How come we never got a Magic: The Gathering cartoon?

How come we never got a Magic: The Gathering cartoon?

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They probably planned to do one after the movie finally happened but rumor is that's been binned.

>tfw no mtg show animated by trigger set during the brothers war and phyrexian invasion

Ya got a manga and an anime, Duel Masters.

How would this work? Like yu-gi-oh? If its the case, I gladly pass.

The movie's been canceled? Seriously? Does that mean they'll stop pushing the Gatewatch and focusing on the world building, which was always Magic's strong suite?

lolno, teenagers looove the gatewatch and buy all the cards for billions of bucks.

It's only a rumor. They're pulling back on the Gatewatch soon, though, and they'll probably give it up in a couple years after that, same as the weatherlight saga. It's funny how many of the same mistakes they repeated from that.

I'm only here to post:

Chandra a burning cute! Cute!

I member that, never gave it a chance since it obviously came to be cause Yu Gi Oh was successful.

Oldwalkers wouldn't have made for good characters to do a cartoon about because they were pretty much gods.
If you can't do Oldwalkers, characters from a specific plane aren't as good because they're tied to that plane.
The Weatherlight arc started as a way to get around that limitation, but there's only so far that story goes.

Part of The Mending was making it so Newwalkers would be reasonable power levels to act as characters for ongoing stories, and that culminated in the Gatewatch. The issue there is that the Gatewatch has numerous and very vocal detractors, which means a movie or cartoon would launch with a guarantee of having a large enough and loud enough hatedom to potentially damage it. No higher up wants to roll those dice.

>duel masters
fuck,i still have duel master cards. i wonder if they're worth anything.
also don't forget Kaijudo

Maybe if you have the Duel Masters Jace or something.

...

>Duel Masters Jace
no clue what that is.

Wizards is incredibly protective of the card game to the point where they probably sue each other.

I think a fantasy action card game where teens are made into planeswalkers while guided by legendary characters. Aim to older kids to teens to twenty somethings and you'd get waves of new players.

But Magic has shown to be unstoppable as a physical card game. I've heard that it's actually gotten more profitable lately. What Magic really needs is an online version that's not shit.

They printed Jace as a Duel Masters card for a cross-promotional thing.

oh no, i got nothing like that. a lot of commons and some holos

what ever happened to the game? I thought it was popular at one point?

because all men are rapist mysogingerds neocapitalist nazis

aside from them being clown shoes incompetent i didn't think they were that bad in the sense that if i had a group for DnD hand me character sheets of them as DnD chars i'd only throw illaina out or tell her player to rework the character in the opposite direction of "obvious evil necromancer" she is in the actual lore

but i'm speaking as someone who fell out of MTG when the store i went to to play at closed down and got back in around original innistrad and was on & off until return to innistrad when i had a permanent store to play at. so i don't know much about most of them. beyond...

-gideon is wolverine/worf/vegeta of the team (tough guy who gets his ass kicked when they introduce a new character so the audience can see how tough that new character is)

-chandra is the hothead firemage that also doubles as waifubait as seen here -nissa is the token elf member

-illana as i said before is the obvious evil necromancer that could of been a much better character if the went in the opposite direction from her backstory of "failed healer turns to necromancy to bring back a loved one"

-jace is a cuckboy mage that some how ended up as the party face

-nobody cares or talks about tamyio & ajani

-and sorin was probably the best character out of the bunch and he got shat on in the lore the most out of anyone

..is that accurate?

>nobody cares or talks about tamyio

tamiyo's my favorite walker fuck off

It remains very popular.
Check /tg/ and you'll see plenty of threads for it at any given time.

oh? then what happened to all the cards? I haven't seen packs being sold in my local card shops/walmart in years.

i was talking about in lore. she just kinda fucked off after they solved the eldrazi problem on innistrad.

You have to go to a store that specializes in mtg, not just a game store.

>gideon is wolverine/worf/vegeta of the team
No, Gideon is probably the best actual character in the Gatewatch. He's got a ton of survivor's guilt and actual guilt for getting his friends killed in a moment of hubris and it's the driving force behind his heroism and resolve to protect people. He's constantly diving into conflicts he has no personal business being in because he's self-sacrificial to the point of self-flagellation.

He's only recently been rekt in a one-on-one fight, and it was by one of Magic's most powerful and longstanding villains.

>Chandra
More or less.

