Let’s talk about Returning to Kamigawa

Sakashima the Imposter by rk post



Most of us don’t have fond memories of Kamigawa. This is a fact. Most of you who think it’s a cool plane and want a ‘Return to Kamigawa’ were never actually there to begin with. This isn’t me talking: This is something Maro himself has said. Sure, there’s plenty of things we liked about Kamigawa, but overall, the entire block failed on a lot of levels. I’m going to upset some people by saying that, but before we discuss anything else about Kamigawa, before we get into what should be changed or kept the same, before we discuss how a return could be successful, we’ve got to accept that the previous visit wasn’t.

I do want to go back. As bad as it was, it’s a rich world with a lot of unique ideas, and today, if you’re willing to listen to the rantings of an old goblin for far too long, I’m going to go through what of Kamigawa needs to change if it’s going to be successful in the future.



Americans Love Beef Teriyaki





Kamigawa has a rich and unique flavor, filled with its own rich elements based on Japanese mythology and culture. This would be great if people outside Japan had any understanding of actual Japanese culture. We don’t. I’m sure there’s a few of you out there that do, but on the whole, we have no idea. Did you know that authentic Japanese cuisine includes little to no red meat? Did you also know that my favorite Japanese dishes all involve beef? Kamigawa is the equivalent of going to a Japanese restaurant that doesn’t serve beef teriyaki. Sure, it’s probably more real, more right, more accurate… But when you said we were going out for Japanese, I was looking forward to my favorite food.

Now, a lot of you are going to argue that people are smart and that people will like it anyway, but hey, this is why Wizards does Market Research. People keep being surprised that Kamigwa’s flavor tested poorly, but there’s a lot of reasons why, and what it mostly comes down to is that the vast majority of players were more confused than enamored by a lot of what they saw.

Various parts of Kamigawa are better or worse about this. Sure, we’ve got Samurai and Ninja, and those are great, and there’s plenty of Demons, but the set itself is called Kamigawa, and the Kami are just plain weird. Of the three hundred fifty four creatures in Kamigawa block, one hundred seventy - nearly half- are spirits. For comparison, Battle for Zendikar block features about forty percent Eldrazi and everybody was sick of them by the second set. The Eldrazi, at least, were explicitly unknowable horrors from beyond the stars with strange forms. The Kami were just supposed to be an even half of the world, except nobody really knew what to make of them. Sure, they’re all some sort of spirit, but when you see a flower puking up smaller flowers or a hand attached to two stone bars and an eyeball, it stops being ‘the nature spirits are battling against the humanoids’ to ‘oh god, kill it with fire.’ The creatures might have been more authentic Japanese, sure, but they’re so ingrained in Japanese mythology that non-Japanese players just don’t recognize them.





For comparison, nobody ever complains about the humanoid races. People liked them, in my experience, as a change of pace from the usual ones without being too odd. Everyone can recognize a ratfolk or a foxfolk or a snakefolk. The Akki were considered a cool and interesting take on goblins. A lot of people didn’t get what a Soratami was, but that was less an issue of “Authentic Japanese Flavor” and more a “Magic trying its own thing.” Did it work? Meh. Do we all love Tamiyo? Yes.

So what’s the fix? Now that we’re a bajillion years later, we can have a world with the Kami at peace with the humans, and maybe take advantage of that to tone the Kami down a bit. Fewer in the set (not none, but fewer), and bring the art a bit more into reality. Inhuman forms are still good sometimes, and maybe keep the theme of smaller bits of their element floating around them, but forms and shapes need to be understandable. Looking at Kamigawa’s spirits I have no idea what’s going on in the art for a good half of them, and the other half I still need to strain to understand what this creature actually looks like.

There should also be a bit more of a push toward the Japanese themes that players understand… And while I hate to say it, that means making things more anime. Not with an art shift, of course, because that would be awful, but with some more of a focus on the martial artists. There are only seventeen monks in all of Kamigawa, and a mere EIGHT Ninja, as they only appear in Betrayers. Show of hands. How many of you want ‘Kamigawa Two: The Revenge’ because it has ninja? Keep ‘em up… That’s one… two… three… A lot. A lot of you wanted that. But there were only eight ninja. I’m not going to go too deep into what’s appropriate Japanese mythology and what isn’t, because all the Japanese mythology I know is from anime or the internet, but that’s going to be the same with most of the audience, which is my point.





(Also, I really want ‘Kamigawa Strikes Back’ to have a mythic cycle of a White Tiger, a Blue Dragon or Serpent, a Black Turtle, a Red Bird, and a green we’ll-figure-it-out-in-post. I know it leans more Chinese than Japanese, but it shows up in a whole mess of Japanese stuff anyway.)

Now, this isn’t all to say there shouldn’t be an aim toward actually respecting and understanding the lore. That’s important. What this is saying is that the ability of the average player to understand the material is more important, and player enjoyment of the set is going to be partially based on them seeing what they’re looking for in a set based on feudal Japan. And what players are looking for in a set based on feudal Japan is MORE THAN EIGHT NINJA.

