Hello folks! I hope that your day is going safe and well in equal parts. Gotta keep yourself safe in these uncertain times!

Today I want to look at a major flavor foul that I have noticed in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, and why is could very well end our current edition of Magic. (It could evolve into another form of MTG though quite easily.

Now before I get into this issue article, please note a pair of things.

1. I almost never write issue articles. I didn't write one in 2019 for example, with 104 columns here at CoolStuffInc.com. There's not normally a reason to do so, as others are writing them already. The only time I write an issue article is when no one else is making a point (or making it well).

2. I'm very positive. One of my strengths is positivity (in StrengthsFinder, a personality test that gives you your five strengths, my #2 strength is positivity). Most issue articles are about negative things. This game gets enough negative press from its fans that I feel bad adding fuel to the fire. (That's not an analogy either. I will literally get a pang in my stomach when I let someone down or hurt them and I get the shakes). It's also one of the reasons why Top Ten articles tend to be about something awesome, not something sucky. It's not fake salesmanship meant to sell cards, but instead what I actually feel and look at when I see a card!

Thus, the following article comes from love, not from fear. I love you! I don't want you to mess it up.

In order to make my point today, I need to digress at the beginning. Don't worry, we'll take you to the promised land. I want to take a deep dive into a very successful game that Wizards of the Coast screwed up by doing the exact same thing they have begun with Ikoria. Interested? Great!

Let's begin with one of my true loves HeroScape!

In my top ten games of all time article I wrote for you a few years ago, I listed HeroScape as my 9th favorite game of all time! That's high praise from me! (Magic only hit #3 for me). HeroScape is just 6 spaces behind MTG. That's how awesome it is!

Debuting in 2004, this Hasbro game was amazing. It was designed as an entry point into wargaming for younger players. It emphasized flavor and simple mechanics over a more complex game. By simplifying a wargame down into the essential bits only, it created a perfect example of where "less is more". That "less is more" principle is why Heroclix (the simplest Clix game) is the best WizKids Games made too, by the by.

HeroScape came with a few great innovations. They had great sculpts for minis. Their core set had a giant amount of terrain that you could snap into place like legos quickly to make your own battlefield. And there were these simple mechanics that made it all work.

Underlying that was the world building of the game. This game was set on a far planet (called Valhalla) where a small number of super powerful Kyrie are add ons over these pools that can summon allies from various times and planets. It featured in the debut set these favor hits:

Syvarris - The sylvan elf archer

Airborne Elite - A group of parajumping WWII soldiers from the US.

Thorgrimm - A Viking Warrior

Agent Carr - A future spy

Mimring - A fire-breathing dragon

Marro Warriors - Farflung warriors from the planet Marr that could remake themselves after death

Deathwaker 9000 - Who wants a giant robot called a soulborg?

Grimnak - An orc-riding a dinosaur

As you can see, the game has this central core story built around these various races and worlds. As the game expanded, we got a bigger number of Soulborgs and Marro and humans like the Minutemen and Roman soldiers, ninjas, and samurai. The game was massively successful and sold in many stores around world the world from Wal-Mart to Toys R Us.

One of the things the game intentionally sought out to do was to distinguish itself from collectible gaming by having set pieces in each expansion. It had more than 40 expansions, another core boxed set on Marro, many more terrain pieces with special rules like snow, lava fields, and swamp water. It had giant monster sets.

This game was massively successful from a lot of angles! It added in roads and trees, bridges and more across expansions.

Under the Hasbro label, it had one misfire, Marvelscape:

Hasbro had purchased the rights to the Marvel universe for its properties and it wanted to get its value back. Fans had been making unofficial mods for various other IPs for forever and a day heading back to the game's earliest days. We had super heroes like Superman and Batman in fan worlds, characters from D&D, TV and Movie characters, and loads more!

In 2007 when this came out, Hasbro probably thought they had a big hit with MarvelScape. It's playing into what fans want! They want to have super heroes get added! They want Spider Man and Iron Man teaming up to face down an insidious dragon like Mimring. Who will win? But the problem is that the fans didn't put their pocketbooks where their mouths were. They didn't line up for it. Other things would sell out as soon as they hit the shelves. I still recall when the lava terrain hit and you had to go to like 8 toy stores before you could find one with them! It was rough! These sat on shelves for years.

Crossing the streams like this also hurt the brand. It was the lone bomb during Hasbro's run on the game. They would never make another IP mix like this again and continued to refocus on the world building they were doing.

Then in 2008 Hasbro gave the game to Wizards of the Coast, probably hoping they could propel the game into the stratosphere. The game had been a huge hit when they got it.

And then they mismanaged the brand so badly that it shuttered two years later. Why? What did they do?

Four major things.

1. Quality. The first is they dropped the quality of the product. They put out one new core set, but it had a very limited plastic run as well as a poorer quality material. They were clearly trying to cut costs.

2. Recasting. The second? They reprinted older miniatures with new names. As another cost cutting savings, they would repaint an old model as a new dork and give it a new set of statistics. Who was this appealing to? Collectors? Newer players? No one wanted this?

