It’s steadily approaching a stage where I can’t approach any article without finding myself talking about design, card philosophy, flavor, or the awfulness of Future Sight. It’s not that there are no other topics that seize my imagination as a writer, it’s just that I get about a page into them and go "Nah, people will complain that there’s too much opinion there," and wind up deleting it. Opinion pieces, it seems, are the only place you’re allowed to actually offer your own opinion, to hold it up to the light that other people can blithely ignore it.
I should stop making those jokes. People are starting to pay attention to what I have to say. Maybe there’s something wrong about the way I write, what with my opinions and all, but hey, I’m doing what I can here.
Devin Low, who I suspect, if I were an Important Magic Writer, would be something like my arch-nemesis, recently came out and spoke about five-color mana fixing. Now, I’d like to say I was planning on writing about this. I would like to say that – but I wasn’t. I’ve more been writing about it my entire career, having started, more or less, with Ravnica waiting in the wings.
Wow. I’ve been writing for something on three years. That’s pretty mindblowing. Sorry, it just hit me.
Anyway, Devin basically said "too much colorless mana fixing reduces the importance of the color pie and makes multicolor too easy." Well, duh, Devin. You did see that whole Ravnica block thing? People playing WWBBB and GGG in the same deck? The (spit) Masterpiece*? An entire block season that would have been defined by Good Stuff versus Good Stuff? Three-color control versus three-color control? What an exciting time to be alive.
One thing that I feel is a shame is that Devin points the blame at Terramorphic Expanse, Chromatic Star, and Prismatic Lens, all of which I feel are better for the game for the simple reason that they are commons. Making cards that let you play spells into rares is really painful. I can understand it in some cases. The thing is, the duals and rare painlands are there in the golden slot as a marketing tool, not as a power concern for Limited play… yet I digress.
I recently… well, okay, two months ago… but I did a deck experiment, an evolution along the lines of JMS’s classic precon evolutions. It was fun and interesting enough, but something that blew me away as I sat down and observed the deck afterwards was its manabase. No rare lands. Three colors. Solid as a freaking rock. I was rarely color screwed and rarely mana screwed, and yet, I was running none of these fabulous lands that defined Standard and made the color pie a squidgy mess.
There’s a balance to strike, a balance that I think Wizards are missing, between the purity of individual colors (which do not excite players nearly as much as multicolor play does). Life from the Loam is the kind of mana enabler I love as a rare. The secondary market should not be the most exciting thing to find in my booster (and let’s face it, for Dissension, it kinda was). With that in mind, I’m not about to champion an impossible cause. People pay money for cards, and Wizards like making money, so we shouldn’t see the Ravnica dual lands in the uncommon slot, no matter how much they make the game better for everyone.
(There’s something condescending and offensive about the excuse of "we make painlands rare so players who don’t understand them will work out why they’re good on their own.")
In the end, the color pie – which is as pure a creature as the English language – has had to contend with a couple of remarkable surfeit of STD environments of late. Oh, I know, it’s fun to get them and everyone loves to watch it happen, but an STD is an STD, and they’re all very different to one another, especially in how you contract them and how you cure them. In fact, waiting it out is the only cure for most any STD Magic contracts.
Everyone loves multicolor blocks and big legends and nostalgia (at least, everyone important). However, as fun as they were to have, in a row, the effect on Magic’s overall immune system hasn’t been great. At least, not in a conventional sense.
Rewind A Bit: Imperiosaur
Lots of people are complaining about Imperiosaur. “You can’t play him with Elf Mana!” These people complain. Now, I can’t be wholly dismissive of this point of view, because they are factually correct. No, you cannot play Imperiosaur in a traditional, Llanowar-Elf-and-three-drops build. That is, as far as I can tell, a good thing. Hell, a fantastic thing.
Green players need to stop thinking in that one mould. Yes, Llanowar Elves are a good card. They (spit) beat and promote, oh, I don’t know, stuff in the early game. You can get a turn 2 Troll Ascetic (in time to get two-for-one’d by Pyroclasm), or a turn 2 Call of the Herd, or any other amazing, amazing, totally broken, leading, tournament-caliber strategies.
Note to self, ratchet back sarcasm.
It depresses me that Llanowar Elves are considered amongst the best Green cards ever printed. I acknowledge what they do, but their increasing of Green’s vulnerabilities, and the weaknesses in deckbuilding they promote make me ill. And even if you could use them to cast Imperiosaur, what happens?
First turn, Llanowar Elves.
Second turn, something.
Third turn, Imperiosaur.
Now let’s say you use Rampant Growth, Into the North, or Farseek?
First turn, Terramorphic Expanse for Swamp
Second turn, Rampant Growth for Plains
Third turn, Imperiosaur.
You can cast a Blind Hunter or a Imperiosaur at this point.
