Mark Rosewater Considers the Fetchlands to be Mistakes
General forum
Posted on July 10, 2025, 9:33 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
In this post, Mark Rosewater stated that he considers the fetchlands (Windswept Heath, Arid Mesa, and so forth) to be design mistakes, because of how easily they can fix a player's manabase, and, while I do not use the fetchlands in any of my decks, I know that many players are very fond of those lands, for that reason, so I am wondering how everyone else may feel about Rosewater's words.
What does everyone else say, about this subject? Do you agree that the fetchlands are design mistakes, or do you believe that Rosewater is being too critical of those cards? I certainly am interested to hear your thoughts, on this matter.
Introductory thought: it's kind of interesting that a fetchland can be something like Terramorphic Expanse or Brokers Hideout, but the fetchlands are unquestionably that cycle.
I'm glad they exist, and I'm happy when they get reprinted. There absolutely should not be any functional reprints. In the formats they're legal in, color restrictions and requirements lose a lot of their impact. Boros Burn splashed blue and green just for Oko, Thief of Crowns. Add in stuff like landfall (wasn't Omnath, Locus of Creation around at the same time? Warp dem formats!) and revolt (Fatal Push) and similar effects, and fetchlands offer a lot of utility in a lot of different directions.
As a thought experiment, if every set for the next couple of years had the fetchlands cycle, and they were preemptively banned in Standard, how would that affect people's deck building patterns? Ignore the financial stuff involved with suddenly flooding the market with a scarce commodity for now. Would that make different formats more accessible?
July 10, 2025 10:25 p.m.
On the one hand, the Fetchlands go a long way to supporting early game mana consistency. They help to make 3 to 5 colour decks more viable in competitive scenes and have been the backbone of decks that seek to play some very ambitious combinations of cards across multiple colours all in one deck. Those sorts of decks may have only ever been able to exist at the kitchen table if it weren't for the Fetchlands.
The flipside is that what a fetchland offers for zero mana cost is:
- Very efficient mana fixing when combined with multi-land type lands.
- A means of reducing your deck size by sacrificing itself to find another land to put on the battlefield. And the new land can enter untapped to boot.
- Puts a card in the graveyard for cards that care about the number and types of cards in a graveyard.
- Repeat targets for land recursion effects.
- A way to shuffle your library.
- A way to trigger cards that care if you sac a permanent or had a permanent leave the battle field.
- A way to get two landfall triggers in a turn.
- A way to trigger cards that care if you lost life.
Fetchlands offer so much potential gameplay with practically no cost in game to utilize. While I credited their ability for making very ambitions card choices competitively viable up above, there is the question of if that's a good thing for the game. As the power level of the game continues to creep up, Fetchlands can contribute to a constriction of deck diversity because they can enable a bunch of powerful cards to be played in a single deck that might have otherwise needed to find homes in different decks if players wanted to maintain consistency in their manabase.
What position you may take on the matter probably comes down to what you value in the game and the play experiences you prefer. WotC also has to take long-term game management into consideration too, so that also influences their views on the matter.
July 11, 2025 8:38 a.m.
FormOverFunction says... #5
The challenge of running a two or three color deck is so low nowadays that I have a hard time getting upset at one specific facet of the land base of mtg. It’s great to reduce that “invest in a land base” barrier to entry for standard and modern, but I don’t even know how much of that is even played anymore. Lands are too far gone for me to worry about fetches.
July 11, 2025 12:03 p.m.
plakjekaas says... #6
I like them in online clients, but the copious amounts of shuffling do make me choose monocolored decks regularly :|
July 11, 2025 12:08 p.m.
Them being able to get non basics is the issue if they said basic island on them theyed be fine
July 12, 2025 3:55 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #8
Here is further commentary from Mark Rosewater about the fetchlands, saying that it is very unlikely that those lands shall ever again be in the same standard environment as the shocklands, and I actually agree with that idea, although I still say that efficient mana bases are better than being mana-screwed.
shadow63, fetchlands that can find only basic lands already exist, so why not have fetchlands that can find non-basic lands, as well?
July 12, 2025 9:43 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #9
I do like the idea of a non-basic-only evolving wilds!!
July 13, 2025 12:18 p.m.
Coward_Token says... #10
Similarly to FormOverFunction, I feel fetchlands are just one mana fixing mistake among many.
For EDH in particular, I think it's kinda perverse that they and their ilk make it so that for commmander cards, it's pretty much always a good thing to have more colors rather than less, because it gives a wider access to a goodstuff card pool in the 99 with little drawback.
Icbrgr says... #2
The only time I HATED them or had any negative feelings towards them was in 2014-2020 timeframe and felt really really gatekept from playing Modern by the price of fetchlands... wasted a lot of money on a lot of half built and or mediocre decks because I couldn't wrap my head around spending $40 on a single land let alone a playset or two.
Otherwise... honestly I love them... as far as constructed goes I personally love my pile decks... and savvy players can punish fetchlands/greedy mana bases.
I also love multicolored sets as well like Alara and Tarkir... Alara had to wait a bit before being able to gain access to the fetches but I think Tarkir should be the gold standard.
July 10, 2025 10:08 p.m.