With a new block for Magic The Gathering, comes new (some revisited) mechanics for the cards to add complexity to your game play. The Battle For Zendikar block has some really great mechanics, to buff your creatures, deal extra damage, take care of pesky planeswalkers or produce multiples of creatures. Let's take a quick look at the new tricks for the block...

Awaken is one of the first tricks. Awaken has two parts: a number and an awaken cost. When you cast a spell with awaken, you have a choice. You can cast it by paying its mana cost as normal. If you do, you'll get its first effect, which is great. But if you have the luxury of more land available to you, you can also choose to cast a spell for its awaken cost. If you do, you'll also choose a land you control as a target of the spell.

When the spell resolves, in addition to the first effect of the spell, the land you chose as the target will become a 0/0 Elemental creature with haste that's still a land! Just like that, you can deal with that annoying planeswalker AND get another creature out on the field.

Rally is the next of the mechanics. This one is awesome. It works in the same sort of manner that Slivers do, in that each Ally card influences one another. If one gives a +1, they all get +1. If one gives someone Reach, they all gain Reach. Super useful and can be incredibly difficult to recover from once someone has multiple Allies out.

Converge is a clever little trick that essentially offers perks to those running multicolor decks. This mechanic offers a benefit for the number of colors used in its casting cost.

For example, if a card costs 2R to do two damage to a player, you can add +1 damage for each color you use to cast it- so if you can cast it with a red and two different colors, you can do 4 damage! Brutal!

The Landfall ability is probably one of my favorite.  Similar to the Rally mechanic, this one offers a benefit for each time a land is played under your control. This could be life generating, creature token generating, or additional strength generating.

This is tremendous when you already have multiple creature tokens on the field and every land you play offers a +1/+1 for each creature token!

Then there's Ingest. Ingest offers a player the ability to exile the top card of a player's library (eat it) when combat damage is done to the other player. This serves it's purpose in both eliminating threats and potentially decking another player.

The Eldrazi have a variety of creatures called Processors, which by right, have their own nasty little ability to "process" two cards from their opponent's exiled cards back into their library, and placing 1/1 colorless creature tokens on the battlefield.

And lastly, we have Devoid, which provides some creatures the ability to be colorless creatures despite a specific color being required to cast them.

Which of these mechanics will be the most useful for your game play?