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Episode 13: "Gate Expectations" for Guilds of Ravnica
109 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our thirteenth episode, Alex and Joe discuss the highs and lows of expectation and hopes in the context of Magic: the Gathering's upcoming Return to Return to Guilds of Ravnica set.
When you've visited a plane before, you have a certain idea of what things should be like when you come back. But things don't always go how we hope they will, so how do we manage our expectations for ourselves and others around us?
Remember: at 300 followers on Twitter, we'll do our next giveaway, so keep the word of mouth going!
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Goblin Lore is proud to be a member of the Geek Therapy Network (on Twitter at @GeekTherapy).
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by Joe Redemann.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lord. This episode features just myself and Alex. Unfortunately, Hobbs had to attend to some family business, so he wasn't able to make it for this recording session. But we wanted to get out this episode as quickly as we could because of the Guilds of Ravnica spoiler season beginning, and we've been planning it for a while to coincide with the release of this new block.
00:00:32
Speaker
You'll also notice that this episode is a little bit longer than usual. That's because there was just a lot of good stuff that we talked about that I didn't feel comfortable cutting out. We do normally try to keep episodes to 45 minutes or less, but I'm hoping that you'll see the extra five minutes as a bonus rather than a burden.
Return to Ravnica: Personal Connections
00:00:52
Speaker
So without any further ado, let's get to the show.
00:01:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the return to return to Ravnica. But before we get to all the hype, I would like my co-host tonight to introduce himself. And then also what's the thing coming up in magic that you're most looking forward to? Hi, I'm Alex Newman. I could be phoned on Twitter at Alexander New M.
00:01:27
Speaker
Right now I think the thing that I am most looking forward to in Magic is not so much a thing but a list of things. It is almost the end of August and we still don't have the list of GPs for next year. I'm guessing something's going on. We've had an announcement about it and they basically said we haven't announced it yet and we're going to announce it sometime soon.
00:01:53
Speaker
So I'm looking forward to that because I really enjoy going to GPs and just looking to see where they're at. Hopefully we've had three Minneapolis in a row. I'm hoping for a fourth because I love having having the Grand Prix in our city here.
00:02:07
Speaker
looking where else to go and thinking about what other cities to go visit. I've visited us a handful and I'd love to visit more. I am Joe Redemann, your host. You can find me on Twitter at Findhorn, that's F-Y-N-D Horn. And my looking forward to my excitement target is really similar to yours. I'm looking forward to hopefully crossing fingers, going to Grand Prix, Milwaukee in November.
00:02:35
Speaker
For those of you that don't know, Milwaukee's my hometown and my original hometown. I now live in Minneapolis. Speaking of returning home, we are gonna be talking about Ravnica.
Understanding Ravnica and the Guilds
00:02:48
Speaker
And Ravnica is the city plane. It first debuted in the set Ravnica colon, City of Guilds, which was back in, what, 2005? Is that about right?
00:03:01
Speaker
And I never got a chance to play it. I had left the game right around Alara and then came back in Tarkir. So and I missed a lot in there. Were you playing or involved in Magic during first Ravnica block? Yeah, I was. Actually, it sort of was a brief period of not professional, but playing at a store, being competitive. I hadn't been playing much.
00:03:32
Speaker
before Ravnica, but I met some friends at work who played at one of our local stores and so decided to start playing magic more actively and that was right before Ravnica came out. So the one Ravnica came out, bought a bunch of cards and I've always loved gold sets and I really enjoyed how they broke this gold set up rather than the invasion style of as many colors as you can possibly jam into the deck. This was very
00:04:02
Speaker
very focused. We're going to run all five colors. It's going to be all 10 color pairs, but you're not going to be looking to jam them all together. And then shortly after that is when I actually left the game for the longest gap, not coming back until Gatecrash, in fact. That's a really great sort of teaser, as we call it, in the industry of what's to come. Or foreshadowing in the writing community.
00:04:29
Speaker
Well, before that, we want to give our listeners sort of an introduction to Ravnica. It's almost like I will hopefully be a tour guide for the city of Milwaukee. I want us to share, you know, sort of the ground plan of Ravnica. Where are the best bars? What should we be looking out for? What's happened here? What is its thing?
00:04:51
Speaker
Well, the most identifiable thing, the thing that everyone will talk about, and the thing that was literally on the box for the first set, are the guilds. It is a world of 10 two-colour pairs. Each guild, not only does it just encompass the two-colour pairs, there have been plenty of cards that were two-colour gold cards before, and all the gold sets, and even non-gold sets, but the thing about the guilds
00:05:20
Speaker
was that it was a very specific melding of these two colors, building a single philosophy out of the combination of those two colors, and then having that identity run through all of the cards that fit.