Imperiosaur doesn’t mandate single-color play, any more than Terramorphic Expanse demands five-color. People need to wean themselves off the Ravnica duals, because they not only won’t be around forever, but, god willing, we will never have cards this good again. God, I am sick of seeing three- and four-color control lists that reduce the color pie into this homogenous, $5,000 slush. The haves and the have-nots. People with money, people who can borrow cards, people who think they’re better than casual gamers, they don’t have to care about the color pie. They’re above those rules.
I feel awfully indebted about this game sometimes.
(Why do people who can’t care less about something insist on giving advice to those people who do care about it?)
Regardless, the tools exist in this environment to make good three-color decks. They’re not as good as the Great three-color decks, but they’re cheaper. Even ignoring Ravnica, there would be many tools for two-and-three color decks running rampant. Observe, if you will…
Creatures (23)
- 4 Mystic Snake
- 4 Silhana Starfletcher
- 4 Plaxmanta
- 3 Tidespout Tyrant
- 1 Primal Forcemage
- 3 Riftwing Cloudskate
- 4 Whitemane Lion
Lands (25)
Spells (12)
Okay, yes, there are non-basics in there. Boreal Shelf and Arctic Flats – because you want lots of White when you finally want it, but you don’t care about having white early. However, look at that build. You have three colors, each one of which wants double colors in some way or another. Green wants to be in GG increments to cast Wild Pair. Blue needs to be UU for the Mystic Snake and Riftwing Cloudskate, with the oft-stranded Tidespout Tyrant requiring UUU – and they want to be UG exactly for Plaxmanta. Whitemane Lion looks like he needs only W… but he really wants WWW3, the turn after a Wild Pair.
This deck’s a blast to play, it really is, but it offends so readily. My opponents are often times bothered by an early game that gets stalled out by a squadron of bears and bounce, then tend to lose interest in the game during the tap-out-for-Wild-Pair turn. The turn afterwards, suddenly Whitemane gets Primal Forcemage, then Tidespout Tyrant, then Tidespout Tyrant, all at instant speed. Whitemane Lion can bounce things (Riftwing Cloudskate), counter things (Mystic Snake), and block fliers with often disastrous results (Silhana Starfletcher). It can even protect the entire team in a pinch, getting a Plaxmanta.
The deck offends, because Tidespout Tyrant is an almost iconic ‘I win’ creature for the casual room. He tears up your mana base, he shreds your board position, and he kills you in four swings on his own. He also costs eight, so in my opinion, that’s fair enough, but some people aren’t keen on putting up with him when you spent four mana for him and his pal. He offends me, because in all my searching across three colors, I couldn’t find a better option. Hellkite would be good if I was running red, but why would I want to do that?
Here’s a quick list of every Green or White creature you could search up with a Lion + Forcemage:
Calciderm
Chronosavant
Durkwood Baloth
Emperor Crocodile
Hunted Lammasu
Jedit Ojanen of Efrava
Sheltering Ancient
Siege Wurm
Stoic Ephemera
Timbermare (genius!)
Craw Giant
Craw Wurm
That’s it. Which of them has any kind of board presence even vaguely reminiscent of Tyrant? Most of the good creatures on this list are good because they don’t cost much retail! I think there’s something messed up with an environment that has this kind of thing happening with regularity.
Oh well, at least I’m not tutoring up Keigas.
Yet, look at that manabase. Three colors. I could probably go down to nothing but basics and still have a deck to play with. Hell… what about a multicolor deck with just basics?
The Empire
4 Terramorphic Expanse
10 Snow-Covered Forest
10 Snow-Covered Mountain
4 Edge of Autumn
4 Rampant Growth
1 Panglacial Wurm
3 Call of the Herd**
4 Skred
4 Rough/Tumble
4 Imperiosaur
4 Demonfire You
4 Burning-Tree Shaman**
4 Citanul Wood-Readers
It’s an anemic list of creatures who can survive your own Rough / Tumbling, in Green/Red.
I’ve been testing this – proxying the much worse Feral Animist and Trained Armodon for the Calls and Shaman, and Sporesower Thallid for Imperiosaur, and have found this bizarre thing. I have never been color screwed, nor have I been in a position where I can’t cast Imperiosaur.
So why do we need all this colorless mana fixing anyway?
Oh. Right.
Green.
Aheh.
This time next week, I should have gotten my hands on Future Sight cards for the first time. I’m ripe with anticipation – or is it the wind? I’m not sure. Regardless. Next time we speak, noble readers, Regionals will be over, and I’ll be fiddling with the cardboard crack once more. For now, I will sign off, with a five-page placeholder, and promise of more next week that might feel more like an article. Farewell, Non-Future-Sighted Magic; Hello, Future Sight.
Hugs and Kisses,
Talen Lee
Talen at dodo dot com dot au
* In an ideal world, the mention of some deck names would only have value as punchlines. I submit Freshmaker and Masterpiece as the leaders in this regard, with White Wafo-Tapa as a contender.
** Who am I kidding? If you own these, you probably own good lands.