Contents:

1. Face Unnatural Disaster
2. Zendikar: A World in Peril
3. Gideon Jura
4. Kiora
5. Ob Nixilis
6. The Eldrazi Titans
7. Battle for Zendikar

Face Unnatural Disaster

By Ben Hayes, Magic™ Designer and Developer

When we last visited Zendikar in the Rise of the Eldrazi^® set, the terrifying and inscrutable Eldrazi had been released from their long imprisonment and were threatening the world with destruction.  In the Battle for Zendikar^® set, a tenacious group of Planeswalkers, the plane’s inhabitants, and even the land itself have banded together to oppose Ulamog and his brood.

Eldrazi

Ulamog and the other Eldrazi have returned with some entirely new angles of attack. In the Battle for Zendikar set, the keyword devoid represents the Eldrazi’s siphoning of the mana and life force from the world of Zendikar. Although devoid cards require colored mana to cast, they’re just as colorless as Ulamog himself. Many Eldrazi-themed cards in the set become stronger the more colorless cards you have in your deck.

The Eldrazi provide a number of ways to exile your opponents’ cards, including the ingest ability. Not only are those exiled cards removed from your opponent’s arsenal,  but they’ll also be available to fuel your Eldrazi Processors—creatures with abilities that move opponent’s exiled cards to their graveyards to provide you with benefits. Striking the right balance between Processors and ingest creatures is important when building a deck with these cards.

Eldrazi tokens are still running rampant across Zendikar, but the 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn you may remember are a thing of the past. In their place are 1/1 Eldrazi Scion tokens. Like the Spawn from Rise of the Eldrazi set, Eldrazi Scions can be sacrificed for mana to help you cast larger members of the brood lineages.

Zendikar and the Allies

The plane of Zendikar itself is fighting back against the Eldrazi. Landfall abilities give you a benefit every time a land enters the battlefield under your control, while cards with awaken allow you to animate your lands into creatures if you have enough mana.

Meanwhile, the Zendikari stand united in defense of their home world, utilizing some new mechanics to rid the plane of the Eldrazi scourge. Allies are back and helping out the cause in a big way. A number of these Ally creatures have rally abilities, which either give a bonus to all of your creatures or provide another advantage whenever an Ally enters the battlefield under your control. New converge cards reward you for spending mana of many different colors to cast them, representing the many alliances that have emerged among old rivals.

Zendikar: A World in Peril

The embattled, chaotic plane of Zendikar was once a tranquil world of mana-rich landscapes and magic-infused wilderness. Thousands of years ago, all of that was nearly wiped out forever.

The Eldrazi Imprisoned

The Eldrazi titans are monstrous beings that roam the desolate spaces between worlds. They devour the mana and life energy of any plane they encounter before moving on to the next. Although only three Eldrazi titans are known—Emrakul, Ulamog, and Kozilek—they pose a threat to countless planes of the Multiverse.

Three Planeswalkers took action to stop the Eldrazi: Ugin, the Spirit Dragon; Nahiri, the Lithomancer; and Sorin Markov. Although they couldn’t kill the Eldrazi, they made a plan to imprison the astral abominations on a single plane: Nahiri’s home world of Zendikar. At Ugin’s direction, Nahiri constructed a massive network of stone diamonds called hedrons. This network would serve as a beacon to draw the Eldrazi in, and it’s power would form the bars of a worldwide prison.

The Planeswalkers’ trap worked. Emrakul, Ulamog, and Kozilek manifested in physical form on Zendikar, becoming confined by the magic of the network of hedrons and sinking into harmless dormancy. Sorin and Ugin left the plane, while Nahiri remained there to keep watch over the prison.

Zendikar’s Awakening

Zendikar itself reacted to the presence of the Eldrazi, stirring to life to fend off the devastating beings. What had begun as a localized agitation near the Eldrazi prison on Akoum developed into a deadly force known as the Roil. In its wake, thousands of the plane’s inhabitants died.

Thwarted by Zendikar’s backlash, the Eldrazi brood lineages eventually died off, leaving the three Eldrazi titans alone in their slumber. Life on Zendikar slowly recovered, and the destruction wrought by the Eldrazi passed into the fog of memory. The destructiveness and danger of Zendikar, however, were established forever.

Rise of the Eldrazi

The Eldrazi titans were imprisoned for thousands of years. On one occasion, they nearly escaped, and though Nahiri stopped them, the result was cataclysmic. Afterward, Nahiri left Zendikar to search for the two Planeswalkers who had abandoned her world and left her to deal with the Eldrazi alone. Even in her absence, the magic of the Eye of Ugin held fast.

