What Lands should've been in MTG

[OgreBattle]

So in the OSSR review threads on MTG the topic of the untapped potential of the Land design space in MTG comes up:

I think Magic's current crop of lands really underlines how bullshit this all is. Right now, Standard has 58 lands in it. And a completely reasonable land set for an Abzan deck to have might look like this:

• Flooded Strand x3
• Windswept Heath x4
• Wooded Foothills x3
• Sandstone Citadel x4
• Canopy Vista x2
• Sunken Hollow x1
• Smoldering Marsh x1
• Forest x3
• Plains x2
• Shambling Vent x2

That's really a lot of different lands. It's ten different lands, which is more than one out of six of the total available lands. But that's misleading, because actually there's only 4 different mechanics.


And three of those mechanics are just slight variations on whether your land comes into play tapped!

The only land card that does anything different in the deck is the Shambling Vent:



The Shambling Vent comes into play tapped all the time, in exchange for which it makes two flavors of mana and if you have nothing to do with your mana later in the game you can turn it into a modest lifelink creature and attack or defend with it. So it's both a cashout land and a multi-land, in exchange for which it is a tapped-land. That's about as weird as lands get in Magic, and it's the only interesting land in the whole deck. Everything else is just a mana source or a fetch land that grabs one of your other mana sources. The deck runs 25 lands, but 10 of them are fetches so by time you've seen 5 lands there are only 18 lands left in the deck.

There's weird sequencing bullshit, where you have several methods of getting three colors of mana untapped on turn 3 in time to cast Anafenza on curve. But while figuring out how to sequence your lands is complicated and requires skill, it's not really very interesting. Standard has 22 lands in it that do something, and that deck only plays 2 copies of one of them because land can only really "pay" its ability to make colored mana or its ability to be used on the turn it is played and those are both very high costs in a format where top decks play 3 cost, 3 colored cards on turn 3.

I figured it's interesting enough to warrant a new thread on that topic. My two main questions are...

1) What existing lands in MTG do you consider a good use of the Land design space?

2) If you could travel back in time to the 90's and change the direction Lands went in, what would you do?


Here's a few of the more outlandish Land concepts MTG has printed:

[Username17]

Lands that don't produce mana at all aren't really lands, they are spells with weird costs. A deck needs 21-26 lands in it that actually make mana, and stuff like Deserts and Ice Flows don't count.

What there should have been is minor powers on the basic land in addition to tapping for mana. The basic crap that the tapland non-basics do in BfZ is probably a good floor for what the abilities on basic lands should have been. So you play a basic mountain and it's the Looming Spires so one creature gets +1/+1 and First Strike until end of turn and it taps for red mana. That kind of thing.

Not only would that improve the design space, but it would make the basic lands be "collectible" as something other than art pieces. Obviously, some of the basic land effects are going to be better than others, and some will be in higher demand. And most importantly of all, it would allow for the simple multilands of the original set (Mountain/Forest that can be tapped for Green or Red but doesn't do anything else) to exist alongside the Swamps and Plains without being obviously broken. Multicolor decks could get the multicolored mana they need, but only at the cost of giving up the various land boosts that single colored decks wallow in.

-Username17

[Prak]

Well, I think for starters, I would have slightly altered the basic land card mechanic. I would keep Land as a card type, though changing the actual word to "Mana" is compelling, and give them types, like they started doing in 8th. However, I think instead of the types being Mountain/Forest/etc, I'd go with correspondences. It's both more flexible, in that not every land has to evoke a forest/island/mountain/swamp/plains, and I would expect it would be easier for new players to latch on to the identity of the colors.

I'd keep the five basic lands, but instead of the card type line of Forest reading "Land -- Forest" it'd read "Land -- Wild" or something. For "grammar" I really do prefer making the type "Mana," and that was a card type for a very short time (well, Mana Source). So your basic lands would be something like-

Forest/Island/Mountain/Swamp/Plains
Mana -- Growth/Mind/Chaos/Decay/Order

And much like Walls inherently couldn't attack, originally, any card with the Growth type would provide 1 Growth mana when tapped.

