As a way to try to give more concrete arguments about where I stand in the whole "BFZ sucks x No, you are just whining" debate, I have listed/arranged everything that I perceive is wrong with Battle for Zendikar in three major groups. Flavor / Context / Playability. Some mechanics/stuff overlaps so I placed them in all the groups where it's relevant in.
FLAVOR
- Devoid means very little. The cards are colored in cost/flavor/mechanic - many are even MULTIcolored - yet, they are colorless. The net result is, in one extreme, many cards that require mana of two colors, have an effect from those two colors, yet the card is colorless because it "represents an alien race that is defined by having no color". It is arbitrary.
Example:
Brutal Expulsion. It is a U/R card that is every bit U and R - like, say,
Electrolyze. But it has an ability that means nothing on the card, besides randomly killing
Silver Knight/
Goblin Piledriver. At the same time, though, it doesn't trigger your
Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh in your regular U/R deck. This is bound to lead to confusing gameplay: players waiting for many turns with a R spell in hand facing a
Silver Knight they intuitively think they cannot kill, or wrongly triggering all the past Magic cards that care about colored cards being cast.
-
Brutal Tyrant is an Eldrazi with devoid that deals damage. Yet, unlike every other damage-dealing card with Devoid in the set, it doesn't exile.
- One could say that it's because you can sac/throw non-eldrazi creatures and thus the flavor of not exiling is justified. Except 1.
Barrage Tyrant deals the damage itself and 2.
Unnatural Aggresion is just a regular Green fight spell - it doesn't care if any of the fighting creatures are colorless - yet, it exiles.
-
Blighted Woodland. In the story, the Eldrazi are killing the very land of Zendikar. They literally walk through the plane and suck the whole life out of it, leaving behind that white chalky thing. Yet,
Blighted Woodland is a corrupted land that... ramps for two basics, an ability that, in every single Magic card it has ever appeared on, has been a fertility/exploration/growth-flavored ability.
- "Ally" has been given at random to non-Rally creatures. There is no clear distinction between many ally/non-ally creatures except the fact that some are "Kor Scout" or "Vampire" and others are "Kor Scout Ally" or "Vampire Ally".
- Awaken is a main White and Blue ability. It is about *animating* *lands*, which flavorfully is exactly what an Elemental is (a non-sentient object/material/element that gets turned into a living thing), but instead of being Red and Green, it is White and Blue. Nissa has literally a pet elemental, yet Awaken is UW. Oh, and it even randomly gives haste (Noyan Dar), or for some reason doesn't (regular awaken cards) but, in practice, you get a hasty creature whenever you animate a land that you played in a previous turn. This leads to gameplay such as "6 mana,
Sheer Drop your guy, bash for 3". In White.
- We *came back* to a world that originally had colorless Eldrazi big creatures and colored smaller Eldrazi that made Spawns to a revisited world with colorless-but-multicolored Eldrazi of all sizes (1/1 deathtouch, 1/1 that dies and makes a Scion -> two 10/10s, a 10/10 indestructible). The new token, upgraded to a 1/1, appears less frequently and, obviously, in less quantity as 1/1 > 0/1. But if Zendikar is more and more on the verge of Eldrazi-consumption, wouldn't it make more sence to have MORE eldrazi invaders infesting the land?
- Eldrazi appear in Devoid form in all colors except White, which doesn't have a single Eldrazi card. What defines Eldrazi is colorlessness, they said, and that "the weapon of choice for the Zendikari to fight colorless is to use multicolored, hence converge." yet...
- Only one White card in the whole set has Converge. With 12 cards total, Converge is actually centered in Blue and Green (4 Blue, 3 Green, two Blue/Green cards, and 1/1/1 White/Red/Black).
- Allies are the Zendikari that have teamed up to fight the eldrazi (not all Zendikari are united against the Eldrazi, as Mark Rosewater answered in a recent Blogatog question). Converge is their way of fighting, through convergence of colored mana, entities that are colorless. Allies show up in every color, and in multiple multicolored combinations such as U/G, B/W and R/W.
- So, if
A. Eldrazi are non-White
B. Converge is the main weapon of the Zendikari, and
C. Ally is five-colored
why is Converge centered in UG rather than in White; or better distributed among colors?
