MM4: The Lands and the Other New Weaver

I don't mean to get off on a rant here. Well, actually I do. Where the hell are our duallands?

According to R&D, they have a virtually limitless number of dualland ideas ready to go. The painlands are ready, the fetch lands are ready, the depletion and off-color painlands from Tempest are ready. All are well balanced and worthy of reprinting, if for some reason no new variant is acceptable. Instead, we get nothing. There is only one land in MM that can produce more than one color of mana: School of the Unseen. Oh, I'm sorry. I mean Henge of Ramos. At least there's no danger of someone running more than four copies of it. But as everyone who's been around long enough knows, the School was useless. Requiring two extra mana is just too much, and slows you down too much. When you need colored mana most, it's colorless. When you can afford to pay the activation cost, you've had plenty of time to draw the mana you need. Even with no other way to get multiple colors of mana, I wouldn't touch this card.

It gets worse. There are ten one-color lands in the set, five of them taking up valuable common slots. All ten are virtually useless. Five of them come into play tapped and can tap for two mana twice and then die. In three turns they can produce four mana. If you need them for any other length of time, they're not as good as basic lands. It's possible that decks aiming to kill on turn three would be able to use these, especially the black one. The other deck that might use them is a deck that uses these to get their other mana sources into play, since the other two mana lands left with Rath Cycle. In constructed, their function is to serve as a bad replacement for City of Traitors. In limited, their function is to be fifteenth picks. If a land isn't going to be better than a basic land in limited it should never be common. As a rare, they serve a purpose. As a common, they damage draft and because of the new approach to sealed deck where everyone is basically allowed the lands they need (which I disagree with, but that's another article) they injure that format as well. The other cycle of lands are the storage lands. It takes three turns to get one mana out of them. It takes five turns to get something the previous cycle of lands couldn't give you. To be better requires at least six. During that time, you've given up a land drop and a card. Is Magic really going to be THAT slow? I wouldn't mind, but I doubt it can be done even with a full two cycles similar to MM. Those lands could easily have been our duallands, tapping for two allied colors of mana. I'm not even ruling out that they could have been five color lands.

It's not that all the lands in the set are bad. Two of them are very good. First, there's Rishadan Port:

Rishadan Port Land T: Add 1 to your mana pool 1T: Tap target land

Without Wasteland, this is probably the best way to take advantage of lands in your deck that don't need to be colored. You can use this and another land you don't need to lock up one of your opponent's lands. Against counter decks, you can force them to keep two extra lands, since you can untap and then tap another land. They can also count as land destruction when trying to get your deck above critical mass and shut down your opponent's mana permanently. Almost as important, you can use it on turn two to keep the situation under control until turn three. If enough decks become one color and start to include the Port, inactive counter decks could become impractical. There are very few cards in the set I consider potential mistakes, and this is one of them.

The other good land is Dust Bowl:

Dust Bowl T: Add 1 to your mana pool 3T, sac a land: Destroy target nonbasic land

It takes a while before this is better than Wasteland. First, it can't shut down your opponent's first or second mana like Wasteland can. I like that a lot. I hated the ability of Strip Mine to do that, and didn't like it when Wasteland did it either. With limitless mana, it's obviously better than Wasteland. There are four ways to use Dust Bowl. One is to use it to remove especially troublesome lands, like Treetop Village. One of the worst lands is, of course, an opponent's Dust Bowl. The second is to include it in a deck that can afford to run colorless lands, especially if you don't need more than a critical mass of mana, with the intention of hitting every land you can when the time comes. That's how it works in the Rebel deck. The third is to use it with Crop Rotation so that if you get into either of the above situations you can go get it. It probably belongs in most Type II decks that run Crop Rotation (don't all yell at once). Finally, it can be used in a land destruction deck. Together with Rishadan Port, your lands can take most decks well into range of your land destruction. The most land normally played in Type II is 28 in CMU Blue. That deck runs only 16 basics. If you can trade off for the other 12 and tap four with Ports, Stone Rain, Pillage and Avalanche Riders will draw you even. Add a card drawer or another land destruction spell and you're over the top without even using Wildfire. The Bowl makes that possible.

The other two lands define the word narrow. A weaker Phyrexian Tower. An anti- Masticore weapon (did they know? Did they care?).

Building the new land destruction deck isn't going to be easy, and other than that the lands don't really justify an entire deck. Instead, the deck is going to be about the real new Spike Weaver. Stand alones are big enough that it's easy to miss a card, and in the case of the last article I missed one of the most important:

Dawnstrider 1G G, discard a card: Prevent all combat damage this turn. 1/1

If there was any doubt that I was planning to use Squee to keep this going, let me clear it up right now. That's exactly what I'm going to do. And since the entire combination is creature-based, the deck can use Worldly Tutor to go get whatever the deck didn't draw. Since no one's really planning on casting Squee with any regularity, the deck still has a second color to choose. Option one is to use black for Vampiric Tutor, option two is to use blue to protect the Dawnstrider. That seems better. I'm going to violate one of the basic rules and use Diplomatic Immunity for the first version. The only real threat left is Powder Keg. The deck this deck would have to fear the most would be a deck like CMU Blue, since you would literally have no way to ever win a game. But I think that deck is basically gone with Rishadan Port and without Mana Leak and Forbid, at least for now. The deck needs a way to win, and a big creature seems like the best way.

There's a very very long article on the Dojo right now that speculates that Enchantress may be Type II's new dominant deck. It makes a lot of sense, with the deck losing nothing too important to it while its foes drop dead left and right. As the Urza's Block version demonstrated, under Sixth Edition rules a single Enchantress on the table beats counter decks. Even if that wasn't true, pure counter decks seem to be on the way out right now. A Combo deck seems like the logical choice. Without Tempest out there to stop people like me and decks like I design, it's going to be a real challenge for the game to stop the ghost of Urza's Saga without another round of bannings. There are four cards that are going to have to go, and a fifth that probably does. Don't e-mail me to ask me what they are. The good news for WotC: None of them are in MM.

Finally, I'm going to start teaching a class the week after London. The first subject is going to be MM Sealed Deck, then we'll move into draft and eventually into constructed. The class will be at Neutral Ground: NY at 5:30pm on Thursdays. The first class will be free -- the in-depth construction of two sealed decks followed by an analyzed best 3-out-of-5 match between them.