This means that Ravnica would be slightly less weird when it came to land (the whole "where are there forests and islands on City Plane?" thing) because Rakdos Mana sources could just have the Chaos and Decay types and Selesnian Mana sources could just have Growth and Order, rather than trying to justify mountains and swamps and plains and forests in a giant city (forests are easy enough, all else gets harder).

I suppose instead of correspondences you could trade the Land identities for constructed identities, and I think at this point you'd have to, since eac color is fairly diverse in what it can do, and even saying "Island magic is about the mind, water creatures, flying creatures and metamagic" is a bit difficult to really swallow as "Island Magic" or "Water Magic." And while you could make it work, you then have weird cases like "Fire Magic" (red) having burn spells that use salt or ice in their fluff.

I'm sure that if I sat down and thought for a while I could figure something out for the specific identities to replace Forest et al as the land types, but that's the first change that comes to mind.

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, as things stand land is a permanent without a casting cost and which cannot be countered. Most (but not all) lands are mana sources, and in most formats lands will be the majority of mana sources in a majority of decks. Conversely, lands are the only type of permanent for which there is a per-turn limit hardcoded into the rulebook.

Now, as for how things should have been: The base unit for balancing land should have been a classic two color dual-land. It counts against the land-per turn limit, comes into play ready to use; when tapped: it can provide either a point Purple xor a point of Orange mana; but it also get the tags common to Purple and Orange lands and is therefore subject to effects (both good and ill) which apply to those lands.

So immediately you can play with the basics: You could have a single-color land which *didn't* count the same against the land-per turn limit, or which wasn't subject to the normal land-type-hosing effects. You could have a single color-land which produced more than one mana. You could have a single-color land which had an additional method for untapping, and you could balance all of that with merely the opportunity cost of not being a dual-land. You could also start to have effects like Pendelhaven's +1/+2 or the various lands-that--can-become creatures, or lands-which-could be played from your hand as spells, all of which would also be balanced by opportunity cost. You could also have single-color cantrip lands which didn't cost a card, or single-color lands which generate progressively more mana each turn, and all that's before you start to get truly weird.

You could then balance even stronger land abilities (or lands with combination of the above) by having lands come into play tapped, having costs for entering the battlefield (Lake of the Dead, Kjeldoran Outpost, etc), or costs for use (City of Shadows, City of Brass) and even by adding restrictions to how they untap.

[Grek]

I'm going to go ahead and throw it out there that you should probably not have any lands that met you more than one mana per turn. Because that would fuck with mana curves something awful.

[OgreBattle]

MTG cards are already referred to by color, so having "Tap for [Color] mana" seems like a standard to follow. I would've described the blue generating mana as "lakes" "rivers" "seas" and so on than island. The multilands of the early MTG sets seem like a good balancing point. Some land cycles I can picture...

"Tribal" Lands- that have synergy with specific keywords
Elven Woods/Goblin Burrows/Oregon Trail/Merfolk Reef/Haunted Grounds
* Tap for [color] mana
* [type] creatures summoned by this land come into play with a +1/+1 counter

Soldier's Barracks/Rebel Hideout/Mercenary Hall/etc.
*Tap for colorless mana
*Tap for mana of any color to pay for [Creature] spell


"Sorcery" Lands- has a 'comes into play' effect roughly equivalent to a 1 mana sorcery or instant, like Looming Spire.


"Activated" Lands- has a "tap to X" effect, like Desert (fitting for Red) and Ice Flow (definitely Blue), a Green land that makes creatures bigger, a White land that heals, a Black land that does Black stuff.


