The General Problem

 I hate to say this, but I'm at a bit of a Magic: The Gathering crossroads of two distinct problems going on with the game and life in general. The first and much greater source of turmoil is the game itself, which will lead into the second, but obviously I'll get there in due time. Basically, my time and money vested into this game stems 90% from the Commander format; it's all I play in paper and all I buy for when it comes to purchases cards as well. I have dabbled into Arena a bit, mainly due to the pandemic and my finding time during furlough/unemployment to give streaming via Twitch a try and it's... fine. It is what it is, and that's Magic in a way that incentivizes you to spend money for digital goods. As a device for Magic in that format, it's perfectly good as a program that lets you play Magic in that way, but when I spend money on hobbies I prefer to have something in return, which is why I prefer paper and which is why I hands down prefer Commander because of its longevity as the hands-down most popular format in Magic and how well the staple cards that define it retain their value. The downside to all of that, though, is with the popularity and money that Commander, well, commands, has placed the format in a position where Wizards of the Coast (who publish the game) focus so hard on it now as a money-maker, that the cards they design with the format in mind have kind of gotten me to the point that I honestly don't know how much I enjoy playing it anymore. 

A lot of this newfound disdain for that game isn't particularly all that "new" but it's been the slippery scale of what I call "The Oloro Effect" that has been going on since I basically got back into the game way back around the Commander 2013/Return to Ravnica era. Oloro, Agless Ascetic on its face isn't exactly the most offensive card but it - and honestly Commander 2013 in general - was kind of the start of a trend in design that really started to permeate into the game bad design. Oloro gaining you two life just by being your general is somewhat innocuous, but it fundamentally warps the game around it regardless. Since a game of Commander is typically a slow-burn of players doing mostly setup for the first handful of turns, Oloro just by sitting there in his big comfy chair, moments away from doing an Al Bundy "hand in the pants" recline, in netting you probably ten points of life which is a leverageable resource and a not insignificant thing. It's ten more life you can use to wipe the board with a Toxic Deluge, it can put you right on the path to winning with a Felidar Sovereign the turn after you put it on the table, it's a free, non-interactible way to slowly drain the table with Sanguine Bond type effects. It does so much and you don't even have to cast it, and that's just from a little thing like life gain, one of the most looked down upon as "filthy casual" archetypes of deck design. Oloro was probably the biggest example of how things could be "pushed" when the design teams that create Magic: the Gathering cards really focus on the cards that serve as the backbones and thematic focuses of a Commander deck: The General

                                                        

As offensive as Oloro was, it was kind of a different thing back then when it was about a dozen generals being designed specifically for the format and once a year. Like, lets be honest, something aound half the generals from Commander 2013 alone were problematic in how they warped the game around them by providing rolling or even cascading benefits just for existing. You had Prossh, Skyraider of Kher whose nature of making more tokens the more you cast it lead to engines with sacrifice effects that looped the game into oblivion. Derevi, Empyrial Tactician and the ability to just ignore the damn casting cost and whatever "Commander taxes" may be applicable to the card was just as format warping then as it is now. The problem, aka "The Oloro Effect", that has happened repeatedly since then is that not only have designs like this become a thing we've all come to expect year-in, year-out with annual Commander preconstructed decks and that do continue to be norm ever since that 2013 batch, powerful abilities that are generically good have been showing up on Legend after Legend after Legend card in just every single set release for several years now to the point that I think the game has just devolved to a point where invariably every time you sit down for a game of Commander now, there's a deck at the table that, whether or not someone is planning to be malicious with what their deck is doing, it's inanely powerful merely due to the existence of a General that does broken things that could even be disguised as "fun."

