Whilst blitzing my way through a ton of games at the Prerelease last weekend, it became hugely apparent that mana — the adjusting and fixing thereof — was going to be possibly the deciding factor in determining success or failure over the coming months in the Limited arena. Whether or not playing five colors is the correct answer for Limited play is a matter for another time (seven days time, as it happens.) What is undeniable is that five colors is the linking theme that draws all the ideas together coming into the Shards-Conflux Limited season. Huge numbers of games will be won and lost on the strength or weakness of your manabase as you either effortlessly make Fusion Elemental on Turn 5, or sit with Progenitus in your hand, uncastable until the end of time (when your 20 life runs out.) Today therefore, we’re going to examine what options we’re only half as likely to have available to us as we build our Sealed deck (the Shards cards, courtesy of the first three boosters) and what goodies we’ve been presented with to encourage us down the path to the near-unpronouncable wubrg (with our three Conflux boosters). Off we go!
By my reckoning, there are 35 cards from Shards of Alara that impact our manabase in some way. They group up something like this:
Cyclers — Angelsong, Yoked Plowbeast, Spell Snip, Ridge Rannet, Volcanic Submersion, Jungle Weaver, Savage Hunter.
Super-Cyclers – The five Resounding cards.
Bonus Generic mana — Sunseed Nurturer, Exuberant Firestoker, Drumhunter.
Bonus colored mana — Druid Of The Anima, Keeper Of Progenitus, Sacellum Godspeaker, Steward of Valeron.
The Obelisks — Five Shard-specific three-mana artifacts.
The Panoramas — Generic producers that can be sacrificed to find any one of the three basic lands in the appropriate shard.
The Tri-Lands — Comes into play tapped, then produces one of any of the three shard colors.
And then there’s the odd one out, Lush Growth.
Let’s briefly look at the pros and cons of these groups.
The Cyclers — Cycling automatically brings you closer to the cards you want in exchange for a card that you don’t, at least at that point in the game. It doesn’t however come with any guarantees, since it’s statistically highly unlikely that you’ll cycle into the single Plains you were looking for, rather than the 26 other cards that were still in your library. Although I have seen players with hideously high numbers of bombs in their Sealed deck who were willing to play every single cycler regardless of their ‘main’ stats, by and large only some of these have seen much play. Angelsong, Volcanic Submersion, and Savage Hunter have been the big losers from the group, Spell Snip and Yoked Plowbeast have seen a little more play, and Ridge Rannet and Jungle Weaver have been the main success stories. This hierarchy relates directly to a fundamental tension in the design of the cards, which asks the question, ‘How likely is it that getting rid of me is going to get you something you like more?’ As you head towards five, six, seven mana, and most likely a period of the game where your mana issues have been largely resolved, the almost-mythical seven mana suddenly seems none too distant, and Ridge Rannet and Jungle Weaver are just a turn or two away. Although 6/4 for seven mana is nobody’s idea of a good deal, as a late game topdeck Ridge Rannet deals with most opposing fatties with ease, and four toughness is still difficult to swat aside. As for Jungle Weaver, this is clearly the best of the bunch, since at 5/6 and with Reach, even something as awesome as a Maelstrom Archangel has to take pause and assess. Overall, these aren’t the answer to your mana prayers, but if you’re running red or green, you’re blessed if you have a deck so powerful that you can’t fit these two in.
The Super-Cyclers — The Resounding set of cards (thought I better avoid using the term Cycle, lest it confuse anyone about it being anything other than a set of five cards that are variations on a theme with one given to each color, because then I’d have to explain that I’m referring to a set of five cards that are variations on a theme with one given to each color. Like I just have.) have the benefit of getting deeper into your deck entirely as a bonus to the main action. There are arguments for all of them in Limited play without any kind of second ability, since Resounding Thunder, Roar, and Silence at least all work just fine if you treat them as regular spells. The fact that you might wait to set up a near-uncounterable splurge later in the game is just a nice extra, and to be honest, if you’ve just removed two attacking creatures from your threat zone, or dumped six points of pain at your opponent’s head, chances are the replacement ability of the cycling isn’t high on your agenda. Nonetheless, just like the regular cyclers, these dig you deeper into your deck in search of the missing pieces.
