Battle for Zendikar Preview - Day 2!

Hibernum_JC

Hi folks!

Today, in our second installment of the Battle for Zendikar preview, we’ll talk about a few of the new mechanics we’re introducing in the set.

The main new mechanic I’d like to discuss is Void gems. These gems are a new resource we are introducing in this set, which are the central mechanic of the Eldrazi theme.

Void gems, by themselves, are harmless. If you match them, you’ll get no mana whatsoever (there’s an exception to that we will discuss a bit later in this post). They do not normally drop from the top of the board either - instead they are created through an ability called Ingest.

Whenever you trigger an Ingest, you convert gems on the board from your opponent’s color to Void gems. Any Ingest ability has a number associated to it - that number is the amount of gems that will be converted. For example, something that does Ingest 2 will convert 2 gems from the opponent’s color to Void gems.

Converting gems to Void has a few benefits: firstly, it denies your opponent’s higher mana color, so you’ll end up slowing them down a bit. They also become a resource for a second ability we’re talking about today: Process.

Process is a keyword that affects ability triggers - abilities with the Process keyword before them will only trigger if a sufficient amount of Void gems are present on the board. For example, an ability that has “When this creature enters the battlefield, Process 2: Deal 2 damage to your opponent” would only trigger if there were 2 or more Void gems on the board. In addition, whenever an ability triggers with a Process, it converts the amount of Void gems it requires to trigger to the opponent’s color.

This might sound a bit complicated, so here’s a quick rundown:

Convert your opponent’s color gems to Void with Ingest abilities Convert Void gems to your opponent’s colors with Process abilities

The other mechanic I’ll discuss here that has an impact on these is Devoid. Devoid is an evergreen that appears on multiple cards, from Spells to Creatures. Cards with Devoid are special in that they gain mana as normal when you match Void gems - they are the exception I was discussing earlier. The mana gain works as usual - if you have 2 cards with Devoid and you match 3 Void gems, you’ll fill the first one in your hand, then any leftover will go to the 2nd card with Devoid. Only Devoid cards can receive mana from Void gem matches.

These new mechanics add an incredibly interesting layer to the game - you can build decks to counter specific other decks with these things in a lot of interesting ways. You can build a deck based on Ingest so that you’ll do mana denial to your opponent, but no worry about Process or Devoid since it’ll just affect your opponent. You can build a deck with both Ingest and Process temporarily deny mana but then give it back when you Process (Process abilities are cheaper on cards, in terms of casting costs, than if they didn’t have Process). You can build a deck with only Process and Devoid to counter an opponent doing a lot of Ingest. There’s a lot of possibilities here at play and we hope they’ll be just as interesting to you fine folk as they were to us when we were developing them.

With that, I’m also revealing a new card, this time a Blue Mythic: Part the Waterveil!



As a Mythic Blue Support with a very low cost, it has the potential to greatly turn games around and let you be on the offensive. We wanted to add a new Support for Blue that would reward players for playing tactically with the board and work towards making Match-5s more often - the interesting thing being that since you get an extra turn (by default with the Match-5) you can chain them together to gain incredible amounts of mana (and tokens!) very quickly. It even triggers on Void gem and Planeswalker gem matches, so it’s very powerful.

The 6 1/1 Island Elemental tokens are just icing on the cake, really, but it brings finishing power to Blue which it sometimes lacks. You’ll note that a lot of the new cards in BFZ are geared towards making games go a bit faster - games can tend to linger for long periods of time, and we want to speed things up a bit.

Did I forget to mention this baby has a shield value of 10? It won’t be going away unless your opponent has dedicated Support removal!

Tomorrow we’ll have our first look at our second Planeswalker as well as another new mechanic and card!

Unknown

While the previous mythic seemed eminently usable, I think with this new mythic you guys are back to the "high cost high swing" type of mythic, which proved wildly unpopular with the previous set.

Have you thought about making it something like

8 mana
On match 4 or higher, gain 4 mana and summon 2 1/1 blue creatures

I would far prefer to use that instead of the current one.

Keegan

Seems usable to me, at least much more so than Mage-Ring Responder.

Unknown

Its not unusable in that it will make your deck worse.

But it is not something I would be chomping at the bit to put into my deck.

Irving

Interesting mechanic! Evil chuckles will certainly ensue the first time the opponent's only possible match is Void gems. I wonder what sort of Planeswalker(s) you've developed to support an Ingest/Process/Void strategy - Jace's third ability helps with mana denial, of course, though it is expensive. When his first ability gets weakened maybe it will be more viable.

Thanks for mentioning the shield value on Part the Waterveil. Is there any way to see that in the game? If not, can it be listed on the online card list when you update it?

