, I think this was good. However we have to deal with the fact that this was also a monetary decision, more legendary creatures (ones that are recognizable too) means more commanders means more money. I also think that this will give a chance for underrepresented characters to be in the spotlight. Niko has gotten one(1) story, and became a fan favorite post desparking in the Duskmourn story. Imagine if Angrath was still sparked, and grappling with the fact that he can still walk the planes after accidentally abandoning his family for over a decade. What if Basri Ket...did something? Imagine if Ugin is desparked but Bolas isn't. So much possibility
I know that Vraska planeswalker black card is beyond annoying. I just roll my eyes anytime I’m hit with “18 poison counters.” The turn before I had 0 counters. Just stupid
Them becoming superheroes A lot of people dont like using Plainswalkers, I never did and never will use them. Its fun to build a deck around a legendary.
Dude, I wonder what Sheldon would be thinking, all the damn back and forth about a game we all love to play. There are so many different formats for everyone to have access too. And not everyone has to like each one.
Spice 8 Rack pointed out some similarities between the focus on planeswalkers and several story beats the past couple of years and the MCU. The Gatewatch is pretty transparently MTG’s avengers, Bolas having some surface level similarities to Thanos. You could even draw comparisons where after War of The Spark and Endgame, both properties floundered in similar ways. Quality took a hit of course. A lot of writing felt like it was trying to get itself over with so it could move on to the next thing. Planes were just becoming backdrops for the next chapter in a walker’s story. That and the sheer volume of products being made was increased more than I think any of us were prepared for. Now it feels like there’s a secret lair every other week, 3 universes beyond at a time and by the time I’m used to a new plane we’re moving on to the next.
You missed the biggest advantage of the shift. Magic has been in a desperate need of a shift from a focus on multiversal threats, to plane-specific local conflicts. It's hard to buy in to a Blaine is the entire conflict of that plane is nothing more than a minor stepping stone to some sort of multiversal plot. And shifting to a creature focus facilitates stories focused on that plane.
9:00 I remember all of them, and have been complaining about Calix in particular for being given a spark as a part of his "destiny" only to be desparked before he even got to do anything off-Theros. Kinda shows how these decrees from above about sweeping changes tend to sabotage the actual stories being told.
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My biggest issue with planeswalkers was that they made stories less "Oh, look at this cool plane and it's inhabitants" and more "Hey, look at what the planeswalkers are doing."
Totally, I think Planes walkers should be a vehicle for exploring the Plane, not something that the world is warped around. I still really like how they did it in amonkhet.
The focus being on the denizens of a plane rather than the planeswalkers is where most of the best writing happens. Teferi is one of my favorite characters and he has some of the most organic development from bratty prodigy to humble master. Kamahl is also another compelling hero even though he never gains a spark. Frankly the change is a welcomed one and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
Now it's not even Planeswalkers, it's just "hey look what this repeating set of legendary creatures is doing"
Now it's "forget this plane, let's go see what fan favorites Kellan or Nashi are doing"
@ICantThinkOfAFunnyHandle
Thiiiiiiiis.
This is 100% my biggest issue with planes walkers.
If I have to see Jayce ONE more time, I am going to scream. I am already screaming preemptively.
An entire universe and beyond of possibilities, entire alternate frames of realities and standards. Dozens if not hundreds of myriad forms of life, perspectives, the possibility for entirely and utterly alien constructions of worlds and their denizens
And yet something like 80-85% of all this potential follows these like six or seven jabronis. No weird species with weirder perspectives, almost no self contained narratives following a particular being from a particular setting thrust into others. The closest thing to variety is goddamn Nichol Bolas because at LEAST he shakes things up and offers a perspective besides the usual suspects of color coordinated teenagers with attitude rangers.
I feel ancient now. I remember "planeswalkers don't appear on cards, because you, the players, are the planeswalkers". (That was back around Mirage block or so, it feels like they were only just moving towards overarcing coherent settings; though Urza and Mishra and Phyrexians go waaaay back. I never did manage to play that Phyrexian Dreadnought 12/12 goodness.)
For me, it took a few Giant Growths and Blood Lusts to play the Dreadnought... but, I did it...
I started playing just in time to be able to StifleNaught.
Now you are the commander/legendary creature in the story. Whatever sells right?
@@Catbus-Driveryou're by definition not the commander, the commander works for you
I for one wish they had never added Planeswalkers to the game.
The problem with planeswalkers stems from a deeper underlying problem Wizards has -- the tendency to take something special and DRIVE IT INTO THE GROUND until it's not anymore.
They lack zero subtlety or self-restraint. "Oh, you kids like this shiny cool thing?? Let's give you endless amounts of it and keep pushing it far past the point you're actually still enjoying it."
Planeswalkers were completely fine -- they just crazily overdid them. Now they're doing the same exact thing with legendary creatures and "everything is Commander" and all that.
They're also way overdoing it with bling. I wish they'd go back to the philosophies they used to espouse about holding back and only giving us certain things once in a great while. I remember articles by Rosewater emphasizing how important it was that they only very rarely printed full-art lands.... What happened to THAT conviction, Mark?!
Simple; that conviction never existed in the first place. Mark Rosewater is a marketing mouthpiece; he will say whatever he thinks he needs to say, or is told to say, in order to sell product. He is a professional liar, and should always be regarded as such.
Full art lands are prettier than regulars, that's a pretty common opinion. Why would I want less of them?
Agreed. There never should have been an uncommon Planeswalker or Legendary. As far as bling, the crazy thing to me is there are cards that are only bling and no regular version. I'm OCD and hate having my card styles all over the place.
I feel planeswalker bloat exists in part due to the rule change about them.
The original planeswalker rule was that you couldn't control two planeswalkers that shared a type. Was rather easy to do in the beginning. Now they're legendary and follow that rule.
@@DXKramer if that rule didnt change we would just see more Basris and Tibalts, not just fewer jaces
My main issue is not with planeswalkers losing their spark, is with omenpaths which basically make every character a “mini-planeswalker”, I really wish we can go back to planeswalkers being powerful demigods so that they feel different from the rest of the cast
Indeed, in the end I think we are just trading one problem for a future one. But I guess we will cross that bridge when we get to it.
Yeah I actually think a shift away from representations of the planeswalkers in game makes sense. They've always fit in a weird place + they've always been super vulnerable. They can be powerful but I'm not sure if I like them as a card type.
That’s a great way to put what I’ve also been feeling. Now that anyone can travel to any plane through Omenpaths, Planeswalking isn’t even special anymore. “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”
@@JayoticMTG But everyone is super because anything else isn't woke
@@Max-nt5zs what?