00:05:33
Speaker
that killed right absolutely and and so the reason that these guilds all exist is this is a city plane it's a huge city that covers the entirety of this plane there are still wilds that's where we talk about the red green guild the gruel they tend to live out in the you know more of the rubble belt is what it's called a certain regions of that um there are still green areas and all that but this is a giant
00:06:01
Speaker
urban plain that has broken up into 10 different guild sections basically. That's part of how they shape the identity of these colors differently from how they would be in different situations. You look because it's a city plain, the wilds are in very specific places and because you're doing all 10 pairs, you've got four different guilds that encompass green.
00:06:28
Speaker
Green is the color of the wild is generally the color of wildlife and trees and vegetation. And so you have four different takes on that from the parks and more curated and manicured portion with the Selesnya to the wild and crumbling part with the gruel.
00:06:50
Speaker
And as you can imagine, these are 10 different factions that are highly differently aligned. There's even less crossover than there were with the wedges or with the shards of Alara. And so each of these groups has very different aims and very different goals, and so they're all in conflict all the time. And they exist within a different niche in the city environment.
00:07:13
Speaker
right so yeah you've got the for instance the azorius are the law mages they are specifically in charge of rules and laws and they're the blue white faction then you have the simic which are the bio-mancers they take you know genetic material and change it they're blue green the rack dose are the entertainment the riot slash entertainment carnival
00:07:38
Speaker
junkies. I still haven't really figured them out yet. We got to talk about them on a later episode. The Boros function as the police force and the military, the red-white guilds. So there's all these different pieces of the Ravnican society that are accomplished by these different guilds, but they all have ways that they run up against each other, which is where we get to the idea of the guild pact.
The Guild Pact and its Evolution
00:08:02
Speaker
And the guild pact was the central founding law of Ravnican society, and that was this law that was put in by Azor, who we found out later is a Sphinx planeswalker. What he didn't really plan for is that these guilds would eventually be undermined and would eventually find a way to break
00:08:26
Speaker
the guild pact which we saw in the first Ravnica block. The first Ravnica block was the dissolution of the guild pact and so all of the laws that bound civil society evaporated. And then as you're talking about the return to Ravnica, return to Ravnica set is where we started to see how planeswalkers
00:08:45
Speaker
worked into here a little bit more. Jace happened to be in that storyline. Gideon was involved in that storyline somewhat. Ral Zarek, who we're gonna talk about in a minute, was involved in this. The Return to Ravnica stories are not great. I just read them over vacation. The way this all ends up is Jace wins a contest and becomes the living embodiment of the Guild Pact, and so therefore he becomes the human...
00:09:09
Speaker
personification of law on Ravnica and has to meet out justice and the head of bureaucrat. Yeah, that's better. Yeah, that's much better. It sounds like the worst job ever.
00:09:20
Speaker
It really does. So now this is where we've gotten to in the Ravnica story is the guilds are finally back in balance. Law magic is back, you know, helping keep the borders of the guilds intact and keep civil society there. But we also are getting to the point where our favorite dragon planeswalker, Nicol Bolas' plans are taking him to Ravnica. So do you want to sort of profile what we know about guilds of Ravnica coming in?
00:09:48
Speaker
What I do know about it is we're getting two large sets just like we had with RTR, just like we had with Return to Ravnica at Gatecrash. We're getting two large sets that each have the five guilds, giving us a total of all ten across the two sets. There is a third set that is going to follow up as the bolus set. I think the comparison was made, or maybe I made it in my own head, to how Hour of Devastation was the bolus set with just a little bit of
00:10:17
Speaker
of Egyptian where Amonkhet was Egypt with just a little bit of bolus. I think we're gonna get two Ravnica sets that are very much Ravnica with maybe a hint of bolus and then a bolus set with just a little Ravnica in the background. So we are going to see something happen where the planeswalkers that we've seen recently are going to have to face off against bolus somehow. What that means we're not sure yet.
00:10:46
Speaker
especially Jace, because ostensibly it's his home territory.
00:10:49
Speaker
It's not where he's from, but being the Living Guild Pact, it's certainly where he works now. Right. Well, and that kind of brings up a point that we were talking about off air, Alex, is this is, for a lot of people, this is sort of a return to their home in magic, right? I mean, this is, we had Dominaria, which is really, I mean, where magic started. That's the plane where magic started.
00:11:16
Speaker
You know, so we got to see all these old callbacks to things from previous Dominarian sets. But for a lot of people who joined Magic in the modern day, this is... Ravnica is where things have come back to, you know, the most. I mean, this is going to be the only set, the only plane that we've returned to for the third time of our, you know, expansion sets, as it were.
00:11:41
Speaker
Ravnica is on a lot of people's minds and is in the conversation quite frequently even when we aren't on Ravnica. Right, and I mean even the main planeswalkers that we see
00:11:53
Speaker
Outside of the Gatewatch 5, a lot of them come from Ravnica. We have Vraska, the black-green Gorgon, who is from the Golgari guild. We have Ral Zarek, who we're going to talk about in a minute, of the Izzet guild. We have Domri Rod, who's of the Gruul. There's a fair amount of stuff going on involving Ravnica that just stretches out, like you said, across the multiverse. Ravnica really is taking on that significance.
