168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater often talks about the importance of “resonance” when designing sets for the trading card game. Giving you tropes, references, and ic𒉰onic imagery to latch on to helps you not only understand the world ꩲthat set is based in, but also its mechanics.

For years, this style of design has given us some of Magic’s greatest sets and planes: Innistrad, Theros, Eldraine, and Kamigawa all emerged from it. But recently, it feels like Magic’s drinking too heavily from the well. It’s become obsessed wit🦹h pop culture references, and I’m not just talking about Universes Beyond.

Magic sets are often designed in one of two ways. The first are bottom-up sets, where the mecha💧nical identity of a set is decided, and then the world, aesthetic, and narrative are layered on top of it. Ravnica’s a great examp💖le – the need for a set based on all ten two-colour pairs gave birth to the ten guilds we now know those pairs by.

Top-down sets do the opposite, and start out with the world and reverse engineer the mechanics from it after the fact. Innistrad began as a goth🏅ic horror set before the idea of its four main creature types were decided upon, and Theros’ pantheon of gods gave it the enchantment subtheme.

Older top-down sets would often play on tropes by giving them a Magic flair. Kaldheim had analogues to the Norse pantheon, but also wasn’t afraid to do its own thing. It had ten realms instead of nine, gods that were amalgamations of the Norse pantheon, and mortal characters that clearly har🦋kened back to mythology, like Tyvar and Arni Brokenbow🥂, without being outright neon-sign-emblazoned parodies.

Recent top-down sets don’t use their inspiration with anywhere near as much care or creativity. Take 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Murders at Karlov Manor, a murder mystery set taking place in the popular plane of Ravnica. Ravnica is loved for its rich cast of characters, sprawling planet-covering city, and the conflict of its ten guildsඣ. Murders at Karlov Manor, meanwhile, is Ravnica if it decided to have an Ellery Queen cosplay day. Everyone is inexplicably dressed up in trench coats and hats, crouching dramatically over pools of blood. To have noir-y detectives running around doesn’t feel natural for the setting, which has two guilds of law enforcers and a fairly rigid high fantasy setting already.

And now we’ve got 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Outlaws of Thunder Junction, the Western-themed set we’ve been wanting for years. It’s rootin’, it&🍌rsquo;s tootin’, it’s got cactusfolk and a little skeleton guy named Tinybones. It’s hitting everything from Steampunk to Weird West, and I’m overall🎐 really digging the Americana, folks-y vibes of it. But vibes alone can’t carry a set.

has gone from a tool in the vast toolkit of a Magic designer, and become the driving force of far too many cards. What is the point in Holy Cow, beyond giving people the chance to exclaim it at the table and chuckle, before moving on with their day? Why is the only reference of Sharkfolk in Thunder Junction on a card called Loan Shark other than to really belabour an unnecessary visual pun? And why on earth is there a pair of cards that ꦺare references to, of all things, Wily E. Coyote and Roadrunner?

Perhaps the biggest offender is the huge number of villains who appear. The idea is that they’ve all come to Thunder Junction from their home planes, but it still feels odd to have the likes of Queen Marchessa of Fiore, a renaissance world of backstabbing anܫd intrigue, just randomly appear as a card dealer. R🔯akdos, the parun of the Rakdos guild on Ravnica, a demon who slumbers in lava for thousands of years at a time, is reduced to the “dumb muscle” of the set.

If Karlov Manor was a murder mystery roleplay party, Thunder Junction is Westworld. It’s like Wizards thinks we’ll clap like seals when we see a reference to something we know, but can’t handle deeper dives into the source material we had back in the Innistrad, Thero꧂s, or even Kaldheim days.

Part of the problem is that Magic doesn’♛t have time to develop its settings. The greats, like Innistrad and Theros, were often the focal point for a whole year of Magic, whereas these days we’ll go to four or five planes in that time. Sets only have one release to sell their entire theme to those looking at booster packs in a shop, which means it needs the grabbiest, most ‘resonant’ imagery possible, regardless of whether it serves the game in any way.

Tไhunder Junction and Karlov Manor both feel dumbed down as a result. In a game where we now have multiple aꦉctual crossovers with other series each year, thanks to Universes Beyond, do we really need the actual in-Magic-set releases to also be as cloyingly wink-wink-referential about everything as well?

You don’t need to fit every single trope into a set to give it thematic flavour. By making a silly goof about a loan shark who’s an actual Shark, Wizards is taking up space it could’ve used to make Thunder Junction a deep, conflicted world worth returning to again and again. Instead, it’s likely going to be just a theme park aimed at people brought up on a diet of Fortnite and Marvel who just need to ‘get the reference’ to get what they want out of media.