I sit down with my normal group of Commander playing nerds. We all pull out our decks from varying degrees of "fun" to "I think this if fun but it ends up being really not" to "specifically not fun." Whatever, the variety of Magic is the spice of life or some "sew it on a throw pillow" type saying. Teysa Karlov hits the table and then the game is basically over because that's how it works. Teysa, thanks to her doubling on death triggers basically means nothing good is happening when she is successfully cast, because even if you are playing a bunch of cards that are individually not very exciting by themselves in a deck she commands, whenever Teysa shows up to the party they immediately are hopped to the gils on PCP. Hell, those decks are usually just a buttload of commons and uncommons like Doomed Traveler  and many cards of that ilk; but even something like that turns into a board shattering terror because then it may as well read "when this card dies, get two bodies, that will then be sacrificed to this other effect, which will net the controller more bodies or mana or cards" and on and on and on into oblivion. Teysa can hit the board and immediately be met with a Swords to Plowshares or whatever but she will still completely shift things because inevitably some critters will be thrown on the value pile of sac effects Commander games are rife with and put that player in a position where, yeah, sure, Teysa costs two mana more now due to Commander Tax, but they probably refilled their hand and either have a plethora of blockers now or forced the other players to burn through their own boards with a Grave Pact. The text on her card is that generically powerful that even her death basically means nothing unless it happens so repeatedly as to make her uncastable and is also accompanied by multiple effects that wipe multiple permanents from play because so many can be an engine with her. And that's exactly how that game went and we gave it hell and then yeah.

Okay, so that game is a wrap but whatever, at least a Massacre Wurm did something cool during. Let's shuffle up, let's try that again. What's that? Oh, a Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow deck now. Cool. So now what happens here is literally even the cheapest and most generic of creatures becomes a potential game ending threat. No one at the table can let a single 1/1 creature get through because what happens then is what happens every game you don't dare to kill relatively inane creatures in a Yuriko deck; Yuriko fucking Batman smoke bombs her way onto the board and then starts being simultaneously a kill condition and a card advantage engine thanks to her reveal mechanic. And that's pretty much it, because the design is so "good" on Yuriko you can never truly kill her because Ninjustu lets her cheat costs, once the deck gets rolling your opponent is just going to have counter magic to save her Ninja minions from Wrath of God sweepers, and just a simple unblocked Ninja could flip a, like, Treachery and effectively mean Yuriko by simply existing is dealing as much as fifteen damage to your average Commander table. So, effectively, you only put the deck in its place by killing every single generic (and usually unblockable) creature the deck puts into play which, again, no one will do because no one wants to waste spot removal on a goddamn 2/2 with no real abilities, and then hope they haven't maxed out their hand on counter magic to effectively neuter the one real threat to the deck and that's sweepers. Oh, and that's also assuming part of her reveals aren't any of a half dozen extra turn spells that essentially means she'll just kill the board at once. Yuriko is fun y'all. No, really she's a blast. 

Y'know what is the sad part of that last bit of sass, though? Yuriko SHOULD be fun. Ninjas, as a matter of proven scientific fact, are cool. Ninjutsu as a mechanic is cool and one of the few good things to come from Kamigawa block as a whole. But because of course every Legend card in the game of Magic these days needs to come with at least three different mechanics on it to potentially be the lynchpin of a deck, something as simple as "the Ninja Commander" becomes one of the most frustrating experiences playing the game can hand a table.

Whatever though, shake that one off, guess it's time to power up my own general a little bit and go less "universal fun" leaning and more toward something efficient. So I pull out good old Lord Windgrace and decide to go some "lands matter" on everyone's asses. And things are going good for roughly five turns. I got my usual bit of ramp onto the table thanks to the dumb stupid dumb engine Windgrace himself is, I've stockpiled a decent graveyard to help churn lands and card advantage, and I just hit the biggest threats on the board with a very thematic Windgrace's Judgment and a Beast Within and am ready to drop a butt-ton of threats down with the Landfall mechanic staple, Rampaging Baloth. It's how I like to play Magic, just some value churn, some big dumb beefy boy Beasts to stomp the table aaaaaaand, oh. The mono-blue player drew a Power Artifact, so his Urza, Lord High Artificer, which is several engines in and of himself, instantly gives his deck an infinite loop because the Power Artifact combined with the Basalt Monolith on the table gives him the mana to do so and yay, there goes that game.  Infinite mana is obviously the bigger problem but it having an always accessible outlet because of the deck General is just backbreaking. 

