Zendikar for Card Designers: Landfall and the Adventure World

Most Magic sets ask players to do something new. The original Zendikar, released on October 2, 2009, did something cleverer: it took the most ordinary action in the game, playing a land, and made it exciting.

Zendikar is a plane of pulp adventure. Explorers chart ruins, treasure lies under every ridge, and the land itself is the danger, shifting and violent and full of ancient stone. The set's mechanics were built to make players feel like members of an expedition. It is a model of how a world, a mechanic and a play pattern can all come from the same idea.

This guide is part of Behind the Cards, a series on the ideas beneath Magic's mechanics, written for people who design their own cards. Like the rest of the series, it describes the set in our own words and links Wizards of the Coast's design articles as sources.

An Adventure World, Built From the Land

The design started from land. Mark Rosewater's look back at the original design handoff describes a vision with three parts: a land component, a mana component and a flavor component, beginning with land mechanics as one of the most open areas in Magic's design space.¹

The flavor gave those land mechanics a home. If the land is the most dangerous and wonderful thing on the plane, then every step onto new ground should matter. The rest of the set filled in the adventure: a band of companions, ambushes waiting in the ruins, and expeditions that take several turns to complete.

Landfall: Rewarding What Players Already Do

Landfall is an ability word for abilities that trigger whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control. A creature might grow for the turn, a spell might gain a bonus, an enchantment might take a step toward its goal.

Its genius is that it asks nothing unusual of players. Almost everyone plays a land almost every turn, so landfall turns a routine step into an event without making anyone change how they play. A mechanic that rewards something players already do is easy to learn and always on; a mechanic that rewards something they would rather not do, such as holding lands back, asks them to hurt their own game.

Landfall still creates real decisions:

• When to play the land. Playing it after combat, or holding it for a turn when a landfall card is about to arrive, is a choice with a cost.
• How many lands to play. Zendikar printed lands that sacrifice themselves to fetch another land, so a single land drop could trigger landfall twice.
• What to protect. A landfall creature that grows each turn becomes the obvious target.

Landfall became one of the most popular mechanics Wizards has made, and it has returned with each visit to the plane.² For designers it is a lesson in finding the routine action of your world and making it matter.

Allies: A Party That Grows

Allies were creatures with a shared creature type and a shared trigger: whenever an Ally entered under your control, each Ally with that kind of ability got something, a counter, a bonus or an effect. They were spread across all five colors.

The story is the adventuring party. Every recruit makes the whole band stronger, and a full party is far greater than the sum of its members. The trigger also teaches a hard lesson about snowballing tribal rewards: with enough Allies they are thrilling, and with too few they do almost nothing. If you build a party mechanic of your own, keep each trigger small, and make sure there are enough members for the theme to reach critical mass.

Traps: The Ambush

Traps were instants with the subtype Trap. Each had an alternative cost, usually much cheaper, that you could pay instead of its mana cost if an opponent had done a particular thing that turn.

The story is the trap in the ruins: the adventurer steps on the wrong stone and the ceiling comes down. In play, a Trap makes the opponent's own action spring it, which produces the best kind of surprise, one the opponent feels they caused. The design rule is that the full cost must be fair on its own, because sometimes the trap will never be sprung.

Quests: The Expedition

Quests were enchantments that gathered counters each time you met a condition, often a landfall trigger, and paid off once they had enough. Progress was visible to both players, so the opponent could watch the expedition near its goal and decide whether to stop it.

A counter track is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Make the payoff worth the wait, keep the count short enough to finish in a real game, and let the opponent see it coming; that visible clock is what turns a quiet enchantment into tension.

Kicker, and the Land as the Star

Kicker, an older mechanic, returned in Zendikar: an optional extra cost you pay as you cast a spell to make it stronger. It suited a set where mana kept arriving, because a late land drop could pay the kicker on a spell that would have been cast plainly earlier. Worldwake, the next set, added multikicker, a kicker you can pay any number of times.³

Zendikar also made the land the visual star. Its basic lands were printed with full-card art, a sweeping view of the plane's landscape in place of the usual text box. The look and the mechanics told the same story: in this world, the ground beneath you is what matters.

