u/aprickwithaplomb

One thing I really liked about Mermaid Mask is the contrast between the storytellers and how it plays on the expectations of how narrative ought to be.

Ostensibly, there should only be one writer on board. Wirman's occupation (and what we gather of his book) should lend himself in theory to purple prose description of the crime and its suspects. Instead, he's surprisingly to the point. He describes things altogether literally, doesn't meander, and is only cagey when he might incriminate himself. We learn that's consistent with his values as a storyteller - he prides his work on its tight arcs, probably carrying some measure of austerity from his time as a journalist. Even though he's got his nose in his books, he's actually quite observant of his fellow crew members, and that's reflected in the insightful way he describes them.

Then we meet Mariana. Her accounts are an exciting, slightly overstuffed adventure that goes from noir-detective to fireside horror to winking Pratchett-esque asides. She's a rumormonger, and part of that work involves making her own myth seem just a bit bigger than it is. She's perceptive, but she's more than willing to hide her own emotional insights when it comes to spinning a good yarn. And, of course, >!a proper fireside raconteur would never give away her own ending, even when she's figured it out.!<

Symmetry is such fun unexpected case, since you kind of expect the orphan magician shtick but the Shakespearean timber catches you off guard. As a performer and playwright, her work relies on currying that sense of mystery off vibesy scenecraft. She's probably got the deepest insight of all into the "essential character" of each of her crewmates, but in turn she's the least forthcoming with any of it, because you're the one that's supposed to be taking the card, remember?

Their approaches to storytelling form a trifecta: Wirman is all about structure and clarity, Mariana is all about twists and audience engagement, Sym is all about emotions and deeper archetypes.

There's this theme throughout the Mermaid Mask of the power of stories: >!how a fantasy ideal shapes the lives of those around them like it did for both Mortuga and the culprit. !<Each of these characters captures an aspect of that storytelling but doesn't quite grasp the whole, in some sense. It's all really delicious to pick apart. More importantly, it makes for really distinct voices in storytelling, which definitely elevated the fun of interviewing all of them. I found myself wanting to show all of them everything, which I definitely didn't do for, say Percival from Tangle.

tl;dr love some storytellers telling stories

Landcyclers have been consistently below the curve in draft, often being last pick fodder in previous sets. They tend to be just poor on rate - see something like [[Rabaroo Troop]] or [[Cloudbound Moogle]]- or are just big balls of stats that get chumped by tokens like [[Daggermaw Megalodon]]. There's often one or two that are occasionally playable - often the green one because it'll come with trample or some lifegain - but as a general rule my eyes have glazed over when seeing one of them pop up. They often don't interact with mechanics of the set in a meaningful way outside of maybe mattering for creature types.

MSH is the first time I think most of them have been hits rather than misses. Part of that is the generic cost on landcyclers. They can now enable more ambitious splashes because both the cost to cycle and the target you're cycling for are generic. In a set with middling fixing, that actually matters, and it's the boilerplate I hope they use going forward.

The other part is that the cards are just playable cards on rate that contribute to the archetype's strategy. [[A.I.M Scientists]] is a 4/4 for 4 that loots and enables draw-2 synergies. [[Borough Backup]] makes two Heroes that contribute to the go-wide strategy. The rest are middling - [[Kree Sentinel]] in particular really could have used some kind of ping or card advantage on ETB a la [[Kulrath Zealot]] - but at the very least they're costed semi-competitively.

I think in general, you should be excited to hold a landcycler, rather than treating it mostly as a bonus if you draw it on turn 6 and have nothing better to do. Hope that's the templating they go with going forward.

The uncommon Mystic Archives appear super frequently, due to the smaller pool size and the mandatory MA per pack, so it's a shame that the choices for the aggressive archetypes are so anemic. [[Duty Beyond Death]] and [[Requisition Raid]] are go-wide payoffs in a color that isn't actually going wide most of the time. [[Zombify]] is a reanimator payoff in a format with few targets to actually reanimate. [[Giant Growth]] is in the schools that aren't doing the cheap aggro thing. Why not have those valuable slots be cards actually relevant to the Repartee/Leaves-the-graveyard archetypes, like [[Auspicious Arrival]]?

Meanwhile, control has some of the best draw spells in recent limited with [[Deduce]] and [[Stock Up]], a bevy of interchangeable, efficient kill spells, and even some fixing on the list.

It's just frustrating I'm seeing a Zombify last pick when I really could have used another bread-and-butter common to shore up my middling RW aggro list.