It's kind of tiring, is what it is. And I know that the Magic community in general is in kind of a "power creep" fatigue when it comes to how cards have been designed in recent years, which is why half of the Magic posting you see on social media was so bitter and gripe-filled that Wizards of the Coast had to emergency ban essentially the best decks in multiple formats. The reason I love Commander so much is that thanks to its "mostly casual" nature and the longevity of games kind of cuts some of the "raw power" out of the equation, but when the power is inherent to the card the entire deck is based around, well, that's when the game loses its luster. I don't blame someone for wanting to play a Yuriko deck because, again, Ninjas are cool. Batman is a ninja for shit's sake, and Batman is the coolest (like in that new "The Batman" trailer).  But Yuriko literally turns generic creatures into game breaking threats. I don't blame someone for wanting to play a mono-blue artifact deck, that's a combination as old as Magic, but it's already a generically powerful one and the last thing it needed is a general that just wins basically on the spot when he hits the table given the advantages of blue spells and the junk blue mages have laying around. And triggers are fun! I play Panharmonicon in as many decks as I can justify and it's just pure fun, so in that regard I'm not about to get in that Teysa player's grill or anything, but having doubling effects like hers, or, ugh, Yarok, the Desecrated attached to a creature you have access to any time you want is just so generically powerful, it skews anything "fun" you may have been planning with those abilities. 

And there's just so many, many more offenders of this and they are, unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Commanders being registered on the Internet at EDHREC. Korvold, Fae-Cursed King is just an insane value engine the can kill you in a singular attack and will mow through a game as soon as it hits. Muldroth, the Gravetide is also in that vein of being "mayonnaise in cardboard form" for its generic ability to just be inane card advantage just by being played and there being a graveyard full of toys waiting for him. Golos, Tireless Pilgrim is literally designed to just be a one-card machine by giving you up to three free plays for as long as you have the mana to activate him. Fun fact, I myself have a deck that Golos heads up; it's a deck that actually features pretty much every card that has a "you win the game" condition on it. The deck is terrible. It's just a bunch of clunky enchantments that need to hit several milestones to trigger, and even then they usual do so on an upkeep so the table has plenty of time to deal with your board, especially as they can see everything coming. But, Golos is just so stupidly, generically powerful that sometimes you play him, get a handful of free cards, and unless you get wiped multiple times he just pieces together a fistful of things that work together at once and that's that. Even a deck full of Mayael's Aria and the like can be broken when it's Golos yeeting them onto the table. 

It's tiring because so many times it boils a game down to someone already having a piece on the board and the simple matter of playing a card that always hovers off to the side of the game waiting for their chance to dominate it because there wasn't a Counterspell at the table. Or because the spot removal isn't good enough because the ability is just THAT GOOD that even answers are resolved into another handful of problems compounded by the inevitable return of the general two extra generic mana later. The games become so linear. Formulaic. Anti-climatic. For every game that "feels like Commander" to me where the board advantage rotates several times, the graveyard player survives a couple clearings of that zone, the token player rebuilds from not one, not two, but three board wipes and you get an hour-plus of just battlecruiser Magic, there's a half dozen games where a everything comes to a big "crescendo" of asking "do you have the other piece?" when some general with a dumb ability comes crashing down and essentially ends the contest. I've enjoyed like twenty percent of the Commander bouts I've participated in this year and the vast bulk of them usually boil down to "well, screw that General" because they ended the game in the most predictable way ever and there was nothing to really stop them or they warped the games around them because the dedication to making sure they don't do what they do simply by existing gave the game to the person who wasted no resources contributing to the problem at hand. 

And with that out there, with the format that brought me hardcore back into the game after a decade-long absence and with a pandemic enveloping this country and, sadly, leaving many unemployed in its wake, myself included, I'm not sure I get enough out of it to keep participating. Having extra time on your hands to reevaluate, well, pretty much everything in your life leads you to some pretty easy revelations, especially when there's things like a, y'know, mortgage on the line, and two of those linear lines of thought like "I need to pay these bills" and "these valuable game pieces I own are quickly losing their engagement value" become easy combo together into "maybe it's time to sell (most of) them out." With several years of The Oloro Effect in place and domino after domino falling into place to create more and more just broadly powerful and non-interactive Commanders becoming so overwhelming because of set after set after set creating dozens more of them, it becomes a little harder to hold on when every game falls into the same trap in their wake. 

