Zendikar Rising Leak: Crawling Barrens

The plane of Zendikar is well-known for its powerful manlands, and here we have a colourless one that functions as a powerful mana sink in the late game, with its strong activated ability! The first activation of this is quite weak, only making a 2/2 creature, but the strength comes in repeated activations, and if you have 8 mana then you can immediately double pump it. This is a deceptively powerful effect, because a lot of decks will have mana lying around late in the game. Since it produces colourless mana, this will remove a mana source from your deck, but that’s a pretty low investment, at least if there aren’t better colourless utility lands to run; certainly you don’t want too many!

As with all manlands, this is weak to instant speed removal, and this one is vulnerable to Shock effects on the first activation, so you will need to be careful – since it’s a may ability, you may want to choose not to make it a creature the first time. I suspect this is on the weaker side of manlands, and that if there’s much competition from other manlands (e.g. a cycle in the same vein as the previous two Zendikar sets) then it might be overshadowed by those, but it’s a shoe-in to see some play regardless.

Check out the manland cycles from the previous Zendikar sets:

Check out the other information we have on Zendikar Rising so far on the following pages:

• First Sneak Peek of Zendikar Rising at Comic-Con@Home
• Possible Nissa Leak from Zendikar Rising
• Our Zendikar Spoilers, Previews, and Card Gallery Page (currently a placeholder but you can bookmark it to come back to!)