Zendikar Rising was released on Friday September 25th 2020, and is the set after Core Set 2021.

Abilities

Zendikar Rising brought back 3 old abilities and 1 new ability. Here are the three abilities:

Kicker

when a creature with kicker enters the battlefield, you may pay its kicker cost as additional cost to cast the spell. if you do, an ability will trigger on the card. the ability varies depending on the card.

Jace, Mirror Mage is a mythic kicker card. if you kick it, you create a copy of Jace, Mirror Mage except its starting loyalty is 1 and it isn’t legendary.

Landfall

Landfall is a classic Nissa ability which triggers whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control. landfall decks aim to play multiple lands every turn, by playing cards that allow you to play additional lands every turn.

Scute Swarm is an over powered card with landfall which is a 1/1 and allows you to create copies of it when a land enters the battlefield. this means that you multiply the number of scute swarms you control by 2, so if you had 1 and over the next 3 turns you played 5 lands, you would have 32 1/1s.

Another good card to put in landfall decks is Fabled Passage, which is a land that you can sacrifice to put a land card onto the battlefield tapped (or untapped if you have 4 or more lands). this is good because landfall would trigger when you play the card and when you sacrifice it to put a land onto the battlefield. a slightly less good version of this card is evolving wilds.

Double-sided cards

Double-sided cards were from Ixalan, the set where Nicol Bolas steals the Immortal Sun. Double-sided cards no longer transform in Zendikar. instead you can choose which one you play, the card on the front or the card on the back.

Because the card is double-sided, your opponent will know if it is in your hand, so, like in Ixalan, you need a replacement card which you can get in Zendikar Rising booster packs like tokens.

Party

Party is a new ability that was introduced in Zendikar Rising. your party consists of four creatures – a cleric, a rogue, a warrior, and a wizard. cards can have abilities that are better if you have more creatures in your party. For instance, a spell could cost 1 less for each creature in your party, or a creature could get +1/+1 for each creature in your party until end of turn.

Tazri, Beacon of Unity, Stonework Packbeast, and Zagras, Thief of Heartbeats are good party cards. Stonework Packbeast can count as any one type of creature in your party.

Rotation

When Zendikar Rising came out, it meant that Dominaria, Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, and Core set 2020 were rotated out of standard, so you can’t enter standard tournaments using cards from those sets or older ones.

The three Ravnica sets were powerful, and most standard decks became historic when they rotated out, so now standard decks are less powerful.

Planeswalkers

There are three planeswalkers in Zendikar Rising – Jace, Mirror Mage, Nahiri, Heir of the Ancients, and Nissa of Shadowed Boughs.

Jace, Mirror Mage

Jace, Mirror Mage is a great kicker card, and he can create a copies of himself if you kick him. he may not look good, but he is better than he seems. Jace is blue.

Nahiri, Heir of the Ancients

Nahiri is all about warriors and equipment. put her in a fitting deck and you can charge your opponent down with warriors wielding all sorts of equipment. Nahiri is white and red.

Nissa of Shadowed Boughs

Nissa has gone Golgari – in other words she is now black and green! she is a good landfall card because whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, you put a loyalty counter on her. as always, she turns lands into elementals, but this time with haste and menace! her -5 ability lets you put a creature from you hand/graveyard onto the battlefield with the same or less than the number of lands you control. Her only weakness is that landfall is usually white, red and green, so few landfall decks would accept her.

Next time i will be talking about banned cards and why they were banned.