There has been a long-running myth, which finally went away with the release of Mirrodin block, that R&D doesn’t design cards for Type 1 and that there are only one or two cards per set which will see any play. Then, there are cards like Mind’s Desire where R&D never even considered Type 1 during design but which end up being among the most powerful, environment-defining cards in the format. Designing for Vintage is a really tricky issue to work with, but that will be the focus for this series and the first place to start is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in Vintage: Proper Mana.
The first area that came to mind when dealing with design is with regard to casting cost. The most commonly known rule is that unless a card is an artifact (and thus its casting cost will usually be cheated by cards like Mishra’s Workshop, Tinker, and Goblin Welder), a card needs to win the game if it costs more than three mana. Also, it’s a bonus if a spell is Blue because it can fuel Force of Will.
This tends to be the extent of the depth of thinking on the subject. What I have come to discover is that once you automatically exclude cards which are simply too expensive for the effect, the color breakdown in the casting cost is actually much trickier than it might first appear. This arises due to the unique effect of fetchlands, rainbow lands, and artifact mana in Vintage mana bases.*
*A typical Vintage mana base usually ranges from about 22-26 permanent mana sources. Out of these, about 6-9 of these are artifact mana. Thus, a Type 1 deck usually only has room for about 16-18 lands on average. Therefore, since fetchlands require a pretty large investment in the number of slots in the deck, you pretty much have to choose between fetchlands or rainbow lands if you are playing a non-combo deck. If you are playing a combo deck, you probably don’t have more than around 10 lands (excluding Bazaar of Baghdad, since it doesn’t make mana) anyway so you’re usually just better off with the rainbow lands.
Before I start, I’m basically assuming that Vintage decks are five-color or base Blue. There a few decks which don’t fall into this cataloging (you know, like Food Chain Goblins) but for the most part, this covers just about every deck.
Fetchlands
The fetchland/dual land synergy thus creates mana bases which are much different from those in formats without dual lands. This makes it possible for decks to splash many colors, but harder for them to run a secondary color. The last deck that I can remember that tried to run cards in multiple colors with double-colored casting costs was Four Color Control, which tried to balance the double Blue of its counters with the double White of Exalted Angel. In order to pull it off (as well as to keep a Red mana up for Red Elemental Blast), the deck usually needed to cut down on the (relatively) drawback-less fetchlands and dual lands and run City of Brass instead.
Yet, while double-colored costs in secondary colors are deceptively hard to do, it is surprisingly easy to support off-color gold cards as a splash. An old Tog deck might have the following land setup:
6 Fetchland
3 Island
3 Underground Sea
3 Volcanic Island
2 Tropical Island
1 Library of Alexandria
and then have the following in play:
Island
Volcanic Island
Mox Jet
Polluted Delta
This position gives the control deck access to three Blue, one Red, and one Black mana as it stands. From this position, the control deck could sacrifice the Delta to get a Tropical Island and be able to cast Artifact Mutation just as easily as Mana Drain. While it is true that you could also get another Volcanic Island just as easily (to cast I don’t know, Thought of Ruin?), this makes the deck significantly more vulnerable to Wasteland and basically requires you to run four of the dual land that you want to play.
Basically, fetchlands make it so that it becomes easy to get one mana per turn for a support color for as long as you want, but somewhat difficult and risky to be able to guarantee more than one of a support color for a period of time. Additionally, the presence of dual lands and fetchlands makes it easier to splash another color than to add more lands of a supporting color. If we’re dealing with a base-blue deck again, after the four Tundras and maybe, maybe a Plains, the next best options for more White mana are cards that require penalties, like Adarkar Wastes or more basic Plains. However, if you wanted to add in say, Black, you could add in some drawback-free Underground Seas.