"Fortification" Lands- defensively oriented so it's like putting down a CMC0 wall.
Great Wall of Texas
*Tap for colorless mana
*0/3 defender, blocks each turn if able
*can block creatures with landwalk

[RadiantPhoenix]

All of the following can go in the same deck:

Innistrad block best block?

Most of these have seen tournament play.

[Ancient History]

I have soft place in my heart for Mishra's Factory, because it was a land with both an interesting mechanic (turns into a critter) and a good support mechanic (can be tapped to pump another factory worker). And I generally don't mind special-purpose lands like the Urza Lands, which are thematically interesting, even if the mechanical benefits are too constrained for them to see regular play.

I generally agree with Frank that the bare minimum for every land is too low. Your basic "Forest" should be able to tap for a G and do something else, so that you can have multiple types of "Forest" that do interesting things but also occupy an appropriate space in your deck as a "Forest."

For example, imagine having a forest called, fuck, Bramble Grove or something, and it had the text:

T: Add G to your mana pool.
T: Deal 1 damage to target creature with Forestwalk.

Now that would be interesting - I mean, yes, it's basically a Green version of Desert, but it opens up a lot more design space instead of saying "Okay, I have 16 Forests in my deck."

[Kaelik]

So could you make an entire deck of Mishra's Factories, and wouldn't that deck actually be pretty awesome? I mean, you could probably make it better by interspering some other cards in it to use mana better, but the idea of just every turn playing another +1/+1 card that can be tapped as an instant effect in response to declared blockers seems pretty cool.

[GreatGreyShrike]

It seems like a pure-mishra deck would swing too slowly to win, and would have way too many vulnerabilities. Turn 1 you do nothing, turn 2 you swing with a 2/2, turn 3 you swing with a 3/3, and turn 4 you swing with 2 2/2 or a 4/4, turn 5 you swing for 5... It takes a long time to ramp up.

If your opponent does nothing, you hit for 2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 starting turn 2 - every turn you get +1 damage (from either a +1/+1 or from using 2 lands to make a new 2/2 attacker), and therefore it takes to turn 6 to kill at absolute earliest if they never block or do anything at all to you, and you aren't being forced to keep some blockers for yourself. It has zero ways to counter or interact with your opponent, and your opponent can deal with you in many ways. The tempo is really not that fast compared to simple RDW stuff, and if you opponent can deal with the tempo at all there is no plan B - you can't trample or fly or do anything other than send one big dude or many small dudes. The best thing about it is it's reliability.

[Kaelik]

The tempo is really not that fast compared to simple RDW stuff, and if you opponent can deal with the tempo at all there is no plan B - you can't trample or fly or do anything other than send one big dude or many small dudes. The best thing about it is it's reliability.

Well my main theory was that you could decide just said one more creature than they have blockers and be assured of killing every blocker and losing no cardsby instant taps of the 1/1 buff, including the ability to just send for example, 3 2/2s if they have blockers, and in response to their blocks, turn whichever one they don't block into a 5/5 to kill them if you have lethal. Like I said, it probably isn't a great deck, but the idea of a deck made of only one card is entertaining enough to pursue the question of the best single card deck.

[Josh_Kablack]

I'm going to go ahead and throw it out there that you should probably not have any lands that met you more than one mana per turn. Because that would fuck with mana curves something awful.

That ship sailed back in 1993, and sailed again roughly every other expansion

Alpha had multipliers like:


and



Antiquities gave the first land that provided multiple mana without a combo:



as well as a common 3-land for 7 mana combo




Plus it also published a multiplier multiplier to allow for quadratic mana



The Dark gave us the oft-overlooked



Fallen Empires gave the weaksauce saclands such as



Which allowed you to briefly exceed the curve once. It also gave the at-the-time underwhelming, but later combotastic multiplier:



Ice Age didn't exactly have multimana lands, but it had this guy



who let you burn a land for 3 mana.

