So that was a horrible announcement for anyone wishing for some sanity in this game. For me, I’m part that and part thinking neutrally about the prospect of more rambly articles like this, it’s certainly something to be thought about then written. Coming off LTR, I’m probably expecting way more commanders than necessary, way more generic borderless frames than necessary, way more Naya and Temur and Jeskai decks than necessary, way more anger toward that one card in the set that they didn’t rigorously test enough and ends up breaking format by costing $100, that one is necessary, so on and so forth and we’re in the dystopian.
But hey, MSRP is back… $5.25 for a play booster.
Considering how long before spoiler seasons was, these images were the only things we know of the set, and they really stuck in my head. About how terrible they were.
One of them is an art piece of the 5 planeswalkers in the set, them being (from tolerable to very much intolerable, not by WUBRG this time) Kaito, Vivien, Chandra, Liliana, Ajani. You know my opinion well, why out of all the characters in MTG and even new ones you could create (cough cough Bastri), you choose these five? Arguably to even show to a new player. I guess it would have been tolerable in 2015 when NotC wants to splatter this Gatewatch all over MTG, to arguably the game’s detriment. But now, in the era where each set has exactly one planeswalker, I repeat, just one, and all those UB sets NotC wants to push so much have, in fact, zero, what is even the point of these five planeswalkers? You don’t even put them on the welcome decks’ boxes anymore, because you know, they don’t appear there. Anyhow I wished they desparked or straight up killed all these lame characters, Magic deserves better mascots.
The other piece of art is of Ajani and Liliana on a black-purple background. Well, this one is just bad, lacking the lighting, contrast, details, backgrounds,… whatever is needed for a piece of art to be good. Liliana looks like some skinny lifeless husk, almost as if it’s a screenshot of that crappy MTG lite mobile game that had 3D models of the planeswalkers. Showing a new player these arts are in fact, poisoning them for thinking the game looks way lamer than it actually is. In fact we now also have another Liliana art piece, this time for Innistrad remastered, which looks far better. Almost as if the cowards think “new players are idiots, they don’t understand what is good art. we just need to put our interesting arts in the sets the actual snobs cares about.”
Not saying the artist in question is that bad, their other arts in normal set are in fact way better than this, which is to actually say if the art director let them stump this low, it’s in fact a serious problem.
Also did you notice how the fonts in the white ribbon of the product name (i.e. play boosters, bundles, prereleases, etc) is using a slightly different font, a thinner one?
MaRo owe us a thorough paper on why this change will make sense to us in the long run. I don’t accept whatever crap some A F guy wrote on NotC’s website, it’s way too short to actually inflict pain on anyone. No wonder the protest is that small and contained to an echo chamber.
That said, it would in fact be damn hard to write such a thing. Because moving from one precon set to one booster set (of various sizes) only Modern legal to three whole standard booster sets (with precons obviously) is in no way going to be logically explainable. And then going from 4 to 3 in universe sets, is there any reasonable explanation? Oh right, each year you could point out one set that does like crap, like 2022 VOW (yeah there’s still too few goths around), 2023 BRO (yeah there’s still too few vorthoses around), 2024 MKM (yeah there’s too few tentacles around), that would have people accepting. Actually MaRo pointed out that Foundations is supposed to be that fourth set, somehow. It doesn’t change, it’s the same size as any normal set (remember 5th edition was a thing with 449 something unique cards, not just collectors’ numbrers), it will be the thing we trash about today, because well no way it could replace a fourth full set. Especially one like return to Lorwyn.
Something you also should notice about this schedule is how the sets are ordered. The first two, finishing off Dragonstorm arc, are in the timeslots you expected, thank god. Final Fantasy in June, also about what I expect, thank god. Then comes the Edge of, August, like Bloomburrow once did. You know how this crappy half of this year came about because it probably should be a one off disaster and shouldn’t repeat? Yeah, look at this mess now. And the other 2 UB sets get the last slots, which you could probably see how they would fit in probably late Sep and mid Nov respectively. You know, the two big holiday slots for sets that really matters. I mean I see it capitalistically, these are for less snobby and cynical players, those people do like their holiday seasons more, so let’s appeal to them instead. But like if you want to commit to the holidays, do you really need 2 whole big holiday products so that apparently the casuals have a choice? Or you think dividing six into three and three is balanced?
I think one giant point of this rant is that three and three is way too stupid of a division. Apparently it means balanced, but I say that’s balanced in the most idiot sense. As in $1x + 1y = c$. In reality, balance is represented by at least something like 2x + 1y = c, look, more complications. Yes, that equation probably would like the answer of four – two more, it’s almost as if it’s intentional. Or well, unrealistically, five – one, that fifth could be something truly interesting like the old Conspiracy. And now with that better ratio you probably could write an actual statement.
When was the last time NotC used stars or pentagons for set symbols? It was this crappy thing called a Game Night box, like $50 for five crappy decks of Magic cards, each deck has like one really expensive creature that maybe is playable in a certain format that don’t end by turn 3 so that these cards have value. I mean the box is a pentagon, so I guess in the game with 5 different colors it does makes sense. Not much more sense than that. Last time I checked the box had a Nahiri on it, even though none of the decks actually have her in it. Do you really feel like you need to be that generic? Last time we got the core set to end all core sets, it was a rising sun, had a better idea all in all.
And then there’s the Commander symbol, which is more a literal pentagon than some star-pentagon mix the actual set goes with, and it’s on literally three cards, two referring to the commander and the other is well, Sol Ring. Did you know that once upon a time, NotC put the two non-Sol Ring cards in Standard, in a thing called Brawl precons? Actually this thing is like the first Game Night’s set symbol, just rotated 180 degrees. Weird we have never tried sideways pentagons.
And now, onto the set symbol I hate just as much, the Jumpstart one. So original Jumpstart had two cards mixed inside a circle, arguably a Teferi’s puzzle box. And then the year after that had Jumpstart Historic Horizons, dumb name because they put some of MH1 and MH2 in some of the packs and also it debuted Alchemy cards, do we still hate those? Then the year after that in the midist of scummy Jumpstart packs tied to Standard sets (they had like 10 decks total of just 5 themes, remember these?) there’s Jumpstart 2022. Both of them stretched the original set’s symbol, honestly unless you put both of them side by side you won’t notice the difference. Then again, these two sets don’t cross each other in their platforms, cowardly to say the least.
And now onto Foundations Jumpstart, named J25 because you know how core sets used to be named, weirdly enough old commander precons never followed that? We’re done with the circle motif, now there’s just two sparks coming off the cards. At higher rarities they look fine since these sparks are black so they contrast against the white type box. But at common, these sparks are white, so they literally blend in, leaving two cards left on white cards’ type boxes. On other colors, they don’t quite blend in, they’re just uncanny feeling of the whole card just wrongly color graded. It’s definitely a big problem, it warrant this much building up, I don’t see why you can’t just put a 25 number in the middle of the two cards, oh wait Masters 25 was a thing.