Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Is One Of Magic The Gathering's All-Time Greatest Sets

thegamer.com:

There’re a lot of contenders when it comes to the best-ever Magic The Gathering set. Some people think it's the Khans of Tarkir block, while others look back fondly on Time Spiral. Shards of Alara, the original Innistrad, and even Dominaria are all regularly thrown around in these kinds of conversations.

But we've definitely got a new challenger – Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Rising out of an underwhelming Standard format, this set takes a radical new approach to Magic's aesthetic and manages to spin it into something that people will be playing and loving for years to come.

RELATED: Everything You Need To Know About Magic The Gathering's Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty

Magic's never really done sci-fi before. It tried Steampunk with Kaladesh, and you could argue Mirrodin and New Phyrexia are metallic enough to qualify, but it's never done anything that's indisputably, definitively sci-fi. So when Wizards of the Coast announced Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, a cyberpunk set based in the Japanese-inspired world of Kamigawa, there were some concerns it wouldn't feel "Magic" enough. 'Magic is fantasy, damn it, and we should not be capitulating to those brought up on a sloppy diet of Star Wars and Black Mirror!'

And yet, Neon Dynasty nailed it. It's taken that Arthur C. Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and applied it to the entire set aesthetic. We have high-tech art like Saiba Trespasser, Network Disruptor, and Towashi Songshaper pressed up against more fantastic elements like Thundering Raiju, Geothermal Kami, March of Otherworldly Light. Neither feels like it crowds out the other. This is sci-fi, filtered through a fantasy lens in a way that calms the concerns that its technology would