Magic: The Gathering Zendikar Rising Preview Card: Ancient Greenwarden

Magic: The Gathering is a game chock full of weird worlds. Some of them, like Innistrad, are full of vampires and werewolves. Others, like Mirrodin, are full of living machines. But one of the most exciting is Zendikar, a world of adventure, that Magic last returned to in 2015. On September 25, the game is returning there with the new set Zendikar Rising, and I’ve got a spicy preview card for you to show off some of the cool things that are going to happen there.

First, a story. The world has never tried to kill me, or at least not in any particular way other than than how it is trying to kill us all. I’ve never been out for a stroll in a wonderful field and had an ensorcelment happen to me in which the very earth itself rose up in humanoid form and tried to crush me like that rock monster in Galaxy Quest. This, my friends, is the thrill of fiction: in fantasy, we can think about rocks, dirt, grasses, trees, flowers, or any other naturally-occurring thing killing us.

This is at the heart of the world of Zendikar, because it’s a place of danger and excitement. It contains hidden shrines and trapped eldritch creatures deep beneath the surface. It also has a thing called the Roil, a magical force that shapes and reshapes the world at will. When the Roil gets going, anything could happen. This river could become a mountain. This cliff could become a seaside paradise. That pile of rocks could become the murderous creature from the previous paragraph. It’s unpredictable, and the Magic cards that come out of sets on Zendikar all have that kind of vibe. Unreal transformation is happening all the time there, and the cards communicate that.