I think making Planeswalkers unique again is a good move, but now we need to close the Omenpaths a bit and lock down on the trope planes. We need to put a little love into the worldbuilding again rather than giving out cowboy hats, fedoras, and retro headbands to classic characters from other worlds.
Well you see, that requires actual effort. Why work hard when you can just pull out the trope jar and roll around in money?
The big issue now is with the omenpaths, the secret of planes is no longer a secret, let's use the House Dimir as an example, how can they be ok knowning that there are plenty of planes and potential secrets available not only on Ravnica but on hundreds of new worlds.
The omenpaths is not a smart idea, they are pretending that every tyrant in the multiverse is frozen in time not dispatching armies to conquer other planes, imagine Baron Sengir, while the gang was cosplaying detectives on Ravnica or playing Wild West on TJ, Sengir would and should be sending armies to conquer other planes
@ICantThinkOfAFunnyHandle Long-term profit over short-term fatigue?
Ah, who am I kidding. Hasbro knows it's on a sinking ship and want to milk everything as fast as possible before the fat rats scurry off.
Ah well, I can still go back to old books and cards and enjoy the good old days.
3-set blocks my beloved. Even with trope planes like Theros, the block structure meant that the plane had to have some meat on its bones if it wanted to keep people engaged for the entire year. I don't think that it's any accident that nearly all of the fan favorite planes originate from before Dominaria and the removal of the block structure. Even the 3 new planes we got during the brief timespan of 2-set blocks have become more or less iconic parts of the game's history. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone gush about Eldraine or Capenna or even Kaldheim. If it weren't for Luka being a joke to surpass Tybalt, I don't think anyone would even remember Ikoria.
The only new plane that I think will Live on fondly in player's memory from the last few years is Bloomburrow, the world that feels like it was crafted by a group of deeply passionate writers who wanted to try something new and interesting and were given a chance. I am...not optimistic when it comes to Duskmourn, the most theme park feeling plane since Thunder Junction and Capenna before it.
@@aceofsalts0246 I like the idea of duskmourn and I think they could make it something meaningful.. and then they made a cheerleader card.. wtf 😒
The thing that makes planeswalkers special is also the thing that made each plane unique. If now any creature/person could show up on any plane at any time, none are actually special.
Syndrome tried to warn us. We only had to listen.
I felt this in the Duskmourn reveals. It's a rare opportunity to do a uniquely themed plane, but instead of the set being populated by peculiar demons and original characters who are invested in the stakes of the world, it's just random characters from other planes coming to Duskmourn to play around, who all have to be able to walk away unharmed by the time the next set comes out.
And its entirely possible to make a story about the unique interactions between planes if they wanted to. Capenna starts running guns in Ravnica, ducking the Azorious' rules, and the sudden burst in the capacity of the unguilded to fight back is causing a serious problem for the guilds, for example. Its even possible to kill of characters because its not like we've seen every moment of thier lives until now. If you really want to bring a character back, they can reprint an older card, or print a new card that shows an earlier part in their life or even (if you're willing to allow a disconnect between story and card), a "what if" version of themselves. They just need to see thier characters as characters and not as brand representatives and marketing anchors, which they won't because one of those two options prints fat money...
Planeswalkers lost their sparks and became legendary creatures to increase commander sales.
It’s really that simple.
blud really invalidated an eleven minute video with one line of irrefutable factual evidence
Came to say exactly this. Its not that deep, is it?
Yep. It’s that simple, and people trying to say this is anything else do not realize how much commander has taken over magic design.
@@latrodectusmactans7592 unofficial format to full time focus in design .
Honestly this is probably why bloomburrow felt so special to me personally
Almost every legendary Creature was an import character, building a deck around them feels like connecting to that character
And yes Ral was in that set, but hes not the focus, and when he is there doing his stuff it feels epic, like the part with the dragonhawk
I totally agree, it was more about the Plane and its characters than anything else
@@DiceTry yeah and honestly I think that's mainly why the change happened, for the designers it was becoming more of a chore coming up with new stuff for these characters to do or threats for them to fight
While at the same time creating those new worlds and characters that the game is known for
It's also awesome that we didn't get 15 legendaries from other planes and got to enjoy the sets and it's inhabitants instead
@@Rucarlos yeah I agree, I won't say every crossover has had issues I think Hunt/Vow was good at both, and duskmourn seems to be doing okay from what we've seen
But I absolutely loved how bloomburrow unashamedly through its world and characters at you, there wasn't a single character I could say was badly written or interesting
Also it was just such a nice pace to have the villain not be some multiversal threat, or cosmic entity, but a person who started with noble intentions turned power hungry
I seriously hope we get more of that in the future
The cross overs can be fun, and some planes are perfect for it, but having an interesting plain, bring new mechanics, and it's own loveable characters is just so refreshing after years of team up stories
@@DiceTry Its about MAKING MONEY. Nothing in magic is authentic anymore. None of the Bloomsburrow crap was made passionately to connect a story and players... It was made just well enough so people like you would do exactly this and drool over some pseudo connections that only exists to sell a product.
Absolutely insane that the average MTG player has been dumbed down enough not to realize this.
Without detracting from your overall argument, I would point out that Planeswalkers don’t need to be playable, any more than any other card type.
Neither do planeswalkers need an ultimate.
At their core, they’re enchantments that can be killed by creatures.
I do not want planeswalkers to be demigods again, but i do want them to be used like Ral was in Bloomburrow. Ral's role in bloomburrow's story was perfect. He was an outsider like us players to the plane but he got transformed and had to adapt to this new plane.
Yeah, it felt like kingdom hearts
Getting rid of planeswalker cards makes planeswalkers demigods again, because it means the only planeswalkers are the players.
Make Plainswalkers great (demigods) again!
I hope they keep the trend that they did with Bloomburrow. Sure Ral was there, but he wasn’t the main focus. That was Mabel and her quest, Ral just happened to appear at a point
Agreed. I don't get this videos assertion that a planeswalker existence in a set warped the story around them. That's just how Wotc implemented them.
@@Kool212 They set out to make a MTG Cinematic Universe, and shoved the Gatewatch down our throats. And now it's the same thing, but with Legendary Characters. The only reason this change was made was because of Commander. They took the one thing that made planeswalking special, traveling the planes, and made it so that anyone can do it. Why even have planeswalkers anymore?
Planeswalkers should be powerful side characters who could help, but either provide a momentary aid or don't really do anything to help the heroes. Like Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings
The real problem with magic is the same with most superhero media. Over emphasis of individuals in grand tales. What really made magic for me was seeing planes for what they were. Planeswalkers play on a wider multiversal field, they still function as an vocal point for the narrative. Since we know established planeswalkers, they can go through catharsis and grow on planes. Show new aspects of themselves, through design and the story.