I don't want to think like this but it's kind of just the way it is. I see the hype train building for Commander Legends come this October and I don't think "man, more cards to build into/around all these decks!!" I think "man, a whole set dedicated to probably making the same mistakes that haunt the game every new release." I don't want the cynicism to be there but when you have to make decisions like the one I'm leaning towards - and I will say here, I'm not looking for pity, in fact I find myself very lucky I'm in the position I am to (hopefully) live through this clusterfuck of a situation by liquidating pieces of a "kids game" - but when the enjoyment is collapsing game session after game session because the cards that serve as the fundamental pillar of the format I love keep leading to uninspired game after predictable game, its easy to see cynicism for realistic courses of action. I do hope I'm wrong. Maybe this stretch has just been the product of a playgroup that has gone stale. Maybe in a world where virus that has killed hundreds of thousands is taken seriously and people can start playing Magic with each other in convention halls and more regularly in gaming shops, some idealistic Magic nerd is going to be all "here's my Shattergang Brothers deck; it's as unassuming and durdly as Gomer Pyle. PS: Screw Korvold" and warm the cockles of my black heart. But, until then, this seems to be the path both the game and my own personal self are on unless something shifts in both the world of the game and the world that we play it in, and I feel like both are very much victims of "it didn't have to be this way."

The "Wednesday Night Wrestling War" and its Hidden Casualties

Diving head first into the deep end of the Disclaimer Pool, I want to say up front that the "Wednesday Night War" in pro wrestling - i.e. the creation of All Elite Wrestling's "Wednesday Night Dynamite" and its prompting of WWE to move its NXT brand to that same night to compete against it - is pretty much the best thing to happen to my renewed pro wrestling fandom since I returned to it about three years back. For context, the biggest fuel in the reigniting of my wrestling fandom that went cold back about a decade and a half ago was hearing about how New Japan Pro Wrestling had hit this "next level" in how it was putting on these spectacular matches with highly charismatic stars that were doing great storytelling in the ring. No overlong promos, no shamelessly gratuitous storylines like "who impregnated this seventy year old woman." Just no frills, all thrills pro goddamn wrestling featuring names like Kazuchika Okada, Tetsuya Naito, and this gaijin named Kenny Omega, who had the audacity to call himself "The Best Bout Machine" and was leader of the hottest faction in pro wrestling, The Bullet Club. It was that Street Fighter loving, walking talking anime character and the group of misfits he was leading that called themselves "The Elite," between their non-wrestling shenanigans inside the ring and outside it in their weekly "Being the Elite" YouTube channel and their unbelievable in-ring work rate really stood out as something both fresh but familiar back to the era of wrestling I absolutely adored, where ECW existed and let its attitude and action speak for the company and its reputation. I was hooked again for several reasons, but the primary one was a group of guys who I felt "got it" when it came to pro wrestling and seemed dead set to carve their own path through it by both paying homage to and learning from the past of the "Sport of Kings."

So, needless to say, early last year when The Elite went out there with modern day wrestling legend, Chris Jericho, who has reinvented himself through over two decades of the best and worst the business has seen, and they all announced they were creating their own federation back here in the States, I got extra hyped. New Japan Pro Wrestling is still hands down my favorite thing going in the business, but as much as I prefer emphasis of the athletic, in-ring action end of wrestling (which NJPW delivers in spades), I still want to see some nonsensical storylines play out and smack-talking promos be cut, which are things NJPW just skimp on. And I'm excited by this because, quite frankly, I still thought (and think) that week to week WWE programming - the only game in town for nationally televised pro wrestling for almost twenty years now - is as fundamentally devoid of creativity and proper booking as it was when it drove me away in the mid-00's. Anyway, so All Elite Wrestling is born via the combined efforts of Omega, Jericho, legacy wunderkind Cody Rhodes, tag team revolutionaries "The Young Bucks", and a guy who likes to do, as he says, "Cowboy Shit" in Adam Page, and needless to say, I'm hyped. This move prompts, predictably, Vince McMahon to say "fuck that, here's my giant wrinkly billionaire balls" and moves NXT, their supposed "farm league" brand of wrestling that is actually the best thing the company is doing because it emphasizes in-ring performance as much as it does out-ring hijinks, to the same Wednesday night slot as AEW's Dynamite show because, well, that's all his lizard brain knows how to operate when it comes to competition. "Seek and destroy" is his only answer to anything remotely threatening, but in due-part to that slapdash answer, we got one of the best things going for the wrestling business in over twenty years; honest to god exciting weekly wrestling featuring two companies that are actually feeding off each others' actions to perform better in their own regard.