Bonus Generic Mana — None of these three saw much Limited action in all-Alara play, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason why that would change with the addition of Conflux. Five-color manabases are likely to be very tight, and allowing yourself the luxury of skimping on mana because you’ve got a bit of generic acceleration seems weak, like the effect of these cards for the most part.
Bonus Colored Mana — I called this group colored mana, but truthfully it’s basically all about green, as you might expect from the dominant color of all things mana. Naya was extremely popular in both Sealed and Draft over the last months, and Druid Of The Anima was pretty close to picture-perfect as fixers go. All three colors of mana, it could only really be better if it wasn’t a creature and vulnerable to even the lowly Blister Beetle. Steward Of Valeron was a great card because of the V word Vigilance, allowing you to treat it genuinely as a beatdown guy on Turn 3, whilst still accelerating you out into a four- and five-mana spell ahead of time. Unlike the Druid of course, it didn’t bring anything new to the party, since you found green mana to cast him. Having said that, if you’re running five color out of a base red-green or green-white, there’s every chance that you might value a second green source to cast some of your late-game spells, like the rare Sacellum Godspeaker, which also generates green, conditionally. As a rare, we can mostly ignore him from our considerations, and the same is true of Keeper Of Progenitus. Yes, if we open them, and we have the deck that suits, fine, go ahead. In the case of the Keeper, you’re once again gaining no diversity of color, but rather acceleration and the possibility of a needed second colored mana to cast a double-cost monster.
Now we’ve reached the big three, the sets of five that defined the flow of mana in Shards play.
The Obelisks — The fact that so many opinions have been voiced on the Obelisks is a testament to just how finely-positioned they’ve turned out to be. Depending on the Format, Turn 3 is a potentially significant one in terms of the flow of the game, and spending yours on a card that does, almost literally, nothing right there and then is not good times. Sometimes you get to sneak it into play as part of a two-for-one package somewhere around Turn 6, as you cast it with your first three mana, then use it immediately to lay a four-drop. If what you really wanted to do with Turn 6 was lay a four-drop, you’ve lost nothing, while still setting up the Obelisk for maximum value on subsequent turns. Still, for the most part, Obelisks are there to fix mana, not just accelerate it, and that means getting them into play sharpish, i.e. Turn 3. In the very late game, they mostly become a dead draw, since they create no action in and of themselves, and if you’re grateful to see one on Turn 10 because it finally gets you the fifth color you’ve been missing since Turn 5 when you actually wanted to cast your Child Of Alara, then your deck has malfunctioned horribly anyway. Having looked at hundreds of decklists from Shards Limited events, it became clear that at the highest reaches of the game i.e. The Pros, Obelisks were seen somewhat charily. Yes, they accelerated and fixed, both good things, but the price was a little higher than many ideally wanted to pay. It seems as if artifact fixing and acceleration is one of the few slots in Magic where a new casting cost of 2.5 would come in really handy, since at 2 they’ve been historically very powerful cards, and at three have seemed slightly underwhelming. Nonetheless, if you’re at a Grand Prix this season, you’re going to see Obelisks.
