Thursday, January 9, 2020

CCDD 010920 – Evolved Wilds

Core 2019 had a focus on eliminating as many tutor and shuffle effects as possible. It made me think: Is it possible to completely eliminate shuffling from Magic except for once at the start of each game?




The biggest obstacle to a shuffle-less Magic is Evolving Wilds effects. Most searches can be replaced by digging into the top X cards of your deck with the understanding that you'd occasionally whiff, but losing a land drop due to bad luck is the kind of thing that could make a player quit the game on the spot. Evolved Wilds is the closest I could get to a similar effect that doesn't rely on luck.

There's memory issues for sure, but they might not be as bad as they look; I imagine players would frequently group this with other basic lands of the same type for convenience.

5 comments:

  1. I don't think this wording is functional. you can't copy without copying a specific actual object the game can see. I'm pretty sure it should be "Evolved Wilds has the chosen type".

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    1. I was wondering about that wording too. The basic land types are weird-- see: Blood Moon-- in that setting the type has the side effect of overwriting the entire text box. The "overwriting" part might cause problems here. Guildgates enter untapped with Blood Moon in play, so I'm not 100% sure that "Evolved Wilds is the chosen type and ETBT" works as intended-- even though the meaning is obvious.

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  2. Neat! I've seen sideboard lands and land tokens suggested to solve this problem, but I haven't seen this proposal before. It probably has fewer memory issues than either of the other ideas.

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  3. If you're not going to require the player to play basics of the required types in their deck, why add complexity to the Quirion Elves format?

    Evolved Wilds
    Land
    ~ ETB tapped.
    When ~ ETB, choose a color.
    T: Add one mana of the chosen color.

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    1. Quirion elves used to cause such a headache of remembering which one produced which color...

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