MTG’s Foundations Remembers Why Zendikar Rising Was Great

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home November 15, 2024 17 Views 7 Min Read
MTG's Foundations Remembers Why Zendikar Rising Was Great



Key Takeaways

  • Foundations and Jumpstart sets celebrate Magic: The Gathering, offering both simplicity for newcomers and nostalgia for veterans.
  • Foundations sheds positive light on older sets, like Zendikar Rising, by including reprints and honoring mechanics.
  • The beginner-friendly approach of Foundations and its reprints from Zendikar Rising create a memorable and exciting experience for all players.

Between Foundations and its Jumpstart spin-off, Magic: The Gathering has decided to take a quick break from crossovers and pop culture allusions to celebrate itself. Both sets are incredible, perfectly balancing simplicity for newcomers with deep cuts and tasty reprints for veterans, and I’ve had more fun with it than any other MTG release this year.

Tucked away in all the excitement, there was one aspect of Foundations I wasn’t expecting. Beneath the reprints and the alt-arts, Foundations has managed to shed a much more positive light on my first set and shown it deserved much more credit than I originally gave it.

While I’ve been collecting Magic on and off since Fifth Dawn in 2004, and had brief dalliances with the Duels of the Planeswalkers games on the Xbox 360, it wasn’t until the pandemic that things finally clicked into place. Out of boredom I downloaded Arena, and by the end of the day, I’d ordered the starter kits to try it out in paper too.

A few weeks later, Zendikar Rising launched. It was a return to a setting I’d never heard of, with characters I didn’t know fighting over MacGuffins I didn’t understand. But it brought forth new cards in my newfound obsession, and I was all in on it. I was buying boosters and bundles, building as many whacky decks with the new cards on Arena as I could muster, and having a fantastic time discovering just how busted Scute Swarm and Ancient Greenwarden are together.

Scute Swarm by Roman Kuteynikov
Scute Swarm by Roman Kuteynikov

As months turned to years, more sets came out that grabbed my attention. Commander Legends was an exciting new set for a format I’d only seen in YouTube videos but had never played. I threw myself into Kaldheim and Strixhaven, and before long the boredom of Zendikar Rising started to set in.

Zendikar Rising was a nostalgic set, but with other releases coming all the time, it eventually felt tired. The party mechanics felt clunky and rarely worked as well as you’d want, and the story is an indecipherable mess that hardly fits into the ongoing plot. I forgot all the good things of the set under the Kamigawas, Eldraines, and Bloomburrows that would launch after it.

Foundations Reminded Me Why I Loved Zendikar Rising

But then Foundations and Foundations Jumpstart came along. Combined, both sets have a shocking number of reprints from Zendikar Rising. Among them are some of my favourite cards from the set. Kazandu Nectarpot used to be the backbone of a white/green lifegain deck I ran, while Into the Roil and Gnarlid Colony were mainstays of my blue/green kicker deck.

Cards I haven’t thought about in years like Marauding Blightpriest, Kargan Intimidator, and Skyclave Pickaxe are all in here alongside the big, splashy rares like Ancient Greenwarden and Maul of the Skyclaves.

In fact, there are a total of 38 Zendikar Rising reprints across the two sets, and I love all of them.

Zendikar Rising was the set that got me hooked into Magic, and Foundations brings that back for a new generation of players. While the community has long considered it a forgettable set that didn’t make too much of an impact, Wizards has honed in on it as one of the most beginner-friendly releases.

The set’s big strength was that all of its mechanics were easy to learn: landfall triggers when you play a land, kicker lets you pay additional costs, and so on. But those mechanics still feel exciting and powerful, letting newcomers have a taste of what can happen at higher levels without overwhelming them the same way later mechanics like day/night or entering the dungeon can.

Kicking a Gnarlid Colony, and then playing a land with Felidar Retreat to give everything a +1/+1 counter and trample might be a simple play for someone with years of experience under their belt, but for Foundations’ target audience it’s a godly moment where your plans finally come together for the first time, and I’m glad that’s an experience we we can both share.

Since Foundations, I’ve been looking back on Zendikar Rising a lot more positively. Yes, party is a really boring mechanic, but that was one part of an otherwise fantastic experience Foundations is recapturing. I want to relive those Scute Swarm and Greenwarden days, and my next Commander deck is going to be Verazol, The Split Current, full of kicker cards from Zendikar Rising to copy.

I hope, in another four years’ time, people playing with these cards through Foundations look back on them as fondly as I do.

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