00:12:21
Speaker
But we'll kind of see about the whole center of the universe thing. I'm going to hazard a guess based on no evidence, just my own intuition, that Wizards is going to kind of step away from that whole concept.
Narrative Speculation on Ravnica's Return
00:12:34
Speaker
That was fairly integral to the time spiral block, that Dominari was sort of a center pillar of the multiverse, and so all of the great number of Apokolai that happened on that plane threatened
00:12:48
Speaker
everything because if that plane collapses the multiverse loses this pillar and it could collapse itself. I suspect that they're going to step away from that simply because you can make these big gigantic things and that apocalyptic stories converse are very hard to make have impact because we know that
00:13:12
Speaker
cynically in the back of our heads that next year, after this storyline is resolved, wizard still needs to sell booster packs. Right. So somehow the multiverse is not going to be destroyed. But when you can threaten a specific when you threaten a single world or a single person or a group, you can build those stakes because they can die individually, we have seen individuals die. We have seen worlds be devastated, even if not necessarily destroyed among worlds that we know and love.
00:13:42
Speaker
But some worlds have been destroyed in the story, too. But from a story standpoint, I think the idea is definitely valid. Ravnica has sort of become a central location in the story. It is a world that Wizards is definitely willing to go back to. It is a world that the community loves, and it's a world that I think they want to sort of exist in the background, even when we're not there.
00:14:12
Speaker
I think it is that sense of preciousness both to Wizards as a storytelling location and to the community as a playing location as well as a storytelling location that makes it that even if it's not mechanically, and I agree with you, I highly doubt that they would hinge. I highly doubt they'd pull in other apocalypse in this next three series and other invasion cycle that would just be a little bit too on the nose.
00:14:41
Speaker
But I do think it is that preciousness that we all feel, that we all put in Ravnica, that sort of makes it that de facto, that de facto modern home, you know? Dominaria is, you know, for, I guess to use my own personal experience as a thing here, Dominaria is my Milwaukee, but Minneapolis is my Ravnica, if that makes sense. You know? I think that makes perfect sense.
00:15:06
Speaker
Well, so with that in mind, it is this place that we have a lot invested in. We have a lot of storylines that lead us here. We should be looking at what things people need to look for coming up in the stories, in the cards, in the flavor text, in the art, as we return to Return to Ravnica. The first and foremost thing, the obvious one, we talked
00:15:29
Speaker
a bit about it before, and you're going to hear about it immensely, especially once Hobbs gets back on the cast, I'm sure, is we need to wrap up the bolus plot. The variety of bolus plots that have stretched across, I mean, in universe, like, what, 20,000 years? And out of universe, almost 20?
00:15:49
Speaker
That all needs to start wrapping up. Bolas being the big baddie standing behind the curtain of every major event in the multiverse, cackling and wringing his hands, has kind of needed to come to an end. There were several very large threats that he was in the shadows laughing about, wasn't he? He had, if nothing else, feelers to assess the situation for both the Eldrazi and the Phyrexians, and those are the three big threats lately.
00:16:19
Speaker
Evan Bolas, Phyrexians, Eldrazi. Amonkhet and the Eternals, the blue zombie army he has. He's got Tezzeret skulking around, stealing things like the planar portal from Kaladesh, and now the immortal sun from Ixalan. And he got the infinite consortium around somewhere doing something maybe still, might be existing. I mean, that may have been an early
00:16:50
Speaker
information gathering apparatus that he doesn't need anymore. But that was going on in the in the background. What during RTR? They're dubiously canon now and those novels. And so who cares? Bolas was also involved in possibly involved in sundering Alara into its four in five shards. And then he's going to steal all the power of the maelstrom when they reunited. God.
00:17:18
Speaker
Just all sorts of stuff that he just had going on. I'm going to move us off of Bola's plots because we could go down a rabbit hole forever with this. One of the other big storylines that we got recently, Jason Vraska. Will they or won't they? The classic love story between a boy and a snake lady. Oh my God. I will tell you story wise, plot wise, this is what I am most excited for this new Ravnica sets for.
Character Dynamics: Jace and Vraska
00:17:43
Speaker
Because like many people, not a fan of Jace.
00:17:47
Speaker
Before the Ixalan story, he was aloof, I think, as I could call him arrogant, I could call him pompous, and I think those things are in there, but it's kind of, he felt distant as a character, and didn't really feel like a person that you could sympathize with, or maybe just didn't really feel like a person.
00:18:10
Speaker
But this plot in Ixalan, where he ended up there by accident, he was thrown there, lost his memory a second time, this time losing everything. Now he shows up on Ixalan and has to figure out who he is and all of this stuff and runs into Vraska. And that whole plot between the two of them actually made me care for Jace for the first time since I came back to the game and he was in stories that I was reading.
