This Land is Your Land

I can imagine lots of possible goals for You Make the Card. Some people want to design the next tournament staple. Others want a new toy for their Commander of choice, or a tool for their favorite color, or an enabler or hoser for a particular strategy. But what matters most to me is that we create a card that appeals to as many players as possible. And that's why I'm on Team Land.

First of all, lands are colorless, which is a huge bonus. Crucible of Worlds would have been a perfectly good design as a 2G enchantment, but it wouldn't go in anywhere near the variety of decks that it does today. 

Enchantments, however, are only playable in certain colors. That's one strike. For casual or new players who own a handful of decks, a colored card immediately eliminates them from the potential audience.

Although enchantments can do just about anything, it is rare indeed for one to have a broad effect that makes it playable in lots of different decks. In competitive Magic, they show up mostly in limited decks and constructed sideboards. In casual games, they're commonly used as build-around-me deck cores. But they are almost never cards that you can jam into any deck. Particularly not the most interesting ones; Faith's Fetters is fine for any white deck, but surely we have higher ambitions.

It is also rare for an Enchantment to appeal to multiple player types. Timmy likes auras. Spike likes hosers. Johnny likes... well, Johnny cards. But can you name a "hat trick" enchantment that everyone loves? Rancor is the closest I can think of, and it was undercosted because of a printing error!

I've seen several anti-land arguments that I disagree with. Here are a few:

"Lands have limited design space. You're only going to get dual lands, Wastelands, and Mutavaults." Poppycock. Land may be the most constrained card type, but R&D has been churning out interesting utility lands for years. Even if you just look at current standard, we've got Cathedral of War, Cavern of Souls, Haunted Fengraf, Reliquary Tower, Rogue's Passage, Seraph Sanctuary, and Thespian's Stage. And those are just the ones that require zero color commitment!

"Designing lands is too hard." Yes, there are major restrictions on what sort of effects you can put on a land. Yes, the submissions for lands will probably include a high proportion of unprintable stuff. But that doesn't matter in the slightest. We're only going to vote on the top ten, which means all the boring and/or broken junk will get weeded out. And if you followed the second Great Designer Search, you already know that the mothership audience is more than capable of stepping up to the challenge.

"Designing lands is boring, since we won't get to pick color or casting cost." This would be a legitimate argument if the goal was to have a protracted design process. And for some people, perhaps it is. But that's not my goal. All I care about is the card we get at the end. 

"Powerful utility lands aren't fun to play against. Look at Inkmoth Nexus, Kessig Wolf Run, and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle." Redirect your ire! The guilty party was that format-warping monstrosity Primeval Titan. Now that he's gone, are the Wolf Runs really cramping your style?

Vote land, loyal readers!