CONTEXT
- Processors work retroactively since many cards do exile (
Abzan Charm,
Magma Spray, Delve cards the opponent has etc), but Ingest doesn't work retroactively at all. Older cards mess up with exiled cards VERY infrequently, and thus only the Processors or the oddball
Torrent Elemental care about what is in the exile zone. Everywhere else, the benefit of exiling is permanently dealing with creatures that come back from the dead - creatures you don't want to Process back to your opponent's graveyard.
- Ingest/Process is akin to Spirit/Arcane. They only care about themselves.
- Colorless lands. Like many pointed out, we are coming from a heavy multicolor block (wedges/hybrid+pairs/allied pairs) into a block that cares about colorless and adds 5 monocolored common and 5 colorless uncommon lands that are all good but are too punishing to a manabase that wants to play the better cards from Khans block. We have a dozen colorless lands that are very good, but very little incentive to play them considering the multicolored cards are so good and the Triland/Painland/Fetch/new duals manabase is also so good at supporting those cards.
- We have 55 cards with "Devoid" written on them. Exactly two cards in Khans block cares about them (
Tomb of the Spirit Dragon and
Ghostfire Blade).
- Converge appears in 12 cards, allies are five-colored, yet both mechanics were put in a set with very little manafixing in common. There isn't a
Verdant Haven type of card, the only common manafixing land is
Evolving Wilds. The set only has 6 artifacts, only one fixes mana (Pilgrim's Eye) and it's an uncommon (?).
- Power creep has a limit and Tarkir block is very good, but a new set that will tone the power creep down can't be as parasitic as BFZ is. Normally the new set is already struggling for the spotlight because it stands alone against a full block, but the Battle for Zendikar x Khans/Fate/Dragons dispute is one of the most lopsided ones we have ever seen. Why are we going to move away from
Hangarback Walkerinto
Abzan Charminto
Siege Rhino into Allies/Ingest/Processors? There is not enough incentive to do so.
PLAYABILITY
- We have 55 cards with "Devoid" written on them. Yet, only and exactly 14 cards in the set care about colorless cards (and thus can care about those 55 cards with Devoid). Two of those are lands, and a third one cares about 7+ mana colorless creatures. Yet, every single creature card with Devoid costs 6 or less.
- When we add
Tomb of the Spirit Dragon and
Ghostfire Blade, we get a whopping 16 cards in the whole Standard that care about colorlessness in any way. Most are designed for Limited. Devoid/colorless means very little in Standard Constructed.
- The Blighted lands all cast spells that cost 3-4 mana (
Divination,
Cruel Edict,
Congregate,
Explosive Vegetation). The Red one costs five mana for a
Shock. It stands out by not being on-par with the rest.
- Normal acceleration went from turn 1 (
Elvish Mystic) all the way up to turn 3 (new
Rampant Growth). Our new rare accelerator doesn't work with spells so we can't play it like a normal ramp spell, because it can't cast
Hedron Archive/
Explosive Vegetation. Basically, Green/Eldrazi Ramp decks start ramping on turn 3. That is a severe setback for a set that wants us to play 10/10s for 10.
- We got a ton of downgrades in order to make Exile/Process "work".
Horribly Awry is a worse
Remove Soul that exiles,
Transgress the Mind is a more expensive, slightly better
Appetitte for Brains that exiles.
Magma Spray rotated out, the common spells that exile all cost 3 mana and are very expensive for their effect:
Complete Disregard is
Reave Soul for 1 more,
Touch of the Void is
Volcanic Hammer for 1 more, etc
- At this rate it is very hard to justify using the Processors. They are all just above average when they process, but they ask for something very difficult for that small gain.
Blight Herder is the only "power card" among the Processors and it is still mostly fair.
Wasteland Strangler, for example, is a very-hard-to-function
Skinrenderand the only benefit you get is paying B less for a card that is, again, mostly fair.
- We traded
Hada Freeblade and
Oran-Rief Survivalists for a bunch of regular creatures that happen to be an Ally (
Expedition Envoy is just an
Elite Vanguard). The good (R)allies all cost 3-4 or more and do literally nothing to the normal allies that you played first. Since Rally boosts all your regular creatures, what is the incentive for playing
Expedition Envoy over Kytheon or
Mardu Woe-Scraper? Just so if/when you cast it very late you trigger Rally again? Unlike slivers, the original allies and tribes like Goblins, Elves and Merfolk, it looks like it is better to just play creatures that are good on their on.
