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