Then, for reasons of his own, the elder dragon Planeswalker Nicol Bolas arranged for the three other Planeswalkers to converge on the Eye and unknowingly reactivate it. These were his own mad minion Sarkhan Vol, the mind mage Jace Beleren, and the pyromancer Chandra Nalaar.

The activation of the Eye loosed teeming broods of Eldrazi upon the plane, but the titans remained fettered. Sorin Markov finally returned to Zendikar in an effort to prevent them from breaking free, enlisting the help of fellow Planeswalker Nissa Revane. Sorin led Nissa to the Eye with the intent of sealing it, as Nahiri had done the first time the bonds were loosened.

But Nissa had other ideas. She believed that, given their freedom, the Eldrazi would leave Zendikar and wreak their destruction on other planes, thus making her home safe again. Instead of sealing the three titans tightly into their prison once more, she broke the last bonds holding them in, and Emrakul, Ulamog, and Kozilek emerged into the world.

After so many eons in stasis, the titans were not able to leave Zendikar immediately. They needed to feed, gather strength, and restore themselves. They followed their broods in spreading out across the plane, destroying large sections of land before starting to target the settlements where survivors had taken shelter. Leaderless and hounded by their inscrutable enemy, the resilient Zendikari kept moving across the dangerous plane, searching for safe places where they could regroup and try to reclaim their world.

Gideon Jura

“For the lands you have lost and the beauty that remains, for freedom and the future, we must hold nothing back!”

The Planeswalker Gideon Jura hails originally from the world of Theros, where he was known as Kytheon Iora. On the streets of the militarized city of Akros, he learned self-reliance and leadership. After his spark ignited, he found himself among the knightly orders of the shard-plane of Bant, where he took the name Gideon and dedicated himself to justice and law.

Bant was a paradise, but it was a paradise Gideon could not enjoy while he knew there were others whose homes were plagued by evil and injustice. He set out into the Multiverse with the goal of protecting the weak.

Around the time the Eldrazi escaped, Gideon came to Zendikar in search of the pyromancer Chandra Nalaar, hoping to help her avoid persecution at the hands of a cruel organization he had belonged to before discovering its true nature. He followed Chandra’s trail through the mountains of Akoum, unaware of the scope of the Eldrazi threat, until he lost track of her movements. Thwarted in his search, he took shelter in a remote encampment called Fort Keff.

While he was at Fort Keff, the encampment came under attack. A flood of Emrakul’s brood washed over the fort, crashing against the walls like a tidal wave. Gideon joined the soldiers in the battle and led them in routing the lesser Eldrazi—but when Emrakul’s enormous form darkened the sky, Gideon told the survivors to flee. He had only the barest inkling of what he was facing, but he knew that the Eldrazi titans were not a threat he could handle alone. Reluctantly, he traveled to the plane of Ravnica, where he hoped to find other Planeswalkers to help him save Zendikar.

Gideon was delayed for a time by events on Ravnica, and for all his efforts to secure the aid of other Planeswalkers, he returned with only vague promises of support. Frustrated and alone, he arrived near Sea Gate on Tazeem. Remembering that Sea Gate was a center of knowledge prior to the awakening of the Eldrazi, he hoped to find more information about the threat that Zendikar faced. But when he reached the edge of the Halimar Sea, he found that the area had been overrun by Eldrazi.

Searching for allies and struggling against impossible odds, Gideon will not rest until the Eldrazi are destroyed—or he is.

Kiora

“The seas of Zendikar are no less imperiled than the dry lands.”

Brash and playful, the merfolk Kiora embraces the singular gifts of the Planeswalker spark: the ability to go where she wishes. Indeed, the situation on Zendikar would hold relatively little interest for her—save perhaps studying the enormous, insatiable Eldrazi—were it not for the fact that Zendikar is her home plane.

Unwilling to allow the Eldrazi monstrosities to feast on her world, but unable to stop them, Kiora began traveling the planes to strengthen her connection to the ocean’s magic. She believed that only by summoning the fierce krakens, serpents, and other terrors of the deep could she defeat the titans who ruled Zendikar. She became obsessed with this pursuit, barely noticing or caring about its effects on her surroundings.

Eventually Kiora’s search brought her to Theros, a world ruled by powerful gods and inhabited by enormous krakens. Kiora unknowingly arrived on Theros during a time when the gods were bound in the star-realm of Nyx by divine law and barred from intervening in the mortal world. This included the sea god Thassa, whose merfolk worshippers, the tritons, were left without guidance.

