I won’t be going over the entire mechanics suite of Zendikar’s history since there’s that giant middle chapter that isn’t relevant to our discussion whatsoever. But well, you can recall yourself, to eventually see what’s missing.

1.1. Party

The first two visits to Zendikar had Allies, a way to tie together all the humanoids forming the adventure parties. They want to see each other arriving for the ability eventually keyworded Rally, and later on convoke each other through Cohort. Ultimately, it’s a parasitic mechanic that ignores all the other people who wants to form these groups in other planes, so we gotta think of something else.

In comes Party, where you’re fixed in building a team of four creatures, each with a specific class, so that cards can scales their effect based on how much of the party you have on board. Sounds difficult? I guess it is.

• If you have four creatures on the board, especially in a draft game, chances are you’re best of just swinging with them to get that life total down to end the game. Or well you could be in a board stall and the party payoff actually gets you through. If you don’t have that much, well, too bad, I don’t think most of these cards will get you there. This is what is called a “win-more” result where suddenly that bonus effect isn’t worth as much as you think.
• These four classes would need a certain mass population I’ve measured here. Sure, we may have left room for the green monsters, but how about room for the quests, or traps, or a few nods to the fallen Eldrazi? Another way to say it: you got your party to adventure, but to where, face what, to acquire what? I waited until this moment to say this, the times I’ve alluded to this issue was about UB highlight reels ironically enough, and I do wonder how much we’ve learned.

• Zendikar is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, the game where you do in fact build a party of four humanoids to go adventure. Here, they actually got a lot of leeways on what class each member can be. Which is how most normal Magic sets want to do things, including the two DnD sets. So you can’t put party in there, no matter how much it sounded to have made sense. Or well, maybe a modified version where one has to remember the entire chart of the classes. Which would cause far too much headache, because these two sets are in the same Standard year. And on the whole “I wish party had more sets to actually be constructed playable”, I’m not too sure either.
• These cards are no longer compatible with Allies of the older Zendikar. Because adding the third creature type, in these in universe sets, feel like blasphemy. This is very much the Day and Night versus old Werewolves issue again, you can’t make them work together just through a single commander. On the flip side, party does count a lot of creatures from other sets, these ain’t the silly Warlock or Ranger so it isn’t that hard, right? No, because that doesn’t change the fact that the pools of payoffs is still limited to this set. So it still doesn’t look all that right to mix all of these. Like, do people realize a spell that discounts big creature is great for a Dragon deck?

Here’s the cards distribution that explicitly mentions the word party. The most common payoff is to discount the spell based on your current party wise, which you got a whole cycle at uncommon for instance (blue got replaced with Azorius, how much contribution does a Healing Salve has compared to an Ancestral Recall is up to you). All but one rare has an additional bonus for having a full party, without it one card would be knocked out of this table because it just spells out the four classes for its other ability. One last fact: Common has two classes per color of creatures that have party synergizes, so you can tell they tried hard to get this to work.

1.2. Land modal DFCs

Slightly related fun fact: In the ancient design stage of original Zendikar, MaRo thought about the land mechanic being this really thoughtful, skill testing thing: you can use your land drop as a mana to pay for cards. You can guess how fun that turns out to be, because I do have to ask you how much do you value the land drop in this scenario? Or maybe you’ve wisen up and realize these cards might just be for the topdeck game.

https://www.tumblr.com/markrosewater/651399363458957312/hi-mark-its-less-than-two-hours-until-my

About 9 years after Magic’s debut, WotC made a card game that tries to simplify Magic to great elegance called Duel Masters. In this game, your playable cards double as lands, because you can just put one of them upside down per turn at your lowest row. I won’t go into the whole discourse on whether this is a good idea or the land systems is sacred, just know that we now want to translate that to Magic.

Or the technology came first in DFCs and we just decide to just focus on the flashy transformations for 9 years, after all the fact you can’t have both sides here certainly reeks of Magic’s unspoken sense of not always being obviously appealing too much. These modal DFCs appear for three consecutive sets so that each one can have a different take of them. Ultimately, Zendikar’s approach of having all these back faces be lands to emulate Duel Masters turned out to be the most popular.

Because well, this is also around the era of Magic cards getting really wordy. And the designers couldn’t resist themselves when they got twice the space on each card. These lands avoided that trap because they all either arrives tapped, or you have the option to untap them for 3 life, so just a reminder at the bottom left can tell you pretty much all you need to know.

Let’s talk about that reminder, or well, let’s expand to the frame design of these cards.

So, on the top left, there’s a waterdrop shape rotated to the left to remind you to know there’s the other option. This waterdrop has a triangle in the front, and two triangles reminiscent of the EDM artist Avicii on the back, or you could just see it as pushing the space of this shape. These circles are colored according to the face’s colors, unlike the TDFCs, I guess that’s handy for distinction.

Bottom left of the card got this rectangle with reversed rounded corners, where it has a really tight arrow pointing in the same direction as the top waterdrop, followed by the card type or one creature type in the creatures’ cases (it’s the classes in this set’s case), in the right there’s either the mana cost or just writing out the land’s tap ability, there’s nothing to the right to justify the funky shape, but it does work well with the oval stamp. This bottom bar is thankfully colored according to the back side so it’s a fun accent on the cards.

To be honest, I have to wonder how useful this specific placement of information really is. Like it can’t be on the bottom right because creatures have their stats here, and it can’t be on the top because carving into the art box is a crime, especially if you even think about rotating this thing to vertical, I guess. Maybe you just learn from playing these cards over time to know when to care about the back side. Or the front side, if you put these cards to replace the land slots.

1.2.1. Cards selection

This one brings smiles to my face because look, it’s color balance. Imagine a miserable world where we make this exclusive to green or something.

• Mythic: The front of these cards are the biggest, flashiest thing you can get there. Whether costing 7 mana or X starting from 2 (oh dear, red) or 3 devotion, it’s surely going to be the trump card when the moment calls for it. The Esper trio among these got flavor text to make, a short but powerful quote that have a capitalized W somewhere in it. Most other times, it’s better to turn to the backside for a land that either arrives tapped or you can pay 3 to untap it. This is as good as it’s gonna come for these MDFCs, after all the front side spells aren’t terribly practical. The same characters come back for flavor texts of this set, plus two last ones we haven’t already met.