What magic truly lacks is the balls to go into the nitty gritty personal stories of people on whichever world. Innistrad was great for this since we had a multitude of non"main" characters, which fleshed out the plain. With how the omenpath's are looking they will just make the same mistake they did with planeswalkers. Keep cranking out set after set with random casts of recurring characters.
It truly does baffle how Hasbro's has the fantasy equivalent of marvel, and they are just making the narrative smaller and samey(Though arguably so has disney, and that is general shape of superhero stories). I don't understand why multiversal stories aren't made multiversal, are the rights holders just too afraid that they'd have to hire an actual fulltime writing team to manage all the thread's?
6:53 sure they can, just add "this planeswalker can be your commander". It's been done.
Commander players don't want planeswalkers to be legendary creatures instead. There's already too many legendary creatures per set and too many sets per year.
Commander players also don't want card specifically designed for commander, they want regular cards that can also work in commander if used creatively enough
They didn't kill planeswalkers. They just made sure they can be your commander from now on.
"Commander". Was I right?
Yup. Same as always. Mtg dies for the D&D game commander: the gathering
@@KyleTremblayTitularKtrey lmao. PW should never had been printed, if they scrap the whole concept is just better
Everything wrong with the game always comes back to Commander.
Many people like me love playing with their 40 or 60 cards low power modern or even old standard decks and playing EDH at the same time. Not the same context, and sure there are problems with Commander dominance, but also helped the game gaining a bigger audience (singleton / epic / multiplayer format is fun!). Many undercurrent problems could and probably would've happened without Commander, like power creep, design fatigue, thematic dilution through constant crossovers, combo cards requiring bans, design mistakes...
yeah to much yapping when the obvious answer is 'planeswalker don't sell a set to our whales, commander players'. Theres plenty of design space in planeswalkers, plenty of cool things you can do, but the audience you cater the most don't care about them so is easy to just axe them and use those slots to juice up even more the legendary count. Remember when Legendary creatures where very special subsets of units from the lore?, now even the tailor in the local village is a legendary creature for the consoomers.
2:42 I appreciate the Chandra, the Firebrand image while you're saying the word brand
5:00 "And then it has to have an ultimate, something that is amazing, but hard to hit."
*Vorinclex has entered the chat*
Wandering Emperor as well
Or any of the dozens of walkers with no ult, like most of the War of the Spark ones
Only applies to Green.
EDH. We are back to where we started with Character Focus. Since Magic story started following Legendary Creatures.
Granted WOTC could have just printed Walkers as Legendary Creatures. They are not mutually exclusive.
Remember when the only representation where the 5 Enchantments from Planeshift for 5 of the Planeswalkers? Yeah they could have simply slotted them into any other Permanent type instead of creating a whole new one and having to rewrite the whole games rules just to work.
1 per set isn't dead, it's endangered lol
Though it's hard to feel like anything is missing when you have 6+ characters we know walking from one plane to the next every set, like we're seeing in Thunder Junction and Duskmourn.
For real, they took the wrong lessons.
"Oh, you don't like the same 5 planeswalkers showing up every set making the story all about them? Ok, we'll cut down the number of planeswalkers, but we'll also make it so that any character can travel the planes like a Planeswalker. And we will still focus on the same 5 characters, making the story all about them, but they aren't all planeswalkers. There, that's what you wanted, right?"
I had some hope for the omenpaths but they squandered that instantly by having the exact same, now desparked, characters have the whole universe revolve around them.
The one good thing that came out of giving us so many Planeswalker cards is the feasibility of planeswalker-themed decks. or "Super Friends" decks. With there being a lot of them, that means you can craft something interesting and unique. But yeah, when you take all of your points into consideration, the downfall was inevitable. Now to those who might say that just because it was bound to happen, so why try in the first place, is foolhardy. It was a fun time, but it is time to change.
Planswalkers are not fun at all. In standard they all had the same ability of "the game isn't technically over but i have already won". In commander and especially with stupid friends decks they all have the ability "you are now archenemy".
Planeswalkers are bad and Super Friends decks are the proof of that.
@@ZavultThat’s how you play Control. Planeswalkers are best thought of as the win cons, like a giant Sphinx. It’s the inevitable win style.
Man back when I played, I had a B/W Control deck around Eldritch Moon that I topped an IQ with. Sorin, Gideon AoZ, Lilliana the Last Hope, and Ob Nixilis. One of my favorite decks.
What I like about the new planeswalkers is they fit well with their home plane just as well as the one they’re in. Point in case: Ashiok sucked in standard, but was playable with Theros cards.
As someone who took a break from Magic right as Throne of Eldraine was coming into standard and only just got back into it as Duskmourne is on its way, I'm not surprised that this is happening. This feels like Maro and Gavin Verhey conceding that planeswalkers as a card type are just *weird*.
They have a flavor problem.
9:01 …I knew who all three were, mainly because I think Jared Carthalion and Basri Ket are hot, and Calix because his existence reminds me that we STILL haven’t gotten the actual story for Theros: Beyond Death.
I somewhat agree that by limiting their numbers WotC is making planeswalker special again sadly they made a big mistake by giving other (legendary) characters the ability to traverse the multiverse planeswalking makes planeswalker special if everyone can planeswalk then no one is special and limiting the number of planeswalker will not help them become special, WotC simply turned them to another "kind" of legendary characters as seen in Modern Horizon 3 If I'm not mistaken the termed used to call them was flipwalkers they're legendary creatures on one side and a planeswalker on the other. WotC should simply go back to basic focus on one plane at a time with a fixed set of characters (probably with one planeswalker) made specifically for that story after they've done all of their adventures then move on to the next plane and repeat the process they did that before with Urza and then with Gerrard they don't need to keep on plane jumping for every set.
But when the skyship weatherlight was traveling the planes with a bunch of legendary non Planeswalker characters that was cool right?
I always felt like the gatewatch was a real problem for the story department. Unlike the weatherlight crew they weren't really on the same quest most of the time. There also wasn't one set protagonist so they'd split time between everyone as best they could but this meant that anyone who wasn't in the gatewatch barely showed up in story. The amount of time we had to spend updating each of them meant that most planes never felt like they were a different place because so much of the story was just those same five characters taking turns.
And also their name is stupid.
1:55 "The Deshprarkening happthened" ☝🤓
shouldve happened in war of the spark honestly, idk why it was just shoved in now
The issue is that WOTC has gotten extremely lazy with the storytelling. They had awful writers and can't come up with interesting worlds anymore. They need to hire actual writers again and make compelling stories that they can sell as novels. Remember when there was a book series about the Weatherlight Saga? Do that again.