>Nissa
She's such a tree-hugger that she got kicked out of her own elf-clan because she found it easier to talk to plants than other people. Used to be really racist towards non-elves until WotC realized that was a PR disaster waiting to happen.

>Liliana
More or less.

>Jace
Jace has a problem where he got put into flavortext as a cocky and sarcastic twat, so nobody likes him. Story Jace is a much different and much better character than Flavor Jace, but Flavor Jace is much more visible to the players. It didn't help him to be printed on one of the most powerful Planeswalker cards of all time, since it kind of cemented the idea that WotC was pushing him as "the cool guy".

>Tamiyo and Ajani
That's more or less how WotC treats them. Both are popular to the more involved players, but they test poorly among the average players.

>Sorin
He got royally fucked over because they had to make him retarded for the sake of the plot in Shadows Over Innistrad. Otherwise, he was a more compelling character than anyone in the Gatewatch.

but they still make them? that surprises me.

I would love a competent re-telling of Urza's entire arc. Fuck Jace and Bolas and all those losers.

I don't know where you're at, but it could be that you're not looking hard enough. Every Walmart and Target in my area has a section dedicated to hobby stuff like trading cards, and Magic always gets the most space.

Walmart definitely sells Magic. It's usually kept on an aisle up front by the registers because of how easy it would be to steal otherwise, so you probably won't see it unless you go through the register it's kept next to.

walmart.com/c/kp/magic-the-gathering-card-decks

I meant Duel Master cards. my walmart always has MTG packs and yugioh/pokemon

Oh, you can understand the confusion with not being a reply to anything. I thought it was just a general question directed at the OP or something.

oh shit, i didn't notice i didn't quote

Dude, it's the most popular tcg of all time.

Well, to sort all this out, no, they aren't still making Duel Masters.

They cancelled it in 2006, relaunched it in 2012 rebranded as "Kaijudo", then cancelled it again in 2014.

Don't worry, it was all a misunderstanding. See

There's like a million cards.

I always had the idea that they could do a cartoon/anime where the planswakers are losing their powers/growing weaker so they train students to take their place. The main character would probably be a white caster or a blue caster. It's a fucking shit idea but it's generic enough to get some popularity.

They're still around but not as much as they used to be. I think the demographic window is closing. Kids don't care anymore. Pokemon is still hot but I think YGO and magic are going to have to rely on poaching older losers as they ween off other video/board/card games.
Older losers just go to a game store, which makes it bad business for other stores to have MtG in stock.

>the planswakers are losing their powers/growing weaker

They don't really need to do that since The Mending.

Fair enough. When I came up with the idea my Magic knowledge was (still is) poor.

It's only 20-30k and maybe a thousand or two of them are relevant.

Personally I think the mending is kind of retarded. Like, I get that they don't want them to be omnipotent gods, but aren't their abilities, you know, MAGIC? Can't they just learn spells for eternal life, shapeshifting, creating planes, etc?

That's not actually the case. Hasbro's earning reports have shown Magic's still actually running very strong. Market study has shown new player acquisition has gotten a lot higher in recent years too.

After a few sets that sold poorly in 2006 and 2007, they instituted some policies to make sets more friendly to newer players and it started paying off around 2011-2012. They continuously broke their streak of "highest selling set of all time" up through 2016. Some recent sets haven't managed to break the record, but they're still doing significantly better than they were 10 years ago.

>Oldwalkers wouldn't have made for good characters to do a cartoon about because they were pretty much gods.

Isn't it the whole point of M:tG?

Oldwalkers would definitely work by downsizing the battles and powers to reasonable limits, they don't have to always go all out

And right now there's Wizard's Soul which is a pretty solid manga

I'm not discussing intake I'm discussing demographic, tosser. You can get a bigger intake from a smaller demo but I AM asserting that the demo is shrinking

Kind of.
Eternal life is costly, and eternal youth even costlier. They can still do it through a variety of ways, but it isn't just freely given anymore.

As for shapeshifting, it was mentioned that at one point the shapeshifting powers were so overblown that a planeswalker said it would be easier to shapeshift your entire body to be facing the opposite direction than to just physically turn around.

Creating planes doesn't seem to be something that can just be done anymore though.

Yeah, so you're skipping over the part where player acquisition has been increasing. The demographic is widening, not shrinking. Consider how narrow it had been before, with it being pretty much exclusively the "comic shop" crowd.

