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CardName: Mowu, desperately avoiding the obvious Cost: Type: Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Conversation None

Mowu, desperately avoiding the obvious
 
 
Updated on 22 Jul 2019 by Circeus

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2019-07-15 17:56:57: Circeus created and commented on the card Mowu, desperately avoiding the obvious

Such I just waded through MaRo's latest article, Constraints and Defaults. The key bit is The response to [Wrenn and Six and Mowu and Yanggu] was why could we break that rule while I was holding so firm to red being unable to destroy enchantments, something mono-red players have been asking for forever.

And then he wrotes 3K words without pointing out a painfully obvious detail: whether or not planeswalker can carry other people has no effect on card design; it affects story writing|

The "planeswalker can't carry others" means nothing to the cards available to any given color whatsoever. It has nothing to do with the design of magic, much less the color pie. Red not destroying enchantments, however does.

You don,t need to rehash an old article to say that, jesus.

Could have just written: "Planeswalkers can't what now"?

But to be fair, MaRo is a frustrated sit-com writer. Give him a chance to babble about the story side of things and he will :)

It is kinda interesting that's he's not able to see how breaking an internal rule is as disruptive to the segment of the audience that cares about mtg as a universe as breaking the colour pie is to those who care about the mechanical game itself, though.

It's also utterly irrelevant, because Mowu isn't organic material and so the whole topic is moot. But MaRo refuses to admit he's wrong about anything ever, so he wrote an extra 3k words trying to defend his claim that "it's okay for some people to travel with organic matter," when that literally never happened and we just want him to acknowledge that he fucked up once on a 5 second answer on his blog

Mowu isn't organic matter? Isn't he a dog?

Indeed; so is clothing. Oh dear.

...wait; I mean clothing is organic. Not clothing is a dog. That's even sillier imagery I didn't need for planeswalker's arrival.

I'm pretty sure for common sense that they let planeswalkers keep their clothes lmao...

But then again, if we're gonna deep-dive, and we're nerds, so yes we will; i suppose in the mtg multiverse what we know about quantum mechanics has never been stated, so technically speaking it's possible for something that we would consider organic to be inorganic (as far as i remember, clothing is inorganic, yes it's made from organic material, but it's all processed, and more than that im pretty sure the cells are dead. it doesn't grow or rot, meaning it's artificial in my books)

Also i've noticed that maro sometimes just makes shit up or is kind of contradictory instead of admitting he's wrong but again we only get to see so much what's behind the curtain... but yeah it does seem oddly.. convenient sometimes what he decides to answer with... or sometimes he skirts around the question entirely.... idk it's pretty annoying imo, but i hope i'm wrong, cause otherwise it's just kinda minorly shitty.

Also it's been specifically stated pwalkers can bring clothes and small items. so that's probably an inherent thing they are capable of, or perhaps (this is a bit speculative) they can use their will to bring things of that sort. I might've heard they can/cant bring food, but if they can it pretty much confirms the pure will theory. if they cant (which i remember them not being able to) then they cant transport organic material, but not clothes either because clothes are inorganic or it's a special case.

lmao maro worked on roseanne for 1 season that's like his entire bibliography but yeah he does write well which makes reading his constant stuff not a chore (and besides it's a chore if you dont want to and you dont need to so dont bother if u dont want to but if you do want to see that stuff he presents it well enough)

Yeah actually i liked the comparison between people caring about intense mechanical consistency and intense flavor consistency, but both gave good reasons why its important to break defaults.

I definitely didn't think this sucked when i saw it i was like oh cool a doggie, that was my camp for sure... but yeah i mean i just figure it's neat he can do that... then again it's not really fair to call it a default because it's absolutely comes off as a constraint to the audience, and i think it mostly is, i was reading his rhetorical questions and expected him to say Yes when asking himself (or the readers i guess lol) if it was a rule they could break, but he said no which just makes me feel like he just wrote all that to elaborately """prove""" he was right , but really just didn't have an important article (Which is fine) and didn't want to admit he was wrong (which aint fine)

then again maro is not the responsible party for creating this unique situation, so he's not at fault for anything expect throwing those who did under the bus.

I normally just accept story how it is cause I'm not super into reading stories or experiencing characters or any of that intimate delicate stuff as i am having a thorough knowledge of all events (down to the smallest detail)

i very rarely question motivation or most things, this especially didn't strike me as odd, it still doesnt thinking about it but i do agree magic presented the planeswalker rule as an absolute and should not have broken it..

if its a default, whatever... magic has been doing a shabby job of some aspects of planeswalkerness lately...

first of all lots of the cards have been so similar, boring and methodological...

secondly they suck at advertising, explaining, empathizing and making it stick/be important that players are basically planeswalkers in game.

