Magic is bathed in nostalgia nowadays - both its own IP and others - but why does nobody ever talk about Alara?

Magic has been revisiting old planes for quite a while now. I've been to Ravnica more times than I've been to London and even Innistrad has almost outstayed its welcome by this point. But with Lorwyn just round the corner, and Neon Dynasty having the biggest planar glow-up in history just a few years ago, we're even starting to see settings that were never popular getting the "return" treatment.

Why does nobody ask for Alara, though? It's almost as old as Lorwyn and both are more recent than Kamigawa. Is it just that nobody really cared about it? I did a quick search for the 'Alara' on the Magictcg subreddit and the last time anybody made a thread about Alara specifically was six months ago. A couple of months before that, it came up in a Blogatog post (https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicTCG/comments/1joewpw/maro_ranks_the_likelihood_of_return_to_ikoria/) where Magic's head designer put Alara third out of four planes in terms of how likely we are to go back to them.

This is pretty damning. See, it's one thing to be disliked so much that you're all but ruled out of a return, but at least people talk about Capenna. The only thing worse than being talked about, as they say, is not being talked about, and that's Alara's fate. It's not that people don't like it, it's that nobody - even the game's head designer - cares about it either way.

It's unfortunate, I think. My own Magic story is closely entwined with Alara. I played very casually in school, and came back to the game in my early 20's when Alara block was still in standard. Indeed, my first ever standard deck was a budget version of classic Jund with one Broodmate Dragon and only a couple of the so-called "checklands." It wasn't the most recent set, though, since my first sanctioned event was a Zendikar release draft - meaning I never drafted Alara block except the few times it appeared as a flashback option on MTGO.

A lot of players I've spoken to have a reverence for the set before the one they started with, and for me, that's Alara. I played with a handful of cards, but even when modern came out, the block's lasting impact was fairly negligible, so Alara always been somewhat enigmatic. The fact that we've never gone back adds to that mystique, perversely.

But why is Alara so widely ignored? It wasn't a great set by most metrics, but certainly it wasn't a total disaster either. Is it just that three-colour sets are hard to do? Well, maybe, but Tarkir is talked about all the time, even before it got a return. Ikoria was a three-colour set, and that came first in the blog mentioned above. Maybe shards are harder to do than wedges, since Capenna was so poorly received? That seems unlikely to me, but I'm no game designer.

People in the reddit comments seemed to think that it's a story or lore issue. It's true that the story of Alara was fairly neatly wrapped-up. But then what? What is life like on unified Alara? You could argue that the conflux leaves a lot more questions than answers. Besides, as important as lore is to Magic as a product, it has always been wrapped around the game, not the other way around. Even if you consider Alara "finished," WOTC would find a way to bring it back if they thought there was enough of an audience for it.

And that's just it, I suppose: there isn't one. One of the reasons Kamigawa worked second time around is because everyone watches anime nowadays. Everyone knows something about Japanese culture. Alara just doesn't have any such hook.

Part of the problem is that you don't have to just design five factions for an Alara set, you essentially have to design five whole worlds. It's hard to do them all justice, and even in the original block, many of the shards were treading on familiar territory. Parts of Alara have obvious on-ramps, like Esper being all artifacts. Other parts are less easily parsed. How is Jund different from other scary jungles? What's the deal with Naya, just in general?

Alara's biggest flaw might be that it was trying to do too much. By attempting to tie multiple threads together, it made itself too diverse, too unfocused. While people joke about "hat sets" in modern Magic, Alara has the opposite problem. It's not the gothic horror world or the cowboy set, it's... the place that used to be split up and now isn't any more. Er, right, okay.

Mechanically, there's plenty to work with, at least. Alara brought us some very popular abilities, like Unearth and Exalted. A lot of stuff has been done better since, such as Discover being a "fixed" Cascade, and Naya's "power matters" being improved upon several times. I'm going to say that coloured artifacts were pretty much perfected, so that's 3-2 in the block's favour. Still, it's not a balance that makes people yearn for a comeback.

Do I have to admit that Alara's main appeal, even to me, is nostalgia? Then the trouble is, the overwhelming majority of Magic players don't share that nostalgia. It's nobody's favourite set, not even mine.

All in all, there's lots to like about Alara, but not much to love. It clearly didn't resonate with players. It doesn't have a specific thing to cling onto, no overarching trope to pull players back in. I love how diverse Alara was, how it felt like a real world as opposed to one big computer game biome, but clearly I'm in the minority. After all, this was just before the trend of every new set being the best-selling one of all time, back-to-back for years in a row. Born too soon to ride the wave of mainstream appeal; born too late to draw on nostalgia; born just in time to be overlooked and under-appreciated.