I can’t lie to you guys.
I’m having a crappy week.
I recently got a job. So far, that’s not impinging on my ability to write – indeed, by coercing my Magic play into shorter bursts, it means that I’m writing more intensely, and a snatched ten minutes of server downtime at work turns into an article where basically everyone in the universe tells me I’m awesome.
This job is in Insurance. Since the vast majority of my audience, I wager, is American, I’d happily bet a dollar or two that the majority of you have no damn idea what’s going on in the world south of your state border, let alone across a body of water larger than Lake Superior*. This means that that wager is also sitting that nobody not in my country knows that we’re currently in a state of semi-national emergency, with torrential flash floods basically raining out some of our biggest non-capital cities, and even killing people. Ten people dead, or some such – now, being fair, that sounds unimpressive, because to your average big-city American, that’s a mugging. To your average Australian parliamentarian, that’s half a state.
What this means is that my workplace has just increased workload, redoubled efforts, and, in general, is working more. I might find weekends being nipped away. Very awkward and not all that cool.
Also, as I write this, I’m lurking close to the phone, because my mother just got out of surgery for a cyst that I’ve spent over a week that might well be the c-word.
I am, as I said, having a crappy week.
Right now, I stand on what I would consider four very big article ideas. So I’m going to table them now, and you guys can tell me what interests you, and we’ll talk more about them later. This week is just going to be a few little putterings about a pet thought that I’ve been nursing for a while. It does actually relate to Magic, though, so you can trust me in that regard.
The four articles I have had in mind are, with the rough idea outlines:
Cyclical Redundancy? Check! Right now, whenever a new set comes out, it has cycles, which R&D has routinely touted as having a number of design rules and being very important to extol the new mechanics. Cycles let the players feel clever as they concept the rest of it, seeing some parts and imagining others. Sometimes, cards feel like they need a cycle attached to it, and players tend to be disappointed when they don’t. Yet… every time a cycle shows up, there is always an imbalance in them, often a huge one. What causes this? And what does this tell us about R&D?
Wasted Potential. Time Spiral represented an amazing milestone in Magic, a return to an ancient place in history, and a point at which a new line could be drawn in the sand. It was a block that had huge potential and incredible depth. However, for all that it might be a mechanical home run, in that, you know, people paid for it, the entire set feels lacking to me. While it’s just my opinion, what could have been done differently? What is the Time Spiral that could have been?
Here and There, Now and Then. I’ve done a set review for almost every set since Ravnica came out, and we’ve had quite some time to sample these cards. We have the whole of Ravnica block, and now, as the good things of day droop and drowse, where did I wind up being wrong? Have I been misguided? What in the past year have I learned, as a writer and as a player? What can we, as players, learn from it? And is this just masturbatory?
Do Your Own Set Review. Mainly to annoy the Ghost of Geordie. No, this would actually require a bit of set up, and it might require some finagling from the outset, but the idea would be to do a set review of an amateur designer’s set. Now, the most obvious target is Evan Erwin. But… Evan already has his own platform to talk about stuff like that. Evan also gets enough crap from me as it is (super secret message to Evan, NO U) – so while he might wind up the victim, it’s only if he asks for it.
So there are the options. Please, let me know which one you do want to hear, and which one you oh-god-so-definitely-don’t want to. Bear in mind, that Josh Bennett has already placed 5,000,000 votes of ‘DO NOT WANT’ for the DIY Set Review. So if you guys want that one, you’re going to have to vote hard for it.
Now. Onto today’s myth.
You Need Green
No, you don’t. Honestly.
What? Oh, right, sorry, that context thing.
I’ve been looking at Prismatic again lately, as right now, all the standard decks I want to play are brutally expensive or just lack room for all the stuff I want. I want to recycle Armageddons and race my Jotun Grunts with my Life From The Loams and my Cycling Lands and I need a win condition then, so we’ll splash Black for Teneb and now I need some more draw and… anyway. One thing that has happened is that I’ve read some more writers talking about Prismatic… and almost universally, they say something that summarizes as:
You’ll need your Green slots for mana fixing.
