Pattern Recognition #309 - Deserts

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

18 January 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And now, you shall have your just desserts! Or Deserts. There's some ambiguity as to how they relate to each other. Look, I didn't create the English language, I just used the damned thing.

Anyway, the idea of Desert as a land type is for most people, something introduced in Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation with cards like Painted Bluffs and the Banned-In-Standard Ramunap Ruins. For most people that is. For me, I'm a well established Old Fogey, so for me, Deserts started with this lovely card...

Desert

Yeah, it didn't have the Desert type back then, but that's OK, it was errated to have it by the time of its Time Spiral printing, so we're OK. But this was the first Desert, and because Arabian Nights - now properly identified as occurring on the Thousand-Fold Reflection of Rabidah - had to stick to a theme. And that theme meant that Deserts needed to have some interaction. You know, aside from pinging a creature after combat. The first of these was Camel, a card whose sole purpose in life was to stop all the creatures that were Banded with it from taking any sort of damage from the Desert they just crossed. On the other side of things, we got Desert Nomads, who couldn't be blocked if the opponent had any Deserts, and also didn't take any damage from Deserts if your opponent had them and tried to punish you for them.

It was... not the most intricate or well developed interactions or ideas. I mean, come on, it was Arabian Nights! Ali from Cairo was a thing! But I'm not here to talk about that set. I'm here to talk about a Land Subtype!

Deserts were a major part of the Amonkhet block, with both the set of the same name, and the followup in Hour of Devastation. As the setting was the last remaining bastion of civilization in a plane blasted down to the sands by Nicol Bolas, the existence of the deserts around Naktamun was a minor part of the plot, but they were there. In Amonkhet, they were colourless as Bolas had tied up all the leylines around the city, and they could only provide colourless mana - with Painted Bluffs existing as a means to fix colour in limited pools.

But with the loss of the city in Hour, the Deserts became more prevalent. They regained the colours lost when Bolas ravaged the Plane, but for some, to get use of of them, you had to pay life. Others represented the last places where the Monuments to the Gods were, and they could still help you, given time.

To put it less poetically, Amonkhet had three common and one uncommon Deserts, each with some small utility to them. Sunscorched Desert was a favourite of mine before his big brother got hit with the banhammer. But of course, there was some small support for them - Shefet Monitor was a card that let you Cycle it to fetch a basic land and draw a card, something that was recycled (HAH!) for the latest Ixlan set with how Spelunking or Glimpse the Core and how they interact with Caves.

But they really came into their own with Hour of Devastation. At Common, we got a horizontal cycle of Deserts that could tap for a coloured mana, but came into play tapped, all with the naming scheme of Desert of the.... These represented the monuments to the Gods of Amonkhet after the fall of the city. For example, Bontu's Monument becomes Desert of the Glorified. And to keep with the theme of the set of filling ones graveyard, they all have on-color Cycling abilities, much like how the Onslaught and Urza's Saga Cycling Lands did, in this case, Barren Moor and Polluted Mire. Truth be told, these tend to be cards I include in my decks as the're mana when I need it, but 'free' card draw when I don't. It all works out in the end!

At uncommon, we got another horizontal cycle of Deserts. These all came into play untapped, but while they can produce without drawback, you could pay one life to add a color to your mana pool. What made them interesting though was in how they all had a similar ability. For a mana cost, you could tap the Desert, then sacrifice any Desert to have an effect.

Ramunap Ruins was banned because it was far to easy to have an uncounterable ability to deal damage to the opponent for a very low, and quite reusable cost. After all, it's not like you have to sacrifice the Ruins to its own ability if you don't want to. You can sacrifice any of them. Well, that and Wizards realized the only thing keeping Ramunap Red decks from Winning Everything was Temur Energy, and that got nerfed into the ground at the same time. But that's another story for another time. I really should talk about Energy, but I think I'll save that until after Fallout.

Hour of Devestation also included a lot more Desert support and synergy. Every colour got something, but the real winner was . Dune Diviner was lifegain, Sidewinder Naga was an easy 4/2 with Trample for , which in turn was outdone by Ramunap Hydra, a probably 5/5 with Vigilance, Reach and Trample, then capped of with Hour of Promise. Go ahead and read that. That's two land cards. Not basic lands, Two. Lands. And if you have enough Deserts, make Zombies!

I have seen that card pull Gaea's Cradle and a Desert, just to be able to make two Zombies so the Cradle could tap for even more. It was disgusting! Enough so that even my local Spike, who loves his Prossh, Skyraider of Kher deck, doesn't do this. It's too much, even for him.

Deserts at that point, met in a beautifully working synergy, that allowed for great things to be done if you focused on it, while not reducing or diminishing anything else in the two sets. It added to Amonkhet and Hour, which is great! And by making the over-reaching mechanic tied to Lands, it didn't take up a lot of design space in the set, making room for other things, like the Cycling/Discard mechanics, and the Embalm/Entomb stuff.

You know, I liked those sets. They were fun!

But that wasn't the last of it. Thanks to Dominaria United, we got twenty reimagined Legends from years past with modern concepts. I had fun with Tor Wauki the Younger, but for here, the old Legend Hazezon Tamar was recreated as Hazezon, Shaper of Sand for Commander. This creature represents the protagonist of the third book in the Legends Cycle - Hazezon, and his fight against the evil Johann. Actually, the whole thing, but he's the viewpoint character in the last. Anyway, this new card brings back Desertwalk to a format that doesn't normally run deserts, except in some decks that have a Cycling/Discard theme going on, but he allows you to play them from your graveyard. Which wouldn't be interesting, except that not only can you play the Deserts you sacrificed to other Deserts - like Shefet Dunes, you get more creatures when you do so! But don't think that just because there are only 16 Deserts in his colour right now, that he's weak. He's not. Not at all.

Well, looks like this article is a bit on the short side, and for that, I apologize. I can't win them all, but I would like to hear from you all about your experiences with Deserts both in Standard and Commander. Comment below!

Next week, I should have finally gotten off my ass and decided what I want to do for this year's Slow Grow, so I'll talk about my chosen deck and what I plan to do with it. Either that, or another video for my dad. We'll see!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!