Sign in

MintyMichael

@mintymichael.bsky.social
150 followers 122 following 401 posts

Something extremely boring (currently rereading the Magic: The Gathering story and posting about it) Youtube: youtube.com/@3brosincofficial?si=yd…

PostsRepliesMedia
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The plot makes her out to be a little bit preachy which I don't love but it's not like other mtg characters aren't similar. Overall it's a fine but definitely skippable story, less relevant to the main overarching plot but also probably better than the actual bolas stuf in m19.
000
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
But the whole “victim of genocide” thing definitely has space to develop a character, she just kinda gets crowded out later on, ikoria was a good story for her if I'm remembering correctly. Even though it's set on ixalan all the vampires make it feel like Innistrad which is a little lame.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Vivien's design is relatively interesting, archer who summons creatures with her bow is kinda cool. Her backstory is…kinda hamfisted, they clearly wanted her to be more relevant than she was by giving her bolas as a direct antagonist. Of course I don't think her cares about her at all.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
They released a threepart story covering vivien reid, who was also introduced in m19 and is a new character. It's alright. They really pushed vivien reid around this time to try and replace nissa. I felt they should've brought back garruk but whatever.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
This sucks and I hate it. The only interesting thing about this story is minor references to how the multiverse works and origins of things older than ugin like the meditation realm. Anyway story sucks, moving on.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Bolas threatens to blow up the entire plane and then still just…leaves? It makes him seem pretty stupid, and when combined with the backstory turns him into a “he's powerful because he can wait longer than everyone else, his plans aren't actually that complicated and/or intelligent” character.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
However, instead of coming up with an interesting “oh they successfully convince him ugin is dead” or some other interesting ending, they just say “they bluff that he's gonna get trapped on ixalan” which is basically complete bullshit.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The second issue is the ending. Eventually, bolas shows up to make sure ugin is actually dead (spoilers, he's not). To put it bluntly, nicol bolas is one of the strongest single entities in mtg lore, so there's no way he gets washed by two teens and a single legendary creature from fate reforged.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The first major issue is that the story is completely irrelevant to the long-term plot because it all takes place long ago. Ugin isn't gonna get killed again, we know the elder dragon war isn't gonna have some wacky outcome, and nothing important is gonna happen on tarkir.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The backstory claims to be about nicol bolas but it's really about ugin, because nothing bolas does is surprising. He's evil, duh. There's some good counterplay between ugin and bolas being twins and the two main tarkir characters also being twins.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The ultimate result of this double flashback is that this story basically only serves to expand characters and retcon?. I'm not sure how accurate this is to the old story though, but it doesn't seem super terrible to add ugin into stuff (although they just kinda make him a “good guy” which is lame).
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Something is apparently “up” with ugin sleeping in his hedron canyon, and they eventually meet up with a jeskai guy who starts telling them ugin's backstory (which is essentially the war of the elder dragons from legends).
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Basically, the plot begins on tarkir in the aftermath of fate reforged, so like hundreds/thousands of years before the actual present plot. It follows two temur/atarka twins who are the grandchildren of yasova dragonclaw.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
The “chronicles of bolas” section released first and is explicitly labelled “core set 2019” so I'll be covering that one first. It's kinda sucky unfortunately. There are some good bits, but the overall story is ruined by a shitty ending.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
ALSO they have a whole spot in the archive dedicated to a novel brandon sanderson wrote for them. So 2018 seems to have a lot more stories than it actually did. Anyway on to m19.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Also complicating matters, they split up the m19 story into two sections, the main one which covers nicol bolas and ugin's backstory and a smaller threepart story covering vivien reid (a new monogreen planeswalker they were pushing to replace nissa at the time).
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
This means they also brought back the core set, with m19 which is the set after dominaria. From a story perspective though, this means that each set basically got it's own story block, instead of having a story stretch over two sets.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Something to note, 2018 was an interesting year, you may notice that there are a lot more “blocks” for stories than really any other year. There's a couple of different reasons for this, first they switched from doing 2 big sets and 2 small sets per year to doing 3 big sets and 1 core set.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Oh right I should read salems lot
020
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Certified tacomaster post
010
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Overall dominaria is a decent story, they mostly just set up stuff for war of the spark, which is fine because ultimately the character moments there are pretty good. The original characters are definitely quite good, and the overall worldbuilding is done pretty well considering it's retreading.
000
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Instead it's mostly actually about war and political dominance, so pretty standard. The cabal and demons are a fine villain, mtg usually has really good villains so they're on the lower end ranking-wise, but honestly they're just standard, a marvel movie would be glad to have them.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The actual plot is fine, nothing really interesting. I suppose there's an undercutting theme of revisionism being evil, but that's not really controversial and the story doesn't bother going in-depth into stuff like narrative competition and organizational honesty.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Jhoria is a good main character, she does a good job of pulling the focus away from the gatewatch, unsurprisingly since I'm pretty sure she was basically a main character for a chunk of time in the early/mid 2000s.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
In terms of side stories, they technically don't have any, but they focus enough on the original and non-planeswalker characters enough to give a wide range of the world, they don't really need to go in-depth because dominaria is literally the most covered plane, with many side stories from the past
