WOE was the first set to go through my set skeleton review. I’d say that was a pretty big honor. Not as much of an honor for me for not backing it up. But you know, maybe it’s a good thing because now I may rewrite it with hindsight.
Which introduced horrible mistakes like the hideous thing of Oko, the hideous wall of text of the Questing Beast, the Fires of Invention that to this day, I still don’t know what’s so “firey” and “inventive” about it looking at the decks that played it, the Once Upon a Time that I may do a whole probability lesson on, the Cat Oven combo that is the tip of the iceberg of the really horribly annoying way Arena just lacks the kind of shortcutting scripts and play patterns that physical humans can understand with the paper cards.
They feel even more horrible of mistakes considering the artistic and flavor merits Eldraine as the rest of the set actually has. Something just feels different when you fight for this place to exist for 10 whole years as supposed to just someone writing the trope on the roadmap and everyone scrambles to work, I guess it won’t come off that blatantly.
I didn’t say mechanical, because while they had their genius in adventure cards (a few were overtuned, I guess), the monocolor support in just 17 adamant cards and very few 3 mana symbols cards is half baked to say the least. In retrospect it probably was a good justification for the whole thing about “five traditional fantasy courts for each of the colors to provide structure for the set”. Maybe such a justification wouldn’t fly, who would notice?
Oh there’s also a big thing that Eldraine brought: showcase cards. Back then things were pretty simple: three planeswalkers get borderless arts that may or may not be stylistically unique, all adventure cards get a unique storybook showcase frame, emphasize the all, I’ll revisit this fact, and the rest of the rares get a lazy extended frame, which came from the UMA box toppers (wow back then NotC was stingy) How long can we hold on to such a simple and clear system?
Fun fact: There could have been a second Eldraine set being darker and more evil and has a Sheoldred right away and kills Will and makes Rowan evil. Apparently that makes Eldraine sounds too much like a sanitized Lorwyn Shadowmoor pair so instead we push Ikoria up. I mean maybe that block would do well and NotC wouldn’t do loose sets as dominantly as they do now. Someone would wish for that.
What they sold to us was Eldraine without all the monocolor half bakedness, now it’s all the fairy tales and evil witches within. The latter is probably why I run a certain bracket on female commanders, one may be running right now.
Two things returned from original Eldraine, Adventures and Food tokens, one for the gameplay and the other for the cute wholesome flavor probably. The new things is a lot of things around enchantments, first off there are Aura tokens named Roles that a creature can only have one of at a time. So it may be wise to take one off before putting on a new one with Bargain, it’s a weird version of Exploit with both overlapping in 1/1 tokens or smaller. Now you got that new Role on, it counts as one of two arrivals for Celebration, adding a bit of skill to Mono Red pilots back then, where a turn 1 certain NEO saga would mean a 4/4 flyer is imminent, for one turn. Also Sagas are back for the most literal depictions of fairy tales, you can’t mix and match elements like MaRo intended anymore, you have to be blatant in this tropey hell.
This 20 card set is divided between 11 monocolored cards, 8 multicolored cards and 1 colorless card.
Each color gets 2 cards with the exception of Black getting 3 whole cards, because one of them is the almighty Ashiok.
The most visible thing to you is probably the cycle of five Virtues. These are the remnants of the five courts from the original set, being 5 or 7 mana enchantments with an adventure side costing 2 or 1 mana preferably cast first and they have the name of the original court there + the thing they stand for. Their normal versions are done by the same artist showing one person looking at some big long or tall thing, or a maze which is as wide as it is far. You know, I would find this set skeleton review much easier had there been more cycles this structurally sound in a set. Instead, more often than not reasons to make a mess just gels with more people I guess. No one looks at the big picture, they just wants cards to put into their deck, not one of a set of decks, just a deck.
The other set of 5 cards is loosely big things you can play down to change the game I guess. One is a more fantasy Craterhoof, one is blue’s way of boardwiping big printed stats creatures not necessarily value engines of any kind, one’s job is to find Sheoldred at zero discount, the last two is a dragon and a turtle, typical stuff.
The last 9 slots are entirely eaten up by lore needs, it’s pretty easy to see.
First are the two main characters, Will and Rowan, used to be on the same card but now not, because they’re desparked. They’re both 3 mana creature with one stat 4 and the other 2, same typeline, have one keyword and a tap ability that discounts spells based on changes in life total. Safe to say, another structurally sound pair that makes me thinks of things, something further pairs of desparked walkers can’t quite inspire.