When Everybody’s Super, Nobody Is





Once flavor is cleaned up to be more understandable to global audiences, it’s a question of mechanics, and the biggest one in Kamigawa is the biggest problem. Kamigawa is a “Legend” block, and has one hundred thirty four legends within it. That’s comparable to the number of Eldrazi in Battle for Zendikar. From an aesthetic standpoint, that makes their legends far less cool. I know plenty of people are just happy to have more options for Commander (which I believe came around at about the same time of Kamigawa block or shortly after,) but while we all remember the greats like Azami and Kiki-Jiki, nobody recalls Isao, Enlightened Bushi or Shimatsu the Bloodcloaked. Kamigawa is the only set since I’ve started playing where I’m not confident I could tell you roughly what any Legend does by name alone, and one of the few I couldn’t tell you most of the Legends without looking them up.

In any other set, being a Legend makes you suddenly cooler. In Kamigawa, it makes you boring.

Mechanically it’s an even bigger problem. See, when a set does something like “color matters” or “spirits matter” or “converted mana cost matters,” that’s just taking a tag that doesn’t get much love and encouraging you to build to care about it. This is great and where a lot of interesting decks come from. The problem with using Legendary as this tag is that it’s a drawback, and it’s a drawback that gets worse the more you use it in your deck. If you run a standard deck with four copies of a single legend, you’re likely to have it stuck in your hand sometimes, but not every game. If you run a deck with four copies each of five legends, then you’re expected to have one stuck in your hand most games. Thus, you need to run fewer of each copy, making a less consistent and less focused deck, which meant you couldn’t take advantage of any of the “Legendary Matters” benefits because you had to spread out into non-legends. There were only a few legends that really saw play, and most of them were Kodama of the North Tree because a 6/4 Trample Shroud for five mana doesn’t need you to have more than one to win the game. The dragon cycle was also popular, because “dies” triggers meant that playing a second copy wasn’t a problem.





On the flip side, Legendary matters is a really cool idea, Legends are still inherently cooler, and it’s an important part of Kamigawa’s flavor. So, what is the answer? Reduce it, but don’t cut it, and give it a unique flavor that isn’t just ‘play Legendary creatures.’ My personal suggestion is to move it to Black. Black is the color of self reliance, not getting along particularly well with others, and total individualism, and so it’d be flavorful in black and allow for a combination of “Legendary matters” and the ‘loner’ mechanic Black’s gotten a few of which rewards you for having exactly one creature. Of course, this answer would annoy a lot of Commander players, but it would change the feel from “every creature is legendary” to “Black (or maybe Black and Red) rely on Hero Combat while everyone else is using armies and groups.” It’d also benefit from the fact that Legends tend to be best in control decks where you only want one large creature out at a time anyway.

At the same time, you could use a different Legendary Matters mechanic in a different color. Perhaps Black encourages you to have one Legendary Creature win the game on its own, while White gives you a number of creatures with “If you control a Legendary Permanent, this creature gets ___” and meanwhile Blue has a triumphant return of Grandeur so that it can draw too many cards and pitch them to improve its legends. The big flaw in Legendary execution before was “look at all these legends” and a mere NINETEEN cards that actually rewarded you for playing any of the one hundred thirty four legendary permanents, with too many of them being purely defensive, and spread such that there wasn’t much to build for. For comparison, Tarkir block has twenty one cards that reward you for playing dragons and only forty five cards that can provide you with dragons. ‘Kamigawa and the Chamber of Secrets’ would need to seriously rework how it does its ‘legendary matters’ theme.





Spirits, Arcana, and Parasitism





In the history of Magic: the Gathering, there are few mechanics more parasitic than Splice onto Arcane. I have no problem with the Spirit subtype in great numbers from a mechanic standpoint, nor do I have a problem with “Whenever you cast a spirit” or anything that cares about spirits. Tribal cards are tribal cards. Spirits may have been a bit too large a tribe in Kamigawa, but if we got a world that was 49% Goblins, I would be doing the opposite of complaining. What Kamigawa really needed is the not-yet-invented and never-returning technology of ‘tribal’ because arcane is bad.

First off, the arcane tag on a spell means nothing. The ninety three arcane spells don’t have any unifying theme like “traps” or “curses,” they’re not mechanically similar, and they’re not not even thematically alike. Why is “Hideous laughter” arcane? “Wear away?” “Spiraling Embers?” It’s a do-nothing tag. What it wants to be is “Tribal - Spirit,” but that’s not a fix we’re getting. If spell subtypes types were normal, great, but they’re not, so arcane is weird and useless on its own.





Then there’s “whenever you cast a spirit or arcane spell” which is fine and sort of justifies arcane’s existence. It still clearly just wants to be “Tribal - spirit,” but it’s a decent mechanic that rewards you for playing arcane spells but works fine if you just hurl spirits everywhere. This is entirely okay because most worlds have spirits, and this is the sort of ability that could actually have great cross-block synergy if you put ‘Kamigawa: The Lost World’ next to Innistrad. The same goes for Soulshift, a spirit-only mechanic.

