How Zendikar Rising will fundamentally alter Standard

Magic has gone through allot of changes over the years. The rate of various effects has changed over time leaving some in the annals of the past while raising others to prominence. Every year WOTC takes steps to keep Magic fresh and offer new play experiences, but have generally shied away from doing anything that would undermine our fundamental understanding of how the game’s core elements work. That is until now, with the printing of dual faced lands in Zendikar Rising.

I will be honest that at first I didn’t get it. I looked at these cards and saw under rate cards tied to tapped lands so why would I want to put two bad cards into my deck? That opinion changed very quickly when I actually started building decks and found a new level of clarity about just how impactfull these cards are.

Everything in Magic is designed under the core assumption that your deck has a relatively even distribution of lands and spells that will result in some games of flood and some games of drought. The rate of card draw is balanced under the assumption that you will be getting some mix of lands and spells. Every card is costed with an understanding of how much harder it gets to continuously hit land drops moving into the later stages of the game.

Dual face lands let you undermine all of these assumptions to create an environment that fundamentally alters the power level of every other card in it while also sidestepping the base fail rate otherwise inherent to every Magic deck.

Because they fulfill the role of both spells and lands these cards allow your deck to essentially live in two realities at once. You have the audibility to play a deck that will never run out of gas while simultaneously having the ability to hit every land drop you need to. There has always been a careful balance in deciding how many lands you want to play to develop your mana well enough without flooding, and now those considerations are largely rendered moot. Let me give you an example.

Here is a deck playing 14 actual lands while still having access to 30 total mana sources, 22 of which with the ability to come into play untapped. That is such an outlandish level of agency to have over the composition of your deck in real time that I still have a hard time believing it’s real. High level players would sometimes put a land in the sideboard to gearshift in certain match ups and now we get to do that in-game with a MUCH wider range of adjustment.

The initial concern most people will bring up is how much damage we can potentially take from the Mythic dual faced lands and the number of tapped lands we’re playing in addition to them. In the case of the tapped lands we are playing 8 out of 30 total lands which is what we would be playing otherwise. If you played this deck stock it would have 26 lands, 4 of which being temples, so all we’re doing is getting a spell over an extra color and Scry. The other 4 tapped lands are gravy that give us the flexibility to be spells or lands when needed. In regard to the potential damage we have played 12 shock land manabases in the past to success while deciding that the extra damage was well worth the power gained from consistent mana. Here we’re likely taking a bit more damage than we did those cases, but the payoff is also much higher. To further assuage your fears lets talk about the specific context of this deck and the format it would live in.

Life loss is something that we have the ability to recuperate and is only punished by a certain subset of decks in the first place. If we’re playing against an aggressive creature deck Chevill, Scavenging Ooze, and Nighthawk Scavenger all go a long way towards mitigating and recuperating life loss. It’s also noteworthy that the aggressive decks in this format do not look to be burn oriented so removal and blocking are viable paths to protecting our life total. I just don’t see bolt lands being as prohibitive as some might imagine, but if you do, the option to shave a few and still have a preposterously flexible deck is always available. I could certainly see other archetypes that lack the same kind of life gain options not being able to play the full eight dual faced bolt lands.

It’s also important to note than using dual faced lands in the kind of quantities shown here is only going to be a realistic option for two color decks. Dual faces lands turn your tapped land slots from color fixers into raw material, so while powerful, you cannot compound the flexibility of dual faced lands with the power of a three color manabase without making untenable sacrifices in regard to tempo. Two of the three rare dual land, or tri land, cycles currently in standard come into play tapped so your color fixing and your dual faced lands are in direct competition with one another. I actually think this is a very healthy side effect of dual faced lands because it’s been very hard to give standard good mana without making three color decks almost strictly better than two color decks, at least when it came to non-aggressive archetypes. Now there is a legitimate and powerful incentive to be conservative with your deck’s color requirements.

We were already moving into an era of Magic where playing 27–30 lands would become the norm and now we get to do so without sacrificing power. It will even be possible to play around 40 potential mana sources without really opening yourself up to flood. That dynamic should change how we evaluate expensive cards and what decks we can potentially put them in. Before you needed to make a dedicated effort to get to six plus mana with cards like Uro or other ramp, but now you will be potentially so mana dense that hitting natural land drops into those later turns of the game is very realistic. Expensive cards in games like Hearthstone or Runeterra are much more playable because you automatically gain an extra mana every turn as a game rule. Games in Zendikar Rising Standard will exists in a very similar space and people will need to adjust their perceptions accordingly.

We are about to enter an entirely new era of Magic that will force players to reexamine their understanding of proper deck building in a way that will heavily reward anyone who is ahead of the curve. Hopefully this article has convinced you to be one of those people.