>Isn't it the whole point of M:tG?
It made for a good gameplay excuse for you being some godlike entity who could call forth all manner of spells and monsters at a moment's notice, but it kind of breaks any attempt at keeping things dramatic.

Imagine a character with all the power of Dr. Manhattan as the main character of Lord of the Rings. You're going to have a hard time feeling any sense of danger or tension when he teleports straight into Mordor and throws the ring in, clocking the entire journey in at about 3.2 seconds.

Player acquisition is not a demographic. Are you using terms you don't understand?
It's more comic shop than ever with all their products retreating from toy sections in retailers. It's becoming exclusively aimed at older players- a shrink in demographic. Even if that means they're hitting that demographic more meaningfully and increasing player acquisition.

As long as they put in my
edh waifu

I think most people picture a story that follows a planeswalker as they showcase and solve problems on the different planes of the multiverse. Alternatively, Wizards could put out something like and tell a more involved story over an entire season or more.
I personally would like to see a freshly awakened walker traverse the clusterfuck that was the Conflux while trying to figure out how their new powers are supposed to work.

>Nobody talks about Ajani
ill bash ya hed in m8

Are you here, MaRo? We're waiting

Player acquisition has been up across the board, not just in the "comic shop" demo. They've been deliberately charting the increase in non-white players, female players, and younger players, trying to rake in those markets and they've been successful in doing so. They're deliberately trying to break up the image of Magic players as young-adult white men.

>deliberately trying to avoid young, white, comic-shop men
They can deliberately never get another cent from me then. Thank fuck for board games and RL devs who either don't care about that type of shit or who make it for the people that love it and don't begrudge them for being the bed rock of the industry.

Yeah fuck those devs for wanting more people spending money on their game.

Not when they have to fight other godlike entities. New walkers are trash. seeing gods fight each other using thousand year machination was the fucking best. Especially when you see a normal mortal blow them out.

>trying to avoid young, white, comic-shop men

That's not what I said in the slightest. Trying to get new people involved does not mean deliberately trying to get rid of your existing market, it just means trying to make it so your existing market is not presented as your exclusive market. Trying to avoid selling to a demographic would be retarded.

Are you this stupid on purpose?

It's going to crash hard the sets just suck now. They aimed for the HS audience and it's biting them in the ass because magic is boring as fuck. I'm an agro midrange player but fighting combo, control and burn was what made the game interesting. Now that the format is all midrange even new players get board of it quickly. They've also been making retarded decisions like removing fnm promos.

I don't think avoiding demographics is wise, either but there's a difference to demographic expansion and, as you put it, 'deliberately trying to break up the image of magic players'. An image is more than a player base it's the stigma of others and it's the culture of the game. The only way to effectively change an image quickly is to hack away at the existing one.

Urza got btfo by Phyrexia multiple times despite his power and had to embark on a huge conspiracy to win, which still failed to stick

There's a RDW and two control variants in Standard right now. Up until they had to kill them, there had been combo in the form of Marvel and Cat Lady too.

Those are still dumbed down versions of what the game used to be, they have been specifically dumbing down the game and it fucking shows.

Say you have some blue paint. You put in a bit of red paint and swirl it around. You didn't get rid of the blue paint, but if you put enough red paint in, it certainly looks different from what it did before.

Breaking up the image isn't getting rid of the existing players, it's just showing more sides of an expanded playerbase. It's saying "you too can be a part of this" to more people.

To be honest, it would be hard to really sell the idea of old school RDW as something "smart" enough to be dumbed down. There's not a whole lot of interesting gameplay decisions in throwing Goblin Guides and Lighting Bolts at a problem until it goes away.

>you don't get rid of the blue paint
Sure you do it's no longer blue
The difference is you can make an image consisting of multiple colours or you can dilute and pollute the current into something else that no longer holds the same traits it did initially. Colours can compliment or mutually remove each other in lieu of a new thing.

You made the visible aggregate nonblue, but the amount of blue paint you had in the mix never changed.

Indeed but the physical make up of the blue paint as no practical effect and can be made up of any number of paint formula. It is blue for its visible properties not its composition.

I meant more combo and control. Which required thought to deal against. i'm not saying bring cawblade back but there are a lot less deck types. i miss ramp most of all.

You're kind of torturing the analogy here.