The Panoramas — No acceleration here, but laser precision in terms of fixing. What’s particularly nice about this Cycle is that there really isn’t a bad one you can play, since there’s never a ‘wrong’ one to have in your pool. If you have the matching Shard Panorama, then you know that you can fetch either the third splash color, or the double of one of your major pairs, or even, if things need smoothing, bringing your second major color online. If you have two of your base colors in the Panorama, you then have the chance to search out your singleton basic of a 4th/5th color towards your Domain cards. And if you’re as far as possible away from what you want — you’re playing Naya and have Grixis Panorama — then both of your 4th and 5th colors await you. The only thing to consider when cracking these is when you’re still shy of one of your major colors and have to weigh up the necessity of bringing that second color online versus the loss of your first option for getting color 4 or 5. When you’ve still got 5 or 6 of a basic left in your library, and the Panorama is your only way of getting your singleton Plains other than flat-out drawing the thing off the top, that’s when greed versus need can get fun. The only other drawback to the Panoramas is their fundamental loss of tempo, if your plan is to make them on Turn 2, pass the turn, and then crack them at the end of your opponent’s turn. At heart, they’re the meat and potatoes of the Format fixing, and they’re great.
The Tri-Lands – So finally we have the tri-lands. There’s no question of avoiding loss of tempo here, because they come into play tapped, and that inevitably leads to horror stories of all the games you would have won if you’d only drawn a blue source, but it turned out the tri-land blue source was not the source you were looking for, as you died the following turn. Deal with it. Tri-lands were frequently taken as high as, yes, first in Draft, and in Sealed they rarely dented your gameplan. On Turn 1, they almost never got in the way, on Turn 2 they were likely opposite an opponent messing around with a Panorama, on Turn 3 they might be faced with an Obelisk, and by Turn 6 they could usually be worked around so as to not lose too much tempo. Only in that last-ditch scenario outlined above did they become an issue, and for the benefit of getting any of three colors, all the time with no drawback, that scenario represents a miniscule dent in their armor. Just like the Panoramas, whilst playing with the ‘right’ tri-land was good, playing with the ‘wrong’ one was often even better, allowing you to consider it as a fundamental part of one of your major colors and probably half your allocation of both colors 4 and 5. As you can tell, I have almost nothing bad to say about them, and although there are times you might want to go screaming aggro and not take the early turn to set them up, by and large they get seen and they get played is the rule.
So that’s the first half of the story, bringing us up to date with the arrival of Conflux. Let’s see what we get.
Basic Landcycling — Gleam Of Resistance, Traumatic Visions, Absorb Vis, Fiery Fall, Sylvan Bounty.
Cycling — Constricting Tendrils, Molten Frame.
Fixing/Acceleration — Grixis Illusionist, Shard Convergence, Exploding Borders.
Artifacts — Armillary Sphere, Kaleidostone, Mana Cylix.
Lands — Ancient Ziggurat, Exotic Orchard, Rupture Spire, Unstable Frontier.
Basic Landcycling — For five color devotees, this mechanic is a really exciting development. Not only do we get to fetch the exact color we need at the exact moment we need it at a cost that’s eminently reasonable, we get the incremental advantage of improving our chances of finding every other piece of the puzzle, and indeed more gas in terms of things that actually win the game like creatures and spells. That alone would be reason to be cheerful. The fact that we then additionally get to indulge in all kinds of ‘what-if’ foolishness with the cards Wizards saw fit to tack on to this quality mananess, and you have something pretty close to fixing heaven. The only authentic drawback is that you realistically can only play the ones that fit with your major two or three colors, since without the required colored mana they are both uncastable and also uncyclable. However, not all of these are created equal, so let’s look at them one by one.
At five mana, Gleam Of Resistance would be a very expensive trick, and a trick that’s fairly transparent. You could argue that as a late game topdeck your opponent might presume that you’d just drawn a land when you passed the turn back, but often they’re going to at least dimly see this coming. Trouble is (for them), dimly sensing that they’re about to be bent over a table doesn’t actually stop it happening, and only a really good trick of their own is going to save them from multiple board-sweeping disaster, or indeed death at the point of casting. This is probably the number one out of the five for wanting to hold onto it until the point it actually does what it says it does, rather than the cycling bit which is the reason you played it in the first place.
