What if WotC had gone the other direction with lands?
General forum
Posted on Aug. 23, 2017, 8:20 p.m. by Qolorful
The Orginal dual lands were very simple. Just literally combining two basic lands to make multicolored decks play smoother. As they progrssed and began to make new duals over time, they decided to add clauses to this mechanic to slow it down. Lands started entering the battlefield tapped unless some clause was met.
I'm not an expert, so this is more of a question than a statement, but I think that if WotC had gone the other direction, and instead made the later dual lands better than the og lands, the game would be much cheaper to play right now, and decks easier to make.
What I mean is that the better lands all cost a lot. Fetch lands and shock lands are fairly pricey because they allow you to be fast and versatile with your mana base. That is part of why the og duals are so expensive now, the other part being the reserved list. But had lands had positive clauses attatched to them, I think that the manabase would have been a much less important part of deck building, and as a result, the pricey manabases would be not so pricey anymore
So to the OP, dual lands are not expensive because they are very good. I mean they are good don't get me wrong but I would say 90% of their price is due to their rarity not because of how good they are. I also very much disagree that we would have affordable mana bases if they just made better lands instead of worse lands. Its hard to tell because this is not the case but if you made better lands than dual lands its very likely those cards would just be pretty overpriced due to the sheer use. Nothing gets reprinted into oblivion (except Tarmogoyf). So they would just make better lands not reprint them because they want to make other lands and then if the new lands were not better than the old ones we would still just have expensive lands because those would be the go to land in any older format.
Also it would be just kind of impossible to continuously make better lands all the time and then standard would be more powerful than the other formats and it would just change the way magic is played and I like the way the formats are now. Something that I think people don't understand is that making bigger and better cards all the time is NOT good for a game in fact I would wager that more often than not it is what ruins any card game that fails. Its basically the reason that no one likes hearthstone anymore. Blizzard just keeps making broken cards that don't let people interact and then the games get boring or the meta is dominated by 1 or 2 classes. There are times to have good cards and times to have bad cards and I would argue that wizards has found a good balance with that over the years and that is the reason it is successful.
As for Redace878 with all due respect that is just wrong. Mostly the last couple of statements because good lands DO make your deck better and DO make it different in almost every way. If we didnt have playable dual lands not only would decks in general just not be good, you couldnt play 3+ color decks because the mana would not be consistent enough. Having a good mana base for 3+ color decks also makes your deck better because then you have access to colors that you would not have access to otherwise. So in general having good lands makes your deck infinitely better and is 100% needed to make a deck that can beat other decks in any format. As far as reprinting, well they are better than basics and basics are free so they should cost money logically.
August 23, 2017 8:41 p.m.
While it sounds like the price would go down I'm not certain it would unless all the lands were equally good. It doesn't matter what direction they go, up or down. If there are ones that are better than others those are the ones that people will want. I'd argue they did what you said, getting better with time, for creatures. But there are some creatures that are used far more than others. Ie tarmagoyf which holds a price tag comparable to OG Zen Lands. Future sight goyfs specifically can go higher but that's a different story all together. My point is if all the lands we currently have came in untapped instead of tapped we'd still have expensive cards. Just different expensive cards. The new cycle lands that can be fetched would be really amazing if they didn't come in tapped. The onlyWay we don't end up with a few expensive cards is if we have a lot of options or a lot of printed cards available. So for example if we had fetches at common for 2 sets or if we had options that were so equally powerful that they are equally played.
Tl;dr
Going the other way doesn't change how expensive cards will be. Just the power level of the expensive cards.
August 23, 2017 8:43 p.m.
It would be nice if the manabase was simplified, and promoted access to the color wheel instead of pricing newcomers out.
August 23, 2017 9:17 p.m.
And so they keep regularly releasing all these new bombastic multicolored cards yet rarely release multicolor producing lands (forget about new lands) I wonder what the ratio of superfun multicolor cards are to multilands?? Seems to me like the ratio should be evened out if not reversed
August 23, 2017 9:21 p.m.
landofMordor says... #7
aholder7 is right -- with more and better lands, suddenly things like Esper Charm, Maelstrom Nexus, Cryptic Command, and Maelstrom Archangel shoot up drastically in price and Snapcaster Mage/Tarmogoyf go down (or at least don't get any better).
As to Gleeock's comment (and also for the OP), I think MaRo is right when he argues that the color pie is one of the most important and fundamental pillars of Magic. If the quality and quantity of dual lands enabled every player to build 5-color decks, there would be no point in having counterspells be exclusively U, or unconditional killspells being B, or beefy creatures being G. And even though you can invest a lot of money into making a 5-c base work, you still don't see competitive players running cards with WUGRB in the costs. Instead, pro decks are 3 colors with a 4th splashed, max (unless it's an inherently unfair deck like Dredge), and those multicolor decks still don't always outperform decks like mono-R Burn with W splash (which recently took a Modern title). (In the same vein, mono-R and mono-B are both top decks in Standard currently.) In that way, the downsides of dual lands are actually restricting power level of old formats like Modern, which is a great aid to players looking to enter into competitive play.