The point is to say that putting thing X together with thing Y until you can look at the whole and see both works to change the image, rather than only being able to do it by getting rid of thing X.

The contention was that the only way to change the image was to avoid the contents of the current image, but you can keep the contents of the current image and still change how it's viewed by just adding a bunch of other stuff to it.

I experience true suffering as well, user

There is admittedly a GR "Ramp into Ulamog" deck. Ulamog's a pretty damn good Ramp finisher even compared to historical contemporaries.

that doesn't matter when ramping is shit and not remotely as viable as it used to be. the modern ramp cards tend to be awful. Also. new ulamog is an accident. just like delver is an accident. just like treasure cruise and that 3 cost vehicle. whenever something unusually powerful it's because magic had poor testers.

I don't think Ceaseless Hunger is an accident in quite the same way Delver or Cruise were. They genuinely didn't understand how powerful those two were, but they definitely set out to make a powerhouse of Ulamog.

>You're kind of torturing the analogy
No I think it's really apt, actually.

Method 1: Destroy the image and replace it with an amalgam

Method 2: Extend the general image and allow different groups and demographics to retain and nurture their own images

>Destroy the image and replace it with an amalgam

The image isn't the contents of the image though. Using the idea of destroying the image to represent "avoiding young, white, comic-shop men" falls apart when you can say that you destroyed the image but didn't remove any of its contents.

Then we arrive back at the paint analogy. Components have no meaningful role past their practical out come, that is, producing the desired colour.
That you have not removed components means nothing if the resulting product has nothing in common to the previous one in practice.

>Urza got btfo by Phyrexia multiple times despite his power and had to embark on a huge conspiracy to win, which still failed to stick

Failed to stick completely to Phyrexia but yawgmoth remains quite dead. Which was the whole point.

Phyrexia is dangerous don't get me wrong, but it was Yawgmoth they were trying to kill.

Exactly. You're getting caught up in the concept of it being paint, rather than just accepting the fact paint is loosely representing a larger concept in the analogy. The idea that the blue paint stops being blue paint if you add other paint to it from a philosophical standpoint is overshooting the entire metaphor to nitpick the details. Treating it as though it's a relevant point of contention is kind of like saying that if you have a group of men and you add one woman to it, the men each individually become less male.

Scrap the paint metaphor if the fact that it's paint seems like the central concept to you. Say instead, you have ping-pong balls. You have 100 white ping-pong balls and you shuffle in 50 balls that are various other colors. You didn't have to take out any of the 100 white balls, but looking at the collection, it appears very different than it did before.

Because literally no one who's got even the faintest sense of MTG's lore wants more of the fucking Gatewatch.

Not the guy you're talking to, but you sound like the worlds most pathetic neckbeard.
Honestly, you're complaining about woman and blacks playing Magic as though MTG is a sacred safe-space for overweight balding white guys in their late 20s. It's a fucking card game, not a secret club.

I'm telling you this for your own good. Businesses don't care about you; they don't know your name. You don't have a personal relationship with Wizards of the Coast. They were never on your side, so they can not betray you.
When a massive multinational corporation like Hasbro panders towards white 20's nerds, it's not because they respect you, it's because they know they can manipulate you into spending hundreds of dollars on cardboard. Being pandered towards is not a compliment, it's an insult to your individuality and impulse control.
They're not "begrudging" you by targeting multiple demographics, and it's pathetic and utterly naive for you to feel offended.

Except it isn't at all. Some images are contradictory. I've JUST been watching a GDC talk on magic player demographics (this time in regards to mechanics) and they admit two in particular coutner act each other often. They instead make distinct peices to appeal to one OR the other. The designer himself said making cards and mechanics that try to mediate BOTH is a mistake and almost always panned.
The paint analogy is on the money. You just won't admit the point it's making.

>They instead make distinct peices to appeal to one OR the other.

That's not avoiding one or the other though. Continuing on with the idea that an image is not it's contents, then Magic is more than the pieces they make for it. Making it so Magic as a whole has pieces for different people to latch onto isn't making it harder for the original group to latch onto it.

>I'm telling you this for your own good
,':^). Similar to multinat corps people on image boards don't care about each other. You're 'telling me' this for your own satisfaction and it's all the sadder that in order to play down how self fellating your 'dressing down' is that you have to say it wasn't because you wanted to talk shit but for the good of someone else.
Get real faggot.