I like Traumatic Visions. I like Counterspells, but then you knew that. What I like about Traumatic Visions is that it’s been a while since legitimate Counterspells were a good idea to play in Limited. If your opponent had an unanswerable threat, like a Cruel Ultimatum, or even (help us) Progenitus, then you might sideboard in a counter in the hope of being able to hit it at the right moment. In this Format, if you’re playing blue, then you’re going to run this, and I like the idea that opposing players might be kept just a little bit honest by knowing this is floating around. I like even more the idea of having two of these and ostentatiously cycling the first early, allowing your opponent an apparently hassle-free path to naughtiness, only to thwart them at the last, but I’m a pervert like that.
Soul Feast was a pretty unexciting card at five mana, and at seven mana Absorb Vis is really unexciting. Nonetheless, since you’ll always play with it, there comes a point where you start reading the top bit of the card instead of the bottom, and with games going long in pursuit of five color enormities, an eight point life swing isn’t, in and of itself, shabby. Nonetheless, this is one of the two cards in the cycle I’m disappointed to see, because broadly speaking I think you should be punished for playing suboptimal cards, not rewarded for it. More on this in a mo.
Fiery Fall is the one of the cycle with the most built-in tension, since you should start reading the top part of the card (deal 5 damage to target creature) from very early on in the game. Five damage is a lot, and kills many many many things. Six mana is a lot, but it is at least instant, and, as I believe I may have suggested, five damage is a lot, and kills many many many things. I guess on Turn 2 it’s still a more or less automatic cycler, but anytime from Turn 4 onwards, I’m kind of hoping that I won’t have to burn it on a land. To my mind, the best way to view this card is as a straight up expensive but effective removal spell, with the emergency exit lane of being able to summon a land when your gameplan absolutely demands it. A really nicely designed card, full of ongoing balance and choice. Terrific.
Sylvan Bounty — And here’s my other disappointment. Natural Spring was rubbish in every Format it’s ever been available… Spending six mana on 8 life, whether it’s at sorcery, instant, interrupt or even warp speed, is rubbish. Cutting off a hand used to be the penalty for stealing the King’s deer, and that’s the kind of penalty that ought to be administered to people playing cards like that. Here’s the problem. You don’t get a choice, because the bottom bit of the card renders the top half effectively blank, and you play it anyway. Then something really bad happens. At the Prerelease, I got into a race, with my Predator Dragon looking to knock off my opponent who had a gigantic flyer of his own. He drew, checked that I was at 14, and grinned. He hit me for eight flying, and I was at 6. He tapped eight mana, cycled Resounding Thunder and killed me. Except of course he didn’t, because I was playing with the utterly marvellous lifegain spell that goes into every green deck nowadays, Sylvan Bounty. I responded by going to 14 again, took 6, untapped, and killed him. Reader, I felt filthy. Not just dirty. Filthy. Six mana instant lifegain should never ever be allowed to win you games, lest you get the wrong idea and think that it might be good. My opponent, who was fairly inexperienced, may even now be building his Natural Spring/Sylvan Bounty lifegain deck for Standard, and that’s a crime against humanity I’ll have to shoulder. ‘Oops, I won’ aren’t words you want in the game, and that’s the phrase that applies to this card every single time it accidentally steals a game. As I found out in the forums last week, apparently you can polish a turd.
The Cyclers — Although not quite as bad as Sylvan Bounty for this, Molten Frame has a similar ‘oops’ side to it. Naturalize wasn’t played maindeck for the most part in all-Shards play, and Molten Frame is much narrower, only targeting creatures. Still, with cycling thrown in it’s going to make the start line in a lot of red decks, and cards like Tower Gargoyle of heavyweight hitters like Sharuum the Hegemon suddenly have another cheap answer running about the place. As for Constricting Tendrils, it’s cheap, and it’s fine in a mediocre sort of way, but you’ll never be leaping for joy.