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I even thought, I mean, I didn't really know that much about Vraska and from reading previous stories, there wasn't a lot there about her either. I mean, not a lot to really cling on to, but they humanized her and really gave her
00:18:55
Speaker
not only depth as a character, but I think just the basic fundamental thing of she's she's not just a character with emotions. She's a character with a purpose with a goal. Yes. You know, we've seen her be angry and like bitter. We didn't know why and we didn't care therefore. And one of the things that I really like in the Wizards, I think is becoming
00:19:19
Speaker
Over the last few years, maybe more sensitive to isn't quite the right term, but they've done a better job with is to really build, as likable characters, people who have a color pie association that we would think of as villains. Vraska is black and green. Anyone with black in the color pie, by and large, classically a villain, and for a while, Magic did. Their villains were in the black color pie. Look at Yawgmoth. Look at Bolas. Look at the Phyrexians.
00:19:49
Speaker
Every so often they'd flip things on their head and have a white hero and a black villain like in Kamigawa, but they didn't have this richer tapestry of characters who were real people throughout the colors. And I think the Gatewatch helped to do that. Like Liliana was the last entry, but they really have helped to build those different colors, different personalities in those different colors. But Vraska is kind of another step in there where they can take this Gorgon
00:20:18
Speaker
who's black and green and make her a real person.
00:20:38
Speaker
Say I've read it over at least twice. I think there's no explicit description that you know Jace thought gosh, she's so darn pretty and raska thought gosh He's swell, you know, but there's there's enough hints that it seems like there's a romantic connection between the two of them we talked a little bit on previous episodes about how It's nice to have some of those expectations subverted. It's nice to have the platonic friendships, but I
00:21:06
Speaker
I kind of like that there's this unexpected relationship even in that, mostly because, I mean, the initial is because they're two completely different species and we wouldn't expect that. First also then Jace is kind of the hero of our stories and Vraska has been seen as a villain. Thirdly, Vraska tried to kill Jace once or twice.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And so the relationship between the two of them is there's hints of romantic, but even if there is no romantic relationship, or if there is a spark and it doesn't develop, there is a definite deep friendship between the two by the end. You have, and a big part of that comes from, Vraska is given something that she cares deeply about, and we see that, it's her crew. She is the captain of a ship.
00:21:59
Speaker
to going after going after an item, but also just being pirates to, you know, get by and do their thing. And she very much cares about that crew. She very much cares about that ship and the people on it. And Jace comes in and becomes a part of that. And he respects that. And he also starts to care about that thing. And that builds a connection between them and gives them the chance to become close and to become friends because
00:22:26
Speaker
He doesn't remember that she tried to kill him, and she noticed that he doesn't remember, and is kind of keeping him at arm's length for a little while, and eventually starts to warm up to him as she gets a better chance to know who he is. Because in their previous story arc on Ravnica,
00:22:42
Speaker
there really was no chance for the two of them to get to know each other as people. It is going to be interesting to see how this develops. And it's, it's cool too, because Jason, brassica have had a lot of very similar traumas in their lives in terms of emotional abuse. And so I think that makes them a really great fit to be around each other and be in each other's lives in one way or another.
00:23:07
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Then let's move on to the last big plot line that we should be seeing.
Project Lightning Bug and Planeswalkers
00:23:12
Speaker
And maybe we won't see this one. This has been a little more on the fringes in the storyline, but this is the Project Lightning Bug. For those of you that don't know, Project Lightning Bug was the research project started by the Izzet Guild, the blue-red-aligned wizard scientist experimenters to
00:23:33
Speaker
basically track planeswalkers. They don't know that they're tracking planeswalkers because most of them don't know planeswalkers exist, but they have noticed that there are these energy signatures coming in and out of Ravnica that they've noticed the living guild pack, Jace, has disappeared for long periods of time. And specifically the head of the Izzet guild, the, we think, Elder, possibly dragon, Niv-Mizzet. I see him come back with, as an Elder Dragon,
00:24:03
Speaker
Now I have a new thing I'm excited for. But we're foreshadowing the expectations part of this podcast. We'll need to get through this part so we can get to what we're foreshadowing. Niv Mizzet is the guild leader and he is a wise and curious and brilliant dragon. And he continually is like just thinking about all these things and has I think he has that capability of understanding the multiverse as a mortal.
00:24:33
Speaker
Well, and like any good mad scientist, if he sees something he doesn't understand, he has to poke at it. And I think that's where Project Lightning Bug came from. It's like, oh, what's this? We got to study it. Let's get some Tesla coils, which would be called something else because Tesla wasn't on that world. And maybe he's from, that's another podcast. The whole point of what I was trying to get at is Project Lightning Bug was them researching something they saw that they didn't understand, and especially as an energy source and magic, and that's what they researched being blue red.
00:25:03
Speaker
Of course it was super appealing for them to figure out what's going on.