The problem is Splice onto Arcane. While there’s plenty of Arcane spells in Kamigawa, the fact that there are none outside of Kamigawa at all means this ability is viciously parasitic. It has no cross-block synergy and relies on a tag that feels incredibly arbitrary. It doesn’t help flavorfully, and it doesn’t actually work with the Spirit creature type. With blocks smaller now, there’d be even fewer arcane spells next time, and Splice onto Arcane would have an even harder time finding good spells to attach to.

Overall, I think neither the Arcane subtype nor the Splice mechanic should return.

Lightning Round

Each mechanic from Kamigawa deserves a look, so let’s look at them each one at a time, see what shouldn’t come back, what should come back in ‘Kamigawa Part II,’ and what should be saved for another step. Let’s go through them all!







Bushido should probably come back for ‘Kamigawa: Fury Road.’ It’s a simple, straightforward mechanic that makes blocking easier while also discouraging blocking, has a name tied to Kamigawa, and doesn’t need any work to play. You could run a deck fine with one Bushido creature or twenty. The biggest boon here is that it needs no support from other cards in the set. There’s no real reason to not put in a few cards with Bushido and plenty of reasons to.





Channel is probably my favorite mechanic in all of Kamigawa block. It’s straightforward, provides an alternate option for your creatures, and has huge amounts of design space. That said: I don’t believe it should return for ‘The Kamigawa Supremacy.’ Why? Because there’s nothing keeping Channel on Kamigawa. It could easily show up on almost any world, and while it is a good fit for spirits, it could also easily fit in Theros on Nyxborn, Innistrad on other Spirits, Zendikar on Elementals, or really anywhere. Hell, Ravnica already had a variant of it called “Bloodrush,” and it was great.





Epic was interesting, but it’s not something you can use more than once a game, not something you want to use in most games, and otherwise not worth repeating. I don’t begrudge its existence, but it’s not coming back.





Ninjutsu is what we’re all here for, isn’t it? It’s great, it’s cool, it’s interesting. It forces blocking, rewards going wide while encouraging you to have a few real heavy hitters that are ninja. It lets you bluff differently with attacks. It makes combat more interesting. It’s what we want, and it was sorely lacking last time. This is the prime mechanic that needs to come back for ‘Kamigawa: The Secret of the Ooze.’







Did you remember Offering? Did you remember what it does? Did you realize it already came back? It’s Emerge. Sure, there’s some differences. Offering was Instant speed while Emerge is not, but overall, Emerge is just an updated Offering.





Sweep may very well be the worst mechanic in the history of Magic: the Gathering. This might just be a question of balancing, but its only modes appear to be ‘win the game’ or ‘completely screw yourself over.’ It only made it onto four cards (what is it with Kamigawa and its barely-used mechanics?) and they all either win you the game or cost you the game. It’s possible that this mechanic could be used alongside landfall to turn the drawback into a benefit, but other than that, I apologize for telling you that this mechanic existed. You’d have been happier not knowing about it.





Flip cards were one of the coolest parts of Kamigawa and are never returning because we have Transform now, which is basically the same thing except with a template that looks much nicer. I would love to see Transform as a mechanic in ‘Rise of the Gawa of the Kami,’ used to show off heroic ascendancy instead of monstrous transmutations.





The unnamed mechanic that cared about how many cards were in your hand was a problem. It was unfun because it rewarded you for not doing things, it encouraged durdling, and a lot of it was binary on having seven cards or more, which just didn’t happen in any reasonable game. No card rewarded you enough to justify holding that much back. What’s worse, the hosers tended to be very strong. I’m not saying ‘Kamigawa 2 ½ ’ shouldn’t have any cards that care about hand size, just that they shouldn’t expect you to maintain a hand count of seven in order to function.





The last larger-than-usual mechanic in Kamigawa was tribal, but the thing about that is, everything’s got tribal these days. I love it, of course. I’m a huge fan of tribes, and have run such great decks as goblins, minotaurs, zombies, goblins, vampires, elves, goblins, merfolk, eldrazi, goblins, and goblins. That’s not me repeating myself; those are all separate decks. Kamigawa was heavy on the spirits, yes, but it also had strong support for snakes and samurai, plus a smidge of other creature-type-matters cards. The thing is, this isn’t a special thing anymore. Every set for years has had ‘some tribal’ and every set for years will have ‘some tribal.’ Some might have more than others, and they’ll all have different tribes, but while this was a relevant part of Kamigawa’s mechanical identity, nobody’s going to notice it as special in ‘Kamigawa 2: The Quickening.’

TL;DR

So, are we going back to Kamigawa? I don’t know, but the more people who want it the more likely we are to go back. Ultimately, if we do, it’s going to need a lot of changes. The flavor needs to be more in line with global perception of Japanese myth than actual Japanese myth, Legendary matters and spirits need to be toned back, and most of the mechanics can get thrown out the window. Bushido’s good, ninjitsu absolutely has to come back because why else do we even want ‘Kamigawa’s Bogus Journey,’ but none of the other mechanics need to come back in a return.

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‘Kamigawa 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

