You see, back in the ancient days that brought Alara, they needed ideas for each set in a block. They chose a bad one for the last set, that being Alara got five of its shards merged so now you just get a giant mess of only multicolored cards, actually not even a single wedge one. How do you pick up on that? Especially when you can’t just bring hybrid cards or dual lands in (you need three colors to get a gold frame). Oh well, just find a more creative solution to pretend that didn’t happen.
Ultimately, it’s decided that Magic can have more than one plane per kind of multicolored factions. Sure, the first one would carry the heavy burden of establishing good names and characters for the color combinations, but surely the color pairs can’t just be pigeonholed into whatever those factions wanted. That gets us to Strixhaven, partially dragon timeline Tarkir and also this plane.
Personally, I’m all for this fact, after all I’m all for interesting set skeletons and this seems to be the most effective source for that. If anything, I would firmly like for more sets to be like this, like once per year, for instance. But who am I to say, some people find all the Strixhaven symbols to be abstract squares or what we’ll meet to be a single vertical line that’s even more difficult to infer meaning from, especially on a horizontal text box.
Another issue these new age faction sets face is their more restrictive themes. Compare to Magic’s first try at a relatively modern city or five regions of Asia, a magical university or, what we’ll be going through: an art deco city far less fantastical, have the side effect of blending in their factions. After all, they all need to have classrooms and make money somehow.
I did finally name dropped the theme of this set, that being art deco families. Something that should be quite familiar to the designers, something they probably are excited to get artworks of, something great to follow Neon Dynasty to expand Magic’s creative vision, unfortunately is something that have gotten too close to home. You see, art deco movement is a thing that happened in the 1920s, so 100 years away from now, that’s too small of a number. More importantly, unlike something like horror which you need a movie to experience, I think some art deco buildings still survives to this day so you might be able to literally visit some. Which might disqualifies this from being “fantasy” in the eyes of some. Especially when a higher than normal concentration of people here wears straight up trenchcoats, sure I love my women in suits, but well, my point is that being this close to reality raises its questions. Some questions that many future sets will have to answer.
So, design lore has it that the Bant faction could have been about “corrupt police”, whatever that is. But considering the time this set’s early design phase was in, that turned out to not be a good thing to show on Magic cards. So they decided to pivot that faction to lawyers, that surely sounds much more difficult to show on Magic cards. So I guess we don’t have anyone to keep this place in check anymore. Each faction just does a different kind of crime: spy crime, art theft crime, union crime, gathering crime and law crime. That’s surely a wide variety that keeps each faction distinct from one another. Through you could spin that as a good thing because they tends to overlap in allied pairs, and you want those to draftable by the virtue of synergy between those factions.
To answer the heading, yes this company would go on to hire thugs a year after releasing this set, after releasing a set that made the decision to hide the fact that organizations like that exist.