Aye, DEI does that
Call me a contrarian, but I think War of the Spark, being an actual Planeswalker-centric event set, solved the design space problem by stripping back the design standards for the card type to the barest of bones, so you could have over 3 dozen Planeswalkers in the same set without a lot of redundancy.
War of the spark was the breaking point for planeswalkers. Too many of them got pushed to the broken side of the broken/boring dichotomy. The effects of a Narset, Teferi, or Karn hitting the battlefield and warping the entire game around them really drove home that planeswalker fatigue.
@@thomasodom4038 Sounds like you have a problem with Control decks to me. Yes, the prevalence of efficient semi-static Control effects in War of the Spark, let alone in Magic in general, can feel like a systemic problem, but that's less than 1/10th of the Planeswalkers in that set alone. The core challenge of designing around Constructed Formats is not making a card so powerful it has to be an auto-include in most decks, and generally, WotC fails at least once per set at that goal. Even with the hard counters built into that set (Despark, Price of Betrayal, The Elderspell), imbalance isn't a card-type problem, it's a card-specific problem.
@@Feralhyena um, no. I stand by statement. Don't put words in my mouth or try to twist my opinion into your liking. I could write a novel on why planeswalkers have had more of a negative effect than a positive one. The reply section isn't the place for that novel.
@@thomasodom4038 stating my understanding of your opinion is not putting words into your mouth. I thought I was emphatic that that reply was my opinion of what I had read.
Although I was never a planeswalker fan, with Serra being the sole exception. I liked how they made the game feel. They gave it continuity and familiarity.
The current way they adopted is too much like fortnight for my taste.
Moar purple and blue hair Mohawks yeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh
I think ignoring the standard card design would be a great way of making planeswalkers. Imagine a 1 loyalty planes walker with only +1s all of which are pretty ok instead of underwhelming. or a planeswalker thats a creature. giving loyalty to itself when it attacks. maybe it doesnt have any +1 and only has 3 ults of different power. maybe a really weak effect for an ult an ok one and an emblem. breaking the design conventions and finding new ways of making them work would be the best thing. or even going weird like haveing the frount face be a planeswalker and having a flip ability that turns them into an encantment. breaking the confines of the current "rules" would be the best thing for planes walkers and i hope to see some cool ones come out of this new era
Opening the omenpaths hasn't really made anything different. We still get the same walkers in sets. I don't think the emperor of kamigawa has spent more than a week actually ruling her empire since she's constantly in random sets for seemingly no real reason.
The wanderer has been in Kamigawa since the end of MOM and just temporarily left it to rescue Nashi in the latest story, but to be fair she also said that she has not been rulling the empire because she doesnt feel ready yet
Yeahhh her lore has been "multiplanar demigod not ready to do her job" since Ravnica Allegiance. She could have just sent someone for Nashi, actually using the omenpaths we have now.
@@ruttokyrpa3472 but duskmourn wasnt really accesible through omenpath. They accesed by a door Niv-Mizzet had in possesion and that was originally sent there by Valgavoth. Also of course the wanderer wanted to rescue Nashi personally since she feels guilty for slaying Tamiyo
TECHNICALLY it does. Reason? Anyone can now be a planeswalker. Its the same thing as the kid at the end of The Last Jedi with them just effortlessly pulling the broom. Being a Planeswalker, like being a Force User, is no longer special.
OG Planeswalkers where RARE, was maybe a dozen to a few dozen OG Planeswalkers. They where the pinacle of Magic users in the Magic multiverse. Now? Well now any tom dick or harry that finds a Omenpath can just move from one plane to another. THATS the problem with Omenpaths.
I really hope the one planeswalker approach leads to more settings like bloomburrow, with us being able to explore and learn about a new plane through a single planeswalker. I hope we don’t just get the same sort of storytelling as planeswalkers but with their de-sparked counterparts instead
3:20 This is exactly the kind of *decision* that WotC made, which they didn't have to, which show why their "death" was not "inevitable" as you claim.
I think it was over-saturation and for me, not so great writing.
I agree, I think the design part could be overcome by taking some risks on how we define what a Planeswalker card has to be, but the oversaturation and writing are hard to get past. Sometimes you just need a bit of a reset button.
The writing is sooooo bad.
I'm really hopeful that with this new shift we will get meaningful story from the planeswalkers.
4:30 - I strongly disagree that Planeswalkers are any more or less limited than the other card types. What makes a 'Walker "playable" is not any more or less than a checklist we have for the other card types as well. Lands shouldn't enter tapped; Creatures often need EtB triggers now; and so forth. Bad argument.
You bring up a lot of excellent points, but the thing that I think ultimately led to its death was its play pattern. The Planeswalkers that saw play immediately protected themselves; either by creating tokens or removing creatures, and in the most egregious cases, a single planeswalker did both. Liliana Dreadhorde General is a great example of this extremely toxic gameplay pattern. Comes down, can immediately remove an opponents threats and then build up an army of tokens to protect her, only to -4 again and then be rewarded with card draw. And given that Planewalkers did not exist until 2007-2008, you're missing about 15 years worth of cards that can effectively interact with them; i.e. removal spells or etb triggers. Planewalkers ended up being extremely oppressive in 1v1 formats and borderline useless in multi-player formats because of this play pattern.
One planeswalker per set might actually mean something if they also didn't print five legendary creatures who used to be planeswalkers in every set, or who somehow got to this plane, even though they're from another one and we saw them in the last three sets.
Why are Niko and Zimone and Aminatou and Nashi on Duskmourn? If they are, and you're already making a card out around them, why not keep Niko and Aminatou as planeswalker is, which would at least make them interesting? Rowan and Will had such a unique thing going for them, and then they got turned into two separate legendary creatures, no different than the 40 other in WoE
My issue with the new focus on legendary creatures stems from two places.
1. A good chunk of them WERE planeswalkers/blood related to walkers, and still have this warping effect on a plane's story with "well why is Kellan here now, whats the point" or "oh goodie Niko is back, why? Why do i care?" Which wotc then has to justify just like they did with PWs being there.
And 2. With that, it definitely feels far more corporate in reasoning than "we wanted to diversify our character's for sets" when Im seeing the a new group of the same 5 people just now with much less character development or growth.
I actually dont even care about the flavour or story anymore due to this, it feels like a 3rd round afterthought at best when before it felt important to give us a story on top of the game pieces themselves.
Exactly my thoughts. Thank you for writing them out
6:15 - This is more an admission that nothing has changed other than the quantity and suggested/implied quality of them. The lore is the #1 reason why players don't want [were not happy with] common and uncommon 'Walkers in War of the Spark. There is nothing about the card type that prevents them from being as plentiful as crestures. It is the lore that does.
