i've basically been in love with the plane since i learned about it and then also got a bunch of cards for the innistrad sets at last year's Gen Con, but then today i watched Rhystic Studies' video on the plane which made me just get obsessed with it all over again. in the video he really does do well to go in depth as to what makes it such a compelling plane, dumbed down easily to "fear of humans" and then when emrakul is introduced as "fear of not humans".
but personally what really appeals to me is that it is fundamentally a plane about struggling against an impossible tide with an absolutely killer aesthetic. i literally bought the plane art book for it because i think it has such a different art direction from all other planes and it fucking KILLS me that dominick mayer, my favorite mtg artist, only got to do work for crimson vow because i think he'd be absolutely killer if he got a hand at illustrating any of the other innistrad sets.
but the first part of my love of it is that i love the narrative and thematic tension of "what is the measure of a man" because that shifts constantly for every creature in innistrad, where the definition of "human/humanity" can change in an instant, and maybe it's massively furry or transgender for me to speak so, but there is only success in innistrad where you embrace the blurriness, where life on the edge requires such a different perspective and livelihood. it's such an amazing take on the horror genre, something i love but end up having to be picky and find distaste with much of the genre because it's easy to manufacture shock and fear, but it takes so much more to craft dread and tension. i have a real love of a particular type of storytelling that requires build up regardless of the genre, but it works so well in innistrad's cards and the setting where everything is about the subtle and the underlying truth that you have to ignore in order to stay sane in order to face that seemingly endless night.
i think that gatewatch maybe was a stupid intervention into innistrad and i'm literally actively trying to find a way to write them out of the plane while still maintaining the eventual emrakul influence and allowing some version of nahiri and sorin (and maybe tamiyo because of the moon thing) to exist. it would be an absolutely BEAUTIFUL setting to run a tabletop game in because it gives you so much potential for designing that dread in your players because everything is so unsteady, making every act done with trepidation.
beautiful setting, amazing card sets, gatewatch kind of made it weird, but im trying to ignore them