YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! you get the idea....

Hell. Effing. Yes.





no cussing please. family forums etc-jd

What? Oh no not Ravnica.......okay, that's me being FoS.

Absolutely love returning to Ravnica. Probably my favorite block ever.

Why is Ravnica block so beloved?

That's a good question. For me, I think it is because this was the block that was out for the time I worked at Cerebral Hobbies running FNMs and other Magic tournaments before the store went out of business. The guild theme seemed pretty popular as well with sets being dedicated to specific color combinations. Coming off the less well received Kamigawa block as well helped its popularity I think.

That a feudal japan-based set wasn't well received just makes me sad.

Kamigawa block had a TON going against it. A ton of legends with nearly unpronounceable and/or interchangeable names (quick: which snake legend is Shisato? Is Shisaku one of the ones from Saviors or did I make that one up?), underpowered or strictly limited mechanics (Bushido, Sweep, "wisdom", ninjutsu), flip cards (the worst possible way to show one card becoming something else -- levelers and the DFCs both blow them out of the water), an emphasis on flavor...

All of those things might have been forgivable, but Kamigawa's biggest crime was coming between the original Mirrodin block -- one of the most overpowered trio of sets since Urza's -- and Ravnica -- a multicolored block (Invasion was very popular, I'm told) filled with some much more viable mechanics (transmute and dredge mostly) and oh yeah by the way ten new dual lands. Kamigawa-Ravnica was the first standard environment that was designed to be more than just block decks mixed with core set staples, but Kamigawa was so overshadowed by Mirrodin during the previous standard and generally underpowered that it really had no chance.

As I've pointed out before, Innistrad has a lot in common with Kamigawa on a lot of superficial levels. But it also has about seven years of R&D maturation behind it -- including learning from the mistakes made during Kamigawa in the first place. Classic horror tropes are more generally resonant than feudal Japanese shinto (anime fans notwithstanding), the smaller set sizes reduces the amount of unplayable crap, and DFCs are so much cooler than flip cards that I almost wish they could go back and re-print the 20 flip cards as DFCs.

The short answer is, Ravnica marked the turning point of RD, where they started to show the Magic community that they had a plan for sets. It worked, and has continued to work since.

The Kamigawa sets had some good cards, but as previously mentioned it was greatly overshadowed in its Standard era by the previous block (Mirrodin) and its subsequent replacement (Ravnica).

I concur with the statements concerning set mechanics. Some stuff looked interesting, but just wasn't very strong in tournament play.

Holy crap... RTR has 274 cards?! The big sets haven't been cracking 250 lately...

I love it for its flavor. And outside of Planeswalkers/Prerelease/Release promos, it was the first part of collection that I collected. A page for all 10 guilds.

I still played standard then, and had some nice Ravinca/Kamigawa decks. Hard to not have a good deck when tops existed though.

But then again, I also loved Kamigawa. Those two blocks restarted the huge emphasis on flavor I think. Mostly because the first Mirrodin I thought was crap on flavor. Haha.

Duel Decks: Izzet vs. Golgari announced today (along with a near-guarantee that some form of Niv-Mizzet will be that deck's featured mythic).

It mentions the Golgari are now led by the lich-lord Jarad... I don't remember Jarad being a lich-lord when I was done reading the Dissension novel. :\

I think that is in reference to Jarad using Golgari magic to resurrect himself as an undead.

Probably. It's been a while since I've read them.

Yeah, he dies in what I think was a Rakdos attack and later his ex-wife is portrayed as thinking about their son spending time learning the ways of the Golgari even though, to her, the man is no longer the Jarad she fell in love with or something to that effect.