Morphis

I was looking the effect yum ok nice
Discussion about it... Fair enough
Then as soon as I started thinking " ok if it has at least 3 shield charge it can be fine" I read it has 10 charges.
WOW.

If blue has kept its ability to control the game intact this + spy network can simply win games.

Also btw is there any chance that, since your goal is to speed up matches, you did change some old mythics in this patch?
Even with no actual numbers/names just confirmation....

EDUSAN

Well with a 10 shields counter i REALLY hope that the colors that have no fast way of dealing with a suppot get some love in this matter

i can see myself losing to this card alone when i play black.

rulerhumankind

Does this mean that the new set will include more support removal options for the decks that are starved of them? I dont know of any current support removal for black, blue or white. There is ony support discouragement in white with vyrn wingmare, and since white relies so heavily on supports, it is almost never run.

ChrisTot

pandabear wrote:

Its not unusable in that it will make your deck worse.

But it is not something I would be chomping at the bit to put into my deck.

Q: Do I want to draw a second copy of this card?
A: No.

ChrisTot

If I already have 3 creatures out and then this effect triggers, will I get a 4th creature on the field?

Hibernum_JC

pandabear wrote:

While the previous mythic seemed eminently usable, I think with this new mythic you guys are back to the "high cost high swing" type of mythic, which proved wildly unpopular with the previous set.

Have you thought about making it something like

8 mana
On match 4 or higher, gain 4 mana and summon 2 1/1 blue creatures

I would far prefer to use that instead of the current one.

You have to note a few things here.

Not all Planeswalkers have been revealed. There might be Planeswalkers that can take more advantage of this card than others.

Irving wrote:

Interesting mechanic! Evil chuckles will certainly ensue the first time the opponent's only possible match is Void gems. I wonder what sort of Planeswalker(s) you've developed to support an Ingest/Process/Void strategy - Jace's third ability helps with mana denial, of course, though it is expensive. When his first ability gets weakened maybe it will be more viable.

Thanks for mentioning the shield value on Part the Waterveil. Is there any way to see that in the game? If not, can it be listed on the online card list when you update it?

I wanted to make sure people saw the shield value and understood that it wasn't a 1 shield Mythic. Right now, there's no way to see that in-game, but it's in our task list for a future patch. There were a few more pressing points with this release.

Morphis wrote:

I was looking the effect yum ok nice
Discussion about it... Fair enough
Then as soon as I started thinking " ok if it has at least 3 shield charge it can be fine" I read it has 10 charges.
WOW.

If blue has kept its ability to control the game intact this + spy network can simply win games.

Also btw is there any chance that, since your goal is to speed up matches, you did change some old mythics in this patch?
Even with no actual numbers/names just confirmation....

Right now, none of the old Mythics have changed (we've fixed a bug with Pyromancer's Goggles, but that's it, if I recall correctly). When we release a new set, we want to see how the new set impacts the old set and see what changes we have to make.

rulerhumankind wrote:

Does this mean that the new set will include more support removal options for the decks that are starved of them? I dont know of any current support removal for black, blue or white. There is ony support discouragement in white with vyrn wingmare, and since white relies so heavily on supports, it is almost never run.

EDUSAN wrote:

Well with a 10 shields counter i REALLY hope that the colors that have no fast way of dealing with a suppot get some love in this matter

i can see myself losing to this card alone when i play black.

There is no new support removal options in Black and Blue, however White has one (although it's not extremely reliable in that it's a bit harder to trigger). Those 2 colors are inherently weak against Supports in general, and we like to keep it that way for now. Black has a lot of new tools that are interesting with this set, so you might not instantly lose to it.

ChrisTot wrote:

Q: Do I want to draw a second copy of this card?
A: No.

It can still get destroyed, however, so 2nd copies of this drawn can still be useful. Regardless, this is the drawback of Supports - they are generally useful, but extra copies of them are only useful if they're getting close to being destroyed.

ChrisTot wrote:

If I already have 3 creatures out and then this effect triggers, will I get a 4th creature on the field?

It will do the same as usual when you have 3 creatures - if it can't reinforce one already on the battlefield, it will ask if you want to remove one.

Unknown

Do these tokens work with angel's tomb?

Also to the note about new pw's, that is true. Perhaps there will be a blue PW to rival jace (though come on, jace is too good...) with mana ramp/conversion like Nissa.

Maybe RIKU. In fact just give riku to all 3 colors and we'll never play anything else again.

Keegan

pandabear wrote:

Its not unusable in that it will make your deck worse.

But it is not something I would be chomping at the bit to put into my deck.

Got it, me neither. I'll concede that I'm thinking in terms of Jace, though. If there's a new PW that it gels with, that's great.

