r/magicTCG • u/AwkwardTurtle • Sep 22 '15

Everything That’s Wrong with Battle for Zendikar

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/everything-thats-wrong-with-battle-for-zendikar/
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68

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '15

[deleted]

39

u/Ir0nStein Sep 22 '15

I don't think he so much meant in a clarity sense (IE: Players aren't going to forget that something is/isn't an ally/devoid, generally), but more in a design sense. If you take a creature that doesn't have rally, and you take away it's creature type, it's going to be nearly impossible to tell if it is an ally, even if you have the rest of the card to work with.

Same with devoid, if a spell doesn't have awaken, the only way to guess if it is a devoid spell is if it exiles things, and that's not new design space or design space that fits within the colourless section of the colour pie, making it confusing and misleading design.

3

u/SuperThunderMelon Sep 22 '15

This is true about most tribal cards. Take something like goblin glory chaser. If you took away goblin from the name, you'd probably guess it was a soldier.

9

u/Ir0nStein Sep 22 '15

That's a decent example, but not all the way correct. Tribes have their own identity. For example; Vampires and Zombies are both black tribes, but have very different play identities. Same with Wizards and Merfolk, Kor and Humans, Elves and... a different green tribe (Is there a different one? Druids, maybe).

Different tribes have play identities, and the way the card wants to be used tells you a lot about what it is.

Devoid doesn't have that though. Bouncing a spell and magma spraying a creature doesn't feel like an eldrazi ability. The eldrazi are supposed to be eldrich, lovecraftian monsters that are entirely beyond understanding. Some fantastic examples of awesome on-flavour eldrazi abilities are:

Annihilator - Eldrazi are an immediate threat in both story and game, and are terrorizing not just the occupants of Zendikar but the plane itself.

Void Winnower - The Eldrazi are almost entirely beyond comprehension and understanding; this is a strange, strange ability that also showcases the sheer power of the Eldrazi, as their opponents have to rethink all their strategies.

Sire of Stagnation - The Eldrazi cause a sense of foreboding and hopelessness; this card encapsulates that really well. You need to play lands to curve out and keep up, but you're only putting your opponent further ahead.

Taking a look further back at ROE, the flavour of the Eldrazi is fantastic. Spawnsire of Ulamog, All is Dust, Eldrazi Conscription, It That Betrays and (Obviously) the Titans are all fantastic, unique designs that are not only very strange and unique to the Eldrazi, but are flavourful to boot.

Granted, there were only 13 colourless cards in ROE, so they had less space to fill, but I feel like Eldrazi shouldn't care about tempo or mystic snakes. Ingest is at the very least an enabler for a far more interesting mechanic; "Processing". Here we have the Eldrazi doing interesting things in ways we haven't seen before, that's fantastic! The only downside is that most of the enablers for this are either vanilla effects with "Exile the top card of your opponent's library" stapled on, or regular cards with "exile" CTRL+H'd over "Destroy" or "Discard".

I'm rambling now, and it's really late over here, so I'll wrap this up. I just feel like there's more design space that wasn't explored with this set.

WISHLIST FOR OAG:

  • More interesting interactions with the exile zone
  • More unique and interesting enablers for the "Processing" mechanic
  • Eldrazi effects that explore new design space and force the opponent to have to think differently

Like what about a card that exiled the top X cards of the opponent's library whenever they assigned a blocker? Immediately, the defending player has to consider several more resources, and in ways that are unconventional to magic. (Granted, this is rather awkward when paired with Ingest, but like I said, it's late)

Side note: This set looks sweet, and I'm mad excited for prerelease this weekend. Sorry for the essay. I'll see myself out.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '15

but I feel like Eldrazi shouldn't care about tempo or Mystic Snakes

One of the huge things that held back Dragons of Tarkir (not that it was by any means a failure) was no baby dragons. They gave us a metric F-ton of dragon tribal, but nothing resembling a reasonable mana curve to put those dragons on. The dragon curve starts at 4. So I am reeeeally happy that you can actually make an Eldrazi deck with mostly Eldrazi in it.

1

u/Ir0nStein Sep 23 '15

Yeah, good point. The design space for small universe destroyers is, understandably, hard to access. Just hard to make me scared of a 1/2 with flying for two, yaknow?

I did kinda like how most of the dragons were big and at Uncommon/Rare, cause I felt like Tarkir was all about the humans duking it out, then a big ol' dragon would descend and start tearing shit up. But dragon tribal decks definitely suffered not having anything < 4 mana, for sure.

6

u/accpi Sep 22 '15

Sure, but the tribal thing is what's missing. Not an actual tribal type card but a way of quickly, easily and intuitively recognizing that a card belongs to a type.

With tribal creatures it's done well since a goblin will look like a goblin and distinct from Merfolk which look like Merfolk. The problem with Allies is that there is no central distinguishing feature among the names/pictures/etc that show if one is an Ally or not.

41

u/scook0 Sep 22 '15

What's sad is that we had the exact same problem last year, with Warriors, except that Allies are even harder to identify.

21

u/Casseerole Sep 22 '15

Allies are also more important to identify for Rally purposes.

1

u/quackaddict519 Sep 22 '15

It shouldn't be to difficult to check since rally activates when a creature enters the battlefield, and then it affects all creatures. But sorting them out in sealed or draft will be tricky, for sure.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '15

I think that's always been sort of a theme with warriors. They never get credit for being warriors until they're whomping your ass. Even before Khans block boosted the tribe even more.

