- Joined
- Jul 30, 2017
It is pretty much confirmed that Spider-Man was going to be a small set like aftermath and assassin's creed. It was after those sets flopped harder than a lead balloon that they decided to make spidey a big set...While I'm doubtful that this set will be on the level of FF for draft, I'm getting an impression that it will nevertheless be a good format. There's a lot of interesting interactions between the color pairs and sub-themes that it looks like they're threading between some of the mechanics, which was the secret-sauce to FF's incredible color-balance and varied drafts. There's also just a lot of tell-tale marks here of the competent designers working on this one, whereas the spiderman set (for which no-one really seems to give a shit) has the same marks as all the in-universe sets: "what if we printed a bunch of cards that are effectively strict upgrades and do a bunch of random, incoherent shit?" "What if we made a bunch of cards that have blocks of texts stapled to them in order to do incredibly limited things, as if everyone just played arena?"
Which yeah, means a lot of rushed designs.
Amazon paid 250 mil for the license.Well clearly Wizards has more rights licensed than Amazon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon took the license that they did because they didn't want to make a LOTR property but figured it was better marketing if they stapled it onto whatever fantasy story they wanted to make. It's similar to how the Velma show wasn't supposed to be a Scooby Doo show but the studio wanted it to be linked to an existing IP, so they picked one they thought might somewhat fit.
Not for the show. Not for anything else. JUST the license and rights to the the name ALONE they paid $250 million. It's part of why Rings of Power is the current records holder for most expensive show ever made.
While sometimes companies will do title staples (I, robot is an infamous one - it was Its own thing until they realized they had rights to Asimov's property), again Amazon aggressively seeking out a deal woth Tolkien estates and paying that absurd amount for a tiny sliver of the whole thing proves this was not the case. They really wanted to corrupt LotR itself.
And yeah WOTC had the rights to the core books, but they clearly didn't have the rights to any other books as you don't see anything from those appearing in the game save where they intersect with the LOTR tale proper.