this is just kind of tangenty

Mowu is a golem, not a dog

Living organisms die in the Blind Eternities if they're not protected by a spark. And a very important part of the Mending was nerfing the spark, which included being able to protect other people you could carry with you. That was an intentional choice they made, and MaRo's (utterly inane) claim that they let Yanggu do it because "it seemed fun" is literally no different than printing a green Lightning Bolt because "it seemed fun"

MaRo is 100% responsible for this, because he made up something on his blog that was wrong, and when we called him out on it, he doubled down

@dude1818 "That was an intentional choice they made, and MaRo's (utterly inane) claim that they let Yanggu do it because "it seemed fun" is literally no different than printing a green Lightning Bolt because "it seemed fun"" I might be missing your intention here, but hard colorshift for a green Lightning Bolt changes the play of the game- green decks now have access to the removal and face damage of bolt that those decks otherwise wouldn't have..That will affect every format the card could potentially be legal for. A story/lore break need only affect the character or characters in question and they become a unique exception that does not affect other rules of of the universe. Make any excuse (after all, this is Magic), and apply it. If Ravnica can have all angels being clones or altered clones of Razia and a gorgon population emerging after the species had one sole member left, Magic can paddle something out about why Yanggu can planeswalk Mowu.

I'm not saying MaRo needed to make the article in question, just that story alterations cannot really be compared game alterations because their consequences are different. Also, I am not necessarily in favor of Yanggu being able to bring an organic matter creature with him, but rather I'm just used to these retcons or deviations happening from experiences with other media. These deviations from what were once truths of the media do not invalidate the media's other engaging or enjoyable features.

It absolutely has as large an effect. By breaking the rules and allowing one person to bring an animal with them, there's now literally nothing stopping anyone else from bringing whatever they want with them. For example, literally the entire Bolas arc hinged on the fact that living material can't be transported through the BE, so throwing out that rule invalidates the last three years of the story.

Give Yanggu ome element of the story that makes the transportation just something Yanggu is capable of, a shared spark or somehow a sliver of the ability planeswalkers had before the mending, or maybe Mowu has an unawakened spark that is linked to Yanggu. The point being, as long as the ability is solely Yanggu's the story remains largely unaffected.

If one character can do it, then more characters will be able to discover how to do it too. If you print one color pie break, then that sets precedence for doing it again

Is Mowu a golem? Where did u hear that?

If so, chances are hes a kind that is fine to be in the blind eternities. Still doesnt justify why yanggu can bring him

I didnt mean to say that maro isnt responsible for being wrong or doubling down i meant he was not responsible for creating the character (to my knowledge lol)

I disagree that a green bolt is the same as a bad lore choice. I do this because in their established story they can break their own rules (they shouldnt and it hurts when they do especially when they give such a non-reason like maro did) and mechanically they have made their own rules but those still apply to real world logic and criticism so they cannot just say Thats how It Is and be done with it.

I think you believe that this is a bigger disaster than it is. I think it was wrong (my main issue wasnt that it was broken its that they did it poorly and still im not super sure they Should be allowe to break their rules) but as with sorrow i thibk it doesnt affect much. I think u disagree with that, and tahts where the main split is that makes it a worse mistake to you

You said that characters will try to find ways to do it but i dont believe that wizards will choose them to do that. If that ruins yer supenion of disbelef then i can only offer that there might not be any way to copy it.

I feel bad that u think it devalues everything but i dont see it as that because simply put yanggu probly wasnt active while bolas was in that planning stage and also one yanggu couldnr have done anythung close to bolas army, so even if bolas knew why would he care. A man and his dog cant hurt him and the boy cannot even move anythnf BUT the dog.

Also when they make a break they dont do it again, so its not the same unless u are worrying abou the WHY. Mechanically becausr they shouldnt and lorewise they dont hace an explanation wgich is bad writing except ive told u i beieve they dont need onee because there is nothing to learn from this or get from it so my sus of disbelief is ok and i hope urs is now too

Btw sorry for errors wroe this on phone and it took days for me to give in and do this becayse pc isnt workin

Mowu is basically a golem, yeah. That's in the War of the Spark novel. That makes it totally fine for Yanggu to travel with him

There's nothing stopping them from printing a green Bolt, other than it being really bad for the game. It's the exact same problem

Well no - printing "This planeswalker can break the flavour-rules" is bad for the novels/flavour. Printing a green bolt would be bad for the gameplay.

I think that's the disconnect here. Some people weight the flavour/novels as important; others as completely irrelevant.

Well, MaRo is also more involved with gameplay, too. With regards to storyline he shouldn't be considered an authority and probably is not aware of the minutiae that are used to explain/justify the exception.

He's answering the question from the more rough perspective of story "vision", because that's what he is concerned with. With the amount of times he gets something wrong storywise because he only remembers a preliminary version, it's no wonder he's missing this.

For the article this is also apparently the perspective he's acting from: Grand vision. And for the grand vision "unique abilities" are the dominant factor over exact explanations.

Yeah. The main problem is MaRo giving grand statements of purpose about things he knows nothing about

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