CCDD 030817—Amberfield Castle & Worldscorcher's Tomb

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/8/2017 - Here are two very powerful lands. Are they too powerful to print? (Probably, but let's discuss.)

In theory, this land gets you less mana than a basic and less fixing than a dual. But it also accelerates your mana the turn after you play it, which is a pretty big deal. Like the karoos (Golgari Rot Farm) and older—even more broken—lands like Tolarian Academy, it also lets you abuse any land-untapping effects. With the advent of {C}-matters cards, generating {C}{C} also has even more weight and it's clear Amberfield Castle would be huge in an Eldrazi deck. Probably just unprintable.

Worldscorcher's Tomb is just a colorless land until you get to 7 lands. At that point, you can cycle it and another land away for one card. With no mana cost, that's pretty handy—helping any deck mitigate land flood, or a control deck trade mana advantage for card advantage late. If you can wait until you've got 8 lands, it can draw you two cards. If you can wait until you have 13 lands, it'll draw you a whole new hand. As hard as that is to do, that unlimited potential is still a big deal: Magic players tend to find a way.

The fact that it does that for 0 mana is a knob we can tweak, though we can also just require the lands it sacrifices to be untapped, so you never have more than five mana to cast the cards you draw. This also doesn't need to be legendary, but that makes it risky for players to run more than 1 or 2 of these, which limits the frequency you'll see it happen. (Again, except for decks built around abusing it, which will certainly tutor for it, or just draw enough lands they don't care if they have to wait.)

This probably shouldn't be printed as-is, but there's likely a very similar card that could be.