And, to keep splurging for just a little bit, the past near-year since this rivalry kicked up has been at times euphoric for someone like me and my fan tastes. The action has been almost as good as the feats of freak athleticism that ECW was pumping out in the late 90's and that NJPW regularly puts on display currently and that really hooked me back in from 2017 to 2019. Legitimately, considering its happening on a weekly basis, the consistency in actual match performance I've been consuming every week for ten months now is pretty impressive. And a good bit of the storylines have been presented with good-to-great dramatic and/or comedic flare without going to the abysmal extremes of both that have induced more eye rolls than actual enjoyment over the years since the end of the "Attitude Era." But, as much as I appreciate the actual wrestling craftsmanship, as much as I've laughed out loud in years at some of the bits, social media tweets, YouTube clips, etc that have been skitted out for us, and as much as I genuinely feel that each week both companies and their performers are going out of their way to put on some wrestling clinics and give us something fresh, all that competitive energy that has created one of the best atmospheres for wrestling in decades is definitely covering some nagging weak spots in both companies' games that I feel like are going to be big detriments to the product before us if they aren't treated appropriately and soon enough.  Such as:

The AEW Women's Division

I'm going to start with the lowest hanging fruit of both companies right now and, quite frankly, this one isn't even clinging onto the branch for the last signs of life, it's laying rotting on the ground. Sadly, it's been this way since almost day one of AEW's existence and had barely scratched and clawed its way to something semi-interesting a couple months back, before some choice injuries put a damper on that. But let's tackle one thing at a time, starting first with the glaring problem of the division: it very much from the beginning started with very little name power (at least stateside) and had to build the talent from the ground up. And there is talent there, for sure, don't get me wrong. I was there for the very first Dynamite (humble brag) and the crowning of Riho as the first Women's Champ over "The Native Beast" Nyla Rose and the two of them very much put on a banger match for the title, as well as having some really good rematch scenarios since. Hikaru Shida has also blossomed into a quality "working champion" who takes on all comers, Britt Baker has become one of the best over-the-top heel mic workers in the business, and the company has come to rely on "The Bad Girl" Penelope Ford, Big Swole, and currently on the shelf Kris Statlander to help fill out shows with solid performances. 

Now, all that actually sounds not too shabby when you put it that way, except for the part where we're now just about a year into the life of AEW and it has taken this long to have barely a half dozen women holding down that division and even then half of them aren't really "there" yet. Like, Riho is a fantastic talent that was very much worthy of her being the inaugural champion given her showmanship and the excitement she generated as the "perpetual underdog" due to her stature, but even pre-Covid her attendance was sketchy at best and without her there regularly, her claim to fame literally was just "she's tiny and spunky." Britt Baker has been great on the mic and churning out pre-recorded skits every since her "Roll Model" ego trip heel turn several months back, but before she got injured with her leg injury she was still a very inconsistent ring worker that was having trouble keeping up with better performers. Kris Statlander is a freak athlete who was also having sketchy in-ring consistency and doesn't spend time talking as her schtick so the miscues hurt her more, Big Swole is also pretty raw on both ends of the mic and mat, and Penelope is a good worker who basically hasn't had any time to show a personality besides it. And none of this is really their fault because, quite frankly, AEW simply does not give their women any time to develop, which is a pretty fatal flaw when these performers were already fighting an uphill battle with lack of overall exposure when they got to a national stage with this company.

The lack of any semblance of dedicated airtime to these women has from the get go smothered it in its infancy, and near a year later it is still that way. Obviously, the pandemic threw this division into more of a panic than anything else the company is doing since it denied them international stars like Riho and Yuka Sakazaki, and the injuries to Statlander and Baker were as about as poor a timing as could happen for both given their upward trajectories and plans at the time of shelving, but still. The women are lucky to maybe get a match a week on Dynamite proper and, hell, they're barely used on AEW Dark anymore either, except for the usual "crush the jobbers" stuff that Dark has now become during the pandemic. The last two Dynamites, as of my finishing this off (August 5th and 12th), featured two women's matches that totaled about five minutes of in-ring time. Hell, to go even further about how insipid this lack of time for the women has been, the whole "reinvention" of Britt Baker has revolved around how perfect her heel mic work has been and even with her still showing up for Dynamites simply to talk shit while recovering, she gets maybe two minutes tops a show to do her thing. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THEY'RE HAVING A TAG TOURNAMENT FOR THE WOMEN AND IT'S BEEN SHOVED ONTO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT YOUTUBE UPLOAD!! The lack of time for this division and these women to build themselves isn't just negligent, it's insulting. How any of them are expected to develop a presence when they're barely even being used on the "squash show" to at least show a move repertoire is one thing, and now they maybe get five minutes a week on the main brand. This division isn't just having a "downturn" between the injuries and Covid, it's just a complete afterthought to how the company books their shows. 