00:25:19
Speaker
this idea that there might be beings more powerful than even he, but he can't figure out what they are, who they are, what they do. And he's got one right under his nose. And Ral suspects probably rightly that Niv would kill him in order to study him if he ever found out. Yes, which is why there wasn't a lot of the return to Ravnica storyline that I read. And I actually I think this was during Origins, but there was a very interesting conversation between Jace and Raltserik about
00:25:48
Speaker
Project Lightning bug. And while Rosarik was running it, he was trying to keep details from Nif misses. As you've said, you know, people, a lot of them don't basically know them, but don't understand the multiverse. They don't know about Planeswalkers. And that's pretty true across the multiverse. It's a very, very small number of people outside of the Planeswalkers themselves who understand this and know this.
00:26:16
Speaker
So with that, let's kind of pivot into our expectations versus hopes discussion.
Fans' Reception to Magic's Plane Returns
00:26:24
Speaker
And maybe they're not diametrically opposed, but we want to talk about how returns to planes in magic have treated vorthoses and melds in the past. You know, we're the people that
00:26:36
Speaker
especially look at the flavor and the mechanics of the world that sort of how it fits in with our expectations, with our understandings. Really, this is how we process it. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a Timmy Tammy, Johnny Jenny, or Spike, but they are a little less focused on the fit of coming back to a world as opposed to just how does it work
00:27:06
Speaker
You know, we try to look a little more at, you know, for Vorthos is it's the aesthetic for Mel's it's the gears, you know. And so how have these returns treated us or specifically you, Alex, you know, you said you came back to magic right as Return to Ravnica was happening. So can you talk to that a little bit? Yeah. And that was it wasn't a coincidence. I came back to magic because of Return to Ravnica.
00:27:34
Speaker
A friend of mine who I played with through high school and a little bit after was still keeping up with the game here and there. He bought cards. I don't know how active he was playing, but he bought cards. So when Ravnica returned to Ravnica came out, he told me about it and he tried to get me back in because he knew I loved the first Ravnica on that. Coincidentally is in wonderful cosmic coincidence was right around when I.
00:27:59
Speaker
had started therapy and had my social anxiety diagnosed. And so actually it was literally the launch day of Gatecrash. I walked into the local store that has become my regular store that I now live across the street from and bought a box of Gatecrash and I started playing Magic again. And that was because of Ravnica. And from a mill and actually really really forth though, the guild structure
00:28:27
Speaker
was a thing that was definitely brought back and definitely reinforced. There's forth those elements and there's male elements to that. The male elements are more in how the colors are structured, how the identity of the guilds remains mechanically similar. Wizards changed the mechanics, every guild got a new mechanic, but a lot of those worked similarly. The Selesnya still had a
00:28:54
Speaker
creature token centric mechanic. You have convoke and then you have populate. Both of them care about and interact with creature tokens in a very positive way. Then from a vorthal standpoint, I think they also did a good job of bringing the guilds back. Even though it was all new cards with a handful of exceptions, I don't really know of any reprints. I'm sure there were some, but
00:29:19
Speaker
The new cards were fit so well, you don't really need to look at that. I mean, see the Shocklands were a reprint, but the mechanics of the guilds and what they did and the flavor of them still fit very well. So I think for Ravnica, at least looking at the guilds, and that's kind of the central pillar of Ravnica, those two audiences, we were treated very well.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean there's it's so nice to have that that feeling of The feeling of coming home the feeling of you know this place and it was so good to you the first time And now it's somehow even better. I mean, you know you get that nostalgia element, but then you get the the extra stuff. I mean I think about
00:30:12
Speaker
You know, when I've gone home to visit my parents in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, that, you know, there are times where I go back to a place where I used to hang out all the time and it's been raised to the ground. And I'm just like, huh?
00:30:28
Speaker
Well that that's odd and it's not like oh you know it was this old junky diner that I used to hang out at and now there's a super cool hip new arcade place there it's just a empty lot and it's that doesn't feel good and so there I know there have been those sets where it's felt like that too and this gets a little I guess into
00:30:51
Speaker
some of the Mel territory for in terms of play I know a lot of people hated the battle for Zendikar block and that loved Zendikar because it felt so removed from what Zendikar was about and I think too that you know while I wasn't around to experience the first Zendikar story as it was happening having read Zendikar story and then comparing it to B of Z
00:31:17
Speaker
It it is, you know, it's just war. I mean, it's not zendikar exploration D&D land. It's just war with the Eldrazi And I believe Mark Rosewater talked about that a little bit because he does his state of design every year And we talked about returning to zendikar He said one of their one of the mistakes maybe one of the things that made it not as as exciting and as successful as it could have been Was that it didn't?
