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.