YMMV / Invasion Cycle

• Badass Decay: The dragon engines are a particularly dramatic example. Back in The Brothers' War, a handful was enough to destroy an entire city. Here, Weatherlight faces twenty dragon engines head-on and utterly obliterates them. That's what happens when technology changes and you don't.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Don't even think about reading this trilogy if you've not read the preceding cycles. Additonally, you need to have read some of the really old (and obscure) comics to really get characters like Taysir, Kristina, Daria and Tevesh Szat, because not much is explained about their backstories here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: For a one-time villain, Tsabo Tavoc proved surprisingly popular, so much so that she was ported over to be The Dragon in Magic: The Gathering – Battlegrounds.
• Evil Is Cool: The fact that one of the premiere sites for MTG story content at the time was at the URL phyrexia.com should clue you in on how fans felt about the bad guys.
• Ho Yay: In the first book, Thaddeus and Agnate are ostensibly brothers, but at times, their devotion towards each other comes off as something else entirely.
• Jerkass Woobie: Gerrard still isn't a nice guy, but he goes through so much shit throughout this trilogy that it's hard not to pity him a little.
• Moment of Awesome: After being a whiny angstbucket through Rath and Storm and being MIA from Urza books and most of the Masques books, Gerrard finally starts living up to his position as The Hero. Beating Tsabo Tavoc in particular was probably his CMoA, seeing as how the feat is completely impossible to replicate using the cards.
• Pandering to the Base: Particularly to the Duelist-reading base who liked Squee, as he is given a much more prominent role than in earlier appearances and is even made immortal.
• Rooting for the Empire: Many fans were rooting for the Phyrexians even before Invasion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ertai's fans were pretty nettled to see how he went out. Arguably he's the best example of this, since the below two cases have at least been memorialized with new legendary cards in more recent sets, unlike Ertai who has been left in obscurity.
  • Greven too, since he'd been thoroughly humanized in Nemesis only to be thrown into Planeshift just to succumb to Villain Forgot to Level Grind and die.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It's a series about a war where many of the heroes die in horrible ways, and where the protagonists sometimes make decisions that might be considered reprehensible if the circumstances weren't so dire. If you're not a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering, it might be very hard to care about the story.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Planeshift's subplot about the rise of the Primevals doesn't really have anything to do with the titular Phyrexian invasion, and mostly seems to be there to explain the dragon legends of the card set and give Darigaaz something to do so the Weatherlight heroes don't have a big Shivan dragon on their side.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Crovax is supposedly a Tragic Villain and his death scene in Apocalypse is presented as a Cry for the Devil moment, but the repeated Moral Event Horizon moments he has in Masquerade Cycle book Nemesis (among which include murdering six thousand innocent people for petty revenge) and his psychotic, incompetent behavior throughout most of this cycle's books (he spends most of the war in animated discussion with the skeletons of his parents and indulging in Wangst via an unintentionally comical torture rack-turned-pipe-organ) leads fans to take a pretty dim view of him.

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