Cool Card Design of the Day1/11/2013 - Counting sucks. It's not hard to make it worthwhile, as with Tarmogoyf and Wayfaring Temple or trivial, as with Kindle, but generally you want to avoid "count all the things" effects. Metalcraft works because you only have to count to three, or if there are enough artifacts visible, not at all.
There are, fortunately more ways to reward "having a lot" of something than counting. Here's an example using ETB-triggers.
The more Oases you have in your deck, the more often you'll enjoy the sooped-up versions of them. I expect any set with these would have at least one common, uncommon and rare Oasis with various effects.
I like these! Fun with Landfall too.
ReplyDeleteI agree. This is a beautiful design.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that Development would never allow lands with built-in acceleration on turn two.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that the locuses both were isolated and at common. Also brings up the question of how much expansion of land subtype we'll see in the future - Gate, Locus, Desert, Tower, Mine, and Power Plant all have mechanical significance. It's comfortable design space - a negligible amount of extra text can change the way you build your deck - but it's also easy to conceive of this as a very "less is more" sort of situation. Would a rule of thumb be exactly one at most extra land type (outside of the basic five) in standard at any given time? Is this anxiety baseless? Could we have thirty different land types and have it not be a problem? (Is this going to be the future of Magic?)
ReplyDeleteI would guess it'll be a very long time before there's more than one land subtype within a given block*, but I think Standard could sustain two at once.
Delete*Because lands aren't the focus of the game and we should never need to pay too much attention to them. Even in Zendikar, it really only mattered when they ETB'd.