Magic: The Gathering – Battle for Zendikar

4/5

MTG was the first trading card game. They needed to make money to produce Robo Rally so they made MTG to acquire the funds. MTG has tons of innovation, theme, and amazing artwork. It is hard to rival this game because it has been out since 1993. It is a wonderful competitive card game. Casual MTG is still the #1 way to play. Commander & Draft are okay. 10,000+ plays.

This is an older card game and due to that it has several outdated features. Other games have improved on MTG, but lack innovation or the card pool. This is also a TCG so the pay to win feature exists & the print crappy cards to make people spend more money exists. Simple way around that is to PnP your own stuff at a much cheaper cost and still have fun with the experience. There are better card games. There is no card game with a better card pool.

House rule: update the land system to Duel Masters, Marvel Champions, etc... rules for a more streamlined strategic experience = less luck.

[b]Zendikar Cube[/b] (mostly Battle for Zendikar block) [i]Distributed Planar Collection III (Jeremy)[/i]

I think I'm going to settle on a solid 7 for this set, which is based largely on the unpopular Battle for Zendikar. The design process was very interesting, as I tried to address the set's weaknesses by incorporating themes from Oath of the Gatewatch, original Zendikar, and Worldwake. I believe I was ultimately successful, which gives me an aura of pride when considering it, but ultimately all I managed to do was get this from being a weak set with few playable decks to hitting straight down the middle with about ten or so archetypes. That's about on par with Theros, which also settled in at a 7.

Design Impressions: In putting this set together, I had to learn all the inherent strategies to make sure I'm including them in the set in a balanced way. My experience echoed the opinions voiced on the Limited Resources podcast: this is a very complex set. Coming off Dragons of Tarkir, which was a cinch to put together, I am finding Battle for Zendikar satisfyingly challenging. I am cautiously hoping to upgrade green a bit, so it's not as nerfed at it was in the original, but just getting a baseline understanding of how the original ticked has been quite the puzzle. Despite the horrid reviews coming from some camps, I must say I am looking forward to playing this one!

Play Impressions: Having tried most of the color combinations in actual play, I can confirm this is a very solid set. It's not as thematically entertaining as Theros, but the decks are a bit more interesting, and I feel like I'm seeing a few more surprises. After a couple tours through the set, I started wondering if the suite of three Devoid archetypes were a little weak, as they'd never made much of a showing in any of our games. While that's the case, I don't think those color combinations are "unplayable"; they're just going to come together in more vanilla builds (e.g., UB Control) rather than the fancy version I was going for (e.g., UB Ingest). (It's worth noting my appreciation thus far has been in direct proportion to the number of sets I stuffed into a given set. Tarkir = 2, Theros = 3, Zendikar = 4.)

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