How Ravnica Changed Everything For Magic The Gathering 

There's just no other cast like this. Deep conversations in a casual and fun format. This just keeps on getting better and yes, I shall stick around.

before ravnica the shorthand we were given at the time was "look at the colour wheel on the back of the card, the colours in the opposing line to another are natural enemies. the colours beside another are natural allies." which later became the guild factions. so even without any narrative reasons to help memorizing the associations, sine everyone gets the magic pie symbol branded into their memory, it was intuitive for everyone and never something one needs to memorize. it often takes a while for people to realize the MtG symbol has a lot more thought put into it than it seems and is not just a random assortment of game icons.

Mark Rosewater was Lead Designer on Tempest, so he was leading sets well before Ravnica. He became head of design in 2003 so plausibly around the time Ravnica was first in the works.

I really like the point you guys made about how two colour combinations really bring out aspects of the other colour. Its why the simic guild is probably my favorite. At a mechanical level using the draw of blue lets you access your resources wile the mana generation of green lets you sink all of that mana into some pretty insane spells. And the way it comes out in the flavour is blues curiosity accelerating the natural processes of green/green evolving to new and unnatural heights thanks to knowledge. So the simic guild being a bunch of scientists making mutants and perverting nature while also genuinely making strides in their own way to better health, strength and longevity really comes together in both its art, lore and gameplay. A lot of the other guilds make sense in the same way and while I'm a newer player, Ravnica has always been a fascinating setting because of that

It’s really smart of them to attempt to create new dual color pairs with strixhaven. Eventually the “another boros commander” trope gets old. I think we are touching up on this staleness to dial combinations today.

This is becoming my favorite magic (and TCG design) podcast

Having the Ravnica guilds be an identity that players could grab and hang on to is interesting, and also something that was done by Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) long before MtG, with the different clans, not to mention the player influenced storyline (a Crane clan player wins a tournament, then the Crane Clan benefits in the ongoing story)

Not sure wut train heist movie u r talking about but my mind goes to Citizen Cane. I never understood y people hyped up that movie so much but then someone finallu explained that it was the first movie to do close ups n back n forth shots for dialogue, etc. All the things that every movie nowadays does but prior to that everything looked like someone was filming a stage play.

Funnily enough my first card I cracked from Guildpact was an Angel of Despair- I thought she was so cool, and she was such a bomb in my sealed deck. But then I traded her away after the draft for a Silklash Spider and a Verdeloth the Ancient because outside of drafts 'i OnLy pLaYeD gReEn dEcKs'. Oh to be young and foolish. I also traded away a Temple Garden for a Plated Slagwurm because 'hOw dO yOu bEaT tHaT!?'

The guilds aspect really gave the color combinations meaning to me and made this the perfect starter set (I started with RTR in 2012). Also, pairing each color with each other color really demonstrates what the different aspects of each color can be.

you know, for april's fools you guys should have done a video on RAID: Shadow Legends and done it in such a way we could never be sure if you were serious or it was all an ad read

I fricken love ravnica. Like I'm a newer player, but I love cards that are simple but complex. Ravnica just feels filled with flavor and fun and interesting shit to do. Even the relatively failed newer ones, guilds and allegiance.

If people can make hour long essays on the meaning of duo colors, you are doing something right

Ravnica saved the game. Mirrodin was overpowered and pushed people away, and Kamigawa was too different and underpowered. Magic needed something really specially, and boy did they get it! If you weren’t around in the fall of 2005 you don’t know how Amazing Ravnica block was!

RTR was around the time I started playing, and the guilds, philosphies, aethetics and personalities all enhanced my perception of the color pie, and those almost certainly drove me to start writing characters!

Bringing up The Great Train Robbery is funny, because that's (debatably) the moment that stage and film became distinct disciplines. Before that, the excitement was that people could take typical stage performances and film them, but the camera hadn't yet been divorced from the limitations of a person's eyes, i.e. people can't "teleport", so why should a camera? I guess Magic figured out that Red & Blue, for example, can be something other than the sum of their parts in a similar way.