The much maligned Alliances had



Things went crazy in Urza Block with things like



and



And that's about when I stopped caring, but I did read the an Eldrazi Temple posted above, so it's obviously not like the concept was abandoned since then

At this point, it's pretty obvious which of the above are crazy-go-nuts, which are useful and which are sad panda also-rans, so you'd want to use those cards to inform your balance decisions for design.


The dealio is that in a vaccuum a hypothetical "Grape Grove: tap for 1 Purple Mana or 1 Orange Mana counts as both an Orchard and an Vinyard" is really about on par with a hypothetical "Prize Vinyard: vinyard; Comes into play tapped. Tap for 1 Purple and 1 Colorless mana." The Prize Vinyard is better in monocolor, better in longer games, worse in multicolor, better in the face of effects that limit land in play or untapping but worse for multicolor, and worse for tempo in the first three turns of most games. The Prize Vinyard has a potential to get abusive in environments where there are ways to untap lands additional times for 2 or fewer mana each. The Grape Grove has the potential to get abusive in environments where you can get bonuses based on the total number of Orchards and/or Vinyards and/or different types of lands in play.

[GreatGreyShrike]

Like I said, it probably isn't a great deck, but the idea of a deck made of only one card is entertaining enough to pursue the question of the best single card deck.

I feel like the strongest single card deck is Chancellor of the Dross

It demands hyper-specific zero-mana stuff in the opponent's hand in order for them not to lose immediately as play begins (like e.g. two different specific leylines and dropping two zero mana creatures to get +2 life)

[Kaelik]

Like I said, it probably isn't a great deck, but the idea of a deck made of only one card is entertaining enough to pursue the question of the best single card deck.

I feel like the strongest single card deck is Chancellor of the Dross

It demands hyper-specific zero-mana stuff in the opponent's hand in order for them not to lose immediately as play begins (like e.g. two different specific leylines and dropping two zero mana creatures to get +2 life)

I don't think you caught the concept. 1) You can only have 3 in a deck, because it's not a land. 2) That is fucking garbage, because you can't know you have it. 3) Even if you did have it, it does 3 damage, and then you have to have 7 mana for it to do anything else. 4) even if you could have only that card in your deck more time than the cap even though it is not a land, it triggers at first upkeep, so actually, they don't need 0 mana, they need 1 mana ability to gain a couple life, which while rare is significantly less rare.

[Ice9]

1) You can only have 3 in a deck, because it's not a land.

Four in a deck, and that applies to everything except basic land, so it applies to Mishra's Factory too.

I agree on the higher-baseline idea - lands right now have a pretty small window between nigh-useless and OP. It would be interesting to see how many other cards were different as a result of that; it'd have knock-on effects on nearly everything.

[GreatGreyShrike]

I am sort of confused by your 'rules.'

In constructed MTG, the official rules:

In constructed play (a way of playing in which each player creates his or her own deck ahead of time), each deck must contain at least sixty cards. A constructed deck may contain any number of basic land cards and no more than four of any card with a particular English name other than basic land cards.

where basic lands are defined as

The basic land types are Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest. If an object uses the words “basic land type,” it’s referring to one of these subtypes. A land with a basic land type has the intrinsic ability “{T}: Add [mana symbol] to your mana pool,” even if the text box doesn’t
actually contain that text or the object has no text box. For Plains, [mana symbol] is {W}; for Islands, {U}; for Swamps, {B}; for Mountains, {R}; and for Forests, {G}. See rule 107.4a. Also see rule 605, “Mana Abilities.”

Decks of 60 Mishra's Factory violate this rule as thoroughly as decks of 60 Chancellors of the Dross, because Mishra's Factory is not a basic land, it is a nonbasic land (see also 305.8). Decks of 60 identical copies of only 1 card that are constructed legal are the 5 basic land type decks, the Relentless rats deck, and the Shadowborn Apostle deck, as far as I can remember... and none of these 7 decks have a way to a win condition (so can only win if their opponent draws their entire library and runs out of cards without killing them). I had thought that the 4-of rule was being relaxed for the purpose of this analysis, to make it interesting?

