Party and Tribal
The core of Zendikar Rising draft was that it was a tribal set, and both the best and worst of the format was wrapped up in this.
It's easier to discuss this starting off with the good than the bad. I don't want to declare it unilaterally because I haven't run through the entire list, but Party might be the best tribal mechanic of all time.
I promise this tangent loops back: a few weeks ago there was a “rank every draft set ever” tier list going around. I had Ikoria somewhere between the top tier for fun and the required texts of Limited tier, and it's almost entirely because of companion. Even if that mechanic was a disaster for Constructed, it felt like the first time Wizards shoved all in on one of the things that makes Limited really fun: forcing dynamic draft picks.
The peaks of the Draft portion of Draft are when you feel smart for making unique decisions and when you get to maximize undervalued cards. This often has chain effects, because correctly taking some undervalued card over the default “right pick” means someone down the line gets paid off, and everyone leaves feeling good. Companion gave you a huge reward, and all you had to do was be the person taking the first jump in this chain of altered decisions. Not only did Companion give you more unique drafts to experience, it uniquely changed the text of of every draft it got involved in for everyone else involved and produced second-hand novelty.
Party does a lot of the same by creating consistent unique scenarios about which creature type you want. When you cross this with filling a curve there's a lot of potential priorities you could have in a draft, even if you learn the format and adjust for the roles that are naturally short staffed.
If anything, I think the biggest issue with Party was short changing this decision a bit. Each of the non-green colors had a primary and secondary creature type that were well populated, and one of the four types that was completely absent, but that tertiary type was literally a single low impact common. I'm not faulting the decision of making the one common low impact, since that means the person who wants that type gets it, I'm faulting not making a backup. Drafting a more Party-heavy deck outside of the “dedicated Party” pairs of Rakdos and Azorius meant you had one type with only that single common supporting it, ie. Farsight Adept was the only Wizard in Orzhov. That meant certain color pairs were horrendous at party because Highborn Vampire makes no sense in Dimir or whatever, forcing them into their linear tribal archetype (more on this in a second) and making them and the whole format just less deep and rich.
The lesson?
If you make a good, lenticular (simple yet deep) mechanic, shove all in on it. There's a risk of homogenizing everything, but Azorius and Rakdos Party feeling so different (check out Sam Black's Drafting Archetypes podcast for good depth on this) implies you could make the full spread be unique enough to avoid this.
Then there were the linear tribal decks. This was the worst part of Zendikar Rising, but it was pretty close to being great. Instead of just counting each creature of the type, tribal was tied to a secondary theme: life gain, spell casting, mill, and equipment.
The worst tribal aspects of Zendikar Rising felt a lot like the worst of Ixalan, with Clerics and Wizards being the key offenders. I'm pretty sure these were the two best archetypes in the format, and they were largely drafting on rails. The biggest diversion from the default was when you first picked a Relic Amulet, then took so many good blue cards your Wizards deck didn't need red cards and could play your white or green rare instead. Congrats, you still spent most picks looking for blue Wizards or good instants and auto-picked the best one. Wizards directly did this via the “cast a Wizard” mechanic, but Clerics was more subtle. Kor Celebrant doesn't need a Cleric to trigger, but all the cards that also gain life are Clerics. Even if a random body could participate in the life gain chains, a Cleric did it better.
Maybe the game play was better than Ixalan, but getting to that point sure wasn't.
Relic Amulet is also a bit of an offensive card in a tribal format since it's so oppressive to opponents trying to control creatures, kinda like Sparksmith, but a single card miss at uncommon isn't a huge deal. Ikoria is an all-timer despite Zenith Flare.
Rogues and Warriors were a little closer to interesting, and it was because they were less supported. Warriors is probably the better example, as no one ever had a good answer for what a good Rogues deck without Soaring Thought-Thief or Zareth San looked like.
Warriors was about ending up with high power attackers, but that tied into the equipment subtheme. Cliffhaven Kitesail ended up being a key piece to tie everything together, and you wanted that in a specific quantity, but in the end that could go on any high power creature just as well as a Warrior. There were a few specific cards that paid you for having a lot of Warriors, but mostly it was just a matter of having enough to make Expedition Champion hit them hard.