00:31:48
Speaker
successfully replicate the feel of Zendikar, the first two sets that had the Adventure World. It much more replicated the third set that had the Eldrazi destroying everything.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I wanna insert a little bit here from Hobbs. While he's not on the show, he did do a little bit of homework prior to the cast and left us with some notes. Hobbs says, quote, the biggest thing I was gonna talk about was expectations for the story for returning to Innistrad and how that did not pay off because of the Eldrazi. And so that's another part too. We got that continuation of the Eldrazi story even into the return to Innistrad block, you know, shadows over Innistrad. And I,
00:32:27
Speaker
have to disagree with Hobbs and I don't know if you I don't know which side you fall on this but I thought and again didn't play the original Innistrad but I really liked that we got the
00:32:40
Speaker
the gothic horror feel in the first set it felt like there was a replication of that and even a little bit of an addition because jace felt sort of like a noir detective sort of thing um the you know so we get again we get the it feels like home and there's something new on there too something added uh and then in set two it felt
00:33:06
Speaker
I did think it was a little bit, you know, sort of a M. Night Shyamalan twist situation with how the feel fully went, but I liked the idea they were going for where they went to a different flavor of horror, which is the... Cosmic horror. Right, cosmic horror, the sort of Call of Cthulhu type of... H.P. Lovecraft is the writer. It felt very Lovecraft. The quick sound bite of my opinion is both.
00:33:36
Speaker
which sounds super on the fence, but it's not, I swear. So let me explain. I had a few things going on within Astrad, but from the story standpoint, I liked the mystery. I liked how they set up the whole mystery noir investigation plot in the first set. And to be honest, I think the payoff in the second set would have been good if it hadn't happened immediately after the Eldrazi.
00:34:05
Speaker
Immediately after we returned to zendikar my my My problem with it is it kind of that was not just the super obvious answer to what is going on because Wizards really truly set up this is a big mystery and there's all this stuff going on and there's the clue tokens that have the different messages that Morgan mentioned one of our past episodes there's a
00:34:32
Speaker
all of these little pieces going on and all of it suggests that there's this thing going on. And because literally three months ago we saw the Eldrazi and we saw two of three Titans, everybody knew the third Titan was missing, that was the lowest hanging fruit. It was a fruit that had fallen off the tree and was sitting on the ground. And had they had a gap of years, two or three, that would have been cool because A, you'd have caught players who
00:35:02
Speaker
who were new and hadn't seen it, B, you'd have given the players who were around during the return to Zendikar block, you'd have given them two or three years worth of story and things to keep track of and remember, and coming back to speak, oh, well, I wonder if it's, and then it, and it also would give some space for the people who love the El Jazi. So that's kind of the long explanation for my thing with Innistrad.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think Maros talked about that in the past, you know, that not every card and not every set and not every story is going to be for everybody. That's not to say anything about like, that they shouldn't be responsible, you know, that they shouldn't be made responsibly. But yeah, you know, they design different things for different people. That I think that's really what being of orthos and being a male means to me in a lot of ways is just because the overarching thing doesn't mean anything to me doesn't matter.
00:35:59
Speaker
there still can be little gems and little elements that I just love. Absolutely. Well, I think that's a good point to sort of move into our discussion to about about kind of the real life element of this. Even though we don't have Hobbs, we do want to talk a little bit about what expectations in psychology and in our own personal lives has meant. And I think using a little bit here from from Hobbs and what he prepped is is a good
00:36:27
Speaker
Segue for us and that he had that sort of disappointment about the return to Innistrad But he loved the return to Mirrodin because he was expecting it was just gonna be artifacts and instead he was blown away by how the phyrexian influence had spread on the plane in scars of Mirrodin in the return to Mirrodin set and so I kind of want to talk about the spectrum of
00:36:51
Speaker
getting your hopes up and low expectations and kind of those two things, which seem very opposite ends of the spectrum.
Balancing Expectations: Magic and Life
00:36:59
Speaker
That's a thing that this have not spoken with you about, but I think could get kind of deep for a very, very long time. I ran with the philosophy of I don't want to get my hopes up.
00:37:14
Speaker
and to avoid disappointment in my life, doing everything, going back to like elementary school. And I honestly think that there's one thing against trying to protect yourself from disappointment because it can be painful, but that being your overriding goal, avoiding the pain of disappointment can be harmful itself. It prevents you from doing things. And that is something that happened to me, I think for a long time,
00:37:42
Speaker
I just didn't go out and do stuff that I really would have liked, that I really could have done, that I would have enjoyed. I turned down some things that I really regret turning down in retrospect because I didn't want to get my hopes up, because I didn't want to be disappointed, because these things don't happen to me. And now, years later, especially after therapy and many years of working on my anxiety, I'm doing things that I literally flat out thought impossible.
00:38:09
Speaker
I just knew for a fact that I couldn't go to a convention because I don't do those things despite how much I wanted to do it. So I think it's an understandable thing to do. And you want to protect yourself to some degree, but there is a level to which that becomes harmful.
