I mean, they're looking at stuff like League or Overwatch and (correctly) identifying how much having characters as points of emotional intersection with the brand is useful in keeping people engaged and passively marketing. The problem isn't really with the idea of promoting characters and storylines, it's very specifically in trying to guarantee that top story cards are also at the very top of competitive value. If anything they should be targeting mid-range playability on most of these and then focusing on ways to get them into people's hands more easily (promo giveaways, etc.)
In the world of Overwatch, there is incredible diversity. And not just in terms of skin color or nationality or sexuality. They all play different. They all feel different. Not just in their presentation, but the feeling you get when you play as those heroes. It comes through in their kits and their voice lines and their highlight intros and victory poses. Like when you hold up your shield and Reinhardt yells "GET BEHIND ME," or Torbjorn loses his turret and cries "MY BABY," or Symmetra starts clucking at her teammates in the spawn room to make sure that "everyone performs their function," or whatever it is.
Magic is handicapped here on so many levels:
1) The face characters are Planeswalkers, which means they're Mythic, which means most players won't get to interact with them at the level you can in other games. You can try to solve this by printing the characters on lower rarity spells - and in fact you're forced to do this if you want them to be face characters - but you only get so many cards in each set, and every burn spell that has Chandra on it is one less chance to show the characters unique to that plane.
2) You have to constantly print new cards, which mean you have to constantly mechanically reinvent your face characters. In other games, maybe your favorite character gets better or worse as the meta evolves, but it is the exception rather than the norm for your favorite character to play differently over time. What happens if I love Nissa as a character, but what her latest Planeswalker card
does is mechanically uninteresting to me?
3) Magic is boxed into five colors, with decades of established expectations about what those colors mean. You can combine those colors to create an amazing pallet and get some very rich characterization, but the flip side is that the mono-colored characters come off as very one-note. Magic's best characters are gold, yet they've chosen (for the sake of simplicity I suppose) to make their face characters all mono-colored. This goes back to my point about diversity.
4) Where Magic is at its best is when it's creating new and unique worlds to play in. They're great at creating new characters within those worlds - think of the Khans from Tarkir or even the Gods from Theros. This is their strength. The Gatewatch experiment is making them sacrifice what they've historically been good at.
None of these are bad things though - Magic has been greatly successful at doing the things it does well. I just think the game of Magic cannot support a story-based approach designed to create an emotional attachment to character on a large scale without fundamentally changing what Magic
is.