Finally, regarding the 1-mana thing:

The ruling on the card is the following:

Some cards allow a player to take actions with them from his or her opening hand. Once all players have kept their opening hands, the starting player may take any such actions in any order.
Then each other player in turn order may do the same.
103.5a If a card allows a player to begin the game with that card on the battlefield, the player taking this action puts that card onto the battlefield.
103.5b If a card allows a player to reveal it from his or her opening hand, the player taking this action does so. The card remains revealed until the first turn begins. Each card may be revealed
this way only once.

You get the first turn happening after all Chancellors, Leylines, etc have resolved.

[Kaelik]

Well thats shit, I though the entire point was that only lands can exceed the caps. If that isn't the case, then why the fuck do people play multicolor decks with 30 multicolor lands?

[name_here]

When they've got masses of multicolor lands, they'll only have up to four of each individual multicolor land. The mix guarantees a decent mana type spread, so you don't have your green-white deck wind up with a bunch of plains and a hand full of green creatures.

[Ancient History]

Well thats shit, I though the entire point was that only lands can exceed the caps. If that isn't the case, then why the fuck do people play multicolor decks with 30 multicolor lands?

That's the entire point. If you're playing a Red/Green deck, for example, you could rely on a mix of Forests and Mountains - but the drawback with those is that you might get a run of the wrong color and not be able to play the cards you draw. So you replace some of the Forests and Mountains with multicolor lands - and those are limited in number, so you take some pain lands and some tapped lands and some search lands.

[Username17]

Well thats shit, I though the entire point was that only lands can exceed the caps. If that isn't the case, then why the fuck do people play multicolor decks with 30 multicolor lands?

You can only field 4 of any "non-basic" land. There are at this time so many fucking multicolored lands, that it is trivial to play an all-non-basic, all-multicolored land base if that is what you want to do. If you are White/Black, for example, you could field Scoured Badlands, Cave of Kolios, Shambling Vent, Sandsteppe Citadel, and Nomad Outpost. Four out of five of those come into play tapped, but that's 20 lands that all produce your choice of Black or White mana if you pack four of each. If you happen to be Black/White Allies, there's an Ally Encampment that can be used for any color of mana to play Ally creatures (or colorless for anything else, including sadly the Ally tribal spells), and you could have 24 lands that tapped for Black or White without exceeding the caps. If you go for extended formats like Modern, you have even more choices available, and you can probably avoid shitty lands that come into play tapped and don't do anything awesome altogether.

Anyway, Land basically fits into four archetypes:

• Drop Land. You play the land and you get an effect right away. This is in effect casting a cantrip and then playing the land with the card drawn. Since the effect comes in for no mana and a land drop, it necessarily has to be a kinda shitty effect. Giving out a one-time bonus of +1/+1 and Vigilance or something is a good example of something you might expect to get from a Land Drop.
• Sink Land. The land operates as a mana source, but it can also be used as a mana sink when necessary. Essentially on turns when you don't have anything to do with the lands you have, you can sink mana into getting some effect. These mana sinks can and should be much much worse than what you'd get for playing a card with that much mana, because it doesn't cost cards and can be reused every turn.
• Sac Land. You sacrifice the land to get an effect. In essence, this allows you to "cash out" the land when you no longer need it as land to get some effect. Sometimes these sacrifices can have large mana costs, making them in essence both Sink Lands and Sac Lands. The effects have to be costed like a dual-use card. The card is a land if you need a land and a spell if you don't.
• Passive Land. The land sits around having a continuous or triggered effect. These effects necessarily have to be incredibly niche or bullshit small, because they operate every turn and are also coming in on land that is free.

The problem with the basic forest not being any of these things is that it wrote them into a corner. We can have Sink Lands like the Rogue's Passage or Sac Lands like the Blighted Fen, but they make colorless mana.

