Island
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Alchemy Legal
Archenemy Legal
Arena Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Brawl Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Gladiator Legal
Highlander Legal
Historic Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Oldschool 93/94 Legal
Pauper Legal
Pauper Duel Commander Legal
Pauper EDH Legal
Pioneer Legal
Planechase Legal
Pre-release Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Standard Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Unformat Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Island

Basic Land — Island

: Add .

_Kane_ on Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder

3 weeks ago

Remove 1-2 Island for Forest & Swap sources, I.E. Balance mana source production

legendofa on Card Cost/Land Mana

1 month ago

The pie chart should be reasonably balanced, although a couple of factors can skew it one way or another. If your 1-2 mana cards are heavily dominated by one color, your lands should be weighted toward that color to ensure you can reliable use your low-cost spells when you need them. If a lot of your cards have heavy color weight, you need more lands of that color. If you have a lot of higher-quality lands like shocklands, ABUR duals, or triomes, these can help smooth out color curves and make a perfect balance less necessary.

The tool I use most for adding lands by color is a calculator. My process is a little involved, but has given me very reliable results.

  1. Count the number of pips of your first color.

  2. Count the total number of all colored pips.

  3. Multiply the number of pips of your first color by the number of land slots in your deck.

  4. Divide the number you got in step 3 by the total number of colored pips. Round up or down to the nearest whole number.

  5. Put in that many basic lands of your first color.

  6. Repeat for your second, third, etc. color.

To put this in algebraic form, Pc/Pt = Lc/Lt, or (Pc x Lt)/Pt = Lc, where Pc is the number of pips of a given color, Pt is the total number of colored pips, Lc is the number of land slots that provide a given color, and Lt is the total number of land slots. As an example, if I have 25 blue pips, 19 black pips, and 16 white pips, and I want to fill 24 land slots in a Modern deck, I multiply 25 (# of blue pips) by 24 (# of land slots in deck) and divide by 60 (total # of pips) to get 10 blue land slots. Repeating for black and white, this formula gives us 8 (rounded up from 7.6) black land slots and 6 (rounded down from 6.4) white land slots. I use 6 Plains, 10 Islands, and 8 Swamps as placeholders.

At this point, check for skew. To continue the example, are most of my 1-2 mana cards black, and most of my white cards higher cost? Cut a Plains and add a Swamp. Do many of my blue cards require ? Cut another Plains and add an Island. Now, we have 4 Plains, 11 Island, and 9 Swamp. This step is part observation, part feel, and part placeholders.

Once you have the color curve set, start adding nonbasic lands. If your nonbasic land provides a color, replace a basic land of that color. If it provides two or more colors, I cut whichever basic land I have the most of, then the second most, then the third most. If I want to add a playset of Raffine's Tower, I see that I now have the most Islands, followed by Swamps, then Plains. I cut two Islands and one of each of the others, leaving me with 9 Islands, 8 Swamps, and 3 Plains. If I then want to add three Watery Graves, I cut two Island and one Swamp, cutting Island first to maintain the chances of starting with black mana available on turn 1 and because more Islands are available. Fetchlands, including Evolving Wilds and similar cards, should be treated as whichever basic lands they're able to find.

Colorless utility lands need more consideration--does it needs a color to use? What colors do I need least? What colors do I need most? Let's say it's an artifact deck leaning heavily on the Alara block. I want to add two Academy Ruins. My current land base is

7x Island 3x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave

I know that I don't need Plains early in the game, that I do need Swamps early in the game, and that Academy Ruins needs to use. I cut one Plains for the first Academy Ruins and consider cutting a Swamp, but the need for early pushes me to cut an Island for the second Ruins. The land base is now

2x Academy Ruins 6x Island 2x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave

This would be a good point to pause and playtest. Make sure you hit the colors you need when you need them, you're not overloaded on a color, and everything flows smoothly. Tweak lands as needed test some more, and keep tweaking and testing until everything's locked in.

As a personal preference, I try to leave as many basic lands as needed to pay any colored cost in the deck. If I have Mechanized Production, but none of my cards need more than one black or white pip, then I will leave a minimum of two basic Islands and one each basic Plains and Swamps. Every format has some form of nonbasic land destruction (and I include Blood Moon in this), and basic lands are reliable and harder to negate or remove.

legendofa on Memnarch by ChatGPT

1 month ago

ChatGPT seems to have a pretty good grasp that people sometimes do certain things, but not why people do certain things, or whether it's correct to do certain things. Here, Command Tower is basically a nonbasic Island, the fetch lands aren't much more than that, and Inkmoth Nexus is very optimistic with no other infect or proliferate. Chromatic Lantern is basically decoration. Training Grounds only interacts with three cards, but one of them is Palinchron, so I'll give half a point back.

On the better side, it picked up a lot of the standard control options, and Deadeye Navigator has some good options to work with, like Draining Whelk and Venser, Shaper Savant.

Rivel on Necromancin' Dancin'

1 month ago

For those interested, here is the list of removed cards, added cards, as well as total current deck stats.