>pandering isn't a compliment
Nor is it an insult. You could consider it one if you likewise aren't "in control of your impulses" and consider marketing akin to brainwashing. Most people who aren't retarded see it as what it is, a business relationship. Demographics affect products as they are affected. As long as you're willing to drop inferior products over brand loyalty there's no draw back for the consumer.
The entire premise of your argument hinges on how retarded you are and quite frankly you need to stop projecting.

They're doing a pretty shit job of it player turn over is increasing and the secondary market has inflated out of control. they proped up modern so people would move too it when they've played enough standard but refuse to fix the bloated mess it's become. modern masters only makes the issue worse. This is a slow decent but a decent none the less.

And we return to the first point:
>deliberately trying to break up the image of magic players [being..]
This is how you summarised their current goals and direction, not me. Does that appear to be an additive or a detractive approach?

Additive, because why the fuck would a business want a detractive approach, especially when it would be detracting their largest demographic?

Again, this comes back to the idea of the image not being its contents. Seeing the concept of the image as something to be changed while wanting to keep its contents so that a new, larger image can be made from them is perfectly in line with an additive strategy.

We've seen loads of industries cannibalise in the name of creator preference and politics. It's the driving force behind any niche market just the same as it's what drives corps to target broader swathes of demographics.

But it's trying to break up the image. Not expand the image. It's detractive. I wrote another argument of the mechanics of changing identity but I doubt we'll agree. If you have to tear down one to make two I think you've done it wrong. The second should branch off the first. Fucking off your core audience for broad appeal is/or should be suicidal for a company.

>But it's trying to break up the image. Not expand the image. It's detractive.

The image is secondary to the contents of the image. Ultimately, breaking it up and replacing it with a larger image is interchangeable with expanding it. This is just another instance of getting bogged down in wordplay and semantics.

youtube.com/watch?v=D9V6oRoutfY

>friday night magic and many casual mtg events are getting older and not bringing in new people.
>people want a different strategy to bring in new players.
>hasbro/wotc is too retarded to actually do anything right

At least at my LGS I don't see any new faces playing MtG. A lot of the young girls, women, and poc are usually playing something else like Cardfight Vanguard or Pokemon.

As far as a MtG cartoon goes what style would fit the show? Who you want to direct it? What should it cover?

Additionally, what references should be put in for older fans that younger and less experienced players wouldn't be able to pick up on?

We had a lot of new people at the Amonkhet prerelease, and some, but fewer at the Hour of Devastation one. "Egypt World" brought people in as a decent hook.

The most new people I'd seen at a prerelease were Innistrad and Theros. It's a lot easier to grab new players with worlds that have some pop culture resonance. Comparatively, Ravnica and Khans got a lot more celebration from the existing fanbase, Ravnica for its history and Khans largely for being the long-awaited Wedge set and having fetches.

honestly of the guys i listed gideon & sorin are probably my favorite of the group.

glad to see i wasn't off with the rest of them. i think my main problem with them is how every plane they visit always get fucked.

innistrad - eldrazi
kaladesh - revolution
amonkeht - nico bolas

i made the DnD analogy because the whole story of the gatewatch just feels like a DnD campaign that went off rails.

is there a good youtube channel that covers the mtg lore. something I can listen to the background.

Yeah, they noticed a lot of that being an issue with the Gatewatch as early as Shadows, but Magic is designed a couple of years down the line, so it's not until we hit Ixalan that we're getting to see them reacting to fan criticism and the focus coming off "The Gatewatch shows up and gets involved in some giant epic confrontation". Dominaria is coming right after Ixalan and will hopefully be a lot more about the plane's history in Magic and rebuilding after the destruction caused by the rifts, instead of some new big calamity kicking up.

>Egypt World
I don't get people who care about the fluff primarily instead of as a secondary or tertiary element.

They already have by having the Gatewatch literally destroyed by Nicol Bolas in less than 25 literal minutes in story time in a "Hour of Devastation" story. He even forces them amongst the planes too.

One speculation with Dominaria on the horizon is that, with the Eldrazi and Bolas having had their turns, it's time to swing back to the Phyrexians, albeit indirectly. Karn returning to Dominaria now that he's free of the Phyrexian influence in order to recuperate and plan makes as much sense as anything for resuming that whole plotline.

For new players, fluff is all they're able to see until they actually get into the game. It's hard to appreciate the mechanical aspects of an expansion for a game you've never played before.