The NXT Tag Division

The Undisputed Era! Imperium! Breezango! Uhhh... Oney Lorcan and Danny Birch sometimes! I present to you, the NXT tag division and, whew, boy. While not completely flatlined like the AEW Women's division, the NXT tag division definitely has an EMT straddling it, furiously performing CPR on it like in a network hospital drama. This one has multiple factors and a couple of them aren't under NXT's control, but they are a factor in the Wednesday Night War (WNW), such as the fact that AEW has gone so above and beyond to make their tag division so red freaking hot they signed so much talent that their sixth best team in the rotation is as good as any top team NXT can assemble. But the real killer here - and this will be a common factor in a lot of the issues NXT has as an organization and is related to ratings, though not necessarily NXT's own viewership - is that NXT has been gutted by talent in the past year or so by the main roster in order to get any sort of momentum going as ratings for Raw and Smackdown (especially the former) have been teetering on the brink of disaster. The Street Profits, War Raiders aka the Viking Experience aka the Viking Raiders aka Vince McMahon's mind is as stable as the United States Postal Service, the (Best) Forgotten Sons. Just from the actual tag teams alone the looting has been real, and also talents like Ricochet and Matt Riddle, who were generating some exciting tag matches just by being paired with fellow high-performance superstars like Pete Dunne kept the NXT tag division at the least "afloat" the past couple years, if not downright exciting when you had a nice rotation of the UE, Vikings, Profits, and whatever NXT UK call overs were vying for the titles. Now there's basically two teams worth a spit battling it out over the titles and while the Imperium pairing of Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel actually hold them, even they feel like they're spinning their wheels because the whole existence of that faction revolves around what their leader and most beef slappingest wrestler in the world, Walter, is cooking up and achieving and he hasn't been a factor in anything since Covid hit and essentially folded NXT UK. The only reason I don't rate this division lower than the AEW Women's division is because at least what little is left of the roster that competes in these bouts is given a fifteen main event slot every fourth NXT broadcast to put on a four(ish) star match and remind you of how things used to be and could be again.

The AEW Singles Mid-Card

Okay, this one is going to be controversial and I already hear the fourteen people who occasional check this space out screaming "how can you say that, look how loaded the roster is with quality wrestlers!!!" And to that I say, yes, it is, but how many of them are really invested in any actual singles storylines that have momentum outside the World Title picture? Because here is the problem, since AEW is in a "ratings war" with NXT, they are very much running their studs, and the studs are a mainly in the tag division and therefore two or three tag matches a week are eating up air time. Cody is doing a great week-to-week exhibition for the TNT title with his Open Challenge, but that is both a) not leading to any long-term storytelling as so far pretty much all those matches have stemmed exactly from a "hey, I want a shot" setup and b) doesn't always feature signed AEW talent as half the matches have been an excuse to essentially call in Indy darlings to give them some airtime and see how the viewers and Twitterverse react. Not that I think either of those are a bad thing, far from it, but with airtime at a premium, those extra ten minutes a week that could set up another rivalry go to a match that happens, is enjoyable, and moves on as Cody deceptively teases going back to either a cocky heel or somehow manages to keep pulling off being a privileged face as the idea of a new Four Horseman forms around his machinations.