What Designers Can Borrow

• Find the routine action and make it an event. Every world has a thing players do every turn. Reward that thing, and your theme is always on.
• Make mechanics into genre props. Zendikar's Traps, Quests and party of Allies were the ambush, the treasure map and the band of companions from every adventure story.
• Give each mechanic its own tension. Landfall is about timing, Traps about bluffing, Quests about patience, Allies about building. Different decisions keep a theme from becoming one repeated trick.
• Let the visuals agree with the rules. When the frames, the art and the mechanics all point at the same idea, players understand the world before they read a card.

How to design custom MTG lands covers the land side of the craft, and how to design a custom MTG set covers building a world's mechanics as a whole.

Riff on It: Four Original Cards

These designs borrow Zendikar's tools for expeditions of our own. The names, costs and rules text are original.

Cragline Pathfinder

· Creature — Human Scout · 1/2

Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, if this creature has fewer than three +1/+1 counters on it, put a +1/+1 counter on it.

A landfall riff. The scout grows with every new stretch of ground, but only to a point. Capping the growth keeps a two-mana creature from becoming unbeatable in a deck full of extra land drops, while still rewarding the player who plays a land every turn.

Ropebridge Outrider

· Creature — Goblin Warrior Ally · 2/2

Whenever this creature or another Ally you control enters, creatures you control get +1/+0 until end of turn.

An Ally riff. Each new member of the party fires up everyone already on the board. The bonus is small and lasts a single turn, so a large party is exciting without being decisive on its own.

Rockfall Snare

· Instant — Trap

If an opponent attacked with three or more creatures this turn, you may pay rather than pay this spell's mana cost.

Destroy target attacking creature. You gain 3 life.

A Trap riff. Four mana for conditional removal and some life is a fair price on its own. When the opponent charges in with a crowd, the ceiling comes down for a single white mana.

Charting the Shattered Reach

· Enchantment

Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, you may put a quest counter on this enchantment.

Remove four quest counters from this enchantment and sacrifice it: Draw three cards.

A Quest riff. The expedition's reward is knowledge: what the explorers found in the ruins. Four land drops is a real game's worth of waiting, and the opponent can see the map filling in.

Build It in PipGlyph

Every card above can be made in the PipGlyph card creator:

1. Ability words. Type Landfall, then two hyphens and the effect; the creator sets the hyphens as an em dash when you leave the field.
2. Kicker. Insert it from the rules editor's keyword list, with its reminder text if you tick "With reminder text", and write its cost in braces, such as {2}{G}.
3. Traps. Add Trap to the subtypes, so the type line reads "Instant — Trap", and build the alternative cost with mana symbols in the rules text.
4. Lands. For a basic land in Zendikar's spirit, the Full-Art Basic Land frame gives the whole card to the landscape. For a nonbasic land, the land design guide covers costing.
5. Build the expedition. Save your cards, add them to a deck from the "Add to a deck" box under the preview, and test how often landfall really triggers. Browse decks for lists to play against.

For more set studies and the stories behind Magic's mechanics, see the MTG lore shelf and the rest of this series, including our Innistrad spotlight.

Zendikar FAQ

When Was Zendikar Released?

The original Zendikar set was released on October 2, 2009. Its world returned in later sets, and landfall came back with it each time.

What Is Landfall in MTG?

Landfall is an ability word for abilities that trigger whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control. Like every ability word, the label has no rules meaning of its own: it names the condition so players can spot the theme across many cards.

What Were Zendikar's Main Mechanics?

Zendikar's main mechanics were landfall, Allies, Traps and Quests, with kicker returning from earlier sets. Together they captured the feeling of an adventure world: a dangerous land, ambushes, expeditions and a party of adventurers.

How Do I Design a Fair Landfall Card?

Keep each trigger modest, because a landfall ability fires almost every turn and can fire twice when a land fetches another land. Cap anything that grows, check the card beside extra-land effects, and make sure the card does something reasonable on turns when no land is played.