Brandon Sanderson, the prolific fantasy author behind the Stormlight Archives and the Mistborn Saga, is not impressed with modern MTG storytelling. In a recent podcast episode he dissects why he is feeling unenthused by the recent trend for ‘hat’ sets packed with genre tropes.
Sanderson is a long standing Magic the Gathering fan, who even wrote an official MTG novella for Wizards of the Coast in 2018. But “for the first time in forever I’m not really that excited for a new Magic release”, Sanderson says in episode 192 of the Intentionally Blank podcast, “and I’ve been trying to analyse why”.
“One of the things I loved about Magic is they would go to a new plane, and you would explore the new plane, and all of its local wackiness”, he states. Superficially, that hasn’t changed in recent MTG sets – the much-lampooned Murders at Karlov Manor centred on a very local, Ravnican issue.
But Sanderson thinks the setup has shifted in important ways. He gives the example of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, in which characters from across the multiverse arrive on the plane, “put on cowboy hats… [start] riding horses and [become] outlaws”.
This was often dissonant with the character’s established backgrounds. The demon Rakdos is “a demigod, it doesn’t make any sense at all for him to be part of a heist team”, Sanderson says. The result is that the characters seemed to be acting out a wild west story “like they were on the holodeck”.
We’ll add here that it didn’t help that, in order to avoid engaging with the real world history of colonial violence against native Americans underlying the fantasy of the wild west, Wizards made Thunder Junction an empty plane without any population prior to the Omen Paths opening it up to the multiverse. Everyone present on the plane is an outsider who has picked this place to act like a cowboy: they’re basically in West World.
Likewise, to Sanderson the upcoming set Aetherdrift “feels like wacky races…. like instead of going to a cool place and experiencing that world”, the characters are “play acting”. He says that in Murders of Karlov manor “it felt like instead of characters participating in an investigation they’re running a murder mystery game”.
“I don’t think [MTG’s] actual story can ever be as strong, through the cards, as [its] environmental storytelling”, Sanderson says. He likens this method of storytelling to Elden Ring: picking up on the sense of a world rather than a series of events from game environments and reading item descriptions is quite similar to the experience of discovering an MTG plane via card art and flavor text, right down to experiencing things in a random order and with lots of gaps.
It’s not just that the recent ‘hat sets’ have been cheesy and tropey; it’s that they lean so hard into the tropes that everything feels fake and unreal, right down to the actions of the named characters. That’s at odds with environmental storytelling, which relies on the world feeling real enough that players actually want to believe in it and fill in the blanks in their heads.
But there are two halves to Magic, the game and the story. Like many, Sanderson didn’t like the worldbuilding of Thunder Junction but loved the gameplay, and admits that once Aetherdrift hits the MTG release schedule and he actually gets to play it, his tone may change. “That happened with the haunted house slasher one, it came out and the gameplay was really cool and the aesthetic was really cool”, he says.
We’re reserving judgment on how well Aetherdrift’s narrative sticks the landing, but we’re certainly eager to add cards from it to our MTG Arena decks. If Wizards springs any surprise freebies, our guide to MTG Arena codes will tell you how to get them.
Source: Wargamer
