Introducing... BfZ?

I am not one of the people who was super-pumped when Wizards announced Battle for Zendikar a little while ago. When it came out, Zendikar was kind of a flop for me, more so than any set since Prophecy. I fully realize that I'm in the minority here, and that Zendikar was pretty successful as far as Magic sets go, but I found the overall design of the set boring. R&D were still finding their feet with NWO, and as a result a lot of the design space they mined for the commons felt very repetitive. There just wasn't a whole lot going on in most packs to pique my Johnny-mind.

From a creative standpoint, I liked the general art direction for the set, but the lack of focus in the story or any type of dramatic tension made most of the creative uninteresting. They drove the point home that the world was dangerous, but there weren't factions to care for, or Planeswalker arcs that give the story a little more heft these days. Rise fixed a lot of my issues with Zendikar and Worldwake, with interesting commons and set mechanics, and a dramatic turn to the story (as well as setting up some cool story beats down the line), but Zendikar, as a new setting, fell completely flat on what should have been a very interesting conceit.

I do regularly remind myself that R&D is much better at making interesting NWO designs now (although given Maro's oft-repeated statement that Khans - my favorite block since Time Spiral - pushed the NWO-pendulum to its extreme, I'm very concerned that they're going to start pushing back the other way hard again) and that the block will necessarily fold in returning RoE elements as well as Zen/WW, and that helps me get a little more excited for the upcoming block.

All this is by way of introducing a project I'll be working on publicly here at GA for the next little while. I was preparing to go on a twitter rant the other day to discuss what I'd do if I were in charge of the design direction of Battle for Zendikar - what mechanics to bring back, what to drop, what to riff on, etc. - and then I decided it would probably make an interesting design challenge to just start making the set from scratch, something I've been wanting to take a stab at for a little while anyway.

So, starting today, I’m going to be designing “Battle for Zeffrikar”. The premise for the design is to take everything I know about how R&D approaches set design, and start designing the Fall 2015 set over the next few months. The goal here isn't to predict what BfZ will be, but rather, using current known information and restrictions, to design a set that it could be.

That said, Zeffrikar will likely have only superficial resemblance to the product we'll be seeing in the fall. The things that made Zen 1.0 a winner in R&D's eyes are the aspects that appealed to me the least. Of course, there are some things that will have to be in the set, so expect some amount of convergent design.

Some quick notes: Zeffrikar won't be as interactive as Suvnica was. While I'm eager for feedback and ideas as this develops, I'm not going to be doing critiques of every card or mechanic suggested. I'll try to credit designs as I adopt them, and offer critique occasionally, but it won't be as much of a communal project as I attempted with Suvnica.

Also, Zeffrikar will not be crafted into a final product suitable for development. I haven't had much luck in playtesting past projects here, mostly for lack of time to dedicate to it. I'll come up with a set's worth of cards and iterate based on Artisan feedback and what I can see on the surface level, but I'm not going to get the playtest-level feedback necessary to move this much past initial design.

I have a little bit of a backlog of content since I've been working on this for a couple of weeks now. Tomorrow I'm going to post the first part of the Initial Design Vision, a document that's basically going to serve as the Exploratory Design phase of this project. It will likely be at least two parts, probably more.

Please let me know what you think in the comments or over on Twitter (Official Hashtag: #gaBfZ). But for now, prepare yourselves for the Battle of Zeffrikar.