Colorless lands in multicolored decks
General forum
Posted on Nov. 22, 2016, 1 a.m. by Mairon_Bauglir
I have a question in general about multicolored decks, since mana ramp seems to be a difficult thing to manage when playing a multicolored deck, why don't more people play colorless lands? Before you get me confused I mean a land like Radiant Fountain and not Wasteland. The fountain outputs 1 generic mana and can be used in virtually any color deck, and put into multicolored decks, so why do so many focus on using a lot of basic lands in multicolored decks when the colorless lands give mana in any color? Plus you don't have to worry about pulling the right kinds of lands to play creatures/spells with certain mana costs. I know there are of course certain benefits that come from playing basic lands such as search cards and the like, but i can't quite figure out why colorless lands aren't more popular in multicolored decks.
There isn't mana that can be spent for any color in cost, but lands that work that way are formatted as "add a mana of any color to your mana pool," such as City of Brass. You'll notice such cards have downside, whereas ones that produce colorless mana tend to have downsides, because Wizards tends to do a decent job balancing lands.
Rhadamanthus says... #2
There are no effects in the game that produce generic mana. Lands like Radiant Fountain only produce colorless mana.
Before Oath of the Gatewatch, generic mana in costs and colorless mana produced by abilities happened to use the same type of symbol: , , etc. Radiant Fountain was printed when this was still the case. Oath of the Gatewatch introduced as the new way to represent colorless mana. Every card in the game that makes colorless mana has been updated to use in its rules text instead of the old symbol. See the current Oracle text for Radiant Fountain for an example of this.
November 22, 2016 1:13 a.m.