Pattern Recognition #402 - Interesting Lands

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

19 March 2026

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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!

Today's article is more me just flipping through the 'Random' Button on Scryfall and coming across Vivid Marsh and thinking to myself: "You know what? That's a neat land. Why aren't there more of them?" So with that thought in mind, I went looking at my collection and in Scryfall for cards not in my collection for lands that I think don't always get a fair shake, or could use a second glance.

Vivid Marsh

The initial land that set this off was the Vivid Marsh, part of a cycle of Lands from Lorwyn and Shadowmoor at the common rarity. These lands were a return to the old Depletion lands, and given a more simple methodology to them. In the old days, a Depletion Land had a limited amount of uses based on the number of counters they had on them, and when they were done and over with, they got sacrificed because they had no more counters.

From the era before proliferate, mind you.

The Vivid Lands were, to me, an interesting take on the utility of dual lands. I've talked about them in the general before, but this is another case where the instance of 'use twice' has come up. Specifically, I have made note of how the Shock Lands - Sacred Foundary was balanced in the damage is caused with the Pain Land equivalent - Battlefield Forge. Namely that outside of extreme outliers, a land tends to be used for color fixing twice in a game. The Vivid Lands worked with that, allowing you perfect mana fixing twice before being reduced to a single color. And unless you're heavily Mana Screwed, that should be enough.

Depletion stopped being a thing because players can be annoyed when their lands stop working the way they want them to, so Wizards depreciated them in favor of life-gain tapped lands as the common-mana fixer of choice in Standard Sets.

However, while the card cycle in question we pretty much the last gasp for this sort if think, it does have spiritual successor thanks to the various creatures or other permanents that can remove a counter from them to make mana. You know, like the perfectly balanced and in no-way breakable Devoted Druid or Pentad Prism. A methodology for lands that would up on non-lands? I can live with that.

The next type of land I want to reveal for you all dates back to my second favourite block, Invasion!

Dromar's Cavern

The Lairs from Planeshift were an extension of the older Karoo lands. Or on the more modern terminology, they are Bounce Lands that when they enter, they return a land you control to its owners hand. The Lairs are the only Bounce lands that provided three colours of mana (so far) and perhaps most importantly - they enter untapped. With the slight drawback that if you don't bounce a non-lair back to your hand, they are sacrificed. This means you can't bounce itself like with the Karoo or Ravnican bounce lands. Which isn't that big of a deal when you think about it. Unless of course you want it in your graveyard because Rith's Grove and Darigaaz's Caldera are in the relevant colours for such shenanigans.

I picked these out from the regular bounce lands for a couple reasons. The first is that they have only been reprinted once. In Dominaria Remastered. The Karoo lands all have sen a couple Commander reprints, and were part of the mono-coloured Planeswalker decks from a decade ago. The Ravnican Bounce lands - Izzet Boilerworks were a mainstay of Commander products for so long, I'm pretty sure I have more of them in reprints than the original printings by now!

There's no real reason why these cards keep getting passed over. They form a nice piece of redundancy for Landfall decks, and because they enter untapped, you can tap a land for mana, play this, bounce the tapped land back and basically give yourself an extra point of mana this turn. And if you don't play Color Identity formats, then this can be a great way to splash for other colors in a deck with very little loss in terms of mana tempo. Or in finding yourself out of a primary mana color at an awkward an inopportune time. Because neither of those have happened to me in real life. At all. Ever.

Bottomless Vault

Part of a cycle of lands called Storage Lands, a cycle that received Allied color pairs in Coldsnap, Storage Lands are a relic of a time and era when the game was much slower, where taking your time to build up resources was the normal play pattern. "Draw, Durdle, Go" was more acceptable.

And in that frame of mind, where time is both pressure and a resource, the existence of the Storage Lands (and their artifact equivalents such as Red Mana Battery, made a certain amount of sense. You were under no pressure until you won, so why bother putting pressure on people?

I actually like these lands in moderation, and had put the one into a Grand Arbiter Augustin IVGC stax deck once as a means to accumulate mana when untaps were limited. It worked. Game took forever. But what can you expect?

Honestly, of all the lands I'll point at today, I think this is the one least likely to ever come back outside of a dedicated throwback product. The game is far too fast for them nowadays, even Commander. They were fun while they lasted, but the Sleigh deck - the prototype to modern Red Deck Wins put evolutionary pressure on the game too much.

Geothermal Crevice

Oh man, these guys! The other fancy mana fixing lands from Invasion block, this cycle of lands entered tapped, and tapped for a certain color of mana. But you could tap and sacrifice them to generate one of each of that primary colour's allies in terms of mana.

Wow, I just read that again, and it did not come out right.

So, these lands were introduced to help with the mana fixing in Invasion, much like the Lairs were. However, these cards came first, in Invasion itself and not later in Planeshift. They did something a little different as they were seen as a temporary source of fixing, rather than something more permanent.

But these were not actually the first lands to do this. Crystal Vein, and its coloured equivalents through Ebon Stronghold and the like. The idea of sacrificing a land for a temporary boost in mana was not unheard of, but nor as it turns out, was it popular at all.

While these lands were great for mana fixing, the players then and now liked a more consistent approach to their lands, and losing out on a source to get a shot in the arm is just bad, unless you absolutely need that one point of mana to win.

There is an exception to that sort of thing for these lands though. A few years ago, I ran a Lord Windgrace deck, and one of the substitutions I did was in adding the Crevice to the deck as having something like that in the deck because I didn't mind lands in the graveyard was something I was looking forward to exploiting. Didn't work out that way, but it was the thought that counts. Land-yard recusrion for the win!

Thinking things over, I see a theme, or at least something of a pattern here. Namely in why these cards were barely even flashes in a pan. And I kinda hit on it with the last example, but I want to spell it out a bit more here.

We the players like consistency. We like it when our lands do what we want them to and when we want them to do it. Lands with interesting effects can upset this reliability (in an 'upset the balance' type way, and not 'upset the player so they cry), and that leads to poor play patters, or just feel-bad events for having a land that has hoops.

Wizards has reinforced this over the years by making lands more simple (mostly), more protected, and more passively utilitarian with things like Scry or Surveil lands. Or lands that have an active effect that is practical and easy to understand. If you make lands too interesting then players will shy away from them as that's not what lands 'do'. I'm looking at you, Arabian Nights, with your non-mana lands.

I think there is still room in the game for lands with interesting concepts, but not as a major thing. Llanowar Reborn was something I considered talking about, but decided not this time. It is a land with a mechanical effect that stretches past the idea of being a land, and yet can work in multiple ways.

But it's not... interesting?

Sometimes we players don't want interesting. We want something else, and those interesting lands get passed over for boring and reliable.

So in the comments below, why don't you all share what you think an 'interesting land' is, and what makes it like that! Help provide me with context from the views of other players. Please?

Thank you all for watching and reading and I'll see you all next week when I give my final tournament report for the Slow Grow this year!

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!