Even great dual lands like shocks and fetches reduce decks' consistencies (through life loss if nothing else), which gives mono-colored decks an edge that they wouldn't otherwise have.
Yes, reprints and/or more dual lands are essential to reducing costs of Standard and older formats, but you'll notice that every block of the New World Order had a rare cycle of dual lands -- Origins had painlands, BfZ manlands, SOI reveal-lands or whatever they're called, KLD fastlands, and AMK bicycle lands. So WotC is aware of the problem, and they consistently print solutions to that problem, even if they aren't all shocklands.
That's not even to mention the uncommon/common cycles of taplands reprinted. Which, by the way, Rugged Highlands, Skyline Cascade, and Ramunap Ruins have come a long way since the days of Gruul Guildgate, so I'd argue Wizards IS slowly pushing the bounds of how much upside they can print on a tapland.
August 23, 2017 10:53 p.m.
landofMordor says... #8
Clarification to my last paragraph: Wizards seems to be experimenting with how powerful their common/uncommon cycles of taplands can be without being rare. Rare cycles, on the other hand, may not be getting more powerful, but things like bicycle lands and the Theros scrylands give budget players access to quality duals that are much more affordable than shocks, fetches, etc.
August 23, 2017 10:56 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #9
Power creep is a thing. If you're always printing cards that's are flat-out better than previous cards, the development process devolves into an arms race and balance becomes farcical.
Consider that lands cost nothing (mana-wise) to play. The degree to which they're balanced depends entirely on their abilities because they don't have mana costs. If you print cycles upon cycles of lands that are even better than the ABUR duals (e.g., a land that has two basic land types and creates a creature token on ETB), there's literally no reason to not play the maximum number of those in your deck. There's no incentive to even play basics at all. Drawbacks force players to think carefully about whether they will pursue greater potential flexibility (more colors, utility abilities, etc.) in the face of greater risk or penalties.
To address another point: color saturation, especially with multicolored costs, is an essential contributor to balance. The color pie exists because certain colors offer certain things, and cards that combine the capabilities of multiple colors are often harder to reliably cast in part to balance their flexibility against the investment required to access it.
If you have lands that essentially ensure your access to any color (and, by extension, any card)—or to a huge range of utility effects with limited or no drawbacks—there's much less strategy and discernment required in the deckbuilding process. Restrictions breed greater creativity than perfect openness; the challenge is part of what keeps deckbuilding interesting. There are trade-offs to everything, and it's impossible to optimize every aspect of a deck.
Keep in mind, too, that the best cards will always be in demand. If new cards are always incrementally better than old cards, they'll always be what's dominant and therefore what's in demand. It'll be just as hard to assemble a top quality deck (increases in print runs notwithstanding) as it is now, but the game would, I think, be less enjoyable for the aforementioned balance issues.
August 24, 2017 12:24 a.m.
Wow, so pretty solid insights here. I could still be considedered a fairly new player (only been playing since the release of bfz) so I really don't have a lot of experience with how more powerful cards being introduced effect the game.
I hadn't really thought about the mana restriction as a means of preserving the color pie and the distinct characteristics of each color as a whole. It's a very interesting point. Gives me a new appreciation for wotc decision making as far as the manabase goes
August 24, 2017 7:59 a.m.
Winterblast says... #11
Epochalyptik while the argument against power creep is understandable, I think the game already does well even though we have literally thousands of crap cards that no one would play over something else in any format. There are even cards that are so bad that everyone would put them aside in standard or a limited environment because there are better choices available. Obviously wizards has no problem in making cards that are obsolete even in the formats with the lowest possible power level. They could indeed use these slots in the sets to add more variations of equally powerful effects in the same set, not fill them with better or worse cards that are either absolutely unplayable or stronger than similar older cards.
August 24, 2017 9:27 a.m.
Epochalyptik says... #12
A lot of what people don't understand in that respect is that sets are designed for the Limited environment, where cards that might be unplayable in Constructed can shine. Those Who Serve is perfectly playable in draft or sealed, even though it would never see the light of day in any constructed format.
There's an adage: "if everyone is special, no one is." The nature of deck construction requires that you eventually have to settle on only a few good cards. Whether you get there by disposing of a thousand chaff cards or a thousand semi-chaff cards is irrelevant; you still reach a point at which you've identified the cards that are just better than the alternatives for one reason or another.
Not every card will be good in every format. Some cards may even be bad in every format, but even they serve a purpose: they test a player's judgment in Limited. If every card is playable or exists at a largely homogenized power level, you degrade the game's learning curve and the complexity of the experience it offers.
August 24, 2017 10:29 a.m.
landofMordor says... #13
Check this article by MaRo out:
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/when-cards-go-bad-revisited-2012-10-22
It details a lot of the arguments presented above.
Redace878 says... #2
It's always annoyed me how much lands cost. If you want to spend lots of money on a very good card that helps you win, that makes sense. However, we shouldn't have to spend so much money on something that just lets you play the game. If you want your deck to be competitive in (almost) any format, you have to spend hundreds of dollars on cards that don't even make your deck better or even different in any way. I really think Wizards needs to reprint more lands.
August 23, 2017 8:25 p.m.