I agree with you about Nissa, but couldn't disagree more with you about Sorin. He helped Ugin and Nahiri, he woke Ugin after the Hedron preserved/healed him.

He is a much more interesting character than Jace.

Check the reddit comments of any of her stories. No one likes her.

I think they just suck at making interesting green characters. They focus too much on the "muh nature" aspect of the color, and ignore the fact that there are green characteristics that do not require you to crap in the woods.

Play group I had in VA before moving to MD was pretty open-minded. We had a regular group of 5 and another 3 that would play with us from time to time as their individual schedules allowed. The way we worked it was the regular 5 voted on things such as non-legendary commanders, mulligans, etc., and generally were pretty fair about it.

We allowed Nephilim's as generals for the four color decks since they were the only options in those color pairings. We allowed a few other non-legendary creatures to be generals (can't remember who off the top of my head because they didn't seem to last long). We approved the use of a few other Planeswalkers as generals.

Given that WotC's data says Jace is the most popular walker while the vocal opinion of most online communities seems to range from apathy to hatred, I'm skeptical anytime I hear claims of "everyone hates him/her." The vocal group of entrenched MtG players does not actually represent the MtG community as a whole.

Honestly, how well a character is liked has more to do with art, flavor text and power level then it has to do their actual personality.

The thing about Jace is that most Magic players don't care about the story, so they basically liked him because he was the best card. The people who cared about the story disliked him for a long time, though now he is more popular, having IMO the best origin story.

Edit: Welcome to the forums, WillNova! Thanks for trying to bring this back on topic lol.

I was on a break during that set so I never saw it but White already does Anthem effects better for cheaper... Seriously what were they thinking? Such a niche ability it should have cost 2 or maybe 3 since it's still +2.

To be fair, these threads kind of always derail because they're usually easy to resolve. There are, for the most part, only so many cards that people want to HR as commanders, and most of the time it falls to the usual suspects (Nephilim, Genju, Elbrus, a 'walker or two). The answer is almost always "As long as your playgroup is cool with it," and the thread quickly disperses. That we've managed to evolve the discussion into this and carry it on this long is actually kind of impressive.

We're cool like that. As long as you aren't trying to do something like run a 4-color deck with Smokestack as the commander, it's probably going to be alright.

WillNova does bring up a good point about doing other house rules though. My group plays pretty close to the base rules as we can get, though we did change the mulligan up a little. Essentially you throw the cards you mulliganed back on the bottom of your library instead of shuffling them in, so it saves you a shuffle. Though we did have to enforce the regular partial paris in any game where Grenzo showed up, but so far he's the only one that's been a problem with it.
I refute that. Garruk has the best origin story, and if you're willing to dig up the comics on the clunky buggy nightmare world of the Mothership's article archive, its definitely worth a read. Dude had the guy who killed his father devoured by a wurm. It was metal. I will give that Jace has the best origin story in Origins, but that's not really saying much for the others.

But yeah, there's a difference between being a popular character and being a popular card. Chandra, for example, is a pretty popular character. They haven't abandoned her yet like they did with the other two out of the Lorwyn 5, and hell, they tried to base M14 all around her. But ask a bunch of players who don't read the novels, skip all the cutscenes in DotP, and scroll to the bottom of Uncharted Realms just to see the spoiler card, and their opinion will probably vary from indifference to dislike, because she's never been a particularly powerful or influential card.

Sure, Nissa's a popular card now, because she's halfway decent. But watch her get a Liliana of the Dark Realms treatment and you'll see interest wane pretty quickly. Concerning the character, just about everyone at the LGS I work at, from our 30-something regular drafters to the random walk-in customers to our 15-and-under standard crowd, from our die-hard Spikes to our fervent lore-junkies, has either expressed a dislike in her reboot or has given me the "I only really care about the card" thing. And from a creative design perspective, disinterest in the flavor is just as bad as dislike. It's a sort of reverse Gerrard Capashen syndrome, where instead of a weak card failing to hold up a strong character, you see the inverse of that.

Honestly, if you're going to redo a character's entire backstory, try to make your new vision of them a little deeper than "Make her the cute elf chick from Dragon Age 2."

Have you never heard Maro point out that Jace was the most popular walker out of the Lorwyin five, despite NOT being the strongest? (Garruk is probably the strongest out of them.)

I think one thing Jace has going for him is from an art perspective, he's relateable. The cast of planeswalkers is actually pretty diverse, with Jace being the only caucasian male - which last time I checked was the majority of MtG players. He's also a smart, arrogant asshole which most MtG players like imagining themselves as. (One we replace arrogant asshole with "witty, clever, always has a good comeback, smarter then the person he's talking to.")

That being said, the fact that so many Jaces have been good cards certainly doesn't hurt is popularity, but that's not the only factor behind it.

Garruk is also a white boy, but is totally a pea-brained jock.

And Gideon is, of course, comblinasian.

Which of the Llorwyn walkers have been abandoned?

Garruk and Ajani have, for the time being, been set aside in favor of Nissa and Gideon as the primary "face" of their repsective colors. That is not to say we won't be seeing them again; I am certain we will, so the word "abandoned" might be premature or just a tad hyperbolic, but for the immediate future at least, it is applicable.

Ajani and Garruk. Abandoned is probably too strong a word, but they certainly have (at least temporarily) lost the limelight to Gid and Nissa.

Ajani got sidelined because they rushed through his story a bit too fast in Alara, and the problem was that since his story was a very personal one, he didn't really have a stake in anyone else's story. We see him in Theros because he's "cool with Elspeth" or something, but aside from that supporting role, we only ever see him in core sets after alara. We might see more of him later on down the line, when they shift the focus to Bolas for that part of the Planar War arc, but that might not be for a minute yet.

Garruk though, they decided to turn evil. While it's interesting what they're doing with him, he can't exactly be a flagship walker while being a supervillain. After all, he beat up Jace and Jace's girlfriend Liliana. Plus he said Jace's ice cream swirly robe thing looked stupid. Not cool.

I liked Gideon a lot better when he looked like Triple H.

Gideon has been my favorite walker since his introduction. Seeing the changes to Gideon's portrayal has given me a taste of why under-represented people need to have characters that look like them in media to truly identify with them. The cognitive dissonance I experienced when the new spoiler art started coming out and Gideon wasn't just another white guy with long hair was really disconcerting and embarrassing because I suddenly felt less connected to the character.

When I sat down and thought about it, I got over it, but my knee jerk reaction was definitely embarrassing.

Well, he looks like The Rock now, so it is basically a lateral move. After all, we know Dwayne Johnson can play a convincing Greek, right?