My native Pennsylvania is home to an institution called the Moravian Tile Works. Founded in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the works — which is, incidentally, still working to this day — was a response to the loss of crafting traditions with the advent of factory production, preserving older Pennsylvania Dutch methods of ceramic production. The founder of the tile works, Henry Chapman Mercer, also collected and preserved a wide range of pre-industrial tools in order that their history and use should not be lost.

This history might just be able to help us understand why there's a rebellion on Kaladesh.

This seems like something worth doing right now, on the eve of the Aether Revolt that gives the latest set its title, and yet I think that for at least some portion of players, the reason for discontent on Kaladesh still seems a little obscure. After all, the Consulate that rules the plane seems to have done a reasonably good job providing for people's needs, getting the Aether that's the lifeblood of the plane to the people, and hasn't maintained the kind of system of wholesale destruction and victimization that the Guilds on Ravnica still do. (How's that Living Guildpact thing working out, Jace old buddy?)

The driving force behind this, I think, might be best expressed on Consulate Crackdown, by Pia Nalaar (who tends, in stories and flavor text, to be the most articulate proponent of the revolt). Look at how Pia describes the crisis of the Inventor’s Fair: "The workshops are silent. Our creations have been seized. They have killed what made us alive." Life itself, in Pia's poetic description, IS the creations of Kaladesh's inventors, and the running of their workshops.

Pia and the Renegades? Hey, that's a good band name! Battle of the Bands AU, anyone? Fanfic authors get on that!

Anyway, this is something that I think would resonate with Henry Chapman Mercer. After all, his efforts emerged in part in response to the spread of manufacture, which he and others saw as not only resulting in lower-quality goods but also a lack of pride and satisfaction in the act of creation. This was a sentiment that spread throughout communities of artists during the Industrial Revolution, and Mercer's Tile Works was only one American result of a broad-reaching Arts and Crafts movement. Proponents like William Morris believed that production models had to return to an emphasis on beauty (which Kaladesh seems to have covered) and the pride of the individual crafter in work that they controlled (which Kaladesh has a bit more trouble with).

The Arts and Crafts movement, and related movements like Art Nouveau, led by crafters and writers like Morris and Mercer, alongside artists like the Slavic painter turned Parisian poster-maker Alphonse Mucha, or the radical designers, architects, and painters of the Vienna Secession, tried in various ways to return the work of the artisan crafter to a place of prominence in the world. Driving this was the belief that creation really SHOULD be something different from mere manufacture. Producing works without creative and economic control is, in this view, inherently deadening. You may have all the things you need at reasonable prices (though it's somewhat unclear that the seeming state-capitalist system the Consulate has in place really does manage to get everything to the people who need it) but the theft at the Inventor’s Fair and the broader context of Consulate control over what gets produced, when, by whom, means that your ability to actually create is curtailed in a way that the rebels on Kaladesh, and many artistic rebels here on Earth over the course of the last few centuries, see as unacceptable.

In this context I think it's a bit easier to see, perhaps, how Kaladesh's Renegades follow in a tradition of rebellion brought on not necessarily by material want, or at least not by material want alone, but by a deeper psychological and sociological need: the need for creative expression and self-actualization through craft. From that perspective, it might be easier to understand the motivations behind the Renegades, and even find more sympathy and support for their cause. And I think one might argue they've got a better chance of succeeding long-term than the Arts and Crafts movement did, for the simple fact that Kaladesh seems to have production technology roughly equivalent to contemporary 3D printing, which vastly expands the possibilities of what an individual can create while drastically lowering production and time costs, which of course William Morris didn't have to enable competition with factory goods.

But that might prompt one nagging doubt:

Is that really how WotC intended Kaladesh's rebellion to be read?

All I can say to that is:

Eh. Maybe?

There's a lot that doesn't quite matchup though — I wouldn't claim otherwise. The renegades are described in the Planeswalker's Guide to Kaladesh, for example, as people who "think that by enacting safety regulations and aether distribution quotas, the Consulate is infringing on their freedoms." Right, nothing like those nasty safety regulations to really cramp the entrepreneurial spirit. I'm sure the word "quota" is enough to make some readers shudder as well, but I can't claim to be particularly sympathetic.

Any of this stuff about the Arts and Crafts movement has to be understood in this context, one that at times runs radically counter to the claims I'm making. Some of this might be ascribed to the realities of politics: history is full of revolutionary movements, and for that matter simple shifts in who holds power, made up of coalitions of people with, at times, radically different visions for the world. Recent history is full of strange bedfellows, and certainly plenty of late 19th and early 20th century artists whose work emerged from the same industrial world had radically different positions. It's hard to imagine the Morris-devotees of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, who had very strong ideas about female virtue, getting along with outspoken anarchist Emma Goldman for example. Kaladesh's revolt, as the flavor text makes clear, has its share both of high minded rebels and petty thieves.

Realistically speaking, pulling off storytelling that has a complex philosophical stance on power, freedom, and creativity in this context has got to be pretty tough, and while there's absolutely moments in Magic's canon that I think reach these heights, it's probably notable that a lot of them also resulted in, well, Homelands and Fallen Empires. Those are sets produced more in a kind of auteur mode, or an arts and crafts mode if you want to put it that way, but it would be silly to claim they're more intrinsically artistically successful (by the standards we might judge a game) than Kaladesh because of that production, and it would be immensely, offensively presumptuous to claim that the people working on Magic now are somehow more alienated from what they're doing than Richard Garfield was.

This, then, isn't anything close to a definitive answer to whether the rebels on Kaladesh are justified. But it is a historical perspective, I think, that can shed some light on just what the big deal is with the control and mass production of the Consulate, and why that might have a real, meaningful psychological impact on the many crafters and artisans of Kaladesh. And I think it's something worth keeping in mind as you produce your own decklists during Kaladesh's release events and the many other games of Magic that will follow, particularly in the context of a series of recent bans designed to "diversify" Standard: just what are you creating with the decks you craft, and how much power do you have to put your personal stamp on the world of Kaladesh?