Is WotC Depleting Design Space for Planeswalkers?
General forum
Posted on Oct. 18, 2023, 8:28 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
Some players believe that the reason for which WotC had many planeswalkers lose their sparks was that they (WotC) were depleting design space for planeswalkers, running out of ideas on how to keep them new and exciting.
I am not certain how I feel about that, since I would like to believe that the people at WotC are very creative and have plenty of ideas for new planeswalkers; I had been feeling that WotC had been emphasizing planeswalkers slightly too heavily since they became card type, but I also feel that taking away what makes them special was going to far in the opposite direction.
What does everyone else say about this? Do you believe that WotC is depleting design space for planeswalkers?
DemonDragonJ says... #3
Niko9, merchandise-driven storylines have always bothered me, so I am very glad that such stories are becoming far less prevalent now than they were back in the 1980's and 90's, and I really hope that WotC does not employ such a practice for MtG.
October 18, 2023 9:39 p.m.
I thought there were too many planeswalkers. I mean, I get they're the main characters, but they started to get in the way of everything else. The Kaldheim and New Capenna stories in particular were basically irrelevant, almost non-existent, outside of what the planeswalkers were doing. Two potentially deep, rich settings ended up as semi-static backdrops for what Our Heroes and The Bad Guys were doing.
And now the Omenpaths are here, and everyone's potentially a planeswalker. If there's a web of permanent O-paths that connect pretty much every plot-relevant location (and I'm kind of worried it's going to go that direction--help me out, story people), then anyone can travel from Thisplane to Thatplane and planeswalking will be commonplace for Our Heroes, even more than it was before.
But I'm wandering away from the question. (Why answer when I can complain?) I bet there's a giant stack of half-complete character designs, ready to be fleshed out with the details they need to fit the story, and that stack keeps growing. I don't think the Desparking was a response to lack of character originality. My guess is that it was to avoid oversaturation of planeswalker characters.
October 18, 2023 9:46 p.m.
DemonDragonJ I mean, I don't think that merchandise driven is always bad. To this day I legit like Beast Wars Transformers and it's absolutely merchandise first, but it is campy and kind of delightful for that.
Anything can be a jumping off point, even merchandising, I think it's really just a matter of how constrained the writing is by that being the format. Something like a newspaper comic strip is massively constrained by what it has to be, certain size, certain length, words have to fit with drawings, overseen by newspapers and editorial bias, but there are still gems like Calvin and Hobbes that work perfectly with all of that. The creative process can make anything good : ) It just doesn't always happen maybe.
October 18, 2023 9:59 p.m.
TypicalTimmy says... #6
I agree
It also feels like a bit of a soft reboot, which I support in any long term media.
I think it was a wise creative decision, and now we change dozens of stories to come of watching our beloved characters have their sparks reignite all over again.
Not to mention, it'll open up new Planes as we see their original homeworlds for those we don't know about just yet, such as Kasmina and Angrath.
October 19, 2023 4:38 p.m. Edited.
FormOverFunction says... #7
I have a hard time imagining that Hasbro has completely given up on the idea of a tv show or movie of some sort, too, and this might help coordinate that in some way. I feel like that was ~70% of the reason WotC even introduced them to begin with. I think the Pokémon and yugioh tv shows were responsible for a significant amount of their success, drawing in younger/newer customers, and that notion is probably not lost on the upper-brass of the organization.
October 19, 2023 5:55 p.m.
TypicalTimmy says... #8
Wasn't Netflix supposed to have a MTG series that followed Chandra?
What happened? Outright cancelled, or put on hiatus due to the writers strike?
- Reddit basically says the animation studio dropped out for another series and the Russo Brothers also dropped out to focus on other stuff, but that it was still in the works - but the writer's strike happened.
October 19, 2023 9:34 p.m. Edited.
I feel like in the past 5-6 years Wizards basically ramped up the number of both planeswalkers and legends because they perceived that people really like planeswalkers and more legends was good for commander. I think they overdid things in both cases and I think Wizards may have now realized that they pushed too far and are dialing things back.
To an extant I do think that they have mined a lot of the viable play space from planeswalkers. There's a reason why they almost all now have static abilities. They are basically turning into pseudo-enchantments that you can attack. I think Wizards saw potential pitfalls of that path, saw how planewalkers just weren't as popular as they used to be, and decided to pull back.
From a story-telling standpoint I think Wizards needed to reset, though based on the quality of the Phyrexian story-arc, which I thought was pretty bad, I'm not holding out hope for something great, even though Wizards has created many very interesting planes and characters that could be explored. Instead I think we're likely to see more recycled stories, though I hope not.
October 20, 2023 10:21 a.m.
