prismari/izzet/general UR post
so, don’t get me wrong, i love the izzet league and i like prismari, but, like pretty much always with this kind of things, there is a lot more to be explored in terms of the themes within the descriptions of these factions (though, quandrix may have suffered more in terms of its development and presentation) prismari feels focused on very surface-level interpretations of blue-red performers and artists and almost exclusively on dancing with an added touch of abstract fire/water swirls. yes, the writing aspect is more of a silverquill field, but a) silverquill’s writing is more about journalism and academic philosophy than about creative writing, and b) there are still visual arts, music, theatre, and they’re barely touched upon (i can only remember two cards that depict some of these themes in a way specific enough to work, zaffai and reinterpret) i mean, elemental tigers are cool, yes, but there’s gotta be room for deeper exploration. like, for example, red-blue conflict as method acting and creativity through intuiton versus thorough analysis and almost scientific approach to creative choices! what about paintings and music boxes that work like spell scrolls? maybe mixing of elements, like paints, could produce effects similar to ravnica weirds? there’s a lot of missed-out-on potential and it really bothers me also, it felt like in GRN izzet league flavour was either partially bailing on the whole “high-int low-wis scientist” angle or dumbing it down to “haha what safety electricity go bzzzzzttt” — again, don’t misunderstand me, i love that part of izzet too, but it was previously established that there are people in the guild that work with time-based phenomena and other kinds of reality-warping. if we already had coin-flipping in red and spell speed interactions, surely there was an opportunity to make a couple of cards that’d use ideas of quantum mechanics! even if it used technobabble (which the flavour for izzet already does anyway), it would be far more convincing from the ludonarrative standpoint than “we’re doing something that’s too hard to understand for the rest of you, but also it manifests itself in this convenient form of lightning yeet” we’re probably not going to see eldrazi magic for quite a while, so why not adapt some of the things from there (and yes, i’m ranting about this because i genuinely want UR factions to not just feel like, but be interesting, complicated and just neat overall)
