Zendikar Speculation 1

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Since Zendikar, was announced way back in March, speculation had been rather wild. This first set in the fall Magic the Gathering expansion really had more theories than answers until MaRo gave some nebulous hints in his article 'Tweet Talk' (see below for the quotes).

If you cracked open booster packs at a Magic 2010 PreRelease today, then you may have seen this advertisement . .


Now here is something to sink our teeth into - a Zendikar Art Spoiler !

The artist, Jung Park, is new to the MTG scene but is quite an accomplished artist from the look of his Blog and Website. This art does not really speak onto a theme but those proponents of a crazy Indiana Jones meets poison-jungle Mirage are now talking louder.

Jung's very beautiful 'Mycon Plateaus' shown below confirms he is quite adept at creating rich organic environments.


'Nuff said for now but more random and baseless speculations latter - so stay tuned.

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Mark Rosewater quotes from the 'Tweet Talk' Article . . .

"Zendikar does not have a multicolor theme. Lights, the large set from 2010, does not have a multicolor theme. The pendulum always swings, and yes, recently we hit multicolor pretty strongly. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing away for a while. Look forward to the possibility of playing monocolored decks. That said, this doesn't mean we won't make individual multicolored cards if they make sense in a particular environment; just that multicolor is going to be a theme we move away from for a while. (Have no fear, multicolor lovers—it will return one day.)"

"Here's my hint. There is a space in Magic design that we've explored on individual cards but have never explored thematically as a block theme. We started with that theme and then crafted a world that made it make sense. Once we had the world, we then made a bunch of other mechanics that made sense in that world. The design and creative did a lot of back and forth work to integrate the mechanical themes into the world. I do feel the world we've create is a resonant one, but not one with pirates or dinosaurs. Or robots. Or ninjas. Or monkeys. Let me wrap this answer up by saying that I'm quite excited with how Zendikar turned out, and once I'm allowed to freely talk about it, I anticipate I'll start getting letters to ask me to stop talking about it."

Planeswalkers ? "Three, one of which is a planewalker that's appeared previously."


Set Name - Zendikar
Three-Letter Abbreviation - ZEN (nice !)
Number of Cards - 249
Release Date - Friday, October 2, 2009
Prerelease Events - September 26-27, 2009
Launch Parties - October 2-4, 2009
Previews start - September 7, 2009