The tritons saw Kiora—with her odd appearance, arrogant manner, and ready command of the ocean’s greatest creatures—and concluded that she was an avatar of Thassa, somehow skirting the divine silence. Kiora did nothing to disabuse them of this notion. She learned from them of the lost city of Arixmethes and the ancient kraken said to dwell there, and she set out to find it.

Kiora soon encountered Thassa herself, back from Nyx and decidedly unamused by Kiora’s tacit impersonation of her. Planeswalker and god fought to a standstill, both summoning the mightiest creatures of the deep to their sides. In the end, Kiora escaped the fight without forming a bond with the kraken of Arixmethes, but she did not leave Theros empty-handed: in the last moments before she planeswalked away, she stole Thassa’s divine weapon, a bident infused with the sea god’s power over the ocean and its creatures. Although the bident’s power was diminished when Kiora took it off Theros, it remains a potent weapon.

Newly armed and with many krakens, leviathans, octopuses, and other sea creatures at her disposal, Kiora has returned to Zendikar to face the Eldrazi in a fight to the death.

Ob Nixilis

“I will secure my revenge on Zendikar one soul at a time.”

The man called Ob Nixilis was a cruel, ruthless tyrant on a hellish plane of unending war. No tactics were too merciless, and no magic too dark, to secure his ascendancy. In his bid for power, he invoked an ancient demonic pact, ordering the demons to destroy his enemies. Finally free to act out an eons-old prophecy, the demons killed every person on the plane except the tyrant who summoned them. Ob Nixilis realized that he was the subject of a cruel and senseless joke: he was, at last, sole ruler of the world. He began to laugh, and in that moment, his Planeswalker spark ignited, flinging him through the Blind Eternities.

Infinite worlds opened to Ob Nixilis, undreamt-of vistas just waiting to bow before the vast new power he had unlocked. Soon, however, he learned that there were others like him—other Planeswalkers—whose power and ambition equaled his own. To best these new rivals, Ob Nixilis would do what he had always done: betray any trust, commit any blasphemy, and pay any price for power. He thought himself invincible—but then he suffered a cruel defeat.

Ob Nixilis sought to seize the power of the sinister Chain Veil, but he instead suffered its curse, which stripped him of his humanity and transformed him into a demon. At last, he had found a price he was not willing to pay. In search of a cure for his curse, he made his way to Zendikar to make use of its powerful mana. Before he could begin to draw on this power, however, he was met by Zendikar’s self-appointed protector—the Planeswalker Nahiri, known as “the Lithomancer.” Nahiri bound Ob Nixilis with the same magic that imprisoned the Eldrazi, placing a hedron in his skull and suppressing his Planeswalker spark. Trapped on Zendikar, powerless, Ob Nixilis became obsessed with regaining his power and his freedom.

After centuries of plotting, Ob Nixilis has finally removed the hedron that bound him to the plane. Now, he is unshackled, and he’s directing his energies toward his next goal: rekindling his spark.

The Eldrazi Titans

Ulamog, the Titan of Consumption

Of the three Eldrazi titans that had been trapped on Zendikar, Ulamog is the only one known to be currently active on the plane, rampaging across the landscape and leaving desolation in his wake.

All the Eldrazi seem driven by hunger, but Ulamog embodies infinite consumption. He is sometimes likened to a terrible maelstrom that sucks everything into the depths and leaves no trace. A consuming aura surrounds him, draining life and mana from everything in his vicinity and drawing energy towards him in a darkly glowing spiral. Where Ulamog passes, the land is transformed into broken wastes. Though landforms retain their general outline, at least for a time, they become elaborate chalky husks that often collapse under the weight of an incautious traveler. Water becomes white dust, and even the air around the titan becomes stale and dry.

The ravenous and brutish Eldrazi of Ulamog’s lineage are characterized by dense masses of suckerless tentacles, multiple withered arms bifurcated at the elbow, and eyeless bony plates in in inhuman but vaguely facial forms. Their coloration is similar to their sire’s, dominated by shades of scabby red, luminous purple, and deep blue.

Ulamog and his spawn seem to function like a single organism, ingesting and processing the raw material of Zendikar. Many of Ulamog’s drones are devoted to transforming the landscape into the wasteland characteristic of Ulamog’s passing. Others, called processors, somehow convert those wastes into usable energy, channeling the destruction of the land into spell-like effects that defy the categorization of Zendikar’s mages.

