If you don’t count Arabian Nights, this was Magic’s first proper try at “top-down design” – building mechanics off creative elements to make for “resonant” designs. The last part, yeah, that block didn’t quite hit the mark. That’s because the designers have far too deep into the really traditional Japanese mythos to make all these abstract spirits and really medival people, medival even to Magic’s own timeline. Even when considering the context of it needing to follow the broken mess that was Mirrodin block, I still doubt people would find ideas like “you can’t play a single card for the rest of the game, just let this thing do the work for you” or “you can only use this thing to buff spells of this specific type that we surely won’t print anymore of” much fun at all.
Well, that’s the bad out of the way, how about what’s actually ahead of its time. Flip cards is the funniest thing of the bunch. While it sucks to actually play, it clearly shows the trajectory of the kind of stories we want to tell directly on the cards themselves, one of evolutions or something. Or the heavy amount of legendary stuff by the simple rule of “if you’re a rare permanent, you’re legendary” (that fumbled because the law of binomial distribution means someone will still be unlucky enough not to open one if the drop rate is below literally 100%) that certainly gave way to a certain format that likes its big long games and lengthy titled creatures.
Some ideas did prove to be genius by being practical however, one being Ninjutsu for being a great embodiment of what Ninjas do, another being Shrines for being very literal about their value engine nature, and the honorable mention goes to Channel for technically letting you build any cycling variant you want.
Rapid fire reviews for these three sets would feel rough, to be honest. Like I would have to list down things like: John Avon artworks wasted on dual lands that only work for half of the time, or creatures that ask 1 mana so that you can be sure that the next 2 mana you spend on it will actually buffs it. And honestly, one of the reasons set skeletons are fun, being multicolored cards, are just missing here, outside of that land cycle there’s literally one Golgari card and one 5 colors cards.
Also rapid fire of how Kamigawa was being represented after their block but before this return, the best you got was a Ninja deck in Planechase of all things, and modernized artworks for the five Dragon Spirits, and a second cycle of Shrines in M21 that’s certainly spaced that way so you don’t bother with an all Shrines deck in Standard.
The Making of a Dynasty, Part 1
Design lore: At some point in time, the designers decided to make a new Japanese inspired world, one that would references a lot of “Japanese pop culture” in addition to the typical mythos ordeal top-down sets often indulge in. This is also the point in time that they want to expand their scope of genre pushing to let something like a cyberpunk world finally happen. Eventually, MaRo look at that new world and realize it’s a good chance to make that Kamigawa. After all, people will know it’s Kamigawa just as long as you got those original creature types in (they’re the fox people, moonfolk, rat people, snake people and whatever red has I can’t name right now). That got them to realize the theme of the set: modernity versus tradition, which you can easily map onto the color pie.
That’s certainly a decent amount of thinking to get there, it’s quite the big perk of having a foreign eye on the subject. When you need to put the effort into thinking, you’ll certainly come out with a more nuanced perspective to have a wiser action.
There’s a timeline where this new Japanese plane came to be and it’s a husk of waifu wars and obvious references and bad dubbing lines, in much of the same way some of our hat sets of “places that are too familiar to our designers” are. Ultimately, it shows the significant difference between actually wanting to be respectful and inspiring, so you hire consultants that checks your work; and just scrambling to write everything in your head, barely giving a second check. Oh right, the latter is what a closed book exam is. No wonder the students come out so flawed.
Oh well, I managed to be so concise this time because this is a very successful decision that got a very cohesive theme going on while still leaving more than enough room for individuality. No need to overthink about what went wrong.