Last week the new Magic the Gathering set, Zendikar Rising, dropped on MTG Arena (the cards for which are published on the MTG website). Set on the plane of Zendikar, the new set lacks the colourless Eldrazi creatures which dominated previous forays to this corner of the Magic multiverse. Instead the first set post-rotation (which sees the old sets Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, and Core 2020 no longer usable in the Standard format) emphasises a new party mechanic, encouraging putting into play Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric creature type cards for additional effects, alongside an older mechanic - landfall - whereby effects are triggered by land entering the battlefield.
Predictions online, particularly on the MTG Arena subreddit, before Zendikar Rising released were that the party mechanic would be largely ignored by many players, while landfall would come to dominate the meta due to the abundance of cards to fetch lands from a player’s deck. At this stage it’s too early to see whether these predictions will come to pass, as the game meta typically takes a couple of weeks after a set drops to settle, however with Zendikar Rising this has been delayed even further by a technically disastrous launch in which many players were unable to even connect to MTG Arena on release day due to rampant connectivity issues.
As the meta is shaping up currently, however, cards across all five colours are seeing reasonable levels of play, with the most recent statistics from Untapped.gg showing Lotus Cobra as the most popular card in Standard across all ranks. The card appears in nearly half of all decks as a two mana cost green creature giving extra mana of any colour when another land enters the battlefield. Unsurprisingly landfall ability cards dominate the top ten most popular cards in the set, with six out of the top ten cards being landfall cards. Fitting in with pre-release predictions that the party mechanic would be largely ignored, only the blue and black colour Rogue card Soaring Thought-Thief appears in the top ten cards utilising the party mechanic in any sense. Another card featured in the top ten is Scute Swarm, which was expected pre-release to be a popular meta card many decks would be built around. Appearing in 12% of decks according to Untapped, the card may not be dominating the meta exactly as expected (appearing as the seventh most popular card); however it is seeing healthy showing and has revitalised the Ikoria set mutate ability.
The popularity of these cards is likely to change as the meta shifts with the discovery of effective combos utilising new set cards, and especially given Wizards of the Coast have announced an update on the Standard format next week following a period of ‘closely monitoring developments’ which is likely to see restrictions placed on long time problem card Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath amongst others. Speculation as to similar expected restrictions on Omnath, Locus of Creation, a four mana red, green, white, blue creature from Zendikar Rising, is unlikely to come to pass however. While Omnath shares many of the same issues the player base has with Uro, namely that for a low mana cost it provides ramp, life, and a third effect (for Omnath direct damage to an opponent, for Uro self-replacement through a card draw), Wizards has proven reluctant in the past to place restrictions or bans on cards from new sets. This is despite the Banned and Restricted list being increased substantially over the past couple of years, earning scorn in the community.
Until next week's announcement, however, it seems almost impossible to imagine Arena as a game not saturated with blue and green landfall decks, and for many players an update to Standard's Banned and Restricted list cannot come soon enough.
Chris Jackson is a postgraduate historian from the United Kingdom and lifelong video game lover. He went to university to do two degrees in History not because it was a viable career path but because he was inspired by Civilization III as a child to conquer the world (at least virtually). His favourite games at the moment are MTG Arena and Divinity: Original Sin 2, and while his CV describes him as a bartender, his current job title is really Dungeon Master for his four ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns.
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