3. Reprinting Exclusives. My third issue with them was their mass reprinting of rare convention exclusives. Whoever was in charge thought it would be a great idea to print previous convention exclusives that you had to go to the convention to buy (or purchase online from someone who did). This massively hurt the brand.

4. Crossing the Streams. Finally, I saved the biggest for last. It seemed to be like they viewed HeroScape as more like marketing for D&D, so their sets and expansions are all set on D&D worlds like Forgotten Realms and Eberron. It overloaded the game with a massive number of D&D products.

Well, I bet you can guess what happened! Crossing the streams was bad, the lack of quality, reusing older figures, and reprinting what was supposed to be "exclusives" all hurt the brand so badly that a successful brand was destroyed by massive incompetence on the part of Wizards of the Coast.

Has Wizards done the same thing with Ikoria? Let's take a looksee!

Ikoria has debuted a Monster World inspired plane. Instead of the Horror World of Innistrad or the Faerie Tale world of Eldraine or the Adventure World of Zendikar, we have the Monster World of Ikoria. And when I use the world Monster I don't mean little babies like Frankenstein and Wolfman. Nope! Real monsters that can crush a city block in a step.

Now I love me some Godzilla. I own every Godzilla film on DVD. I also own most "big monster" films from King Kong to Gamera. Gotta catch 'em all! I love my cheesy Ultraman or the Spider Man Giant Robot that he uses to kill the bad guy aliens in the Japanese version of the character. (It's the best Spider Man ever!).

Anyway, I love this core trope and its central conceit. However, Wizards announced something else:

In addition to cards inspired by the major monsters, we are getting them in a pack near you. You can acquire Mothra, Supersonic Queen in the expensive promo-booster. Or just purchase her second hand.

Note that cards in her ilk remain legal, she isn't just a silver bordered joke like Sword of Dungeons and Dragons or Nerf War.

The problems this can lead to are obvious...

After Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and the famous Dungeons and Dragons with it, a number of fans began wondering about whether or not we'd see the two cross over? Would we see a Magic rules book in D&D that added in things like stats for Serra Angels and Shivan Dragons? Would we see D&D coming to a collectible card game near us?

Mark Rosewater addressed this issue in his weekly column and said that it would be bad for each IP to do so. Their world building was too specific to cross over. And since then, we've recently seen Magic in D&D with world books giving D&D resources for places like Ixalan and Ravnica. But nothing has crossed over the other way.

And you know what? Mark Rosewater was right! Imagine how well a Forgotten Realms themed Magic booster set would be! It would be awesome! You could have a legendary Drizzt Do'Urden and the legendary artifact The Crystal Shard, and loads more. Elminster as a Blue mage and a legendary land for Baldur's Gate and many more. You could have an aura called "Bhaalspawn" that represented the Baldur's Gate video game! And that's not all!

You could do a Grayhawk one and then a Krynn one with Dragonlances as equipment. You could dip deeply into D&D's creatures too. Imagine a Green Gelatinous Cube with the Ooze type or your Mind Flayer. A Black Beholder!

You could also make instants and sorceries that copy famous spells, such as a Red direct damage spell called "Magic Missile!" What about "Cure Light Wounds?" in White? You could also dip into famous magical items like Portable Hole and Gauntlets of Ogre Strength among others.

But the problem is obvious. Once you begin mixing your IPs, your world building is ruined. How do you do a Return to Kaladesh without adding in the D&D stuff? Do you want the latest Chandra novel set in the Forgotten Realms? I mean, sure a little fanboy inside each of us might cry out for it, but it would hurt.

I also think the sales would rise massively for the first set, and then drop massively moving forward. I don't see this is a sustainable model. It would sacrifice the future on the altar of today.

There are two times that I think would be a clarion call for the end of the game.

1. Crossing the streams and getting as much sales as possible from D&D.
2. Undoing the Reserve List and mass reprinting cards like Bayou and Mox Pearl.

I think either of those would give you a massive spike of sales but would ruin the brand at the cost of longer sales. If WOTC had, say, one year left on Magic after being told to wind it down from the powers that be at Hasbro, I could see one (or both) of these happening as they would push sales to the limit.

So here is my key question:

Is Ikoria's push for Godzilla themed cards Magic's Marvelscape? Does this place into the same crossing of streams of the above issue? I do consider it a big issue.

Bigger than that. Really big. Like H.P. Lovecraft's favorite adjective, "cyclopean" big! (By the by, cyclopean means vast in size, not "one-eyed,')

Is Mothra, Supersonic Queen too much of a cross over in normal play? Will it lead to countless more future iterations of other IPs mixing in? Are we going to see G.I. Joe White soldiers and Cobra Commander? Are we going to see Star Wars cards or DC Super Heroes? Is the next shield going to be Captain America's? How about the Lasso of Truth and the Ring of Green Lantern? Mjolnir? Are we seeing Innistrad cards next visit that are Wolf-Man and Dr. Frankenstein?

As you can see, I have some serious trepidation about where this will lead. How about yourself? Do you agree with my analysis or are you loving the Monster World and its Godzilla cards? Let me know!