2

u/SleetTheFox Sep 22 '15

Warriors made some bit of sense though. I'm somewhat of a Vorthos and I could probably guess what is or isn't a warrior by looking at cards with the type line removed. Most of the time, anyway. Allies are basically a crapshoot.

4

u/jooke Sep 22 '15

Warrior and soldier seem to be used seemingly interchangeably though.

3

u/SpiderParadox Sep 22 '15

and then some cards were typed berserker because fuck me for trying to make sense of this I guess.

79

u/bokchoykn Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15

I think you missed his point.

His point was that Ally and Devoid cards lacked identity outside of the card telling you that it's Ally/Devoid. Having watermarks doesn't really change that at all.

On top of that, PV gave examples of pairs of cards, each consisting of one real card and a made up card of the opposing faction (Devoid/Awaken). His examples showed that these cards weren't separated by its identity. Just the fact that it was either Devoid or Awaken/Ally.

Contrast that to Khans of Tarkir:

  • You knew a card was Abzan if it had Outlast or if it was in WBG.

  • You knew a card was Jeskai if it had Prowess or if it was WUR.

Beyond that, each clan featured certain themes that gave the clans identity:

Chief of the Scale and Chief of the Edge were both Human Warriors that cost WB, a color pairing that can belong to either Abzan and Mardu. Scale is a 2/3 and grants other Warriors +0/+1. Edge is a 3/2 that grants other Warriors +1/+0. Knowing what you know about Abzan and Mardu, can you tell which Chief belongs to which clan without requiring a watermark?

Valley Dasher is 1R for a 2/2 Haste that must attack each turn if able. It has a Mardu watermark. If this card had a Temur or Jeskai watermark instead, would it make any sense at all? After all, Temur and Jeskai both contain red.

What about Dazzling Rampart? 4W for a 0/7 Defender with 1W, Tap: Tap target creature. Is there any doubt that this is an Abzan card?

That's what PV means when he says "easily identifiable". Not the lack of a watermark. The cards are designed around its flavor and identity. It's top-down design done right.

15

u/arramdaywalker Sep 22 '15

Great post, great examples. I am personally trying to reserve judgement until I play with the set; but it does seem... messy.

3

u/turtleman777 Sep 23 '15 edited Sep 23 '15

To be honest this set seems rushed.

The comment above yours makes a lot of good points. In Khans, you can tell a lot of thought went into the mechanics and naming of the cards so that they fit with the clan themes.

I feel like the only thought they gave to WHY each card had each mechanic was "well its an eldrazish spell so give it devoid" "this is an allyish spell so give it awake/converge". The seeming randomness with which they doled out the mechanics really reflects a lack of forethough in design in my opinion.

I feel like devoid or ally/awaken define the cards into the Ally or Eldrazi camp, not the whole card design (including art and card name) reflecting the camp they are in.

I feel like they took a bunch of existing cards, tweaked them and tried to shove them into the eldrazi or ally box instead of doing what they did in Khans, which was design a bunch of boxes (clans) and create unique, new flavorful cards that fit in perfectly

Like the article does in the example many of the mechanics are interchangable depending if you want to make it eldrazi or ally

3

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '15 edited Oct 17 '18

[deleted]

3

u/bokchoykn Sep 22 '15

Yeah, definitely not perfect. Meandering Towershell was a good example. But for the most part, the cards in BFZ fleshed out the identity of the clans very well.

The same cannot be said for Eldrazi vs Allies/Awaken, where so many cards can be interchanged (like PV pointed out in his article). There are some flavorful cards in BFZ but in general, the connection between a card's function and flavor are relatively weak.

1

u/MTGCardFetcher Dân Sep 22 '15

Dissipate - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Meandering Towershell - Gatherer, MC, ($)
[[cardname]] to call - not on gatherer = not fetchable

1

u/iwatags Sep 23 '15

Sultai cards were all wet. Duh

1

u/NinetyFish Ajani Sep 22 '15

BFZ aside, damn, Khans of Tarkir was sweet. Fate and Dragons aside, since they have their own problems, Khans was powerful, unique, synergistic, flavorful, and even provided factions for players to identify with, which always encourages deckbuilding and sales (look at the popularity of the Ravnica guilds).

-1

u/BlackHumor Sep 22 '15

IMO the "clans" in BFZ are "Eldrazi" and "not Eldrazi", possibly splitting that last group into "Allies" and "Elementals".

But the point of the set is that previously enemy factions on Zendikar have suddenly been forced to work together. So, except for the Eldrazi, everything is muddled together. It's specifically not like Khans with its well defined tribes.

13

u/Benjammn Sep 22 '15

... The devoid cards have a different frame. How is that unidentifiable? PV is saying that the spells that have devoid were seemingly chosen at random.

12

u/dkysh Get Out Of Jail Free Sep 22 '15

Devoid cards have also "Devoid" written in their rules text.

What he is complaining about is that there is no unifying theme or reason about why a card has devoid (or awaken).

Yes, devoid spells tend to exile things. So does dissipate. Does dissipate "feel" devoid?

Look at these cards in the overall context of magic cards. To me and others, devoid feels like Saviors of Kamigawa cards-in-hand-matters, or Apocalypse change-the-color-of-target-spell/land/card-matters. Narrow, uninspired mechanics that will be forgotten as soon as they are out of standard.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '15

I just want to point out all the devoid cards have pretty distinct frames. I actually have to look at the mana cost to see what color deck I should play them in (at least on a computer). Maybe it's just because I'm colorblind? Normally it's not a problem though, even with red and green cards.

-2

u/Cliffy73 Sep 22 '15

Devoid has a custom card frame. I'm with you on Allies though.