Thursday 3 September 2020

Kamigawa Announcement

Did I really end that last review promising the next one would be up after a week or two, and then posted nothing for multiple months? How embarrassing. I don’t really have an excuse either. The world just has an annoying habit of having stuff happen (as I’m sure you’ve noticed these past few months), and between friends, family, work and other stuff the blog just always seems to be the last thing that gets incorporated into my new routine. So after the so manieth misfired attempt at a regular schedule I think I’ll just have to accept that this blog isn’t going to have one, and I’ll just put up an announcement whenever I’ve got a chunk of reviews ready.

Speaking of which… Announcement! Kamigawa reviews start this Saturday! Here’s what you can expect the coming weeks!

  • September 5th - Champions of Kamigawa vignettes
  • September 12th - Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa
  • September 16th - Champions online
  • September 19th - Champions fatpack booklet
  • September 26th - Betrayers of Kamigawa vignettes
  • October 3rd - Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa
  • October 7th - Betrayers online
  • October 10th - Betrayers fatpack booklet
  • October 17th - Saviors of Kamigawa vignettes
  • October 21st - Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa
  • October 24th - Kamigawa trilogy review
  • October 28th - Saviors online
  • October 31st - Saviors fatpack booklet
  • November 7th - Kamigawa block overview

You see, the first Kamigawa review was almost done when I put up the last Mirrodin one, and when I decided on this new way of doing things I first finished up all the others before doing the announcement. Couldn’t show up empty handed after all that time, could I?

As you’ve probably spotted already… this is quite a bit more stuff than a block usually gets! This is because Kamigawa is a top-down block, meaning it was made flavor-first, rather than mechanics-first, and to promote this WotC put out a lot more lore than usual, including a whole bunch of online stories. Which means more reviews, but also that I’m not going to do the usual order of looking at the books and then at the online stuff. The first of the short stories were released during spoiler season, making them the very first look at Kamigawa we ever got. So to keep things roughly chronological I’m going to cover them first for each set, then the novel second. Which does leave the articles on the rest of the online stuff fairly short, but that’s why you’ll be getting articles on the fatpack booklets (which normally don’t have anything worth talking about in them, but hey, top-down block!) in the same week.

Oh, and one more point of housekeeping: from this point on it seems Wizard’s has finally learned from Odyssey and Mirrodin block that having three different authors on your trilogy is courting trouble. So starting with Kamigawa each cycle has at least one writer working on all three books. This is great for the consistency of tone, quality and continuity, but a bit strange when it comes to writing reviews about them. When I’ve covered one book there isn’t much more to say about, for example, the writing style of the other two. So to keep me from repeating myself I’m going to cover the Kamigawa novels the same way I did Invasion novels way back when: the three reviews will just have the summary, trivia and continuity sections of the review, then in the same week as the third article I’ll also put up a review of the entire trilogy as a whole, where I will also cover the timeline stuff.

And with all that out of the way… see you Saturday for our first look at Kamigawa!

4 comments:

  1. Awesome looking forward for those, regards

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  2. I have been waiting for the Kamigawa block reviews for a while now. Kamigawa has a lot great lore to tap into. Hopefully, Wizards returns to the Kamigawa in the future.

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  3. I'm a little slow on the draw here, but it's great to see you (and my favorite blog) back online!

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