Tuesday, April 10, 2012

CCDD 041012—Sunset Veil + Sunset Field

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/10/2012 - I was reading Steve Sadin's article about drafting black-white in Innistrad, and that you have to choose one color to be dominant so that you're not looking at two plains and a pair of Highborn Ghouls in your hand, and as I often do, that made me wonder if we could make some cards to change the exclusivity of CC cards for a while.

Graven Cairns and the Shadowmoor land cycle did a very good job of shaking this particular boat. Too good, arguably. Is was these 'filter lands' (with the help of Reflecting Pool and Vivid lands) that allowed a single deck to run Chameleon Colossus, Cryptic Command, Profane Command and Firespout without trouble. Can we find something less strong? Or at least notably different?

Once you get it, this is kind of neat. Tap this and a Forest and get GG. Tap it and a Mountain and get RR. I hadn't thought of it until I wrote the above paragraph, but it's basically just a nerfed Reflecting Pool. It's also a bit confusing. You can write it out explicitly, of course:

That's quite simple to understand, and has an interesting visual symmetry, but it also very busy. It also doesn't change the fact that we're making a bad
Reflecting Pool. In fairness, any new card like Pool should be worse, but I still don't see much value to this. Fortunately, it leads to something interesting.

Here we have a land that produces only one color of mana, and yet it's only relevant in a multicolor deck. In this case, rather than having one land that lets you produce multiple colors of mana as we're used to, we'll presumably play multiple lands that each let you produce one color more. That wasn't very clear: with a couple of these in your deck, it's not as crazy to play Loyal Cathar and Chapel Geist in your primarily black deck. With a Sunset Field and a Sunset Marsh in play, you can cast your Loyal Cathar and your Highborn Ghoul.

Is a cycle of cards that negates the cost of dedicated color cards something Magic needs? Not usually. Rewarding a heavy color commitment is the whole point of Leatherback Baloth. But if it makes sense to enable multicolor decks via dual lands sometimes, there must be some scenario in which it makes sense to enable them via mono lands, now that we've shown that's possible.
Why two abilities? Sunset Field seems better than basic Plains because it does more on its own. But lacking both the basic supertype and the Plains subtype limit the number of cards that count it in play and drastically reduce the number of cards that fetch it from your deck. That's never been so big a disadvantage to stop players from running dual lands in the past, but I'm not sure this card needs as much nerfing as dual lands anyhow since its function is more focused: It doesn't help you play a deck full of Fauna Shamans and Phyrexian Metamorphs any more than Forest does. Black Knight and White Knight on the other hand, kissing in a tree.

11 comments:

  1. Sunset Field's not STRICTLY better than a plains, but it's enough better that it should probably ETB tapped.

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  2. I think you should drop the "T: Add W" and just leave "1, T: Add WW", as the Skycloud Expanse cycle had it.

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    1. I like this idea a lot. The Skycloud cycle was rare (which was probably too high); Jay's got Sunset Field at common. Should the "1,T: Add CC" lands meet in the middle, and be uncommon?

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    2. Yeah, it probably is better with just the filter ability.

      It's fine at any rarity in terms of complexity, so the set's needs would determine whether common or uncommon is best. Rare would just feel lame, unless these turn out faaar better than we think.

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  3. I'm not sure that a common cycle wouldn't also make splashing things too easy. Ravnica had this problem where the Karoos/signets would make something with ZY easier to cast than XX, which encouraged some funky splashes.

    Consider:

    Mirrorvale
    Land
    T: Double the amount of mana target land would produce this turn.

    That's a little more exciting than just a reflecting pool reprint. Fun with Coffers/Locus etc.

    More of a color fixer could be:

    Prismvale
    Land
    1: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.

    It's like a beefy shimmering grotto. I like how simple this is, while obviously opening a pandora's box of color fixing. If you wanted to make it rare, you could:


    Prismvale
    Land
    Prismvale enters the battlefield tapped.
    t: Add 1 to your mana pool.
    1: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.

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    1. I feel like R&D overreacted to the bounce lands though. I think the Shards tricolor lands or Zendikar refuges could've been ok at common.

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    2. Mirrorvale is a cleaner AND cooler execution of Sunset Veil. Nice.

      Prismvale is crazy broken. MUCH better than
      "Goldsville ETB tapped.
      "T: Add one mana of any color."

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  4. I like the idea, but the fact that it's a land that produces only one color but is meant for decks running TWO colours is really counter intuitive. I look at it and think, "It adds WW, I want it in my white deck" but I realise, I actually want it in a deck with little white. Cards should really go in decks that you expect them to.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    Replies
    1. The fact that White Knight and Black Knight are hard to cast in the same deck is a feature, not a bug.

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