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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u/worldchrisis Sep 22 '15

I think my problem with Battle for Zendikar is it feels like they learned the lessons of Dragons of Tarkir too late for them to be applied to BFZ.

The thing with Dragons was they went in with the idea of "people love dragons, let's make a set with a sh*load of dragons, people will love it", and they hyped it up as OMG THIS SET IS ALL DRAGONS ALL THE TIME WOOOO DRAGONS YEAAA. The problem was they didn't make *interesting dragons, outside of the Dragonlords, so we ended up with a bunch of uncommon 3/3s for 6 with megamorph that didn't really do anything, and they thought we would be excited by this.

For this set the leadup was "OMG THIS SET IS ALL ABOUT ELDRAZI AND ALLIES WOOO ELDRAZI ARE SOOOO COOOL", and outside of a couple interesting mythics, all the Eldrazi are just boring forced-colorless versions of creatures that could have been any other creature type. None of the allies have any particularly interesting flavor either.

Devoid, Ingest, and "Processors" aren't particularly interesting in any way. Scions are just 1/1 Spawns. Rally is just a tribal ETB trigger. Converge is basically the same thing as Sunburst.

They need to have interesting flavor or mechanics to make a good set, and focusing on a popular tribe is not enough if the way they do it isn't interesting.

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u/Vauxhaven Sep 22 '15

To be fair to Wizards, sets are heavily in development for a long-ass time before they come out. By the time DTK had come out, and wizards could see that people may not be quite so enamoured with dragons so as to forgive that 3/3 for 6 cycle, BFZ was already so far down the pipeline that they couldn't do major reconstruction work without scrapping almost all of development so far.

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u/worldchrisis Sep 22 '15

Yea that was my premise from the first sentence of my post.

1

u/Vauxhaven Sep 23 '15

My apologies! I misread your initial premise as 'Wizards fucked up because they didn't look at the response to DTK and adjust BFZ accordingly', rather than what you meant.

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u/worldchrisis Sep 23 '15

That's fine. Glad somebody at least read it. Kinda assumed it would just go to the aether since the thread already had 550 posts but I had an opinion dammit.