Remake the Super Friends(Gatewatch)
Lore forum
Posted on Sept. 28, 2017, 10:56 a.m. by vbfabled
So it's no big secret that the gatewatch was pretty lame. With flat, boring characters who had very typical backstories and uninteresting interactions, all the stories since Tarkir have been lacking in quality.
But here's the thing: the idea of teaming up a bunch of planeswalkers and having them go on adventures and fight evil is actually a pretty cool one, they just handled it horribly. Other than Jace, it doesn't seem the characters they picked were very popular in the first place, and, at least in my opinion, any interaction between them that didn't involve Liliana was just painful and something that felt more like fanfiction than an official story.
So here's my question: If you could remake a gatewatch-esque group of planeswalkers, how would you do it? What characters would make the story more engaging? How would they interact? What types of adventures would they go on?
Discuss!
Agreed lol
I really enjoyed when Koth, Venser, and Elspeth teamed up to fight the phyrexians
September 28, 2017 12:22 p.m. Edited.
LittleBlueHero says... #4
I would love to see a Planeswalker "Legion of Doom"
Tibalt, (evil) Garruk, (pissed off) Sorin, Tezzeret and (white zombie) Elspeth... How and why they are working together doesn't even matter.
Hell lets just bring Garruk outta the woodwork and have some of the walkers team up to take him down... but maybe not before he "axes" a pretty important character.
The stories are too big... kind of like a lot of comics were having problems because every new event had to be bigger than the last. I would love to see the walkers tackling something that DIDN'T involve bolas machinations for a while... jumping from the eldrazi to bolas was too many huge stories.
September 28, 2017 12:47 p.m.
If I were building a team of good-aligned planeswalkers, I would start with a core of Ajani, Narset, Tamiyo, and Ugin as they strike me more strategically inclined, patient, and knowledgeable. From there I would add Samut and Gideon, as they would be best at taking to the front lines and rallying others to their cause.
September 28, 2017 12:57 p.m.
Dredge4life says... #6
Ugin, Sorin, Koth, Elspeth, Tamiyo, Ajani, and Garruk.
September 28, 2017 3:40 p.m.
It'd be cool if we had an explorer group, like Sarkhan or Sahelli, who introduce us to the plane, then step out of the way, and lets the story progress
September 28, 2017 4:02 p.m.
Homura_Akemi says... #8
I would start a group with Kiora and Nahiri on Zendikar, and then take it from there. Kiora must be in the dumps after BFZ block ad trying to stop the Gatewatch, yet she's such an unpredictable character (we see her trying to kill Jace, fight Ulamog by herself, and then afraid to crawl through tunnels with Jori En). Nahiri also is at a low point after getting revenge on Sorin. The Eldrazi are off of her plane, and if she goes back maybe she'll realize it's not totally destroyed (just the continent of Bala Ged). I feel like the two of them meeting would be interesting and stir up some trouble.
September 28, 2017 5:24 p.m.
filthyc4sual says... #9
Chandra, Nahiri, Elspeth, Ashiok, Garruk, and maybe Vraska
September 28, 2017 7:16 p.m.
Honestly I don't think Wizards or anyone else for that matter, can actually make a good planeswalkers all-stars team without running into most if not all of the problems the Gatewatch had. The reason for this in my opinion is that Planeswalkers, especially the popular ones, are incredibly powerful. No one likes to see a group steamroll through every challenge like the Gatewatch did before Bolas wrecked them, but that is exactly what a group of incredibly powerful beings like a team of Planeswalkers would do. One of the biggest annoyances for me in the story wasn't that they kept winning every time but that it took them so much effort to do so. You can't have a group that can steamroll Powerful demons like Razaketh, and Ob Nixilis, and then not feel a little miffed that they struggle against a few wurms. They keep cheaply taking out characters that would actually be effective in those situations and not letting them do things like how Nissa keeps not being able to do anything in major fights because the one time she did get to do something Ulamog and Kozilek died. (and the few other times she did things her elementals wrecked everyone.) And in that wurm scene I referenced a bit earlier Liliana just gets swept aside right at the beginning because in all reality she should have been able to just instakill all of them and use their corpses to pave a way to the city without difficulty. (I mean she would hurt a little bit from using the chain veil but that hasn't stopped her before.)
It reaches the point where they are so powerful that you have to constantly put them against insanely overwhelming enemies like Bolas and the Eldrazi just so it feels like there is actually a challenge in front of the group.
In summary Planeswalkers are overpowered and any group filled with them is realistically going to steamroll anything in their path and would be forced to battle ridiculous overpowered enemies constantly just to have a real fight. IE a boring story.
September 28, 2017 10:10 p.m.
I'd have Sorin, Ajani, and Tamiyo form the Responsible Adultwatch. Everywhere the kids go they keep breaking stuff, let someone a little more mature handle things for once.
And really who needs a Gatewatch when you have The Unluckiest Planeswalker in the Multiverse (the guy from the C17 curses)?
September 29, 2017 12:04 a.m.
SpammyV "Responsible Adultwatch" is funnier than it should be.
Although I do like the idea of getting some of the more responsible walkers together. And the whole color balance thing is really hindering their creative options here. Like, I imagine a group of 5 white planeswalkers getting along waaaay better than one of each color(and briefly Ajani). Imagine Elspeth(if they got her out of the underworld) and Gideon on the frontlines with Ajani as their support/medic and Narset as a strategist. Maybe even Dovin Baan for planning if he ever got tired of being a communist.
Chandrian says... #2
A lot of fantasy-books I've read begin with introducing characters one at a time. Either the main character starts on a journey because "reasons" and then meets the others... Or you can have multiple people who don't know eachother face the same threat on different places and eventually meet eachother and team up.
For the Gatewatch story, I have only read very small bits because it wasn't all that interesting (honestly I really liked the stories in Shadows over Innistrad with Hal and Alena (?) and the werewolves, I thought those were pretty okay).
The major problem with having multiple planeswalkers suddenly team up and face an enemy is that you have to create interesting bonds between them. They need their own reasons why they want to work with the others and the threat they face should be big enough. For the Gatewatch it felt pretty mediocre... I mean they were tricked by Bolas and then they start listening to Ugin... comon fellas, make your own decisions.
I think that for the Gatewatch to be really interesting for me they should have built up slower. For example, the Eldrazi were released, it's the home-plane of Nissa, so she's there to fight to defend her world, but I'm not certain for example Chandra needed to be there (I remember a story were she hesitated to show up). In fact, it might even have been better for e.g. only Nissa and Jace to face the Eldrazi, lose to them and have Zendikar be destroyed... Which then leads to their team of 2 searching for their fellow planeswalkers, helping those with their own problems in order to gain their loyalty and be strong enough to face the original threat they faced. Here it felt too forced.
I also think that having a hidden evil mastermind (Nicol Bolas) is okay, but they should/could do small stories about the tiny gears he sets in motion even though it's not related to a plane we're currently on. (Honestly, a small story a year ago about Vraska cursing Bolas for this stupid mission and showing she's on a ship or something could improve the overal idea we have of the Multiverse and make us curious about what's to come).
Right now there's very little long-term planning in the stories, wich is a shame.
And honestly, they shouldn't stick to their balance of colours and be more free. Put some 2 or 3 coloured planeswalkers together with monocolored ones (on both sides) and use that for their characters, because right now Team Evil is just much more interesting IMO (Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker , Vraska, Relic Seeker, Ral Zarek , Tezzeret the Schemer)
September 28, 2017 11:43 a.m.