Hibernum_JC

pandabear wrote:

Do these tokens work with angel's tomb?

Also to the note about new pw's, that is true. Perhaps there will be a blue PW to rival jace (though come on, jace is too good...) with mana ramp/conversion like Nissa.

Maybe RIKU. In fact just give riku to all 3 colors and we'll never play anything else again.

They don't work with Angel's Tomb! They are tokens after all. Angel's Tomb was essentially meant for giving your defenders a bit of an oomph the turn they come into play, but it turned out that it had the completely unintended consequence of having problems with something we've actually been internally discussing for a while - the fact that when you reinforce anything, it pretty much gives it Haste. This greatly devalued Haste, but every single solution we've looked into was incredibly clunky - we thought about making sure all creatures would get summoned after combat, but that proved to be confusing for newer players since every single card in the game has an immediate impact, so if creatures had a delayed impact it just felt really strange. We looked into UI solutions, but even that was problematic. So in the end, since absolutely no one in the community (from what we've seen anyway) even commented on that fact, we just left it as is. Sometimes what we feel are problems actually aren't for players, so we don't always address them.

Keegan wrote:

Got it, me neither. I'll concede that I'm thinking in terms of Jace, though. If there's a new PW that it gels with, that's great.

Well you might be pleasantly surprised. Who knows?

ChrisTot

I imagine this card is also better to evaluate once we know all the cards in the set AND how much different matching 5 is with the new mechanics. It's possible that Mage-Ring Responder is better now with the new mechanics, we will just have to wait and see how frequently matching 5 happens in the future.

Especially since there will most likely be even more mana fixing supports in this set to match the lands.

loroku

So, it's possible for your opponent to Ingest a lot of your tiles, then if you play a Process ability, you'll give those tiles to the opponent as well? So Process cards by themselves can actually work against you from a tile-color perspective, then?

Also Ingest in the current meta is going to favor certain PWs more than others due to the fact that green is probably >50% of your opponents. Red doesn't really like taking green off the board, for example, but black might.

loroku

Hibernum_JC wrote:

...something we've actually been internally discussing for a while - the fact that when you reinforce anything, it pretty much gives it Haste. This greatly devalued Haste, but every single solution we've looked into was incredibly clunky - we thought about making sure all creatures would get summoned after combat, but that proved to be confusing for newer players since every single card in the game has an immediate impact, so if creatures had a delayed impact it just felt really strange. We looked into UI solutions, but even that was problematic. So in the end, since absolutely no one in the community (from what we've seen anyway) even commented on that fact, we just left it as is. Sometimes what we feel are problems actually aren't for players, so we don't always address them.

I've actually thought about this as well and there isn't an easy solution that comes to mind. It's nice to know that you guys at least think about it though (this is the type of thing we'd love to see more of!). I just thought it was like a bonus for keeping something on the board and then getting another one out, or an indirect buff to small, fast creatures.

ChrisTot

Hibernum_JC wrote:

...something we've actually been internally discussing for a while - the fact that when you reinforce anything, it pretty much gives it Haste. This greatly devalued Haste, but every single solution we've looked into was incredibly clunky - we thought about making sure all creatures would get summoned after combat, but that proved to be confusing for newer players since every single card in the game has an immediate impact, so if creatures had a delayed impact it just felt really strange. We looked into UI solutions, but even that was problematic. So in the end, since absolutely no one in the community (from what we've seen anyway) even commented on that fact, we just left it as is. Sometimes what we feel are problems actually aren't for players, so we don't always address them.

Strangely enough, the only thing I've ever thought about with that is that creatures with Renown can't fulfill their renown again when reinforced. And Colossus being reinforced doesn't mean you'll get a 24/24, for example. I think that the reason I've never cared about hasty reinforcers is because drawing a 4th creature and choosing to play it is creates the opposite effect: taking a current creature that can attack off of the board to replace it with a creature that cannot attack. Reinforce once, and replace a weaker creature once, and you've kinda evened yourself out on damage dealt over the course of turns

*edit, just to clarify..i am completely fine with the way the current system works and don't think it needs changing, other than the actual bugs like abilities falling off after reinforcing happens.

mixed bag

If Ingest abilities converts your opponent’s color gems to Void gems, what happens if there are none of your opponents gems on the board, or left on the board? Does the card your trying to cast become red (invalid)?

Hibernum_JC

loroku wrote:

So, it's possible for your opponent to Ingest a lot of your tiles, then if you play a Process ability, you'll give those tiles to the opponent as well? So Process cards by themselves can actually work against you from a tile-color perspective, then?

