CCDD 081711—Idyllic Castle and pay-lands

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/17/2011 - While I've played with this concept for years, I'm dead certain I'm not the only one, and probably not the first. It breaks an unspoken but fundamental rule of Magic design: Lands don't have mana costs. "Why not" is not a question—mana cost is what differentiates land from spells. "Could land have mana costs" is a question, though.


Much like the Ancient Den cycle from Mirrodin, the Early Years—Idyllic Castle (and any land cards that would follow in its path) are not spells. They're just lands*. In the case of Ancient Dens, * means they also count as artifacts. In this case, * means you have to pay mana when you play them. Apart from violently rampaging over some of our pre-conceived notions, I'm pretty sure this doesn't actually break any rules of the game.

You can still only play land once per turn, on your turn. Playing a land is still a special action that doesn't use the stack. It's just that you have to pay mana to do it in this case. Paying mana doesn't change the timing or nature of playing a land, since mana abilities also don't use the stack.

There's room for confusion around the fact that a spell with no mana cost can't be cast normally. One could wonder if we can still play lands without mana costs now that there's an alternative. Naturally the answer is 'of course,' but the potential for confusion isn't irrelevant.

Even if it's possible within the scope of the game and the rules to put mana costs on lands, that doesn't mean we should. What are the pros and cons? It does open up a lot of design space. While we're far from reaching the limit of interesting land design, it is inherently much more finite than the design space for spells simply because lands all have the same cost (your land drop for the turn). Allowing mana costs opens that up dramatically. Do we need that extra space? I'm not sure we do. In theory, anything we can do on a land we can do on an artifact for two mana more.

Mana costs on lands adds complexity to the game and could confuse casual/new players. If a player is learning Magic for the first time and starts to get that lands are resources and spells are outlets for those resources, but then he stumbles across a land that looks like a spell but says it isn't even though it plays similarly, well, that could set him back.

We must also consider compatibility. Having lands with mana costs shouldn't break any existing cards, but there are tons of spells that search for and/or put lands directly into play and those were all balanced for lands with no mana cost. These pay-lands should probably never be basic or Rampant Growth and Cultivate would become too good. Even nonbasic lands with basic land types are dangerous because of Farseek, Grixis Panorama and Arid Mesa. No precaution will prevent cards like Crop Rotation, Scapeshift and Primeval Titan—which for the most part are already plenty good—from fetching pay-lands onto the field. We could make it so that you have to pay the mana cost (if any) of a land any time it enters the battlefield, regardless of how, but that's so different from the concept of a mana cost, that you'd be better off making it an ETB ability like Scorched Ruins, Golgari Rot Farm or Rupture Spire.

All told, I don't know what the right answer is, but I lean fairly heavily against putting mana costs on land cards. If it did happen, it would probably just be for one block where it serves a very specific and worthwhile purpose. Still fun to think about though...