MTG's Foundations remember why Zendikar Rising was great

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Important takeaways

  • Foundations and Jumpstart sets celebrate Magic: The Gathering, offering both simplicity for newcomers and nostalgia for veterans.

  • Foundations shines a positive light on older sets, such as Zendikar Rising, by including reprints and honoring mechanics.

  • The beginner-friendly approach of Foundations and its reprint from Zendikar Rising creates a memorable and exciting experience for all players.

Between Foundations and its Jumpstart spin-off, Magic: The Gathering has decided to take a quick break from crossovers and pop culture allusions to celebrate itself. Both sets are incredible, perfectly balancing simplicity for newcomers with deep cuts and delicious reprints for veterans, and I've had more fun with it than any other MTG release this year.

Tucked away in all the excitement was an aspect of Foundations that I didn't expect. Over the course of reprints and alt-arts, Foundations has managed to shine a much more positive light on my first set, showing that it deserved much more credit than I originally gave it.

While I've been collecting magic off and on since Fifth Dawn in 2004, and had brief bouts with the Duels of the Planeswalkers games on the Xbox 360, it wasn't until the pandemic that things finally clicked into place. Out of boredom I downloaded Arena, and by the end of the day I had ordered the starter packs to test it on paper as well.

A few weeks later, Zendikar Rising launched. It was a return to a setting I'd never heard of, with characters I didn't know fighting over MacGuffins I didn't understand. But it brought new cards to my newfound obsession, and I was all for it. I bought boosters and packs, built as many crazy decks with the new cards in Arena as I could, and had a great time discovering how badass Scute Swarm and Ancient Greenwarden are together.

Scute Swarm by Roman Kuteynikov
Scute Swarm by Roman Kuteynikov

As months turned into years, more sets came out that caught my attention. Commander Legends was an exciting new set for a format I had only seen in YouTube videos but never played. I threw myself into Kaldheim and Strixhaven, and soon the boredom of Zendikar Rising began to set in.

Zendikar Rising was a nostalgic set, but with other releases coming all the time it felt tired in the end. The party mechanics felt clunky and rarely worked as well as you'd like, and the story is an indistinct mess that hardly fits into the ongoing plot. I forgot all the good stuff in the set under the Kamigawas, Eldraines and Bloomburrows that would launch after that.

Foundations reminded me why I loved Zendikar Rising

But then came Foundations and Foundations Jumpstart. Together, both sets have a shocking number of reprints from Zendikar Rising. Among them are some of my favorite cards from the set. Kazandu Nectarpot used to be the backbone of a white/green lifegain deck I ran, while Into the Roil and Gnarlid Colony were the mainstays of my blue/green kicker deck.

Cards I haven't thought of in years like Marauding Blightpriest, Kargan Intimidator, and Skyclave Pickaxe are here along with the big, splashy rares like Ancient Greenwarden and Maul of the Skyclaves.

In fact, there are a total of 38 Zendikar Rising expressions across the two sets, and I love them all.

Zendikar Rising was the set that got me hooked on Magic, and Foundations brings it back for a new generation of players. While the community has long considered it a forgettable set that didn't make much of an impact, Wizards has honed it as one of the most entry-level releases.

The set's great strength was that all its mechanics were easy to learn: landfall triggers when you play a land, kicker lets you pay extra costs, and so on. But these mechanics still feel exciting and powerful, letting newcomers get a taste of what can happen at higher levels without overwhelming them in the same way that later mechanics like day/night or entering the dungeon did.

Kicking a Gnarlid colony and then playing a land with Felidar Retreat to give everything a +1/+1 counter and stomp might be a simple play for someone with years of experience under their belt, but for Foundation's target audience, it's a godsend moments where your plans finally meet for the first time, and I'm glad it's an experience we can both share.

Since Foundations, I've looked back on Zendikar Rising much more positively. Yes, partying is a really boring mechanic, but it was part of an otherwise great experience that Foundations recaptures. I want to relive those Scute Swarm and Greenwarden days, and my next Commander deck will be Verazol, The Split Current, full of kicker cards from Zendikar Rising to copy.

I hope that in four more years, people playing with these cards through Foundations will look back on them as fondly as I do.

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