But, again, that leaves time sparse to get everyone else involved, and since AEW Dark has been relegated mostly to squash matches involving local talent. I'll say it once more, I think it's great that AEW is giving these folks paychecks and attention, but it leaves that actual signed talent out in the cold storytelling-wise. Right now, with so much going on in the tag division and Cody with the TNT title and even the five minutes the women get (and of which they definitely count toward the Mid-Card and, as I explained earlier, are getting the shaft) you have what left? Matt Hardy and Sammy Guevara have beef that is playing out two minutes at a time every other week, Orange Cassidy and Jericho are building to one last brawl at this year's All In, and there MAY be a Darby Allin/Brian Cage thing in the works but outside of Cage and Allin failing to dethrone Jon Moxley as champion in recent weeks, there has been no real time spent to develop anything toward that bout with a month left to do so. Lance Archer is running around killing people in the dressing area with no one else to focus on, Brodie Lee is going to get a TNT title match because he answered the open challenge and that's about it; he failed a World Title bid and then spent the last two months hitting people with papers on Being the Elite. And, to be fair (to be faaaaaaair) one of the best things about AEW right now, hell, in all of wrestling, is the Hangman Page and Kenny Omega saga which, as good as it is, is taking away two prime singles competitors that could be building other storylines to attempt to dethrone Cody or Moxley and then build even more singles storylines down the line. The talent is there, no doubt, but the time isn't there because AEW's focus on the tag team situations across something like eight premiere tag teams is soaking up precious minutes.

The NXT World Title Picture

This, I feel, is a combination of some of the things I've mentioned above for both companies and also may be kind of controversial, but I don't really think so for reasons I'm going to break down. The first thing is that, again, this "Ratings War" has led to both companies running their studs, and right now the biggest upside that NXT has are its Women's Division and it actually has an exemplary singles mid-card, as they have invested a lot of time into talent acquisitions that they then run into each other and also against veterans that aren't in the main event picture at the moment. The NXT North American Championship is one of the most contested singles titles in the business right now because you not only have intriguing "build" talents like Damian Priest, Cameron Grimes, Dominic Dijakovic, Dexter Lumis, etc vying for it, but also names like Johnny Gargano and Finn Balor want that gold for some decent reasonings but also mainly because they're just not in the world title picture right now and the folks that run NXT realize you just leverage names not in the world title picture in mid-card rivalries, which AEW isn't doing. The downside to all this is that even though NXT is doing a lot of "building" they don't have a lot built yet, which compounds the other problem the big belt picture has, which is that, like the tag division at NXT, the main roster call up and the drain it put on talent the past year and a half or so, really left NXT devoid of those that they had already built.

Andrade and Aleister Black were already at the top of the game when they were pulled up early 2019 but at least it wasn't as devastating then because you had Gargano, Tommaso Ciampa, and Adam Cole and all their already built storylines ready to go. But on top of them you had guys like Ricochet and Matt Riddle who could have easily been next in line for pushes into that spotlight yoinked away and crumpling the foundations built with the skills and talents of those gentlemen. With such a large drain of talent upwards and NXT still very much building people in the middle still, you're left with a main event picture that rally is basically Adam Cole - who the title needs time away from to kind of "refresh" itself due to the length of his rein - Tommaso Ciampa, champion Keith Lee, and now Karrion Kross who, quite frankly, has had himself some interesting segments (a lot of which run through wife/valet Scarlett more than Kross himself) but has been kind of generic in the ring ever since he got the rocket pack slapped on him to be in this picture. Also, home grown talent Velvetine Dream continues to be both green in some mic and in-ring performances and may also be a pedophile with many accusations filed against him. 

So you have a division that maybe, MAYBE at best has five people that feel right in being in the forefront of a well-built World Title run as champ or challenger. One of these guys (Cole) has just run so long with it it would be excessive to move him back into the picture any time in the next several months, next is a guy with a serious neck surgery under his belt (Ciampa) and that hasn't even been on TV in several weeks, and then you have a guy in Kross who everyone knows is destined to basically win the title, have a photo op with it, and then be moved up to the main roster because he's the kind of wrestler Vince McMahon pops his top off to with a valet/manager that he pops something else off to even more. Considering how great this World Title picture was for the better part of the past several years with some of the most exciting names in the business, having this cloud of, let's call it indifference, somewhat enveloping it despite one of the most enjoyable human beings on Earth in the form of Keith Lee holding it seems like there's a call for concern. Oh, and also, like half those names I mentioned as being "developing mid-carders" are actually ring vets that are in their mid-thirties and may just never have a top contender/champion run; they may just be running out the last few years of their careers as mid-card rank and file, leaving no real talent to fill the void at the top.

