Some thoughts on the Phyrexia arc

Now I'm blogging again I might as well get some thoughts about the most recent arc of Magic Story off my chest. The gist of which is that if the finance people at WotC won't make more money available for longer stories, and the cardmakers don't want to stick around on a plane for more than one set, I really think the story people at WotC should leave the planar invasions and global catastrophes of the table for a while. It's just really disappointing that Kaldheim, Dominaria United, All Will Be One and March of the Machine have been duds to me because of the exact same issues every time.

In all of these cases the story felt rushed and didn't manage to convey the grand scale necessary for its plot. Often the worlds felt very small, stories seemed to lurch from one mandated plot point to another, and since they didn't have the space for character development they often leaned heavily on shock value instead, hoping that any sympathy the reader has build up for characters from their previous appearances would be enough to tug the heartstrings when something terrible happens to them. To little effect, at least in my case.

Some examples:

Kaldheim is a mini-Multiverse with ten interconnected planes. Ethan Fleischer described it as one of WotC's most ambitious worlds. Yet the story doesn't do this justice at all. When all we see of what caused the interplanar war is Tibalt talking to a handful of trolls and then leaving some holes in Immersturm, when the whole thing can apparently be resolved by a single battle on a bridge and Tyvar talking to his brother off panel, and in the end Niko and the rest of the B-plot randomly fall from the sky to meet Kaya... the effect is not so much "one of the most ambitious worlds Magic has ever done", more "A LARP organizer wanting to do an epic story despite not having the people nor the space to pull it off."

Other examples of rushed plot points would be Ertai being alive without any explanation, the battle of Yavimaya ending because Meria spots a random Thran machine the bad guys just happen to plow up, or Tibalt's big ruse of pretending to be Valki lasting all of one paragraph.

If I look at the character tragedies in recent stories... I like Ajani, Vraska, Jace, et cetera. Heck, Jaya is one of my favorite characters ever! So the last few sets should have been gut punch after gut punch. Yet I didn't feel much of anything for them. Mostly because these character hadn't really been part of the story. Ajani hadn't been a pov character since Kaladesh. Jaya hadn't done much of anything since her reintroduction. And so they could kill off one of my favorite characters with me only going "Ah well. They weren't using her anyway..."

As for Jace and Vraska, while the scene of him creating the illusion for her is very bittersweet on its own, in context it didn't work for me at all. We hadn't seen Jace since Zendikar Rising, and hadn't seen the two of them together since War of the Spark: the Forsaken, in which their relationship seemed strained from each of them keeping big secrets from each other. Thus I spend too much time wondering what exactly their relationship status was at that point to really appreciate the scene. Putting it in the middle of a story that seemed to be speed running through a mandated amount of character death didn't help either. As a result what could have been a fantastic scene had about as much impact as just telling me "Hey, remember those two characters you liked? Well they're dead now!"

Having a massive cast is nice and ambitious, but most of the fun should come from those characters actually interacting. Where was the Jodah/Jaya reunion? Where was the tense Jace & Nissa recruiting Nahiri scene? Liliana is hanging out with Chandra at the start of March of the Machine story but we don't get to see her reunion with the Gatewatch, and then she immediately leaves again?! So many missed opportunities!

I've joked on the blog before that there should be a Secret Lair: Cathartic Reunion, with art depicting a whole load of scene of characters being reunited. Maybe that could be accompanied with some stories to fill out the gaps in the recent arc?

The finale in March of the Machine has been a bit better, partially because it's twice as long, but also because most of the characters have at least had a pov chapter in previous sets. Yet there we still have stuff like Sheoldred and Urabrask's rebellion being handled off panel. Heck, the end of all the praetors except Norn felt more like getting rid of some loose ends than satisfying narrative conclusions. And the need to cover the fate of all the compleated 'walkers leads to an odd pacing issue where entire planes get conquered between sets, only for the MoM story to show us Phyrexia losing battles right from the start.

