So this world has four nations of the four elements. Unlike our faction sets that can just map all of these cleanly to two or three colors combination, this IP will see its nations spread all over the place but at least nicely focused on one of the color in hopefully an obvious way. The reality of these splashes is one of the reasons to not make commander precons for this set.

One thing to note is that some cards will still belong to nation watermarks yet not feature the namesake mechanics. Given the looser than usual colors, this shall make things more tricky for us. Maybe a table to the right will tell you what cards can’t fit in tables below.

Personal venting goes to how Scryfall wants you to type the full name of these nations in to find these watermarks (only one actually ends in “nation”, that’s part of the problem), dunno about you but that’s like asking some casuals to look for exactly “jeskaiway” or “selesnyaconclave”.

What is my finding? It turns out that this tactic is most seen in the Fire Nation, almost beating the three other nations combined. I guess either these creatures have their way of providing mana, or you have magecrafts that refund mana too. For that, this nation deserves its own table, not overlapping with anyone else. Black and red do looks tiny in the main table for that.

1.1 Airbend = Flicker + Taxing

For a mechanic that sounds as simple as it is, it gives you quite a few options on how to make the most out of it:

• Saving your own creature from permanent death, not as good as giving it indestructible or hexproof but certainly better than nothing.
• Rebuying an arrival trigger, not as good as a flicker but certainly better than just bouncing it.
• Getting an oppressive enemy thing out of the way, even for just a single turn.
• Maybe also cheating out expensive cards if you can exile stuff in your hand/graveyard/deck.

And that’s how you get heavily, heavily mono white mechanic with very few splashes into blue, because after look at the title of this series (there’s a different one in the same IP I think), the kind of people who can do this looks are pretty specific. The star is the one card I can’t count for asking you to have done the thing rather than do the thing by itself. Doubt there would be enough space on the card but well, it’s the only one.

1.2 Waterbend = Convoke + Improvise + Activated abiltiies

Well, it certainly have taken this long to be able to convoke and improvise for (activated and triggered) ability costs and not just spells. That rare white 1-drop in Lost Caves of Ixalan would certainly have appreciated this.

One of the reasons to wait this long could be the fact that putting a word followed by a mana cost is how quite a few keywords have already functioned, and for now to have a cost, let me repeat, a cost, that is written in literally the same way, it can get quite confusing. At first, this cost was just shown on activated abilities, where it doesn’t look as terrifying. But now to see it in other places, I can totally see the confusion.

As water isn’t a word on this series’ title, clearly more people can do it, especially in blue and splashing more for other colors. The culprit returns, we get two rares in Azorius and two uncommons in hybrid Dimir.

1.3 Firebending = Special mana done funnily

It’s like the Mardu’s Mobilize but you get mana instead of blitzing 1/1s. It’s also infuriating because it’s the only bend mechanic written in continuous tense, but well the rule text have never used “flies” to reference to flying.

This mechanic also has a very “teaching tool” vibe to it. In that for one, the mana only lasts until end of combat. So you gotta make use of it by flashing in stuff or activating abilities, therefore maybe don’t waste your normal mana on this stuff in the first main phase. For the other, it’s about commander specifically with how it doesn’t care about colored mana in reminder text. So you can totally get these mana outside of red decks, and now it’s a quiz question whether that mana would actually be red.

This seems to be the most popular bending, while the number of mono red users is slightly less than water, the heavy amount of black and multicolored more than makes up for that. For instance, we have our culprit actually bends this instead of just setting the element as the goal. And at rare it’s just a mess, we get Dimir, Grixis (same character I guess, also scene box has a second Grixis), Mardu and Temur, so overall this element has crossed into all five colors. Which raises a question about how come water not wipe off the fire, like the uncommons would ask, outside of Rakdos the primary pair, Gruul and Boros both dabbled in one each, but never Izzet. I guess another reason to explain is that blue has a lot of good instants to make easier use of the mana.

1.4 Earthbend = Awaken – Risk

It’s certainly handy to finally have this, like to finally have discover to freely do the cascade thing whenever. It’s also never brought up that when animated lands die, you have in fact lost a land, that can be a big set back unless the whole point of animating the land is to have a use for your mana at

all (i.e. in the topdeck game). So that seems to be the reason that the BFZ awaken cards always animate the lands to be at least 3/3.

1.5 Lessons without Learn

Draft set wise:

• At mythic, there’s the sole Lesson having a pseudo kicker because mixing that with waterbend might be terrifying I guess.