FormOverFunction says... #10
I think they’ve made enough stories that they can just tread water now while they begin churning out “shows” on Netflix. Sorta surprised it wasn’t amazon prime, actually, since they seem pretty cooperative there. Maybe they’re waiting out the Netflix licensure so that amazon can scoop it up. And I said “shows” in quotes because what I mean is “a shortish tv show that’s basically an overly-long movie that is broken down to tv show pieces, but isn’t a full season of tv episodes.” Whatever that sort of thing is called nowadays.
October 20, 2023 1:40 p.m.
FormOverFunction Either that, or they are just putting the final touches on the magic show that everyone didn't know they needed...Tefari and Squee: Time Police...One travels looking for time crime and the other is always already there : )
October 20, 2023 6:22 p.m.
Seriously though. What we really need (but just don't know it) is a show starring Fblthp "the Lost" as he keeps ending up on a chaotic rollercoaster ride through all the planes of MtG. It would be great if Fblthp had a unique curse, like a busted spark that somehow latched onto him & force-planeshifted him at random on some sort of periodic timeline. Then you can star all the favorite walkers out there in the role they were meant to play: 'enigmatic visitors of great power'.
Also Tef & Squee: buddycops would be another great option.
October 20, 2023 10:45 p.m.
.... Though I think Squee already has his buddycop in Slimefoot
October 20, 2023 10:46 p.m.
pookypuppy6 says... #14
I have had points in the past where I've thought design space was running thin. I remember Shadows Over Innistrad coming out and thinking "Wow. Nahiri, the Harbinger, Sorin, Grim Nemesis and Jace, Unraveler of Secrets all look eerily similar". Plus that draws. Minus that removals. Spoopsy ultimate. Bam, done.
War Of The Spark was a blessing and a curse, in a way. It gave planeswalkers new fun design space with static abilities, but also made planeswalkers wayyyy too bountiful in the setting. They didn't even prune that many in that event overall.
And... yeah, after a while, there's just so many Chandras or Ajani's that I honestly struggle to remember what each one does. A lot of planeswalkers with three (or more!) abilities is a lot of explored design space, and there's constraint doing the same characters over and over when they need to keep flavourfully consistent in their mechanics.
October 21, 2023 5:56 p.m.
Yeah, I agree that it is a difficult thing to stick with the same character while flavor-keeping mechanics & all the while you have to match this with color-appropriate mechanics as well. This gets more difficult with the mono-colored walkers that are paragons of their colors, the mono-colored paragon does not really favor character/story driven developments without potentially taking a big dump on the color pie.
I think they sometimes can help alleviate some of that by color splashing a walker for an arch, so letting Nahiri her way into battle magic. Or giving us a "darkside" exploring Nissa that is . This would at least reflect more character growth in walkers & allow for some expanded abilities for stalewalkers.
Or for crying out loud! give me a that can polymorph for everyone & goad the results :)
October 21, 2023 11:13 p.m.
TheoryCrafter says... #16
I think it may be partially true of Chandra. Five years since Dominaria and her magical arsenal is still not more varietized. Though in all fairness you go through all of the cards of any planeswalker type and you'll see roughly the same 2-5 abilities.
I concur it was oversaturation. Personally, I think desparking was a cop-out. War of the Spark should have been a Slaughter. So should've March of the Machine. I wouldn't be surprised if all the sparks flying around at the end of War of the Spark end up in the bodies of former planeswalkers.
I have no plans to see any MTG series that doesn't start at The Brothers' War, let alone on a streaming service with a penchant for abruptly canceling their popular shows and creators leaving due to creative differences.
October 27, 2023 9:17 p.m.
TheMartianGeek says... #17
Nah, there are lots of things that they've never done or very seldom done on planeswalkers. The ratio of how many cards each character has gotten is also heavily skewed; you'd think that the characters with a wider and vaguer power suite would get more cards, but if anything, the opposite seems to be true.
Niko9 says... #2
Hard to say for sure why they did the big desparking, but I'd imagine it had more to do with keeping the idea of a planeswalker a special thing. Kind of like the old idea "if everyone is Han Solo then no one is Han Solo" because as the amount of planeswalkers grows, the ability of planeswalking means less. I thought it was a good move, kind of like comic books where the storylines have gotten so big that then need a hard or soft reset every now and then.
Or maybe a better comparison is that it's like a new line of planeswalker toys coming out. They keep the old characters around as a safety net, they can always come back, and they can always come back in a new style, but by launching a whole new group of characters at the same time it will make it more likely for most people to find one that they really like.
All in all though, I think they probably have a lot of ideas for planeswalkers : ) I think it's more like one of the old transformers cartoons or something where the advertising is writing the storylines. Not that that's always bad, but it is new-ish in magic.
October 18, 2023 8:54 p.m.