I always thought of invasion block as the first real modern multicolor set. But the guilds sure added a lot.

Be interesting to hear your thoughts on the Sorcery tcg and if a game with 1 set a year can survive.

Have you thought of expanding upon this eith the evolution of the multi coloured cards over sets, from legends, to the Dark, Invasion block, Ravnika, Alara block, Return to Ravnika.

I guess it’s strength is also it’s weakness as the cards tend to get pigeonholed into a specific two color combo (that card goes with azorius, that card is obviously a rakdos, etc) which discourages mono color or three color decks, though I loved the gate cards lately as some of the artifacts cared about multicolor or having gates. I kind of like the older sets where the sets were quite large and there were tons of ambiguous cards that your not sure which color combo it goes with, it makes you think deeper and analyze the synergies more carefully, Ravnica just makes it easy I guess but less creative?

Would love to hear you discuss the Dandan format

Ravnica is the best, no question. Could have been a five second video 😅

Completely off topic, but; Flamecraft in the background! that game has such good art ♥

I think 3 colors go into that even further, sometimes it's easier to describe a character through the different combinations of 2 colors in the "shard". For example I believe Orkz from Warhammer 40k should be Jund or Temur: Jund for obvious reasons (take the wilderness and savagery of gruul and add the evilness of black that permeates the grimdark future) and temur because you still have gruul with the added mad-scientist feeling of izzet (40k orcs are famous for building impossible contraptions that should not work but still do because they believe in them working)

I need to ask you a question because it bothers me to this day. I think Wizards made a miss while making Vehicles by not moving a P/T to the left side of the card. That would indicate that is not a Creature, while still making it visible and easy to differentiate. Why they did not do this ?

Invasion was “proto” Ravnica block. It just didn’t really give the color pairs identity.

I always found all ten guilds on Ravnica at least partially evil, each in its own unique way. Never felt like I could embrace and identify with either.

Do you think the WotC will ever design towards having stronger cards of a single colour, so more of the Invoke cards from Neon Kamigawa?

If You think the Ravnica changed it all, then the next podcast should be about 4 color cards problem :)

My sense is that guild names did not replace color pairs in common parlance until very recently. No one called BG “Simic” for at least a decade after Ravnica, if not more. And I played during Shards and Khans and those names also did not become synonymous with those colors. I sense that commander is the reason but that’s because when I stopped playing after Khans we didn’t have a ton of commander and now that we’re back it’s everywhere. My favorite color pair is Blue Green, but my expression of Blue Green is about tempo through bounce and tricking opponents with giant growths and other instants to win, it was the Eventide Era of BG. Basically the complete opposite of simic and/or whatever BG’s identity now is. Which is a real shame imo. I think Ravnica is quite limiting. Set after set we grind out the same 2 color archetypes in Limited for the most part lol. I do love most of the Ravnica sets on their own though. Just wish they didn’t come to define the color pairs so much on other planes. Good episode, keep it up!

What about the problems of returning to ravnica or return to return to return to ravnica with detective hats?

For the Boros Legion!

Is shards of alara as foundational as ravnica?

Ravnica is amazing, but only when they're building the world and expanding on the guilds as a whole... I think that the last two Ravnica sets War of the Spark and Murders at Karlov Manor are terrible for both worldbuilding and lore/story... They had strong cards sure, but both those sets feel like a major loss in the identity of Ravnica. Bolas "apexed" as a fumbling throw-away villain, hardly anybody died. They fumbled the Phyrexians in All Will Be One the exact same way. :^) Niv should have just stayed Red/Blue... Detectives on Ravnica and the whole goofy Clue plot, all the artwork... it just felt a lot more like New Capenna to me. Neither of those last two sets felt like Ravnica at all...

First Just' cause