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's kind of the crux of what expectation in a negative sense can be. I think too about one of the big things that we talked about in my teacher training, in my education program, where one of the big reasons why the education gap between races and even between genders is so stratified, why it stays the way it is,
00:39:01
Speaker
is because of teachers' low expectations for students of color. You can do a lot by just raising your expectations and saying, I expect everybody to be able to meet this. Not saying that every student can do it without a certain amount of help,
00:39:17
Speaker
but that every student can do it somehow. You know, you'll scaffold, you'll give extra resources to kids who need it, to kids who don't have somebody helping them study at home. Maybe you'll find a tutor for them or, you know, something like that. It's that holding somebody up to standards and for ourselves,
00:39:39
Speaker
you know that can be super important even even when you're in the throes of a deep depression there were days where i just had to adjust my expectations into scaffolded bits chunking it out so if on that normal day i should have like gone and cleaned up the apartment and washed the dishes and vacuumed and all that stuff but i barely felt like i could get out of bed well then i would say okay step one get out of bed
00:40:07
Speaker
I got out of bed, check, that was one step up. Okay, step two, shower and get dressed. Okay, I did it. And so you have that way of keeping your expectations high, even when things aren't going super well for yourself. Does that sort of make sense? Oh, that makes perfect sense. And I love that expression for it too, because that's how I started doing things after getting some treatment for my anxiety.
00:40:38
Speaker
That's how I'd go out and it wasn't now I'm going to go do a big thing. It was now I'm going to go take some small steps. That's why I started playing magic. It's not an exaggeration to say magic taught me how to socialize because of that. It gave me an environment where I could take some steps. Where I think that ties into is if you have low expectations coming into this for whatever reason, maybe you didn't like the return to Ravnica and that's fine. That's personal preference. That's okay.
00:41:05
Speaker
Maybe you just haven't liked some of the recent expansions or the recent returns. And so you're kind of bummed out and a little bit cynical about that. You know, that's also fine. But if you go in with these low expectations, assuming that the story is going to be bad, assuming that the play is going to be awful or something like that,
00:41:25
Speaker
Then you kind of get into the self-fulfilling prophecy where when they start spoiler season, when they start releasing these cards and showing everybody what's coming up, maybe what some of the new mechanics are or some of the returning mechanics, starting to drop the Ravnica stories.
00:41:43
Speaker
you're going to find the things that you don't like about it as opposed to having the openness to say, okay, here are the things that I like, but here are the things that I don't like about it and being able to be balanced and critical. And I think that's a difference between low expectations or negative expectations. And I don't know what I like to think of. And maybe this is an expression and maybe it's something I made up, but a suspending judgment. I need to, if, if,
00:42:12
Speaker
I'm not excited for the thing as a whole. I'm going to suspend my judgment then. Say, this thing hasn't come out. It's a little bit like the people who go on Goodreads or other review sites, like review products that haven't released yet. Pat Rothfuss has two books out, and he's taken a very long time to do the third book. But some people love his series so much, they've already rated it five stars on Goodreads. And it's like this book.
00:42:40
Speaker
We have nary a whisper of it for the last couple of years. We have no idea what it's going to be out. Why have you rated it five stars? You have no idea. And then, of course, people who rate it one star because they're all pissed off that he hasn't finished writing it yet. It's like, just stop it. Take a step back. Suspend your expectations. This has been my approach, and that's what I did with Innistrad. I suspended my expectations. I said, OK, I will wait for this thing to come out. I have no positive or negative expectations about it.
00:43:09
Speaker
wait for it to come out and let it hit me as it does, and then I will build my impression of the set at that point. So because I wasn't ready to just find all the things I didn't like and say, see, I knew I wouldn't enjoy this.
00:43:22
Speaker
set those aside and was able to find some things that I genuinely love in those sets. The other side of this is the optimism bias or overestimation and I just want to touch on that briefly too because that I think is what we see a little bit more of in a lot of ways especially with maybe newer players or maybe players who are a little bit less cynical have seen a little bit less of some of the mistakes that have been made and so they're a little more just like
00:43:50
Speaker
Bursting at the brim optimism bias specifically. I want to give I want to give the actual scientific definition of this it's the belief that the future will be much better than the past and present and Often it's unfounded often. It is just
00:44:06
Speaker
It's the devil you don't know as opposed to the devil you do. You know, the grass is always greener on the other side sort of thing. And that leads to a lot of the disappointment elements. And I think you and I are similar in that we often lowered expectations to try to soften the blow for us. But I do think that there were plenty of moments where I also have gotten
00:44:29
Speaker
up in my hopes, all of a sudden the thing that you think can't possibly let you down, sometimes it almost has to because your belief is so high in it. There's a story that I'll link to in an article that I'll put in the show notes, but it's about
00:44:45
Speaker
It's about a philosophy professor who told his students in his class about a time where he had prepared this beautiful meal for his wife's birthday and then she came home, said, I had a terrible day, walked right past the meal and went to bed. And he was mad. And he said, how dare she slap, you know, throw aside all the work and preparation I did.