Removed

  1. 6 Island
  2. 6 Swamp
  3. Dreadhorde Invasion
  4. Liliana, Death's Majesty
  5. Dispel
  6. Drown in Dreams
  7. Negate
  8. Plumb the Forbidden
  9. Reality Shift
  10. Resculpt
  11. Unwind
  12. Exsanguinate
  13. Final Parting
  14. Ghouls' Night Out
  15. Charcoal Diamond
  16. Sky Diamond
  17. Gleaming Overseer
  18. Hordewing Skaab
  19. Undead Alchemist

Added:

  1. Evolving Wilds
  2. Exotic Orchard
  3. Malakir Mire  Flip
  4. Mystic Sanctuary
  5. Obscura Storefront
  6. Reflecting Pool
  7. Secluded Courtyard
  8. Terramorphic Expanse
  9. Unclaimed Territory
  10. Verdant Catacombs
  11. Vesuva
  12. Mystic Remora
  13. An Offer You Can't Refuse
  14. Blue Sun's Zenith
  15. Pongify
  16. Rapid Hybridization
  17. Read the Bones
  18. Bident of Thassa
  19. Dimir Signet
  20. Fellwar Stone
  21. Herald's Horn
  22. Pyre of Heroes
  23. Thaumatic Compass  Flip
  24. Urza's Incubator
  25. Champion of the Perished
  26. Fell Stinger
  27. Liliana's Standard Bearer
  28. Murderous Rider
  29. Shambling Ghast

Misc deck stats: Ramp: 13 Draw: 19 Tutors: 4

wallisface on Mishra, claimed by Thopter

2 months ago

Some thoughts:

  • You're playing a lot more cards than the 60 required. Any amount of cards over 60 reduces a decks consistency and generally makes it weaker - I'd suggest heavily on trying to cut back to 60 cards.

  • You're currently playing waaay too many cards as 1-ofs or 2-ofs. This is going to make your deck super inconsistent and clumsy to pilot. You should be aiming for the majority of your deck to be playsets (4-ofs) of cards. A good strategy for new deckbuilders is to pick 9 cards, and run playsets (4-ofs) of each of those (making 36 cards) alongside 24 lands (for a 60 card deck).

  • Your mana curve is quite high. Most modern decks can't justify running more than 4 cards (1 playset) costing 4 mana, and seldom run anything costing more than this much mana. You've got a whopping 16 cards costing 4-or-more mana, which is far too much. Going from the above suggestion of picking 9 cards, the mana costs of those cards should look something like 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4.

  • With only basic lands, i'd suggest maybe going down to 2 colours - it's going to be really hard to consistently play 3 colours with only basic lands, and it's going to lead to your deck losing-to-itself a large percentage of the time. In any case I have no idea why 2 of your lands are Island... if you're doing this just for Clearwater Goblet, it's not even close to worth-it (also, cards that only gain life and do nothing else are pretty universally-bad, especially at that mana cost, so i'd really suggest ditching Clearwater Goblet)

wallisface on Thopters!

3 months ago

Also just something else i’ve noticed, Sword of the Meek won’t work with Tempered Steel or Chief of the Foundry, as the buffs will mean the creature is no longer a 1/1.

Keeping that in mind, here’s an example list incorporating my suggestions:

Balaam__ on Balaam__

3 months ago

@Daikodubs Alright, so here’s what I cobbled together. It isn’t quite Sultai, and I’d actually very much recommend abandoning a tri color mana base in favor of instead, but if you’re dead set on Sultai it’s easily adaptable.

4 Vapor Snag 10 Swamp 4 Spell Pierce 4 Mana Leak 6 Island 4 Hedron Alignment 4 Gurmag Angler 4 Counterspell 4 Cling to Dust 4 Choked Estuary 4 Cabal Therapy 4 Cabal Therapist 4 Bojuka Bog

You’ve got enough mana to reliably cast Hedron Alignment from your hand.

You’ve got 8 cards that will get a copy from your hand into your graveyard, namely Cabal Therapy and Cabal Therapist. Just name yourself as the target player and dump from your own hand.

You’ve got 8 cards that let you exile a copy from your graveyard, playsets of Bojuka Bog and Cling to Dust. That last one will let you recover lost life too in case you’re dangerously close to death.

You’ve got a boatload of countermagic to fizzle a lot of what your opponent may try, either to stop you or else to bolster their own strategy.

Lastly, I threw in Gurmag Angler because you mentioned you like Delve and it’s also a fine card to block with if necessary or even to win with should Hedron Alignment somehow not be a viable wincon for whatever reason.

Prices fluctuate depending on where and how you buy, but this rings it at around $20 or less depending on the set of card you’re looking at. Like I said, this is but one way to try building around Hedron Alignment and there are many others. But the idea is to fully commit to it while ignoring anything that’ll only distract from it. Take it, adjust it as you see fit, make changes etc.

Hope this helps.

FearRipper70 on U/B Faerie Tempo Control

4 months ago

-1 Island, -2 Force of Negation, -2 Fallen Shinobi, -1 Counterspell, -1 Bloodchief's Thirst, +1 Mistbind Clique, +3 Cunning Nightbonder, +3 Slitherwisp

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