3:10 I think you swapped the Streets of New Capenna and MoM
I think the main problem is that it has to sell to commander. Not sure why they couldn’t include “can be your commander” on more planeswalkers instead. I, like many others, think the omenpaths are not that great and instead throws an over importance on Legendary Characters which is an insanely over bloated category that they just added a bunch of desparked planeswalkers. When everyone can do the special thing, then it isn’t all that special.
Just some more things I've also seen around;
1- Development wanted a rough color balance of planeswalkers in standard so lead to things such as characters like Nissa getting random colors and not having a BR for year in-between Sarkhan the Mad and Angrath. This meant they had to forced colors or character into sets just to meet this requirement. With 1 pw card a set this is lessen.
2- Many characters where made planeswalkers to be a mascot/ face for the plane (Kenirth twins, Saheeli) and they decided those character can work as legends for this. Under the old marketing I think characters like Proft, Annie and Mabel would have been pw.
3- From a writing point of view they always had to make conflict around pw just being able to peace out. With omenpaths they can make sure most characters don't have this to avoid conflicts.
Nissa didn't get "random colors". Nissa dabbling in in black mana was always a part of her backstory, and her move into blue was a part of her character arc over the duration of the Gatewatch era... before WotC higher-ups had her kicked out and started outsourcing their writing with Dominaria.
3 - Maybe instead of adding omenpaths, the best idea would be to heavily nerf pw's abilities to shift planes? Maybe make it take a good while or require a certain condition so they can't just do it to escape any danger?
@@JediMB Her dabbing with black mana was retcon out with origins and while the blue was explained with her arc, they needed to do half blue pw character so I doubt that was the plan going in.
Also a writer of the original gatewatch saga said it was always the plan for Nissa to lose faith with the gatewatch and leave at the end of wots while breaking up with Chandra (the biphobia was not planned however).
@@ElfosDeMordor I mean there are ways they came up with, the main thing was as @dicetry said tho this was just one many factors that lead into the desparking and omenpaths.
Wizards of the coast had an opportunity close a door on four eras of magic completely and lore wise they had every piece set up.
When the omen paths opened up, and pherexia invaded all the other planes of existence, Bolas could have been set free.
The omen paths could have alterted the eldrazi in the moon leading to them freeing themselves to fight the pherexia menace.
Slivers could have been brought back, allowing them to gather again, adapting into pherexia slivers and eldrazi slivers. We could also have had a sliver Planeswalker as well.
One last major fight to end all fights, deaths on all ends with no victory. The end of an era, alliances rising and falling. An eldrazi Planeswalker. Nico bolas falling to pherexia corruption. His brother unable to save him, resulting in both their deaths. Pherexian eldrazi obliterating everything. A multidimensional war to end all wars, Planeswalkers losing their lives left right and center.
Then they release a four deck special called "finale of an era" and it is four rainbow decks. Rainbow eldrazi, rainbow Walker, rainbow sliver, and rainbow pherexia. Then the players can play out the final battle of the era.
The next set "new era" we follow the story of a child and his two pet dogs. The kid was a human named Nico Bolas. His pet dogs are eldrazi, and sliver. We follow the life of his home plane of zendikar hundreds of years in the future. The past multidimensional war has become nothing but stories told to children. Even he was named after someone from those stories and so he named his dogs after two of the clans.
You can now make sparks extremely rare.
Sounds fascinating
Do you honestly think that WotC has the ability to write something like this? They can barely test the new cards to see if they are broken, let alone create a final battle scenario. The game from now on will be "this is cowboy Jace, next is pirate Jace, next is chef Jace and 2 years from now you'll get teacher Jace". It's a joke, really.
@@Izelor they should write the story first, and then make the products. However their design philosophy is completely backwards and it results in terrible products.
They do not have the writers they need, in order to write a story that has a bunch of cards in it like 1000 story prompts.
Also with naming the kid after Nico bolas, we can have a "reincarnation of sin" story where the children embody some of the aspects of their name. Nico bolas for example would be a child that wants to learn and grow and "be a god" or "king" due in part to idolization.
You can boil down every Planeswalker into a reincarnation child and the few traits they had. Oko would be a child into pranks. Garruk would be a kid that loves animals and lives on a farm.
This also would allow them to target a younger generation as well. The kids could play a game of "plane chase" tying in other MTG products. Or they could play "archenemy" as another game.
However despite their "we plan things seven years ahead" it seems like they don't.
@@TheKillerman3333 they don't really care about the story. I remember 15 years ago, they did a poll and players voted for the Phyrexians to win the war against the Mirrans. Current day WotC doesn't have the balls to do something so cool and that's exactly what is missing from the game. Passion from the developers that in turn will ignite passion from the players.
@@Izelor Phyrexia was always going to win that war, the poll was just cool bit of marketing.
0:55 - It wasn't inevitable, but the result of decisions made by WotC. There are many directions that they could have chosen, which would have seen 'Walkers as vibrant to this day.
When I heard they were doing one planeswalker per set I was pretty happy bc we would actually get to see the plane and its inhabitants but then I heard about the omenpaths I was immediately taken aback also pre-mending planeswalkers I believe the term is were basically gods but yes in recent years they’ve become more just people who can move between planes
What would a good fan made planeswalker replacement would be? By that I mean what kind of new "special character type" card xan be made to servw as a replacement or a counterpart to planeswalkers and what would their mechanics would be ?
Big fan of this video, I think it did a really good job of explaining The situation. I would be into more videos of this sort in the future no doubt!
I think it was a good idea for the card balance idea of the game. But in terms of the stories, omen paths are just becoming, insert random character into set so we can have a diverse cast of legendary creatures. And as a reader of mtg, I feel like it's just becoming any legendary creature can show up anywhere now. And it kinda looses its luster. Except bloomburrow. That was a set that was very self contained and it was hinted that there was an omen path but nothing so crazy to where raktos is enjoying being a cowboy.
Highest quality mtg content out there! Keep going and keep growing!
Personally I’m thrilled. I even hope we get sets with NO planeswalkers
I don't know the format, but why they didn't just allow Planeswalkers as Commanders?
Some can if it's specifically stated, but I'm not sure as to the reason why they can't be by default.
Yeah a lot of us older EDH folk have said for years that they probably should all be allowed, same with the cards that make legendary creatures when they enter
You can if the planeswalker card specifically say that it can be used as a commander you can use it as a commander Daretti, Scrap Savant and Dihada are examples of that and in modern horizons WotC made "flipwalkers" they're legendary creatures on one side and a planeswalker on the other WotC found a way to make planewalkers relevant in commander and made them not special at all.