The single-other-Warrior nature of that payoff was great and gave the deck room to play non-Warriors at lower cost. In another cool twist, otherwise high priority Party cards like Grotag Bug-Catcher went down in value because they were Warriors, and all your other Warriors meant their Party floor was closer to 1 member than the usual 2 members for controlling any other creature.
And guess what? These soft, conditional tribal strategies have been the ones that lead to the best formats. All of the Innistrad sets have approached tribal this way, and every time it's been a slam dunk implementation. The secondary mechanic focus of each tribe is another great way to maximize this. You can mesh in other cards that incidentally work well with equipment or life gain.
Zendikar Rising went too far on the raw tribal pieces here. It was a combination of “every Cleric has to do the Cleric thing” and just the raw power of the top payoffs, but in the end those overpowered the Party setups the format really should have been about.
Makindi Ox, or Makindi GOAT?
Makindi Ox was among my favorite commons in Zendikar Rising. It wasn't the best card, and I wasn't taking it highly, but I won some massive percentage of the games I resolved the card. And it wasn't just Makindi Ox. Dreadwurm, Living Tempest, Spitfire Lagac were all fine for the same reasons.
The lesson is up front this time:
if your filler commons aren't going to be synergistic, at least make
enough of them impactful when drawn and cast.
Like I said before, the key to good draft formats is giving people things to do with the cards that wheel. In the actual best sets of all time, that usually involves crazy intermeshed synergies with that common, often with specific build arounds. Think about Runic Repetition in the Spider Spawning deck being unplayable anywhere else. Or it involves something like cycling letting you mesh a free roll onto a conditional but fine playable, which was basically the entire story of Hour of Devastation draft.
Zendikar Rising chose a third path because it was a broadly linear tribal set without a cycling-style mechanic: make the lower individual impact cards the high priority synergy cards, then make a lot of the non-synergy cards just decent, high impact stuff.
Looking at past sets, I think this was the biggest reason Throne of Eldraine missed for me. There wasn't really room for this kind of design because a lot of the thematic payoffs were those higher cost, high impact cards, and the ends of the packs were real stinkers that didn't do anything when drawn. Some of this is the Adamant mechanic naturally pushing the mono-color payoffs into the five-drop slot, but if that's a mechanic in the set it may have been worth considering a different path to make later picks matter.
You don't need every filler card to be a high impact card like this, and you don't need all your high drops to be non-synergy pieces like this. There's still Guul Draz Mucklord in this set. You just need enough that people reliably get a couple cards that matter when you draw them on the wheel, so that their drafts that don't go to plan feel like they are competing in games.
Also shout out to the concept of giving white four power creatures at common. Makindi Ox is the 7th one of those ever, and three have been since Theros Beyond Death and one was New Phyrexia making a mockery of that paradigm with a 4/2 for four. So many of white's Draft struggles in 2019 can be summed up by "their cards aren't impactful" and this helps a lot more than it looks like it would.
The Green Rant
Why isolate green with weird archetypes when you can bridge those with party when green is the all types color? I get giving the flex color worse Party payoffs, but why is there only one and it is so bad? Why not make dual-class creatures in green to actually give it a reason to Party?
Why are there no landfall creatures with a Party type? Why are there more Party typed creatures that get +1/+1 counters in white than in green? Why are as many kicker plus Party type creatures in red as there are in green, and twice as many in blue? Why repeat the Battle for Zendikar issue of making green basically four colors of cards that don't overlap in a single color? Especially when Party is in the set, so random creature with text can be playable because of types even if the synergy doesn't hit.
Hitting people with 6/5s is nice, but a functional color that you can move into in draft without throwing out seven earlier picks is better.
Good Odds and Acceptable Ends
The rares in Zendikar Rising were really, really nice for Limited. The crushing non-creatures were setup dependent or tempo negative. The bomby creatures gave you a window to kill them at parity. Luminarch Aspirant was kinda messed up, but that's about it.