00:45:11
Speaker
well he missed the point you know the point is it's her birthday she didn't live up to his expectations in that moment but that didn't matter those expectations were
00:45:23
Speaker
ridiculous because he didn't know where she was going to be coming from mentally in that moment, you know? And that kind of gets me to the point of our actionable advice section, you know, sort of our wrap up. The biggest thing about having avoiding unrealistic expectations is not assuming. Never assume is very similar to suspend your judgment. I mean, and it can be a lot of fun to build ideas and to build concepts like
00:45:50
Speaker
that whole playing with the unknown is a thing that people have done forever. Like we've done it basically going back as far as we can tell. And so that can be great, but it's a balance. It's a bouncing act. The big part of Aristotle's moral philosophy was that all things need to be in balance. And it's, I personally, that's where I pull a lot of my own. I believe that, but firmly that most things
00:46:19
Speaker
are not harmful in and of themselves, but too much, too little can be. And expectations are like that. It can be great to have some expectations, some hopes, perhaps, things that you want to see, things you want to see developed. But when you start depending your, you know, likes and emotional states and all sorts of other very important, significant things on whether these expectations are met or not, that's when you start to get into harm.
00:46:50
Speaker
I agree. The next tip on managing expectations is just simply taking stock of what's in front of you and enjoying it. I think the way that we can translate this for magic is take those elements that you do like and appreciate them. There is that ability to still be critical of something. I know recently a lot of people, including myself, have been critical of
00:47:15
Speaker
some of the things going on with magic story or some of the block structure changes that have really messed up how stories are coming out or how cards are coming out or how standard is functioning as a magic format and it's it's reasonable to be critical it's reasonable to say I don't like that
00:47:33
Speaker
But we can also look to some of those things that we do like about it. You know, maybe we can say, OK, this is keeping a format affordable for people, or it is getting us more variety of artists writing in stories or, you know, whatever those elements are. So it's just, again, having that balance, like you're saying, Alex, of here are the things I do appreciate, but here are the things that I really would like to see changed. It becomes a lot more practical in what your hopes are.
00:48:02
Speaker
And, and it also, it can be challenging and kind of a good challenge to look at those things and say, Well, overall, this wasn't successful, but what was good about it? Mark rosewater talks a lot about that and set design, I believe, Mark rosewater, I think he said that those were two of the questions on the second great designer search, I think it was the second one. Looking at what was successful about the comic owl block, something that was overall unsuccessful,
00:48:30
Speaker
And what were some weaknesses of, what did he list? I think it was Ravnica. Yeah, because that was such a successful block, you know, but dig in and what did it do wrong? What were some of the things that were, that they tried, but flopped that can help you, you grow your, your ability to understand and your, your ability to really dig into the things around you. If you can, if it builds some critical thinking skills, if you really look at something that you loved and say, I love this, but
00:49:01
Speaker
here is a weak point to it that can really help you build some of those skills that can be really helpful in all sorts of ways all over life. And it builds bridges between people too then because then you're acknowledging the validity of some of the things they like while still saying like, here's some ways that maybe you haven't thought of that could improve, then you're helping them grow in their appreciation for the thing they enjoy too. And then it can, and you're right, it can build some bridges too. If people who hold minority opinions,
00:49:30
Speaker
Someone says, I really didn't like Ravnica, and you're like, yeah, okay, so what didn't you like about it? Then you can start that conversation and say, well, I love the set.
00:49:38
Speaker
But here was this thing that really niggled at me. Here was this thing I think wasn't great. And I guess the last tip that we have too is just the key to wellbeing is not low expectations either. It's the ability to take negative outcomes and process them positively. You know, it's again, it's that looking for the silver lining of the cloud. You know, say this guilds of Ravnica block falls on its face and doesn't feel anything like Ravnica to us. Okay.
00:50:08
Speaker
There's still gonna be some elements of it that we like there's still gonna be some elements that we can take out of this and go forward There's never you said you mentioned Alex. You said I love that phrase Nothing's perfect. But the other thing too is nothing's perfectly good and nothing's perfectly bad You know, there is no black or white in our universe or in the multiverse for that matter There's shades of gray everywhere. Yeah, and there's also a
00:50:36
Speaker
very common expression. You hear a lot of successful people and other people will say you learn more from your failures than you learn from your successes, which often can be true. Your failures teach you not just how to not do things, but you can also learn the way things work from how what you did didn't work. Good Lord, did that make any sense?
00:50:59
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, I don't even know where to go from there. That is Snap's material. Yeah, I think right there we just smoothly call out the smooth transition we're going to take to the outro.
00:51:18
Speaker
That's our show. You can find us on Twitter at goblinlorepod. You can email any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com. Joe Redmond can be found on Twitter at Findhorn. That's F-Y-N-B Horn. Hobbs Q can be found at Hobbs Q. And Alex can be found at Alexander New M.
00:51:46
Speaker
The Goblin Lore podcast is part of the Geek Therapy Network, which you can find on Twitter at geektherapy or at geektherapy.org. Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.