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Not that I get WHY Mary Sues are so beloved. Of course, this is coming from someone who DOESN'T think wish fulfillment can possibly be THAT important in choosing what stories you look to. Probably says something that a big part of the reason why I dislike the Silent Protagonist conceit in many CRPGs is that I think the player is properly the director, not the lead actor. (The programmers are the producer.)

I've not read enough post-Ravnica fiction to get the proper gist of Jace, but it's sounding like he's slipping into Boring Invincible Hero territory, from these posts. So the question becomes, how are "the masses" NOT getting bored?

Not that I like the idea of just ONE signal character. I'm toying with the idea (not connecting to Magic personalities) of five main characters who each readily map to one of the five dangerous flaws in a general that Sunzi identified in the Art of War:

--The general ready to die (he can be killed easily, quickly robbing the troops of his earned insights)
--The general intent to live (he can be captured rather easily)
--The bellicose general (he can be lured into an ill-advised battle)
--The puritanical general (he may be reluctant to take certain ethically/morally grey actions, and thus force his army--and people--into an even more deleterious situation. In other words, he's unwilling to accept the possibility that the grey he's glaring at is as light as it's going to get for the time being.)
--The general overly concerned with the welfare of non-combatants (he can be lured into protecting an actively threatened village, rather than properly protect an integral pass or the like)

The idea? See how whatever lies behind these particular flaws may actually counterweight and correct each other.

Although if we're going to focus on planeswalkers...how about a set-story whose protagonist is a normative introduced in set one, but awakens during the course of events, with their planeswalker iteration card in set three? (Or is that too redolent of Glissa? In any case, we'd probably need another, already-awakened planeswalker, such as Tibalt, to be a contrasting antagonist.)

Now, as to the mysterious past...Remember that while Ravnican culture has a Slavic cast to it, the remnants of the old--nephilim, lamassu, etc.--have a more Hebrew/Assyrian/Babylonian cast. Now remember the existence of the Sanguine Praetor . Methinks the "old gods" are going to make a return appearance. Going by the inclusion of the nephilim, I'm going to guess that these old gods will have the creature type "Grigori"--according to 1 Enoch, the angel-side progenitors of the nephilim. Or else...Eldrazi. Note the "el" in there. Or still something else, whatever Apsu, Tiamat, Mummu, and Qingu were classified as in Sumerian and Babylonian myth. Either way, I don't think Jace is going to be too happy about discovering anything even remotely like the headaches back at Zendikar.

Then again...the nephilim were an odd pastiche of colors, as opposed to the colorless Eldrazi. So perhaps the Grigori are the opposite of Eldrazi in that, but no less deadly to the rest of Dominia. If they're somewhat a negative image of the Eldrazi, then Jace might make for a good advisor for the Ravnicans in how to at least drive the old gods back into slumber, if not out of Ravnica and Agyrem entirely.

EDIT: ...And I just realized something ugly. The earlier merfolk planeswalker is GU. The merfolk are in charge of Simic now. The planeswalker in question adulates leviathans and other horrors of the deep. The Sumerians and Babylonians regarded Apsu and Tiamat as the incarnations of, respectively, fresh water and salt water.

The "old gods" are going to be in the vein of Apsu & Co., aren't they? And at least a portion of the merfolk are their agents...

Come to think of it, why does Magic NEED a mascot? For that matter, why are mascots necessary for anything in the first place?

But returning to the storytelling problems from focusing on planeswalkers over normal planar denizens...Remember that most fantasy epics, whether they're in a Romanticist or Enlightenment cast, focus on mortals (heroic deeds-performing or otherwise) rather than gods. At least, not entirely on gods (one or two Forgotten Realms novels come to mind here). The thing is that the capabilities of planeswalkers have a tendency to make them the closest thing Dominia HAS to gods (excepting horrors like the Eldrazi). Focusing too much on them puts the mortals--the ones the readers would most easily identify with--on the periphery. (Yes, I know I said I'm not that fond of the idea of reading stories for the sake of wish fulfillment. But one does expect an avenue into the story that they share.)