They allow it in Brawl since that format is controlled by wizards. since commander is controlled by the RC wizards doesn't force then to allow planeswalker as commander.
Well, we have Oathbreaker now
The less is more approach for planeswalkers is a good one but I think they might want to try that with legendary creatures too. It's seems like with every new set, they release a least a dozen new legendary creatures and I think this could lead to the same fatigue that Planeswalker where if every creature is special then none are special
I played Magic back in the 90s, didn't play for a couple decades because I was poor, then came back with Magic Arena giving me a free to play way to play. Planeswalkers were possibly the most obvious change from the first time I played to when I started playing again, and let me say this:
I hate them. I hated them, and I still hate them. They're almost impossible to balance, since they tend to warp the game around themselves. Trying to get creatures to be relevant in the era of Planeswalkers is, I think, a major contributing factor to power creep in the last decade. Baneslayers are a joke in the era of Planeswalkers, they don't just die to removal, they die to a card that sticks around and keeps accumulating value, so the only way to make medium to expensive creatures even close to relevant in the era of Planeswalkers is to make them all Mulldrifters. There are other factors that go into the power creep, of course, like Wizards realizing that, as people have moved away from Standard (both because of the rise of Commander and because rotation makes Standard so expensive), making cards relevant to older formats is important to their bottom line, but I think Planeswalkers have played a critical role in Magic's mistakes.
I'm glad to see less Planeswalkers, because if I could go back in time and erase the entire card type, I would, and at least cutting back on them is a step in the right direction. Of course, there's no putting the power creep genie back in the bottle, Baneslayers might never be relevant again, but at least we'll be getting less of the obnoxious Planeswalker play pattern if they become less prevalent.
I dont have too have to much to say, but I will say I that I am slighlty disapponited with the omenpath arc (Wilds of Eldraine - Outlaws at Thunder Junction), while in hindsight I now though it was a stiryline that focuses on Kellan, my original thought was that after each set I guess one of Kellan's I guess group would be the omenwalker for the set, for example Kellan woukd be the omenwalker for Caverns of Ixalan, the vampire girl from Ixalan would then be the omenwalker for Murders at Karlov Manor and so forth, untill it would conclude with all the omenwalkers to team up against some bigger threat. Also as I side note, I am confused on why they kept on changing Kellan's magic color despite his personality not really changing or really only changing slightly. It felt they just kept changing his mana colors for it's own sake.
This is why I LOVE Nicol Bolas, the Ravager. It fills both the Planeswalker want AND the Legendary need for a commander. I wish they would do more "flip" style planeswalkers. Every time I "spark" him in an EDH game it just feels SO satisfying.
Very interested in your insight on this topic
4:45 I mean War of the Spark proved those requirements aren't actually needed.
10:14 I don't think this really solves the issue, merely delays it if that. On the memory issue now the 'relevant' cast for the multiverse has expanded to every legendary creature still alive and the presence of a planeswalker on a plane is still mandatory and mundane. The only surprise is which one it might be, and that's the same as before, except that now if there is a specific planeswalker with ties to a plane that are too strong it may not even have that.
10:35 No, the fact that half the planeswalkers are mid-tier superheroes or random barely developed characters instead of the epic grand personas of oldwalkers and some of those that came after isn't changed. Add to that the fact that now literally anyone can go to other planes and planeswalkers find themselves diminuished. You made many points which I think are largely correct but this is the only one in which you're probably getting backwards: Wizards doesn't want to enhance the planeswalker they want to diminish the importance of the planeswalker.
I think Commander and wanting to pull characters from different planes that aren't planeswalkers probably make up about 95% of the reason for the reduction in planeswalkers. The design limitations also play a factor but I don't think they are nearly as limited as was suggested.
In my view the change isn't entirely wrong but would have been made better by rather than having a single planeswalker, having an uncertain number - down to having 0 in most sets. Both in lore and in gameplay this would make more sense. In addition I think Wizards could solve a lot of issues if they could at least cut off some planeswalkers. Some of the old ones should probably go, but those are harder for marketing reasons. On the other hand, there's likely a whole bloat of them that could be given one last heroic moment or big role in a story and then get cut off.
They are also not good for a story in general - most planeswalkers are static, one-dimensional characters and by making room for Chandra and her flaming puns and predictable humor you have less time for plane itself and his habitants.
Ultimates especially were always a flawed concept.
MtG is the card game I play the second most, the card game I play most is LoR. In LoR, during their third set, an issue the devs and and playerbase mutually discovered was an issue with Aurelion Sol.
Sol was a champion card who cost 10 mana and when he levelled up (think transforming a transforming double faced card after a condition is met) he made all of your celestial cards (extremely powerful cards counterbalanced by having to first create them, they didn't start in deck) cost 0. The problem, the playerbase discovered, is that when you flipped Sol, the game was effectively over. It only made sense to scoop and go next. So the Sol player never really got to do their gameplay and engage with the power fantasy the character is supposed to facilitate.
The big take away was this: you want to make the point where the player effectively wins the game and they *actually* win the game are as close together as possible. Because the period between effectively and actually winning the game is just playing out a formality.
Almost every planeswalker's ultimate effectively says win the game. Yes they're all different, but almost all of them win the game once used. This leads to one of three outcomes:
-the ultimate has to be totally unattainable, making it an effective non factor the card may as well not even have it
-the ultimate is attainable, but what it does effectively doesn't matter because it just wins the game, not producing any interesting gameplay decisions or board states
-the ultimate doesn't win the game immediately, but ironically this makes it not even worth using in the first place because if your deck is meant to facilitate using a planeswalker ult you want one that *does* immediately win the game
Like Ral in BLB. His ultimate is that your instants and sorceries have storm. The amount of times you're getting this ult off and then *losing* the game are practically nonexistent. You're not losing the game in a red blue spells deck if all of your instants and sorceries have storm. But you're also not making any interesting gameplay decisions or novel mechanical interactions either. You're going to draw your whole deck, give your prowess creatures +10/+10 and one shot your opponent with face damage.
If your effects are too powerful, the specifics of those effects don't matter because they really just say "win the game".
Exactly. I wish they continued to experiment with War of the Spark type planeswalkers (that only had one ability and could only spend loyalty) and static abilities, making them into a sort of value box that gives you stuff every turn, but your opponent can deny it via dealing damage. Maybe also effect that trigger if walker dies, so it's actually beneficial to lose loyalty. I don't know, this whole "limited design space" just looks like a poorly thought out excuse to flood us with even more commander cards.
@@kindlingking I keep thinking about how Planeswalkers are supposed to be "on the level of players". Might be better to go the other way, with "You can only have one planeswalker enter the field under your control, total, for the entire game", and make them harder to kill with better regular abilities (the equivalent of an actual decent deck in the hands of a teammate casting a spell every turn) but with no 'ultimate', unless the spells one can normally cast for 6 mana would be considered 'ultimate'.