Also Ingest in the current meta is going to favor certain PWs more than others due to the fact that green is probably >50% of your opponents. Red doesn't really like taking green off the board, for example, but black might.

When you Process, you always convert to your opponent's color. The advantage to using Process cards is their abilities are much cheaper than they would be if they had no restrictions, so it's always worth it, and if you didn't have to invest into Ingesting you'll still come out on top.

loroku wrote:

I've actually thought about this as well and there isn't an easy solution that comes to mind. It's nice to know that you guys at least think about it though (this is the type of thing we'd love to see more of!). I just thought it was like a bonus for keeping something on the board and then getting another one out, or an indirect buff to small, fast creatures.

It is a buff to small creatures, which in itself isn't that bad, but it's incredibly strong for tokens, which is why anything that gives temporary stat buffs on summoning needs to be either toned down or not affect tokens.

ChrisTot wrote:

Strangely enough, the only thing I've ever thought about with that is that creatures with Renown can't fulfill their renown again when reinforced. And Colossus being reinforced doesn't mean you'll get a 24/24, for example. I think that the reason I've never cared about hasty reinforcers is because drawing a 4th creature and choosing to play it is creates the opposite effect: taking a current creature that can attack off of the board to replace it with a creature that cannot attack. Reinforce once, and replace a weaker creature once, and you've kinda evened yourself out on damage dealt over the course of turns

*edit, just to clarify..i am completely fine with the way the current system works and don't think it needs changing, other than the actual bugs like abilities falling off after reinforcing happens.

Like I said, we're fine with it too. It just gives us certain restrictions when working with certain type of cards.

mixed bag wrote:

If Ingest abilities converts your opponent’s color gems to Void gems, what happens if there are none of your opponents gems on the board, or left on the board? Does the card your trying to cast become red (invalid)?

If there are no gems to Process, you can still cast the card. Typically Process is mostly on creatures, and you can always summon creatures, regardless of it their abilities can trigger on summoning or not. The Process just won't trigger if it can't convert enough Void gems.

That's it for me tonight - I'll come back on tomorrow morning and see if there are more questions. Tomorrow we'll have another big post to share with you guys!

mlktws

There are a few things I don't quite get.

Hibernum_JC wrote:

Converting gems to Void has a few benefits: firstly, it denies your opponent’s higher mana color, so you’ll end up slowing them down a bit.

I don't see how there's much benefit in this. I play green because it (or at least my current inventory) is the fastest option, and I must not be the only one with this (or a similar) view, because the majority of my opponents are using green as well, so the majority of the time, won't I be slowing myself as much as my opponent, since my opponent's color is also my own?

These new mechanics add an incredibly interesting layer to the game - you can build decks to counter specific other decks with these things in a lot of interesting ways.

How is this feasible? I get it for story mode, because that's how I've been getting the crystal rewards (tweaking my decks for a specific purpose), but it is a tedious and incredibly time-consuming process. The deck building interface is incredibly annoying, so to me, it's not really an option to tout as an exciting opportunity. Even less so, since building your deck specifically to counter another deck can't even be done in PVP; it's not like you can know what deck you're going to be up against, and it's one and done, so you can't even sideboard like with regular Magic.

Or am I completely misconstruing your intention?

On a side note, it would be great if we could save multiple decks so we don't have to slog through the editor when we want to counter a specific other deck.

We wanted to add a new Support for Blue that would reward players for playing tactically with the board and work towards making Match-5s more often

Until last week, I didn't think it was possible to actually work towards making Match-5s; it always seemed to be nothing but chance. I figured out a way to make them more frequent, but it's still more luck than planning. Will there be any changes upcoming that make them easier to come by? And are there any tips you would be willing to give in order to more frequently take advantage of Match-5s?

The general feeling I'm getting from what you've so far said of BFZ is that there may be some new, fun, and interesting ways to play in story mode, but in PVP, it may be lacking. That's not a criticism of the impending release, mind you (I wrote with the utmost respect), because, as you've said, there's more to be revealed, and I just may not have a clear picture. Or I may just be stupid. Or something else, maybe.

I'm assuming that you guys have been play testing with the new mechanics; do they work as intended in both PVP and story mode? Are my fears ill-founded?

Also, will there be any UI or other general updates? I believe I read that duplicate cards can be cashed in for runes, and that creature types will be visible, but (if this isn't stepping on the toes of planned pre-release news) will there be any others? Liiiiike an inclusion of a graveyard? Because that would be super useful

Also also, so you don't think I'm just some Negative Nancy or Doubting Dorothea, I wanna say that I love the game in general, and I'm really looking forward to BFZ, even if I don't yet understand how it will fit into my playstyle. Thanks for doing the things you do!