Thunder Junction, the first Magic the Gathering plane inspired by Western films, was “not a unique take on the genre” and “felt paper thin”, according to head designer Mark Rosewater. Reflecting on the past year’s Magic releases in his annual State of Design retrospective, he says “we were too on the nose with our tropes”.
Rosewater says that the MTG design team had been talking about making a Western-themed MTG set “for years”, and “many players were excited to finally go there”. This apparently manifested at the pre-release, with a high number of in-person players and online content creators dressing up in gunslinger costumes.
But he admits “most thought the set didn’t really deliver” on the premise. Although “the worldbuilding team did put a lot of work on aspects of the set that players didn’t get to learn about”, there were no ‘Planeswalker’s guide articles’ to let players know what was really going on in this MTG plane.
He acknowledges that some elements, like “no creatures being native to the plane”, seemed to contradict other facts, like the seemingly-native cactus people.
Rosewater doesn’t acknowledge feedback from critics and the community about how Thunder Junction engaged with the reality of European settlement in North America. As we noted in an article before Thunder Junction even hit the MTG release schedule, there is a fundamental tension between the real world atrocities committed by settlers, and the ways that Western genre media romanticises that era.
Rosewater says that “the number of the cards in the set that took a lighter tone” exacerbated the feeling that the plane didn’t make sense as a place, and gave the impression that the designers “didn’t care about the setting”.
Likewise, he says that “the set’s large number of legendary creatures from across the Multiverse”, who appeared without explanation, “contributed to the feeling of the set adding the Western aesthetic to pre-existing characters”. Rosewater stated on his personal blog in March: “Thunder Junction was designed first as a villains set, second as a Western genre set”.
The State of Design article looks back across a whole year from multiple perspectives, and Rosewater has plenty of positive things to say about Thunder Junction and the rest of the Magic release lineup. But sets failing to engage players with the worlds of Magic is a recurring theme, and two of the major lessons for the year are “we were too on the nose with our tropes” and “planes need to feel more engrained in the bigger picture”.
Got some Historic or Brawl MTG Arena decks on the go? Check out our guide to all the MTG Arena codes that still work to grab some free digital booster packs!