If we had basic lands that were doing things, the Rogue's Passage could just be a kind of Swamp. And land choice would be all about trying to get the right ratio of lands that did positive things passively or for coming into play with mana sink lands so that on average all your lands that were paying for the mana sinks had done something positive for you along the way.

-Username17

[name_here]

Ravnica did something special; each guild had a land that tapped for one mana of both guild colors simultaneously. The price was that it came into play tapped and you had to return a land to your hand when you played it.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Ravnica did something special; each guild had a land that tapped for one mana of both guild colors simultaneously. The price was that it came into play tapped and you had to return a land to your hand when you played it.

They are called Karoo lands, because Karoo did it first.

[Ravengm]

The biggest problem that you run into with lands that have basic minor effects is board complexity. In small enough numbers, it's much easier to keep track of, like the manlands from the various Zendikar sets, since they belong in generally different decks. But when every single land in your deck does something either when you play it or as a tap ability (or even passively), it adds another layer of processing to what you're looking at.

If, on turn 6, there are 2-3 nonland permanents on each side of the board (definitely not out of the question), you can look at those and have a good idea of what the board state is. But suddenly when each players' lands all do something, that's an extra ~12 cards that you have to process to make a decision. It's the same reason they don't like printing instants that have Flashback anymore, because it's easy to forget about game-changing abilities when they're in an area that can pile up with cards.

Take this, for example: a board consisting of 6 Forest vs the following:

• * Centaur Garden
  * Heart of Yavimaya
  * Llanowar Reborn
  * Mosswort Bridge
  * Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
  * Sapseep Forest

That's 6 distinct abilities to keep track of at any given time, and 6 abilities to parse through and decide which ones you want to leave available when tapping lands for mana, and both players have to keep track of it for the purpose of their own thoughts. And there's two sets of similar lands, one on each side of the table. Not to mention games with more than 2 players.

That's a nightmare, especially for an inexperienced player.

Of of the most straightforward ways to deal with that would be to just have the exact same ability on all lands of the same type. For instance, Forests all give a creature +1/+1 until end of turn when you play them. Or Islands can untap a creature. But then you've locked yourself into a certain ability, which is kind of against the point of giving lands unique abilities in the first place -- you want to be able to tweak and change them. There are a couple solutions though.

1.) Have basic lands with effects rotate in Standard. This makes non-rotating and eternal formats have a higher complexity bar, but it's less of an issue there since multiple colors and effect lands are the norm rather than the exception, due to the larger card pool and (generally) more experienced playerbase. It's still possible that you hit a critical mass of complexity though.

2.) Players have an Emblem they can choose to bring with them at the beginning of a game that has an effect that triggers off of a basic land or lands. For example, "Whenever you play a Forest, target creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn." Tons of card games nowadays have the concept of an "Identity" that you choose before the game that impacts gameplay: IDs in Netrunner, Agendas in Game of Thrones, Phoenixborn in Ashes, and so on. I'm kind of surprised that Magic hasn't tried to re-jump on that bandwagon since Vanguard happened.

[Ancient History]

That's a nightmare, especially for an inexperienced player.

Of of the most straightforward ways to deal with that would be to just have the exact same ability on all lands of the same type.

No. The whole point is that nonbasic lands are complicated BECAUSE the basic lands have no design space left in them. A Forest is a Forest that taps for G. That's it. You can't make anything better than that, because it would automatically invalidate the Forest. You can't make anything worse than that, because it's the bare minimum of what a land is. (I mean, I guess you could have something like a Forest that adds G to your mana pool when you throw it down but then is just a land you can't tap, but what the fuck is the point of that?) So the whole reason we have pain lands and tapped lands and search lands and all that happy horseshit is because there's no design space. You want a little room to play with things, and if all the lands of the same type have the same fucking ability, you're back where you started.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If too much text on land is a barrier to entry, you could have the beginner lands be the plain duals.