You can print game dominating rares and still have a good set. Just don't make them lifelink indestructible hexproof cantrips that immediately Wrath your opponent (Theros Beyond Death) and you are off to a good start.
I have no issues with Golgari Counters failing. Sometimes an archetype doesn't work. Again, the failure was not giving the color pair a default, acceptable backup plan in Party, or maybe it was just splitting the non-synergy black cards from the green ones using that Party vs lone non-Party color wedge.
The modal DFC lands were just flawless for Limited. I really don't know if another run of them can match how perfectly selected these effects were. They were unique but simple, always a decision, not dominating or warping, but helped out in a very visible and concrete way every time in either direction.
I just want to repeat that compliment: these were so well designed, doing them again needs to be handled with caution to not underdeliver the high expectations.
Landfall was also really well done. The lessons from the last times was taken to heart: Steppe Lynx looks way more exciting/enticing than Scythe Leopard, but you need to be careful aggressive landfall doesn't negate blocking. This set hit a good balance of rehashing the old (Lotus Cobra, Akoum Hellhound), avoiding those pitfalls (Brushfire Elemental as gold uncommon Plated Geopede), and bringing new things to the table (Felidar Retreat, Makindi Ox). Add in how it meshed with the DFCs and you have another success story.
Where Was The Zendikar in Zendikar?
But the real miss that goes beyond draft? This wasn't Zendikar. It said Landfall, it tried to replace Allies, it has Zendikar names, but it's in the uncanny valley.
Zendikar had two parts: Dungeons and Dragons, and Indiana Jones. It was groups and individuals questing for treasure and discovery, but the world was unstable, filled with traps and land that would rise up and do stuff.
This set got as far as groups questing, but stopped. There wasn't even a purpose of finding treasure, discovering things (the quest enchantments) let alone traps or peril. Where did all that go?
Weirdly, if the problem with draft was the party mechanic wasn't saturated enough, the creative issue was that it was all consuming.
Even if you are trying to distance from the Eldrazi era of Zendikar, you have material to draw from. The world had spots drained to dust, had fractures in reality. Those are new kinds of peril and traps left behind without a single noodly, hedron crowned, or quad-armed thing from beyond
Maybe the quest isn't treasure, but just rebuilding something to live in. Not that original Zendikar showed a world with a lot of civilization, but there's still purpose and not just durdling Clerics and Rogues.
Mechanically, why are there actual zero allusions to quests or traps, but they could fit in a converge card? I actually had to work to remember the name of that mechanic because it's just sunburst and was utterly forgettable in Battle for Zendikar.
This all sounds like nitpicks, but it isn't. The point of returning to a creative asset is making a cohesive and deeper world. Dominaria may have been a bit on the fan service side of things, but it told a story while recognizing and building on what existed. Scars of Mirrodin was basically an entirely different slant than the original Mirrodin, but it tried hard to capture so much of the original style and mechanics for the Mirrodin pieces. Shadows over Innistrad was so faithful to expanding the source material that it may as well have been the third set replacing Avacyn Restored.
Zendikar Rising just takes the brand name and slaps it on a sticker. Doing landfall well and nothing else almost makes it worse, like that mechanic is the only relevant history here.
Maybe some of this was compounded by Zendikar Rising sitting in the Constructed shadows of Throne of Eldraine, and that looming presence is why I skipped discussing the set in Constructed. Maybe if it had the chance to be the star of the show it could build it's own identity, but I can't help but feel like if the set had the right permeating flavor of a return it couldn't overcome that.
So much of what I say about Zendikar Rising sounds harsh, and I really try to temper that because so much of the set was really well done. Party, MDFCs, the balance of 279 of the 280 cards. But a key thing repeated in Magic design is “it is better for a set to have people who love it and hate it than be a set that's just fine”, and Zendikar Rising missed there. Time and time again, it failed to really push on its principles and produced the minimum viable version of the best things it did. When inevitably one or two margin shots missed in the set, it becomes easier to criticize those than to say deep statements about what is good, because all the nuance is in why something failed and not crafting the successes.