This one I held off for too long. So let’s rip this bandage, now or never, even though knowing how brief it may be because I may want to hold off a proper look at a lot of these cycles in their original printings’ articles.
If it wasn’t for Ravnica, this series wouldn’t exist. Especially if it were to start out like WAR or MKM. Why? Because, it’s a much holistic whole to look at all the 10 guilds, see what each of them offer through the lens of the different cycles, then pick one for yourself. Compared to opening an overpriced box trying to pull one arbitrarily chosen chase card, you know, you shouldn’t chase for the Charizard, you’re supposed to be able to choose Blastoise!
Let me think about 10 facts about Ravnica so this section can be relatively quick:
The WAR novel fucking sucks. You know the “decidedly male” meme MTG people spread around? It came from here.
Nissa and Tamiyo’s normal arts back in WAR were horrible, very indicative of the bland art direction of this Gatewatch era. How convenient there’s an anime version of them that do them justice.
My favorite Ravnican character is Vannifar, the Simic elf ooze lady. Obviously because of the MKM arts for her, the RNA original art was too deep in the sea probably.
RNA has off color activated ability cards, GRN doesn’t. I’ll never understand why.
Once upon a time, I used to play two Izzet cards called Experimental Frenzy and Risk Factor, both with truly bonkers ways of generating card advantage. To this day, I still wonder how much card draw I actually gotten from either of them.
Selesnya in GRN has the only returning guild mechanic in Ravnican guild sets history, and that feels infuriating since I do want to know what their third thing could have been.
There are zero monocolored uncommons in DGM.
RTR could have been a 4 set block, with the first one being the place of Avacyn Restored. Would that mean there could have been a set with just 2 guilds?
RAV is the only block with 2 invitational cards in it, as in these cards have bearings of someone who won some Magic tournament. The latest one is in OTJ and MOM respectively, and unfortunately TDM didn’t continue this streak.
Ravnica for the first 3 visits always seem to be the balanced solution after a cycle of an overpowered artifact year (first Urza’s, second Mirrodin, third Kaladesh) followed by a horrifically underpowered year (first Mercadia, second Kamigawa, third Ixalan). Nowadays sets are so noisy it’s hard to say where MKM’s place really is.
Well I deliver just that much.
This 20 mythics set is divided into 11 monocolored cards, 7 multicolored cards and 2 colorless cards. That is really strange for a set allegedly about guilds compared to MKM not being, yet MKM is the one with more color balance, go figure.
Each color has two whole cards, except Black has three.