Aaaand those are definitely my top points to be made in all of this but I do think there are a couple other items to address that I'll kind of bullet point here, such as:

Rhea Ripley. While her World Title push probably came a little early given how rough around the edges she still is in a couple aspects of the wrestling game, she still has all the talent in the world to develop and was done dirty while she had the title during her first reign earlier this year. Instead of being given the chance to try and thrive under the spotlight, she had her rein cut off at the knees because it was obvious the people running things wanted a cheap ratings bump and what screams that better than just slapping the belt on someone like Charlotte Flair who dethroned Ripley? And now Ripley is kind of stuck in women's mid-card limbo while Io Shira (who, admittedly, is debatably the best women's wrestler on the planet) runs with the title and it's easy to see that Ripley will be floundering about for months before she's back in that ring vying for the belt again. 

Joey Janella - Where's Joey?!?!? I don't know if he's on the outs with AEW but the sheer nonexistence of Joey anywhere, even after him and Sonny Kiss started showing some real good chemistry together in the overcrowded tag division, kind of goes to my greater point that there's just no real room for anyone to get Dynamite time if they're not one of the top six tag teams at the moment or challenging Cody. But this one is especially glaring because of how much face time the "Bad Boy" had with AEW in the early stages of its development as a company. 

The WWE/NXT Cruiserweight Title - This title was already kind of iffy as to how much anyone cared about it once it essentially defaulted to NXT's purview several months ago, but then its fate was kind of sealed when Lio Rush up and left the wrestling business, Angel Garza was called up to the main roster, and a tournament was held for the belt when Jordan Devlin vacated it and then pretty much none of those people have been seen again on TV outside of champion Santos Escobar occasionally doing some weird kidnapping shit with his cronies and Drake Maverick spittling at the mic about the whole situation in their feud. But no one cares. The wrestlers who showed up for the tourney maybe pop in on NXT programming once every third week for a six minute match that fails to showcase their talents properly. Freaking Kushida is probably the best Junior-weight to grace the ring over the past fifteen years and he hasn't been on TV in a month. It's just all a waste of endless 4-star matches that could be being had on television amongst them all. 

The AEW Ranking System - It's great that they do still use this intracompany metric as a way to establish who gets runs at the belts and so on and so forth, but to go with my long complaint about the singles mid-card of the show being kind of non-existent, what do these rankings mean when someone is, say, 8-0 because they beat a bunch of jobbers on Dark and then go lose to Cody? But then you have a like Darby Allin who is 3-4 but taking loses to guys like Moxley? There can't be any real weight to these ranks because no one is getting wins and losses to other quality talent. I'd be more impressed with someone who is 5-4 and their loses are to Cage, Brodie, etc and they have wins over a, say, Rey Fenix, Scorpio Sky, Allin combo than someone who racked up near double digits wins on Dark to get an easy "justified by their record" match against Cody some random Wednesday night. 

I'll cut this off here because this is already a monstrous amount of wrestling talk, but there's probably a couple storytelling bits on both shows I could identify and performers I could pick at being slipped through the cracks, but yeah. Again, it's just a matter of time being precious and you having to use the best you got to fill time and hit the ratings, but not leveraging other resources to their detriment. Like, AEW could easily have an amazing mid-card singles presentation with the plethora of names on their roster, but no one there is doing anything to set up something against each other because all but about ten minutes a show is going to tag teams, world title stuff, and a Cody held belt that currently is not designed to set up rivalries. That last ten minutes is maybe enough to get a something like Jericho vs. Orange Cassidy going and, hell, that's also been more a main event deal. And NXT is always going to be hamstrung by the bigger shows being mismanaged until someone puts a foot down and lets talent stay on Wednesday to flourish instead of being called up just to be forgotten a couple months later. Resource management is key and both companies, while doing amazing stuff with what they do have at their disposal each week, are definitely still botching some usage of it. Regardless, Wednesday nights for wrestling today have been some of the best aspects of a wrestling watching habit I developed twenty-five years ago and then kicked for a long time because the highs just weren't there anymore. But now they're back and feel just as good as they ever did, you just hate to see this "renaissance" happening but quality talent getting squandered while the scene is as good as it has ever been.