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!