Magic: The Gathering is about to return to the mythical plane of Kamigawa, inspired by real-life Japanese history and folklore, from colorful spirits to samurai warriors, roadside shrines and much more. However, though the original Kamigawa block is seen as a failure, the upcoming Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is poised to fix all that.
The original Kamigawa block is notorious for its low power levels, awkward mechanical identity and lack of resonance with players. Furthermore, it only had a handful of strong cards to its name. For years, Wizards didn’t want to touch the Kamigawa plane, but Neon Dynasty found a way to reboot this plane and appeal to modern players by using the cyberpunk aesthetic.
How Cyberpunk Erases MTG Kamigawa’s Baggage
At first glance, the cyberpunk genre seems like an odd, even immersion-breaking choice for the new Kamigawa block. Magic: The Gathering players are used to seeing robots and computers, but only in sets like the upcoming Unfinity, which has an outer space theme. Until recently, M:TG sets and lore never featured technology more advanced than 18th-century crossbows and horse-drawn wagons, but as the Kaladesh two-set block showed, advanced technology has a place in the game when circumstances allow it. If Magic can have steampunk vehicles and gadgets in Kaladesh, then the plane of Kamigawa can embrace cyberpunk.
In Neon Dynasty, 1,200 years have passed since the events of the original Kamigawa block’s events, which took place long before the game’s main events. Since then, the advancement of Kamigawa caught up to planes like Dominaria and Kaladesh and even surpassed them, creating the most technologically superior plane yet known. Lore-wise, this makes sense, and from a design standpoint, it was an opportunity to experiment radically and reinvent the plane for a modern audience. The original block’s many issues may have persisted if the new Kamigawa set borrowed the previous block’s design philosophy, and upping the cards’ power levels wouldn’t have been enough to fix that.
Wizards of the Coast rebooted the plane, wiping the slate almost clean and presenting a modern world where technology is at odds with tradition. This gives the set a simple, easy to understand theme, at the same time avoiding the obscure Kamigawa lore with which few players today would be familiar. It’s a new Kamigawa for new players, while veterans of the original block can still find something to appreciate. Dredging up an old, complex story would have been more trouble than it’s worth, and creating a radically new setting was a simple and appealing way to distance the new set from the original Kamigawa block’s lore.
How Cyberpunk Reinvented Kamigawa’s Gameplay
Just as Kamigawa’s history is safely distanced from the original, the gameplay was similarly rebooted to appeal to modern players. The original Kamigawa block was one of the first top-down sets, wherein the cards were designed to fit the lore and flavor rather than the other way around, However, the implementation was iffy at best. This resulted in “parasitic” gameplay where Kamigawa‘s cards only worked in the context of other Kamigawa cards, meaning the block blended poorly with other sets and blocks. Effects such as Arcane, Soulshift, Sweep, “Wisdom” and Offering are all gone in Neon Dynasty, replaced with more modern effectsthat work well with other sets.
Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty smartly provides broad gameplay themes and mechanics common to most sets, including an emphasis on artifacts, playing enchantments, attacking with a single creature, the use of +1/+1 counters and crewing Vehicles with creatures. All this gives Neon Dynasty unique gameplay and flavor, but most importantly, these effects can be found in any set. All sets have artifacts and creatures, for example, and many have +1/+1 counters and cards that implement enchantments.
This is the opposite of parasitic and, flavor-wise, the cyberpunk setting justifies this aggressive shift in Kamigawa’s mechanics. Crewing vehicles and making living Equipment cards wouldn’t have made sense in the original Kamigawa block, but with Neon Dynasty‘s interwoven gameplay and lore, it all makes perfect sense. Now, cybernetic ninjas can hop into anime-inspired giant robots to fight enchanted snake warriors, and it all ties together well with the “cyberpunk modernism vs nature” theme in the set. The old Kamigawa had no chance of returning, but this cyberpunk Kamigawa 2.0 is perfect for today’s players.
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