Battle for Zendikar Preview: Eldrazi = Neutral Evil?

The prerelease for the upcoming Magic: the Gathering set, Battle for Zendikar, is right around the corner. This is a very momentous set from a historical Magic perspective because it's the first expert level expansion that will be released in the two-sets-per-block paradigm (as opposed to how it previously worked with three-sets-per-block). It's also a momentous set for me personally because it's a return to the plane of Zendikar, which is where I started my journey into Magic nerd-dom. Additionally, Battle for Zendikar is a momentous set for us Vorthosian creature type historians because it will be just the second set in Magic's history to introduce new creatures with the type Eldrazi.

For those of you interested in the Magic storyline, Eldrazi are giant, colorless, otherworldly monsters that appeared on Zendikar seemingly out of nowhere to terrorize the plane's inhabitants in the third set of the original Zendikar block (predictably titled Rise of the Eldrazi). It was later revealed, during the Commander 2014 casual expansion, that these Eldrazi first showed up thousands of years before the events of Zendikar/Worldwake/Rise of the Eldrazi, but were trapped using a network of stone hedrons by a power trio of Planeswalkers: Sorin Markov the normally-heartless Vampire, Nahiri the Kor stone-mage (or Lithomancer) , and Ugin the Spirit Dragon. Flash forward to the the aforementioned Zendikar block when Sorin returns to the plane for some reason, just in time to witness the destruction of the hedron prison and the... rise of the Eldrazi.

Although the Eldrazi have plane-shattering storyline significance, they've only appeared (not counting reprints) in Rise of the Eldrazi (abbreviated ROE to distinguish the card set from the historical event). As I mentioned before, that fact is about to change with the release of Battle for Zendikar (BFZ). But one thing that won't change is that ROE will still be the only set to feature Eldrazi Spawn: 0/1 colorless creature tokens, which you can sacrifice for 1 colorless mana. These are being replaced by the significantly more powerful 1/1 Eldrazi Scion tokens, with the same ability. But seeing as we currently have an small sample size of BFZ cards and don't know a lot about Eldrazi Scions, let's look back at the set of old, for background and reference.




In ROE, there were 16 cards that create Eldrazi Spawn, of which the only colors are Black, Red, and Green. This bit of trivia reminded me of a random train of thought I had about a month ago about the correlation between the color wheel in Magic: the Gathering (WUBRG) and the alignment spectrum in Dungeons & Dragons (GELCN). The first thought in this train was that if we were to try and determine the colors on the color wheel that most closely correspond to the Evil alignment, they would be Black and Red. These are the colors that have stereotypically evil creatures such as Demons, Devils, Vampires, Zombies, and Goblins. That's not to say there can't be Evil-skewing cards in the other three colors, but it makes particular sense to assign two colors to each factor on the alignment spectrum.

I reached this conclusion through simple math: there are ten Magic colors and five traits that make up the nine DnD alignments (remember, there's the good/evil axis, the lawful/chaotic axis, and neutral goes with both). Skipping ahead to the end of this thought experiment, I determined that the two colors that best exemplify neutral are Green and Black. I've posted the full results above, but suffice it to say that most Druids in Magic use Green mana (just 8 of the 131 creatures with that type don't have G as part of their color identity) and Druids in DnD used to have Neutral as an alignment requirement. You can see how Black can be Neutral too, despite its association with Evil, when you look at the other half of the spectrum: Black cards use elements of both Law and Chaos to accomplish their goals at any cots.

So according to my system, the Neutral Evil alignment is most closely identified with the RBG color combination (commonly known as Jund, from the Alara block), which are also the three colors associated with Eldrazi Spawn. This proves the validity of said system, if you think about how the Eldrazi operate. They're clearly Evil, in that their sole motivation is destruction and propagation, and they're clearly Neutral, in that they seem to act in accordance with some sort of hive-mind rather than individual Eldrazi monsters showing any type of agency. I don't know if this information has any bearing on deck-building strategies going forward, especially seeing as more and more colors are gaining access to Eldrazi tactics thanks to the new Devoid ability (where a card technically has no color even though it requires colored mana to cast). But it's thinking more about random trivia involving non-Magic games than viable Magic deck-building strategies that make Vorthos who he is...