Kozilek, the Titan of Distortion

The presence of the Eldrazi titan Kozilek warps reality and distorts perception, making the true nature of reality nearly impossible to discern. Proximity to the titan also has a distorting effect on sentient minds. He muddies thoughts and transforms emotions, banishing forethought and causing confusion, panic, and despair. He stirs aggression and inverts loyalties, so friends suddenly appear as enemies, and foes as trusted comrades. Kozilek has not been seen by the defenders of Zendikar for some time, and it’s generally believed that he has departed the plane entirely. In his absence, Kozilek’s brood have retreated to the remote places of the world.

Emrakul, the Titan of Corruption

Emrakul is the largest and mightiest of the three known Eldrazi titans, drifting through the sky like a mountain unmoored from the bedrock. In contrast to the utter desolation left in the wake of the other titans, Emrakul doesn’t affect rocks, water, or other inanimate substances. Her passage is marked by the warping of living things, whether they be plants, animals, or sentient beings. While some of these altered organisms still remain on Zendikar, most of them have shriveled away.

It appears that Emrakul recovered from her imprisonment more quickly than the other titans. She vanished before Kozilek, and most scholars believe that she has left the plane. Her spawn’s characteristic lattices have decayed into stringy flesh, and in this weakened state, very few are still active threats.

Battle for Zendikar

There are many important moments in the Battle for Zendikar story, and the five most crucial—called “pivotal events”—are shown on cards. You can read more about these events in the official Magic fiction at Magic.Wizards.com/Story.

Slaughter at the Refuge

Gideon Jura returned to Zendikar alone, ready to face the Eldrazi. He arrived near Sea Gate on Tazeem and found the area nearby overrun. He fought his way through the Eldrazi until he reached a besieged refuge, then held the Eldrazi back while the survivors fled to the cliffs. Among them was Nissa Revane, a fellow Planeswalker whose connection to Zendikar’s elemental soul had waned. Although their paths would take them in different directions, they agreed to meet outside Sea Gate to face the Eldrazi once more.

Nissa’s Quest

Led by visions, Nissa traveled into the depths of the devastated continent of Bala Ged to find the Khalni Heart, an outgrowth of the soul of Zendikar. Through it, she rekindled her connection to the plane, but she also ran afoul of the demon Ob Nixilis, a former Planeswalker who hoped to use the power of Khalni Heart to reignite his spark. Flush with the elemental power of Zendikar, Nissa bested Ob Nixilis, moved the Khalni Heart to safety and escaped.

Revelation at the Eye

Although the mind mage Jace Beleren had resisted Gideon’s efforts to recruit him, he soon journeyed to Zendikar. He found Ugin himself rebuilding the damaged Eye of Ugin, the underground chambers whose magic had once imprisoned the Eldrazi on the plane. Ugin revealed to Jace how the network of stone hedrons might be used again to immobilize the Eldrazi titans, but Jace realized that the same trick might instead serve as a first step in killing them. Ignoring Ugin’s dire warnings, Jace left the Eye and made his way to Sea Gate to pass this information on to Gideon.

The Liberation of Sea Gate

Gideon set out with the small band of survivors from the destroyed refuge. Battle-hardened veterans and desperate new recruits flocked to his banner. Kiora, a Planeswalker native to Zendikar, brought her own army of merfolk and colossal sea monsters to fight alongside Gideon. They began an attack on the Eldrazi-controlled Sea Gate, joined soon thereafter by Nissa and Jace. The Eldrazi were driven from the city and Sea Gate’s defensive ramparts were rebuilt and fortified. The soldiers of Zendikar celebrated a hard-won victory.

Hedron Alignment

A horde of Eldrazi soon retaliated, including the titan Ulamog himself, and the four Planeswalkers enacted a bold new plan. While Gideon’s troops and Kiora’s forces held the city against this fresh assault, Nissa called on the elemental power of the earth to raise sunken hedrons from the ground and move them into a ring around the Eldrazi titan. Jace activated the hedrons’ magic and Ulamog was trapped!

Then everything collapsed. Ob Nixilis appeared, having followed Nissa from Bala Ged. He knocked the hedrons out of alignment to siphon their power for himself. As power flowed into him, Ob Nixilis’s Planeswalker spark reignited.

But Gideon still believed victory was attainable. Ulamog was still within the hedron ring, still in reach of his army and Kiora’s mighty followers. Gideon urged his soldiers ahead and leapt forward to attack the titan. Ulamog was battered, off balance, and apparently on the edge of defeat.

The story will continue in Oath of the Gatewatch™, the second set of the Battle for Zendikar block.