Fixing/Acceleration — Tideshaper Mystic was a nice card, and Grixis Illusionist is a nice card. It’s an obvious Turn 1 play, and makes any land you play any of the five colors, the very epitome of fixing. Like Druid Of The Anima, it suffers from being a creature, and you have to wait a turn for the goodies, but basically he’s great. Since many five color decks are going to base themselves in green, Shard Convergence is a thing of beauty. Man(n)a from heaven, you might say. Or I might. Of all the cards we’ve looked at today, this has the most profound effect on the nature of your library. Removing four land cards from it is a significant chunk. Suppose you cast it on Turn 4, and that you’ve played four lands to get you there. That leaves 13 out of your initial 17 still in the library. Assuming no mulligans, you’ve got through 11 cards. That means 13 out of 29 cards left in your library were lands, or 44.8%. After Shard Convergence has done its thing, you’re left with 9 lands in 25 cards, or just 36%. That’s a massive swing in card quality moving forward. Then we have Exploding Borders. Clearly this only fits with a dominant red/green strategy, and it’s expensive in terms of only being able to find one land, and at sorcery speed, almost certainly costing you an entire mid-game turn to accomplish. However, fixing is fixing, it’s also acceleration, and it has a burn spell tacked on that calculates once you’ve fetched the land. Suddenly four mana doesn’t seem so unreasonable. I imagine this is too slow for Draft, but in Sealed play it sat really well in my Sunday Naya deck. Of all the cards, it’s probably the one I’m least certain about. Thoughts welcome. Finally we have Noble Hierarch. I trust you don’t need me to tell you how good this card is, but just in case you do, it’s ace.
The Artifacts — You’re going to derive zero technical benefit from the rest of this sentence, but Armillary Sphere has amazing artwork in my view. There’s a wallpaper of it on my PC right now, and in big-screen splendor it’s truly spectacular. As a card, it’s pretty interesting. How useful it is depends on quite what you want it to do for you. Suppose for a moment that our goal is to assemble all five colors as rapidly as possible in order to cast Fusion Elemental. If Armillary Sphere is in our opening hand, the chances are that we will spend all of Turns two and three on it, leading to off-color land drops on Turns four and five before triumphantly making our 8/8 (which meets Oblivion Ring, but that’s another story.) The Sphere doesn’t accelerate us at all, and is really clunky. However, a smooth Turn 4 at least gets it out of the way in one go, with a relatively small delay in turning our five-color goodness online. Plus, as we’ll see next week, there are plenty of cards that derive incremental benefit as we go along — that’s what Domain is after all — and so Turn 4 may be the correct position for it. I’d be pleasantly surprised if this is smooth enough for Draft to see much action, but in Sealed we can expect it to see a lot of play. Kaleidostone should also be all over Sealed, and may well feature in Draft too. Even in the most straightforward two color deck, there’s usually some way to take a one-shot advantage out of having all five colors available. At the very least, Kaleidostone provides insurance against not being able to cycle a Resounding spell due to mana issues, or a one-time kicking with something like Paragon Of The Amesha. Add in the fact that it essentially cycles whilst remaining in play (since it comes into play with Draw A Card stamped on it) and you have a very tasty proposition indeed. That’s before we get to any synergistic entertainment with Sanctum Gargoyle or Esperzoa. I wouldn’t presume to stray into the territory of Sanchez, Chapin, Thompson et al, but I imagine there’s a bunch of people looking for a home for this right now. Finally we have Mana Cylix. It’s hard to argue with the outcome, since one of any color is exactly what we want. It’s also hard to argue with the cost, since one isn’t going to cramp our style anytime soon. It’s just that spending a whole card to do literally nothing other than turn one land into a different one — color-washing — seems disappointing when compared with things like Chromatic Sphere or Star, or indeed accelerants like Prismatic Lens. Perhaps we’ll come to cherish it in the same way as these three, but I personally doubt it.
