It makes sense that the Phyrexian army can defeat most of the Mirrans because the Mirrans has the population scale of one plane and the Phyrexian army should have about that much scale because they grew from that one same plane. It would not make sense to write that said army can defeat like some two digits amounts of different planes. You know, with a few braincells, you can probably realize that.

I guess the point of this set isn’t to compare the heroes and the villains. It’s just supposed to show a bunch of different planes and characters within those planes. Like how War of the Spark is supposed to have a lot of planeswalkers, not necessary so focused on the war.

I thought of doing a story preface for this review. Then I run out of words to really offer my perspective on it. So let’s just see how the cards illustrate the story and I’ll tell relevant points as we go.

1 Invasion of the Planes

1.1 Who needs Battles?

Did you know that they thought of a card type that play in this kind of flavor back in War of the Spark? And then MaRo stressed on “planeswalker” in the phrase “planeswalker war” and we got the set we know today. Using similar logic, what is so “March”-y about these Battles?

First off, the important question to be asked is “Do we need a new card type like at all?” Magic, for the longest time, tends to favor making new prowess subtypes for new functions instead of making whole new types. Sagas, Vehicles, Equipments are what I mean. Like, have you ever look at a planeswalker and just think “They totally could have these just a subset of commanders”. Like I could propose 0/0 creatures that gain and lose +1/+1 counters like our timeline’s loyalty counters. But well, our timeline do come with loyalty counters, so something for enemy creatures to attack at is just on the table now. So here we go, what are basically planeswalkers with just their static abilities.

Well, I just described something that is probably written in the rules or the desks of some designers somewhere. What MOM actually has are battles of the subtype of Siege, which worked very differently. You play them for an opponent’s board, get basically a magecraft on arrival, you or someone send creatures in to attack the battle, the battle gets to zero and it transforms into a free card. To explain in a way, you’re the villain casting these spells like you’re marching onto these places, you get the magecraft as the buff the plane gives anyone fighting in here, you have to go through the plane’s natives, and when you win then you got the plane’s flavor in form of that back side.

How did that turned out? Not revolutionary I can say that much. Like I definitely spent a lot of words to make you think of how necessary a new type really is, let alone this one. Like the word Siege itself, in Tarkir it actually represents enchantments you can choose the side of. Which is probably why we haven’t seen another Battle anywhere outside of playtest cards. My best prediction is probably in the next story arc conclusion set, but well it’s just as likely it should have other ideas to focus on.

Actually, if going by the design lore, this is a pretty backwards way to look at these things. The goal of these, if you haven’t noticed by looking at the cards, is to represent the wide gamut of planes. Originally these things could have just been lands with loyalty counters because you’re a planeswalkers and you stay on planes temporarily. You know what, that definitely loops back into my “could have just been a subtype” argument.

1.2 Battles review

In much of the same fashion of War of the Spark having 36 planeswalkers, this set has 36 battles, and unlike that set we have none as a promo (what a mistake), none in precons of any kind and none in any sets surrounding it.

While both sets equal in their use of 20 uncommons, the rares and mythics beg to differ. Instead of the weird 13/3 split, we now go for the 11/5 split typical for DFCs since Zendikar Rising basically.

You shouldn’t be too surprised at this point to see color imbalance really. But the way the color imbalances were obfuscated are still quite interesting, and we shall break it down.

1.2.1 Mythics

At mythic, there’s one for each color of Jund, and then there’s one Azorius card to cover both White and Blue, and lastly a colorless card. In M15, there was a cycle that assigned colors to some of these planes, it put Innistrad as black and that stayed very much true, then Shandalar is red, Ravnica is blue and New Phyrexia is colorless. Those latter three certainly got changed, and now you wonder why?

• First off, Shandalar, it has to be green this time to make room for Tarkir which definitely fits red a lot better, and it just so happens that red and green both like their strong natural forces to things.
• Secondly, Ravnica, it was blue probably because at the time Jace was the Living Guildpact (literally a card in M15) at the time and now it’s a 5 color Niv Mizzet that’s in this role, so now the theme is to like two colors, any two color pair, just has to be a two color pairs. Unfortunately this colorless card can’t have weird clauses to require exactly two colors of mana or something.
• Lastly, New Phyrexia. I said above that you’re the villain to play these Sieges right? For this one, to reflect the story, it’s the opposite. So here’s a Zhalfirian army storming mommy’s place and if you win you get Teferi. Truly a clever idea for a siege, I have to admit. Now the dumb question is can you cut colors off this card? Front side, it’s more likely to be mono white than mono blue. Back side, Teferi was mono blue in a few cases, but I’m not too sure if that middle ability emblem can count as mono blue, probably would need to buff the toughness instead of the power but well then that doesn’t sound as helpful to the front side right?

1.2.2 Rares