Then again, this problem may stem from the in-game conceit that the players are themselves planeswalkers. Not particularly potent world-bound sorcerors, but planeswalkers outright. Thus, I'm thinking that Creative is expecting that the readers/followers of the story have already besotted themselves with fantasies of being that far above the normative mortals, and want stories to reinforce that vision. Now consider that a defining aspect of planeswalkers is that they can travel among many planes and/or worlds rather quickly. This causes an expanse problem. From such a scale, the ordinary events--and even the not-so-ordinary events--of single planes don't get notices easily. Only the ones that encompass multiple planes, if not the entirety of Dominia, get noticed. But only the vanishingly few numbers of planeswalkers can even notice their span. The day-to-day/year-to-year, easily identifiable concerns of individual planes get overshadowed by the power-drenched problems of the Blind Eternities...where non-planeswalkers can't see their totality.

I understand that Creative wants to have stories that encompass multiple planes. But first perhaps we should ensure that others than planeswalkers can appreciate (well, at least understand) the situation, and be able to contribute. Why force planeswalkers to do all the work? Although we'd probably need some way for non-planeswalkers to move back and forth between planes, even if in limited amounts. Network of stable gates? Spelljammer-ish vessels? Other?

Could be a case of Creator's Pet--with the Creator in question desperately trying to nullify AoA (which I've not read at all). The "masses'" fondness for Jace would be exacerbating it. I wonder how many of THEM have read AoA. Even worse, I wonder how many, despite the ignominy you mentioned (or still worse, have ways to excuse it; the TVTropes term you want here is Draco in Leather Pants), actually IDENTIFY with him.

Then again, we don't know the EXACT point in time in which RtR occurs with respect to SoM, I believe. We've had these switchbacks before; the Kamigawa block must take place quite a while before Odyssey and Onslaught, at the very least.

Honestly, if (IF) we're going to have a mascot, why can't it be Ajani? No less a sorceror than Jace...

(By the way, my hope for how this block ends, even if it turns out it's based on misinterpreting the term "Gatecrash"? Ravnica and Agyrem become satellites of or binaries--trinaries?--with another world, such as Shandalar or Equilor.)

Aug 29, 2012 -- 4:22PM, Brady_Dommermuth wrote:

Some revisions have been made to this article based on feedback and proposals from the Flavor and Storylines community and from user Barinellos in particular. Big thanks to them for helping us keep our many ducks in a row.

My faith in humanity has been restored.

Ravnica was my favorite story cycle, and may have been my favorite block, in all of Magic the Gathering. I've been playing since 6th edition was a new thing. I already notice characters fading away (Feather lost power, Jarad's Selesnyan lady friend seems to have disappeared) and I sincerely hope that this isn't in favor of bringing in the recurring annual heroes. (And then suddenly, Jace conveniently appeared and stole the story of the entire trilogy and provided infinite card advantage to all!) Things were just so much more interesting when the plane was separated and had its own culture and inner workings, rather than being yet another stop on the Jace, Lili, Garruk, Chandra, and Gideon World Tour (occasionally guest-starring Elspeth). The players were always supposed to be planeswalkers I guess, although the earliest explanation I recall is that we represented mages in a duel, and we had Urza and Karn and the like, but they didn't insist on popping up... everywhere... constantly.

I quit Magic for a good while when Planeswalkers first came around, played in a couple drafts over a couple years and occasionally played a nostalgia match with an old friend. When Scars came around I was like "hey I remember Mirrodin, even Ravager was preferable to planeswalkers!" and then a buddy invited me to an FNM, I built a silly Myr deck, and I was hooked again. I had planned to quit again to save money and time once Scars block cycled out and I couldn't play the infect deck I've been playing for the last 13 months anymore, but then I heard we were going back to Ravnica... and that, more than anything else POSSIBLY could have, pulled me back in.

I guess what I'm saying is in your hands, Wizards, is my favorite piece of nerdy lore and fiction and gaming ever... and I fell in love with it because the characters had life and personality, the world was interesting on its own, and on top of that there were just so many viable strategies... please be gentle. (And could we get Cory J. Herndon to write the novels again? That was way above par for licensed fantasy writing.)