5-Color Lands
If you don’t have enough room allotted in your mana base to be able to run fetchlands and dual lands, the next most common mana base in Type 1 is made up of 8-12 5-color lands. The progression usually goes City of Brass, then Gemstone Mine, and then lastly Forbidden Orchard. Typically, Workshop deck, which want to start off with four copies of Mishra’s Workshop and Wasteland, and combo decks, which don’t want to run more than ten or twelve lands, are the most common decks to use this approach. The other reason that they typically don’t have a lot of room for lands is that a lot of their mana production has been set aside in (more or less) colorless accelerants.
This creates mana bases where decks can play all sorts of color breakdowns, but usually cannot run any cards which have multiple colored mana symbols. A Stax deck, for instance might have Crop Rotation and Choke in Green, In the Eye of Chaos and Ancestral Recall in Blue, Goblin Welder and Rack and Ruin in Red, Yawgmoth’s Will and Demonic Tutor in Black, and Balance and Seal of Cleansing in White. However, it might need to stray away from running gold cards like Meddling Mage because of the buildup of penalties incurred from having to tap its lands multiple times.
On the flip side, colorless costs tend to be less bothersome here because of the large number of accelerants being run in slots which before would have been fetchlands or duals. Thus, something like In the Eye of Chaos becomes significantly easier to cast on turn 1 when the deck has an additional Mana Vault, Lotus Petal, Mox Diamond, etc. as accelerants which could possibly be drawn in the opening hand.
Accelerants
Outside of Vintage, the ratio between colored and colorless mana in a spell’s casting cost is there to distinguish how much of a main color you need in your deck to be able to run the spell. In Type 1, the presence of so many accelerants changes it so that the colored mana cost, rather than the total casting cost, becomes the deciding factor in how fast a spell is. A card which costs say, 2W can potentially be cast turn 1 and should almost certainly be castable on turn 2. However, a card that costs WW will almost never be castable on turn 1 and is less likely to be castable on turn 2.
In fact, there is not very much of a difference between a casting cost like WW and 1WW, since you probably will have a Mox and a colored mana source in your opening hand. This is why Mana Leak is so heavily played, but Counterspell almost never sees play, even in the most counter-filled mono-Blue decks. In Type 1, the Mana Leak becomes a turn 1 play while the Counterspell remains a turn 2 play like it is everywhere else.
Accelerants aren’t limited to just Moxes. It’s amazing to notice how many unorthodox and seemingly underpowered accelerants in the last year have found spots in decks. I’m talking about you, Cabal Ritual, Skirk Prospector, and Aether Vial**. As long as it doesn’t require to spend an inordinate amount of resources trying to accelerate it out (I’m looking at you, bootleg Saviors Seething Song), there’s potential. For instance, while I haven’t seen a list yet, there could potentially be a one- or two-land Belcher deck which runs Desperate Ritual and Seething Song as additional accelerants. You can even accelerate those out with Tinder Wall***.
**C’mon, it even took the pros a little bit longer than it should have for them to notice this one!
***See, another goofy accelerant that saw play!
Lastly, is sort of a gap when it comes to casting costs and acceleration. You can easily accelerate a colorless mana or two on a colored spell and an extra point or two on a colorless one. After that, you get to the point where it simply isn’t worth trying to cast the spell. Instead, it’s just worth it to simply get around casting the card in the first place. For example, it’s not very hard to accelerate out Exalted Angel, since the Morph costs mean that you only need to pay 2WW. For anything more than that though, it stops being feasible to try to cast the creature. At this point, you need to start relying on cards like Tinker or Oath of Druids to put the creature into play and thus, rather than trying to get something that costs say, six mana, you might as well go all the way and get something really expensive like Akroma or Darksteel Colossus.
Wrap Up
- Making a card gold is not necessarily a drawback in Type 1
- There is not much difference between a card that costs one colored mana and a card that costs one colored mana and one colorless mana
- Adding additional colored mana to a card’s casting cost is usually the only way to force a card to be cast on the turn that it is meant to be cast on
- Decks are usually capable of cheating small amounts of mana, but once you get above that it you simply need to cheat the entire casting cost.
–JP Meyer
jpmeyer at gmail dot com