This weekend sees the release of Battle for Zendikar (BFZ), the new Magic: The Gathering expansion—and this time the collectible card game tries its hand at fantasy-meets-Lovecraftian horror. It’s the follow-up to the Zendikar and Rise of the Eldrazi expansions, both released five years ago, continuing their themes with a brand new set of 250+ cards that return us to the plane of Zendikar, a place of hidden treasures that turns out to have a dark secret bubbling below the surface.

To begin with, a quick note: this review is aimed primarily at new and returning Magic players. Intermediate-to-expert players might like to skip ahead, to where we’ll discuss how BFZ might impact the competitive scene or figure into higher-level deckbuilding strategy. With that out of the way... bring on the tentacles!

With the advent of Hearthstone and other digital TCGs, Magic’s core concepts might already be familiar to you: customisable decks of cards that battle against each other with both minions and spells, with the aim of killing the other player whilst defending your own life points. Unlike Hearthstone, Magic also includes land cards, which produce mana—the fuel that powers your spells—and also allows players to act during their opponent’s turn, sometimes ending up with both players flinging spells back-and-forth to try and make—or counter—a key play.

The first thing you’ll notice when you pick up some new Battle for Zendikar cards is the artwork. It’s beautiful and disturbing in equal measure, with plenty of tentacle-ridden abominations set against the normal-looking humanoid natives of Zendikar. The real stars are the landscapes where the battles take place: At long last, and after much clamour from the playerbase, BFZ finally sees the return of “full-art” lands which eschew the normal half-art design for a card that is 90% art.

The headliners of the set are the giant Eldrazi titans—huge abominations from the Blind Eternities, the spaces between worlds—and Planeswalkers, which for people returning to Magic after a ten-year break will be completely new. The Eldrazi roaming Zendikar are the brood of the titan Ulamog, whose card costs a whopping ten mana and, as our editor discovered recently, ends the game in short order when cast. Ulamog’s minions make up roughly half the set’s creatures, with the rest of the cards representing the desperate, defending natives of the plane.

Planeswalker cards represent allies much stronger than mere minions, but with different vulnerabilities as well. This set brings us Gideon, Kiora, and Ob Nixilis, each returning from an earlier set, but with a new card representing them at this point in the story arc. These cards are powerful and satisfying to play, but are balanced by being attackable as if they were a player, giving all Magic decks a way to combat them.

The other thing you’ll notice as you flick through a pack of the new expansion is the language on the cards. Magic cards of the past have tended to use straightforward, if overtly nerdy words: Counterspell, Dark Ritual, and yes, there’s even a Lightning Bolt. As soon as you pick up some cards from BFZ, however, you immediately see that the Eldrazi are from another world, another setting. The words you find on their cards are alien—devoid, process, ingest. scion, drone—whilst in contrast, the defenders use landfall, rally, and awaken. These words detail special abilities, helping you to learn what cards do without having to read the exact details every time.

In Magic, your dead creatures usually go to a place called the graveyard, but BFZ is slightly different: those malevolent, cthulian Eldrazi aren’t satisfied with just killing. Instead, many creatures and spells have the exile effect, which usually removes another card from the game completely. Creatures with the ingest feature don’t even wait to kill something—they exile straight from an opponent’s deck whenever they injure them. Processor Eldrazi can use these cards in your enemy’s exile pile for extra effects, returning them to the graveyard as part of their cost. For people who haven’t played Magic for a few years, this will feel like a very unusual style of play. But it's deliberately weird to reflect the Eldrazi’s alien nature, and it hits that nail on the head. There can be a little frustration in having one piece of the combination without the other, but it’s well balanced—it doesn’t happen often enough to spoil the experience overall.

At the bottom of the Eldrazi hierarchy are scions, tiny minions that are summoned in a variety of ways: sometimes as a little bonus to your spells, or sometimes alongside your Eldrazi drones. These little guys can fight smaller creatures, nibble away at your opponent, or be sacrificed for a one-shot boost to your mana.

And you’ll need those boosts, because there are some huge spells to cast, not just Ulamog himself. One of the much-loved features from the original Zendikar was giant monsters, and BFZ doesn’t disappoint. Cards such as Breaker of Armies, Conduit of Ruin, and Void Winnower represent towering abominations, some with unusual (and fun!) abilities. Annihilator, a mechanic from the original set which made these cards hard to fight back against, has been removed, making the game feel less hopeless for someone facing down one of the huge monsters.

The denizens of Zendikar banding together to fight back against the Eldrazi is represented by the rally mechanic, with each creature boosting your team when you play it, and repeating that boost if you play more ally creatures. Decks built around rally are designed well as a counterpoint to the slower, looming threat of the Eldrazi, with the abilities stacking up to good effect. This is an evolution of a similar (but unnamed) mechanic in the original Zendikar set for ally creatures, but feels a lot better to play with, as it always boosts your entire team rather than just allies.

The living world of Zendikar is represented by the mechanics landfall and awaken, the former of which returns from the original Zendikar. Landfall causes your cards to get some sort of bonus when you place a land, which usually players are allowed to do once per turn. Usually this means a rhythm of playing lands and then striking at your opponent with your boosted creatures. As you start to see more of the set, however, you see cards designed to interact with this cleverly—cards which fetch more lands, even in your opponent’s turns, allowing you to suddenly boost a defender or react to a key spell. Awaken appears as an extra bonus on some spells in exchange for casting them with more mana. Casting these spells for their awaken cost will “wake up” one of your lands into a creature, which can then fight for you as any creature can.

There’s an interesting tension between playing your lands to build up enough mana to cast your huge spells, versus holding them back to trigger landfall on certain key cards. It also helps to mitigate the problem of your draw for the turn being an unwanted land later in the game. Overall, it’s a simple but solid mechanic with a lot of space left to explore. Awaken also gives the player options for their cards at low and high mana counts, which has the dual bonus of introducing another decision point (allowing players to show skill by choosing correctly) and of stopping the card being useless if you are stuck on low mana (which removes a possible frustration state for players).

There are also plenty of special lands to play with. Alongside the basic lands that make up the base of most decks, there are lands that produce a small bonus when played, like boosting one of your creatures, or, later on, turning into creatures themselves. There are also lands which can produce more than one colour of mana, with the tradeoff of not always being immediately available for use. All these options add together for more tools for deckbuilders, without severely punishing players starting out with the basic lands.

Finally, speaking of lands, there’s a special something about Battle for Zendikar that might appeal to the gambler in you. Some packs of BFZ have a super-rare foil (shiny) card from the set-within-a-set: Zendikar Expeditions. These cards are a special group of lands, with deceptively simple effects that experienced players know to be very powerful. Whilst there’s been a lot of discussion about the effect of super-rare cards on a card game, and speculation on how this affects the secondary market and the cost of getting into tournament formats, for the most part they’re just a nice—and very visually attractive—extra. Following the prerelease event last week, some Expedition cards are already being sold on auction sites for over £100.

Listing image by Wizards of the Coast / Johannes Voss