Dude keep going you are gonna be huge
Thanks, that's the sort of thing I needed to hear this morning
7:05 - This is why, for 12+ years, we have seen people ask about planeswalker commanders, which we got for the first time ever in Commander 2014, and a few more since then. Still, this is a lore issue more than card type issue.
Back in my day... We had Planeswalker
Commander.
Yep. All of the decisions Wizards make are due to Commander at this point because it's where the money is. That is their only insentive to print more legendary creatures than before. Has nothing to do with lore or planeswalkers, they just want to be able to pump out new commanders every set.
Planeswalker cards are the worst thing that happened to the game (at least before 2020). Ever since their introduction, they always warped the formats around themselves. Desparking them was not the solution though. They could easily cut down on the number of planeswalkers that are available, by having the majority of them die during crucial moments in the story (looking at you Liliana).
However, WotC doesn't want this. What they want is more legendary creatures because that's what Commander players ask for. Take Thunder Junction, for example. Out of the 156 creatures of the set, 43 are legendary. That's more than 25% of the creatures. You said that they overprinted planeswalkers and that's true but what they are doing now with legendary creatures is outrageous.
Magic was never about legendary creatures. Sure, there were a few in every set but they were never the focal point. They were there just for flavor.
Back in the day, the game didn't need beatiful teenagers to promote itself. They just put a big, scary beast on the front and it was enough.
WotC thinks that players want to see characters in comic adventures. What players want is to take a dragon and a demon and have epic battles with them.
0:20 - This is exactly why I do not like this idea of Omen Pathes.
Nice video! Though we may run into some of the same problems with legendary creatures: where there are so many that you think, "Really? You're 'Legendary?' They're just handing that out now, huh?" Or the characters we see repeatedly just feel like their iterations have the same words re-arranged (or even the opposite problem, where they do something entirely different but then that makes it feel too unrelated to the past version(s) of that character - can be mitigated with good flavor/character development).
Just want to say that you have amazing editing skills! It looks really professional. :) Also, I think I pretty much never played planeswalkers. The problem for me as a Commander player is that I have to defend my planeswalker not only against one player, but THREE players with a bunch of creatures on their boards. I think the only planeswalker I play is Minsc&Boo as a commander, but they are super fun haha.
Got a video suggestion. Yu-Gi-Oh has lore behind their instant win Exodia the Forbidden One, so how about all or some of the MTG instant win cards had some lore explained, made up, or theorized.
That's an interesting idea. Would have to dig into it more to see what's there first.
I forgot to include the make a player lose the game like Door to Nothingness also in the suggestion.
Destiny Board and the two Gimmick Puppet Leos also have lore. I wish the other instant wins had lore in Yugioh though
I like the idea of making Planeswalkers unique again, but depowering them a third time isnt the correct way. It removes the uniqueness by making them more like everyone else. If anything story wise sure some walkers get desparked again, but with a return to the still sparked ones getting close to having premending powers to help combat multiversal threats that inevitably will show up in the future.
Just to say I really enjoyed this video. :) I think I am going to miss the Planeswalker era, but the cards have a limited design space and shrinking down and only having 1 per set means we'll get more get more unique and thoughtful designs for years to come.
I only just got into MTG recently and I was extremely confused as to why Planeswalkers weren’t usable as commanders.
It’s especially weird because to me the structure of the planeswalker card feels like it should be a ‘player ability’. Something you’re always building and discharging at different rates in a similar way to a Commander, but that isn’t targettable in the same way.
The one thing I was hoping with despairing was finally having quality versions of the characters as legendary creatures you can have as a commander.
Maybe I’m just an old head but I always thought we, the players, were the plainswalker.
And I had no idea that many plainswalker cards had been made.
Great video as always
As much as I agree with some of the story related points, they also apply to legendary creatures
Too many to remember, even if you are focusing on one plane/block there are legendaries in there that don't even get mentioned in the official story stuff
Main characters of the multiverse still happens with the Omenpaths expanding the possible cast, but what's stopping Kellan and Simone and Niko and co from becoming the new Gatewatch?
Coming up with new ones dilutes the "special-ness" of planeswalkers isn't necessarily one that translates to legendaries, but considering a planeswalker's first planeswalk is nearly random with no concious control over it as some event ingnites their spark, and they learn most, if not all, other destinations from interacting with other walkers it would make sense that almkst every plane we visit should have one walker, who brought the others there or who added their plane to the shared pool of "safe places to land" that our core cast knows
Desparking walkers also removes some of the flexibility in design space, I can't imagine a Chandra that cares for artifacts (much to her parents' chagrin), but Daretti is a mono-red planeswalker that cares about them, Koth cares about mountains in particular, Chandra cares for burn, impulse draw and ritualsn Jaya cares for instants and sorceries
And if they want us to play them as our commanders they can make flipwalkers, some are amazing (Ajani is great, though I only have him in the 99), or they could just make creature versions, say that the invasion lead to the development of spells that could temporarily lock out sparks from walking, or say they are undercover, or just say we can make these nown Vraska having her spark wouldn't make me feel any different about her OTJ card
I don't mind that they are printing less planeswalker cards and putting more care towards the ones they are making, the set-design argument is perfectly valid and I see why after WAR they may need to take a step back from printing as many, it's the justifications storywise and mechanically that bother me
Even after only a year of Omenpaths, I honestly already miss having planeswalkers be the focus. I much rather have just a few characters reappearing as strangers on strange worlds than have every character from every world show up what feels like everywhere else. It seriously detracts from each new setting's own unique personality and waters it all down to just trope over trope.
Been rewatching Evan Erwin's old 'The Magic Show' videos, and it's nice to hear him talk about the first walker cards. When War of the Spark came out, it felt like an overload of Planeswalkers, Wish WOTC would have held back on them for a few sets after that...
I absolutely hate Planeswalkers and how they shoved a bunch of them in every set. They were fine when they were few and special, but we were getting so many I was sick of them. At the same time we're also getting a million Legendary creatures which make those less special as well. It all started in 2018, along with the Legendary Crown update for the card frame. That was also the time when the game shifted focus to Commander. It wasn't noticeable at first, but WOTC had been preparing the game for it since then. I would love for the game to tone down both Planeswalkers and Legendary creatures. Bloomburrow was a step in the right direction, with just 1 Planeswalker and 26 Legendary creatures. That's still a ton of Legendaries for a single set, but sets before it could have up to 50 Legendaries, which is insane (Dominaria had 64 o.o). So that was a good start.