Apparently there has been some complaining about how similar the March of the Machine story was to Avengers Endgame. (I didn't see the complaining myself, but there were suddenly people complaining about the complaining in my Twitter feed) I personally don't mind it much, as massive crossovers and last minute rescues are just cool story beats, and hardly invented by Marvel. But if WotC does want to take cues from Endgame, they shouldn't just look at the plot, but also its structure. Endgame only worked because a) they got rid of half the cast in the previous story and b) they made clear decisions on which characters were going to be the focus, which characters were mostly going to play supporting roles, and which would be cameos in the big battle. And even then it only fitted because the movie was bladder-burstingly long.

Now it's not like there haven't been good stories during the Phyrexia arc. It's just very noticeable that the stories I did like were all much smaller affairs. Neon Dynasty was pretty good, and that was just one guy looking for his childhood friend and running into illegal science experiments. New Capenna... well, it weirdly fumbled its ending, but the story up to that point was very enjoyable. If they had kept out the extra battle with the Cabaretti from the last chapter, instead using that space to have Gaida tell her origin story and have Eslpeth and Vivien putting that together with info they got from Xander and Urabrask to figure out they needed to get to that random church... we would have a much better wrap up on the plane's mysteries and the whole Capenna story would've been pretty good.

Well, and one of the side-stories should've been about Ob Nixilis. It feels like someone came up with the (admittedly funny) "Mob Nixilis" pun and then they forgot to come up with an actual motivation to get the character there...

And then there is The Brothers' War, which is definitely my favorite story of the Phyrexia Arc, and will probably score pretty high on my list of best stories over all. Now, yeah, I know, I will always be biased to a continuity heavy story that calls back to my favorite Magic novel of all time, but if it had just been a rushed retelling of the war I wouldn't be praising it so much. Yet as a series of purely character driven vignettes it also gave me all the character development and interaction that had been sorely missing from Dominaria United. That's what you can do if instead of a planewide war your overall plot is restricted to one Phyrexian attack and Teferi using a machine to cheat on his history homework.

Similarly, while the All Will be One story overall disappointed me, the last two side stories were great. Yes, again, I'm biased, the one having our return to Zhalfir after literal decades and the other having Reinhard Suarez overloading it with references to everything from Agents of Artifice and Test of Metal to Roreca's Tale and freaking Mezlok's Challenge, but it's also significant that the first deals with Teferi, who we had just focused on for an entire story, and builds on his story from Midnight Hunt, and the second deals with Tezzeret, who we've been checking in on in almost every set for the last year. They were part of the story, I know their current status and role, and thus I'm invested in them in a way that I'm not with Jace if you just shove him center stage after being absent for two years.

Magic's story has a lot of up and downs, and this is far from the worst it's been. In the past we've had some genuinely terrible writers, but I think the current crop are all good to great, and it's been wonderful to see some of them talking on Twitter (or in the comments of this blog!) about how exited they are to be writing for Magic specifically. We've had times when stories were complete continuity trainwrecks, but when it comes to continuity (both within the current arc and in relation to Magic's history), things have never been better than they are now! And at times the story simply suffered from being at the bottom of WotC's list of priorities, but they're clearly putting it front and center and have pretty ambitious ideas for it.

So it's a shame, and really just quite irritating, that with all those things going for it, the end product still leaves me underwhelmed. For the Phyrexia arc to work every set since at least Kaldheim needed twice as many stories (then Kaldheim and Dominaria United might have had enough space to showcase their planewide catastrophies properly, while Kamigawa and Capenna might have had space to spare to check in on characters like Jace and Vraska who were going to become important later on), or it needed to be paired down massively (limit Kalheim's story to just Kaya hunting Vorinclex, Dominaria United to a horror story about Karn being stuck in Koilos trying to escape the Phyrexians, and cut half the cast of All Wil be One and March of the Machine).

I think I've rambled on for long enough to make my point. Here's hoping Wilds of Eldraine is going to be about a handful of characters rebuilding a single village or something like that.