The Lands — Ancient Ziggurat is a straight ‘equation’ kind of card. Let’s say you have 16 creatures and 7 spells and 17 land in your Limited deck. That’s round about 30% of your business spells that the Ziggurat is functionally a blank for. That figure rises once you start factoring in activation costs, whether it’s a minor BG to give your double striker +1+1 or a completion on a Resounding cycle. Not happening, and that’s significant, because it’s exactly this kind of off-color stuff that you want a land like Ancient Ziggurat to be good for. It’s far more likely that you’re splashing for activations and spells than creatures, since it’s not that often that we get killer creatures with only single color requirements, rather than the 5GG or 3RRR we’ve got used to. In other words, the deeper you dig, the harder the restriction bites. It also gets you precisely nowhere with Domain, since it doesn’t become a basic land type. Having said this, if the reason you’re playing five color is to make five color monsters like the utter beating that is Maelstrom Archangel, then knock yourself out.
In general, the only thing I want to reply on my opponent doing is sitting down at the start of the round so I have someone to play against. Any time after that, where I’m relying on them doing what I want them to do, I get nervous. That means Exotic Orchard makes me nervous, especially after game one where they’ve seen what I’m looking for them to do. Remember how frustrating it is when you have landwalkers and they resolutely refuse to lay the appropriate basic until they absolutely have to? Exotic Orchard is potentially just like that, but with more serious consequences. That said, many of your opponents, and by many I mean most, will be running at least four of the five colors, so you have a decent chance of benefitting at least somewhere along the line. I believe the correct approach to this card is to factor it out of your fixing calculations when building your manabase, and instead consider a form of insurance.
The tap symbol on Rupture Spire prefaces the holy grail of manafixing: Add 1 mana of any color to your pool. No pain, no ‘if you control a creature’, ‘if it’s Tuesday’, no nothing. Just anything you want, all the time. There’s a neat tension built in to the card, which is when you should play it to your least disadvantage. Basically, there are three places to play this. Turn One isn’t an option (which is obviously when you’d want to play it without the drawback), so the early game means Turns two and three. Chances are you’re not giving up a ton of tempo to an opponent, although as we’ll see next week there are definitely decks out there that can punish you in this part of the game. Then there’s late game, anytime after Turn 6 or so, where you may well be able to cast what you want and still have the land-drop plus one space you need to get the Rupture Spire ready to go. That’s where we get to the tension bit. See, it’s round about Turns four to six that you can reliably identify what you want to be doing, what’s missing, and what to do about it, and Rupture Spire almost certainly robs you of one of those key turns if you choose to play it there. OK, play it early or late then you say, but it’s in the mid-game turns that it really shines, fixing you out of whatever hole you’re in, whether it’s a double casting cost, a missing 4th color, or a big all-the-colors-of-the-rainbow completion. Ideally, you want this in your opening hand, and to have no necessary two-drop. Of course, the deal is well worth it, but you need to place it carefully.
That leaves us with Unstable Frontier. Make no mistake, setting yourself back a turn in order to sort your mana out is a significant drawback, but certainly not to the point of leaving it outside your deck. From Turn 6 on, it’s as reliable as anything in the hassle-free mana department, and has the added benefit of actually turning the land into a different type, thus altering the Domain math against people who can’t read (which, judging by the Prerelease, is most of them). I like.
And that about wraps us up for the mana fixing in Limited play. This article has been the ‘How’ part. Next week, we get to the ‘Why’, or maybe the ‘Why Not’, since there are powerful reasons to avoid the lure of the five color matters brigade. As we’ll see, five color may not be the way to a Grand Prix day two. Still, if we’re going to, at least we know what we’ve been given to work with.
Until next week, when we attempt to put all that tasty manafixing to good use, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.
PS: For those of you who like to wallow in my dulcet tones, feel free to download the podcast from The Games Club Prerelease in London, featuring 2004 World Champion Julien Nuijten, British Pro Quentin Martin and a host of willing victims from the Gunslinging tables. Enjoy!