I miss having more planeswalkers, I started after m12 came out and was here for the majority of the planeswalker arc of magic. It is absolutely my favorite type; but I understand them wanting to move a different direction.
In order of occurrence
Oversaturation: too many introduced at once in a short period of time
Overpowered: several decks in varying formats have them as win conditions almost by virtue of just existing on the field
Overused characters: people are very tired of seeing liliana, jace, teferi chandra and ajani all the time
Having one planeswalker per set can be a good opportunity to create very interesting one-off designs. I think it's important to make that one card design be memorable to make planeswalkers still feel special even if they're no longer the focus.
Let's look at the planeswalkers printed starting from Wilds of Eldraine:
- Ashiok in Eldraine is an enabler and payoff for exiling your own cards but it feels too clunky.
- Quintorius in Ixalan feels too simple (but I guess being the first Quintorius planeswalker card makes it special enough). And you can certainly attempt to break that discover 4 ability.
- Kaya in Ravnica has a static ability, and no ultimate ability (a design pioneered by War of the Spark that's kind of become the norm).
- Oko in Thunder Junction is a crime payoff so I guess that technically feels new.
- Jace in Thunder Junction has a static ability only seen in very few creatures before, but the ability is a restriction. Also, it can plot your cards, so interacting with a set's new mechanics can feel fresh.
- Ral in Bloomburrow has a pretty splashy ultimate ability, something that's been getting rarer nowadays, and he became an otter so that's cool.
- Kaito in Duskmourn has ninjutsu so that's pretty cool.
Planeswalkers used to be unique, special. Then, they started popping a new planeswalker character every set and we got up to a point where we went from having these few main characters to 30+ planeswalkers who had no impact to the story. Meanwhile, the cards themselves kept getting nastier and nastier to play with. You get a planeswalker during draft and you've likely won the event just because of that one card, that's how powerful they are. So the reduction to 1 per set really helps the gameplay side.
9:15 and how many Kellans do we need? To cover all colors for some reason.
9:04 and how many people remember Old Stikyfingers, Kardur, or some random throwaway legend.
Witch number is far beyond 293.
Will we eventually get the legendary creature fatigue? Cause im feeling it allready
8:59 Honestly? I remembered two of the three of them. Basri because I opened TWO of him at the pre-release and he carried me three rounds (split fourth) and Calix because the way in which he got his spark stuck with me. I'm not a big Commander player so I've never even heard of Jared before now so I can't remember someone I've never heard of.
Thanks for the video.
Planeswalkers were strong in a 1v1 setting, where defending the PW to get value for multiple turns and/or earn a turn where the opponent does not hit your life points was a strong and novel idea.
Commander absolutely trashes this design. You play a planeswalker, and you are almost guaranteed to lose it to any of the 3 battlefields you are fighting against. Unless you are playing a dedicated Superfriends deck, they act as a modal sorcery, which is normally overcosted for what they do. Simple as that.
An option for not having a protection minus ability is to give the planeswalker an attack score but not let the planeswalker attack. Or a defensive score that acts like a wall. There’s two ideas they’ve never explored, to my knowledge
I think the biggest mistake was Rare and Uncommon planeswalkers. That really let the genie out of the bottle with bloat. Having a cycle of 5 walkers per set (or even just per block when that was a thing) could have been more sustainable, especially if they weren't always new designs, but reprints when it made sense (no need to make yet another Chandra, just use the old one with new art when it fits the narrative). The flip walker cycle from Origins is till one of my favorite mechanical and flavor designs in magic.
And the planeswalker gameplay that midrange decks were doing between Tarkir and Dominaria was also fun in-game.
Making the Planeswalkers legendary and adding them to an even larger pool did not help keep track of them in any way. The omenpaths are basically just any legendary creature can planeswalk now. Honestly miss the older style of block we had from back before war of the spark with basically one Planeswalker per color pie guild alongside the 1-3 legendary creatures for those guilds.
Honestly, I enjoy the desparking from a story perspective
Making planeswalkers more special, something less common that only a handful of people, which is what I always imaged planeswalkers should be.
Specific desparks (Mainly Calix and Aminatous) do remove the most interesting part of those characters, some desparks I'm completely neutral on, but most of them offer very interesting character changes. Especially the newest Duskmourn story, Tyvar, The Wanderer, and Niko all offer great new perspectives and character arcs. From a purely story decision, I think this was good. However we have to deal with the fact that this was also a monetary decision, more legendary creatures (ones that are recognizable too) means more commanders means more money.
I also think that this will give a chance for underrepresented characters to be in the spotlight. Niko has gotten one(1) story, and became a fan favorite post desparking in the Duskmourn story. Imagine if Angrath was still sparked, and grappling with the fact that he can still walk the planes after accidentally abandoning his family for over a decade. What if Basri Ket...did something? Imagine if Ugin is desparked but Bolas isn't. So much possibility
I know that Vraska planeswalker black card is beyond annoying. I just roll my eyes anytime I’m hit with “18 poison counters.” The turn before I had 0 counters. Just stupid
Them becoming superheroes
A lot of people dont like using Plainswalkers, I never did and never will use them.
Its fun to build a deck around a legendary.
Dude, I wonder what Sheldon would be thinking, all the damn back and forth about a game we all love to play. There are so many different formats for everyone to have access too. And not everyone has to like each one.
Spice 8 Rack pointed out some similarities between the focus on planeswalkers and several story beats the past couple of years and the MCU.
The Gatewatch is pretty transparently MTG’s avengers, Bolas having some surface level similarities to Thanos. You could even draw comparisons where after War of The Spark and Endgame, both properties floundered in similar ways.
Quality took a hit of course. A lot of writing felt like it was trying to get itself over with so it could move on to the next thing. Planes were just becoming backdrops for the next chapter in a walker’s story.
That and the sheer volume of products being made was increased more than I think any of us were prepared for. Now it feels like there’s a secret lair every other week, 3 universes beyond at a time and by the time I’m used to a new plane we’re moving on to the next.
You missed the biggest advantage of the shift. Magic has been in a desperate need of a shift from a focus on multiversal threats, to plane-specific local conflicts. It's hard to buy in to a Blaine is the entire conflict of that plane is nothing more than a minor stepping stone to some sort of multiversal plot.
And shifting to a creature focus facilitates stories focused on that plane.
9:00 I remember all of them, and have been complaining about Calix in particular for being given a spark as a part of his "destiny" only to be desparked before he even got to do anything off-Theros.
Kinda shows how these decrees from above about sweeping changes tend to sabotage the actual stories being told.
Desparking Aminatou doesn't make since either, unless they're planning to eventually respark a lot of these characters.
bloomburrow was a step in the right direction, but duskmourn feels like a step back