The Problem with the B4Z Gift Box

If you happen to have a Battle for Zendikar Gift Box  handy, take a look at it. Nice and sturdy.  WOTC spent some extra design time on it to make certain of a sturdy design, even dropping the box from a height of several feet to make sure it could withstand a fall. That’s not the problem.  The problem is on the back. Specifically on the back where the box lithograph shows a picture of the box contents. You’ve got the box, empty but able to hold over 2000 cards, card dividers, stickers for customizing the dividers, an alternate art card, 5 booster packs of Battle for Zendikar and a stack of 20 basic lands.  There’s the rub. The top card of the stack of lands is a full art forest card. However, the lands included in the box are not. The only full art land cards included in the Gift Box are those that might come inside one of the booster packs.

However, the problem is that the stack of lands shown is topped with a full art card. The Battle for Zendikar Fat Pack came with 80 full art land cards, a major reason they sold out so quickly and at such high prices. Given both those factors, it is reasonable for the customer, and the store, to expect that the Gift Boxes come with 20 full art land cards. After all, WOTC did put a disclaimer on the back of the box that the 2000+ cards shown in the Gift Box were there for “illustrative purpose only”. Certainly WOTC could have included a similar disclaimer about the lands, or even better, just used a picture of standard land cards instead. Happily, our store and a number of others found out about it in time to warn customers but I know of a few stores that did not and told their customers that  “Yes, they do have the full art lands”, a perfectly reasonable assumption given the evidence.