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
It's clear they wanted to hit certain character moments for others, like chandra, liliana and teferi, but they're still pretty well written. Jace…is kinda written out of the story very quickly and it really sours the development they gave him in ixalan unfortunately.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The original characters are all very good. Particularly the angel mechanic Tiana (brief aside here, something I've noticed is that mtg has some really interesting angel characters, especially when they go into their pov)and slimefoot.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I'm not really sure if this was done well or not, since I didn't read the old stories and even now am only vaguely aware of their plots and characters. Overall the story is surprisingly good, but not as good as ixalan.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Starting in 2003 they stopped focusing entirely on dominaria, but until after time spiral block in 2007 it was still a major part of storylines.Thus 2018's dominaria represents a return to old mtg characters like jhoria, teferi, jodah and jaya ballard after nearly a decade of absence.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
...which she was working on around the same time as this story (2017-18ish). To make matters worse, dominaria is a very weird plane to cover. For the first decade of mtg it was basically the entirety of the setting. Other worlds existed, but the main storyline took place in and around dominaria.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Dominaria is a weird story for several different reasons. First off, it's written by a guest writer, Martha Wells, who at the time had written several different fantasy novels since the late 90s. Nowadays she's best known for writing the murderbot novellas...
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
@argonautgames.com HQ: "Who is that guy who really likes Croc? MintyMichael? Yeah go ahead and data-scrape his birthday and then release croc 2 remaster that day"
140
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
A blacksmith who has been hired to make electrical parts
020
Reposted by MintyMichael
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Different new wave bands have different styles of scifi associated with them. For example, Fallout is Talking Heads
141
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There's a lot more detail I could go into here, but honestly people should just read it for themselves, most of the characters are new so you don't need a ton of background to get the story and as I've said, it's really good. An excellent jumping off point if you don't want to start with origins.
001
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
...bolas’ plan should be somewhat obvious, basically trapping all the planeswalkers on ravnica and probably killing them all for some reason. Mtg story is always a little haphazard though so it wasn't impossible for it to be something really unexpected when war of the spark finally happened.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The teasers for the future are really good in this one, jace leads directly into the next set, dominaria, which is great although he didn't spend much time over there unfortunately. Kaldheim gets a throwaway reference and at this point...
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The merfolk could've been interesting I guess. They did end up with an issue with huatli because they clearly needed her to leave the plane, so they kinda pushed her character out of the dino empire which is kinda funny.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
...each other which is interesting, multiple endings are always fun to analyze. It seems they had no intention to actually let the vampires win, which makes sense. I would've liked the pirates to win but I understand that the dinos were the most popular, so they won the poll taken at that time.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Angrath is great and I wish we got to see him more, this is his introduction, he hasn't show up a ton since. I also really liked that they released alternative endings, it's infrequent that we get any “non-canon” media in mtg and it seems that some of these endings don't explicitly contradict...
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Most of the other characters are pretty good, huatli is…fine, I'm not a huge fan but she's not annoying. The pirates are all great and I wish there were more of them in the story. The vampires are weird in this setting but I'm not gonna get into that because it's more real-world related.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
...memories back they worked to make him a lot more outgoing and decisive, without completely removing some of the chudiness which still defines his character in comparison with others. They also gave him a technical power up and set up a return to vryn which apparently will never happen.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
He's both incredibly intelligent and really stupid, he doesn't take people seriously and really is kinda incompetent but things still always work out for him. Ixalan worked to give him some clear character development, no memory jace is actually like a normal person and even when he gets all his...
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
He was kinda cool back in 2007, but as the mtg playerbase moved away from exclusively the “male teenager/young adult” audience people got pretty tired of jace. To make matters worse, his character is essentially what we would call a chud (although this terminology was not common at the time).
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
In contrast, jace was the posterboy for the game, being one of the original 5 planewalkers and after being prominently featured in return to ravnica in 2012-2013. And actually, a good amount of people really loved to hate jace because of his excessive exposure.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Additionally, jace and vraska being relatively similar in power level canonically helps a lot with both power scaling and their conflict. Vraska at the time was a relatively interesting new planeswalker character with a well-done backstory and lots of potential.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Because jace and vraska have been together since 2018 it's a little difficult to explain how peak the enemies to lovers plot was. Up until ixalan vraska was essentially jace's number one opp. The jace vs vraska duel decks were extremely popular and the relevant online short story was pretty good.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
...impressive worldbuilding considering each character is essentially in the same area and moving towards the same goal. Additionally, the main storyline has some of the best character development I have read in a mtg story, especially one of the in-house web fiction ones.
100
MintyMichael @mintymichael.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Ixalan is a really incredible story and might be the best one they've done of the modern era. They manage to weave what would normally be “side stories” into the main story relatively seamlessly, with background on all the factions being given and...
100
Reposted by MintyMichael
Any Austin @anyaustin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
no im saying it did.
51976