Thread by @EthanFleischer

I have a few thoughts on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty in general, and on Mechtitan Core in particular. I want to preface this by saying, I'm not Japanese and can't speak or read Japanese; my perspective is purely as an American who helped to design the set. 1/X #MTGNeon #WOTCstaff

The original Kamigawa block was a failure on a lot of levels, though it has always had its vocal proponents. Part of the problem lay in execution, both on the design and worldbuilding departments, part lay in a competitive format that was broken by Mirrodin block... 2/X

...and part lay in the audience. A lot of people were completely unfamiliar with the concepts evoked by the block, so the sets did not resonate with them. I've been a Magic designer for over ten years now, and for most of those years I opposed returning to Kamigawa. 3/X

I didn't think that we could responsibly build off what had been made before, because it was so inaccessible to so much of the audience, and I figured that if we changed things a lot, it would disappoint the fans who enjoyed the original Kamigawa block for what it was. 4/X

But the audience requests for more Kamigawa kept coming, and we kept knocking around potential angles for a a return in The Pit. Eventually, we got the go-ahead to design a new Japanese-themed set. We'd make the coolest thing we could come up with. 5/X

Once we had the concept nailed down, we could decide whether it fit into Kamigawa, in which case we would make the necessary adjustments to align it with the old sets' worldbuilding, or didn't, in which case it would become a new plane. 6/X

To make the set more accessible to a non-Japanese audience, we opted to let the Japanese people themselves do a lot of the heavy lifting. Japanese mass media has been tremendously influential, basically for as long as there's BEEN mass media! 7/X

Hokusai's woodblock prints took the art world by storm, and influenced modern art tremendously. 8/X

Kurosawa's films were a revelation in subjective, nonlinear storytelling. 9/X

But I can't tell the story of Japanese media's impact on world culture and do it any justice in a tweetstorm, so I'll try to reign it in and make it relevant. (You should totally watch Akira Kurosawa's films though, especially the ones starring Toshiro Mifune!) 10/X

During my lifetime (I was born in 1976), Japanese comics, animated films, and video games went from being a niche hobby for fans to being totally mainstream elements of American media consumption. 11/X

There were a few anime TV shows translated into poorly-dubbed English when I was a kid. To me, they were just more cartoons: Speed Racer, Voltron, Robotech. Sometimes producers stitched multiple Japanese shows together into one show to have enough episodes for syndication. 12/X

By the time I was in high school, I understood where these cartoons were coming from, and I was intrigued. I started attending a club at the local university where they showed anime every month. Sometimes it had subtitles, sometimes it just wasn't translated at all! 13/X

I was a fan, an anime fan! I discovered Hayao Miyazaki via a copy of a copy of a copy of a bootleg, fansubbed copy of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It blew my mind; clearly one of the best films I had ever seen. 14/X

As it became easy to watch anime on cable, and as Miyazaki's films were distributed by Disney, I drifted away from anime fandom. Maybe the chase was what excited me, maybe it was the exclusivity. I was probably just a hipster who liked anime before it was cool. 15/X

But I digress again, this time into personal biography. The point is that Japanese media has become tremendously more popular in America in the 20 years since the original Kamigawa block was released. We could use that to our advantage to connect with an audience. 16/X

By taking inspiration from Japanese media, particularly fantasy and science fiction, we could create a set that was more resonant to majority of the audience. 17/X

One of of the more alienating elements of the original Kamigawa block, the concept of Kami themselves, is much better understood outside of Japan nowadays, thanks to Miyazaki's masterful films My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. 18/X

The above is all just my subjective take. There were hundreds of people involved in making Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and they all brought their own influences to the table. While I was on the design team, I was particularly concerned with big themes and the set's mechanics... 19/X

...but I also became the advocate for Japanese film and anime references from 1950-1990, as a result of my background (above) and my voracious interest in film history. I designed several cards based on my earliest anime obsessions as a child. 20/X

The one I'm most proud of was based on Voltron, which was a show that combined episodes of Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV into a single series. 21/X

The two original Japanese series had a thematic link: each involved teams of pilots who combined their vehicles together into a giant robot who battled monsters in space. (Giant robots were a very popular topic in 1980's anime.) 22/X

I loved the show when I was a child. The first part followed these five characters who piloted robot lions that connected together to form the giant robot Voltron, namesake of two different Magic deck archetypes, the Auras and Equipment deck and the Urza land ramp deck. 23/X

I wanted to capture this idea of different robots combining into one, bigger robot, so I designed Mechtitan Core! Just a little something for those of us who were of the age to watch cartoons in the 80's. 24/X

It's not a highbrow reference, but I think it turned out to be a pretty cute card. Enjoy #MTGNeon! 25/25