Lorado is a Weird West set made by shadowcentaur. It's probably the best custom set I’ve ever seen.
Seeing it makes me want to be involved with it somehow, so here’s a review of it.
(Incidentally, my recent card posts have all been aimed at Lorado. Gonna make a masterpost when I regain access to MSE.)
Lorado looks really good. The art is great across the board, and has so much unity that you’d think it was assembled by an art director with a style guide.
Straight and Loaded, two of the new mechanics, are great. Reflex and Warband are pretty cool too, although not quite as inspiring.
Although I haven’t drafted the set, it feels like a good draft set. I can think of plenty of different ways a deck could take shape in this environment, and the process of assembling something from these cards looks like a lot of fun.
Almost every card is well-designed and balanced. Pick a random card from Lorado; it’s a design someone can be proud of.
The flavour is interesting and cohesive, making Lorado seem like a real plane. It feels both familiar and new, like a top-down set should.
The reprints in Lorado are well-chosen, and feel perfectly natural alongside the new cards.
This section should probably be called “the less good”, because none of this stuff is major. But I’ve got a naming convention to stick to. Gonna go into more detail about these than I did about the good points, because I figure they’re more useful to shadowcentaur.
Take these as polite suggestions, not complaints.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the native tribes in Lorado. I couldn’t tell you whether a random card belongs to the Hyastee, the Makade, or whichever other tribe. And without checking the guide, I couldn’t tell you what distinguishes the tribes from each other. I appreciate the effort to avoid “this is the red tribe, this is the blue tribe” but I think some on-the-nose explanatory flavour text saying “tribe X is Y” would make for a better set.
Some of the themes and mechanics in Lorado feel underdeveloped for Constructed. Inevitable to some extent for a Limited-focused design like this one, but I still think it’s a shame that there’s no gun that I’d want to play in Constructed, no real chance of a Standard livestock tribal deck, and so on.
Some of the coolest bits of Lorado’s setting don’t really show up in the cards. I was really hoping to see Vivian Alston and the soul-buying crossroads demons, but they’re both absent. Farajo’s actions in the story are unclear, none of the native spirit animal gods get cards, and even though cowboys on pegasi and the zombie bandits of the Pine Gulch gang show up in the art they don’t show up as cards.
On a related note, I think Ace Holden’s story consumes too much flavour text space. I applaud the decision to focus on a smaller story, but I think the set misses some of the benefits of that decision by overexplaining the small story.
The guide says that Lorado is a frontier, and that there are more densely populated areas elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s the way to go; Lorado as depicted in the cards feels like a standalone place. Between reading the set and reading the guide, I assumed that the “non-natives” were just a tribe with less respect for tradition, better technology, and a correspondingly higher population than the others.
I’m not sure about the uncommon dual lands. I don’t see much reason to punish greedy manabases, and I’m just generally not big on them design-wise.
A few of the things I was expecting to see in a Wild West set aren’t present. First and foremost, fighting. I really expected some kind of pistols-at-dawn fight card, but there isn’t one. Would’ve also expected a coin-flipping subtheme, though that might just be me.
I have exactly one real complaint about Lorado: the mythic slot is a real letdown. I’ll go through it card by card, so this section will be longer than it deserves to be.
Embodiment of Innovation is pretty random. Without looking at the design commentary or the guide, I would have no idea what it had to do with anything. My fix would be to make it legendary, rename it “The Horse Twins” and put something the flavour text of another card about how the Horse Twins represent innovation.
Empty Night is fine. Don’t know that it needs to be mythic, though.
Expedition Corps feels out of place. It’s not like the set has a big land-sacrifice theme. Ramunap Excavator felt a lot more fitting.
Farajo is very cool but I think he might be broken in Constructed. That -X ability is brutal, especially with enchantment-based removal.
I really don’t like Fort Redemption Ranger. He feels entirely un-white; white is supposed to be the worst colour at getting huge. And he’s the opposite of a renown lord because he works best with creatures that don’t have renown.
Gale Hannity and Gamble are solid.
Malastrix is terribly weak. She should really have haste, to keep her from being totally worthless against removal, and to give her something to do before you have mana for her ability.
I actually really like Roselyn and her viola. Music as a red theme needs more love.
I almost love Royal Flush. Thing is, I don’t think it should be black. The “sharing a colour” restriction kind of pigeonholes it in monoblack, and I see no reason not to let every colour in on the fun. It works flavourwise as an artifact, so why not make it a 1-mana artifact that’s all colours?
The Titans are my least favourite part of the set. The punny name on the red one is neat, but the 3-card cycle feels wrong and I don’t like the cards themselves. It’s galling to me that some of the biggest bombs in the set have nothing to do with the Wild West, American myth, or the set’s new mechanics. Plus the red one seems blue mechanically and the blue one seems generally unfun.
I really think the set could be better, particularly for Constructed, if you cut the Titans (or at least the green and blue ones), Fort Redemption Ranger, and maybe Expedition Corps. The space could be used for bomby cards that are integrated more closely into the set’s themes, like a really scary gun, a payoff for livestock in Standard, or a Vivian Alston card.
Huh. Not sure I like how long the negative bits got, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to make suggestions. In case anyone reading this forgot; the set is very very good.
Next post, I’ll go through Lorado and talk about some individual cards that aren’t mythic.