Where have these people been?
Back in the days of Five-Color Magic and Prismatic before Mirrodin, back when Arc-Slogger wasn’t the best creature, or even a gleam in his daddy (Wildfire Emissary)’s eye, this was true. This is back in the days when Internet articles were written on stone tablets and distributed from home to home in pneumatic canisters sent in tubes:
YE OLDE CHARLES NORRIS DOTH NOT FEEL YON PAIN.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Anyway, back then, yes, Green had a strong role in Prismatic. It formed the basis of decks by smoothing mana, and when you needed it that badly, well, you had to run it. Harrow was the top tier of land searching cards, and everyone ran a large complement of Green cards for things like Rampant Growth, and Nature’s Lore. Prismatic had to feature these cards.
Then Scourge added landcycling…
… then Mirrodin added Wayfarer’s Bauble, Darksteel Ingot, the Talismans…
… then Kamigawa block introduced basically d*ck, but who cares…
… then Ravnica exploded onto the scene and suddenly we had common good bouncelands…
… and here, with Future Sight in the mix, Blue has access to a tutor for any land you need, there’s a colorless fetchland, and there are just enough mana artifacts that you simply don’t need Green any more.
Oh, sure, artifacts are prone to destruction, but let’s not kid ourselves, the people who play Prismatic are just baby enough to start conceding en masse to Signet hate, but right now, at three mana or less, you have no less than fourteen artifacts that can give you multiple colors of mana, and that’s not counting Signets or Cameos. Ignoring the five Talismans** from Mirrodin, that’s still nine slots. Cut out the Chromatics, and add Terramorphic, and you have ten slots that are dedicated color-fixing cards that cost three or less. Three three-mana five-color sources***, three two-mana five-color sources****, and the Wayfarer’s Bauble to kick it all off. You can even add Tolaria West, which conveniently fetches any dual land you could want, as well as Engineered Explosives, Prismatic Allstar.
Now, tell me seriously… what can Green do that’s better than that?
Green’s mana acceleration is, in a pure sense, better than these cards. Rampant Growth can’t be Disenchanted, can’t be the victim of a stray Dismantling Blow (though being cut off from your Green source on turn 7… not so scary). Birds of Paradise give you three mana on turn 2, and all that jazz. However, in order to use Green’s mana acceleration, you have to have Green’s lands in your deck. You have to use Forests to get other colors, which puts a burden on your manabase: pony up a Forest early. If you don’t intend on your late game involving that Forest, then your deck is going to be designed to play well provided it gets something in the first three turns that you really don’t want to see thereafter. This kind of forward building strikes me as in the same school as the speed-based Mono-Green Aggro lists, which run eight one-drop mana accelerators, just to get to three mana as soon as possible, and pray they don’t draw them late game.
You draw them, don’t you?
Yeah, I thought so.
Within Prismatic Magic, Green’s role has often been assumed as the eternal bridesmaid. It is there to shore up the early game, the back-up plan if your manabase doesn’t gloriously fall together in a cavalcade of perfect land drops. After that point, nobody dances with it, and let’s face it, that dress is not looking very impressive once the bride arrives anyway.
The truth is even more damning than that. Green’s not the bridesmaid. Green’s not even invited to the wedding.
Go check out some Prismatic lists sometimes. Ignore any Green card that fixes mana as a primary focus. Then look at what Green does. And yet, the manabase is almost always unfairly biased towards the color, because you have to have it early.
Free your mind. Stop using Rampant Growths. Five-color players have abandoned Red for years – it’s time that Prismatic players face reality and do the same thing to their own red-headed stepchild. Green has passed its use-by date in Prismatic, with its ten best cards either mana-fixers, or gold cards. You still have a range of good cards that just require a Green splash, with Solifuge letting you cheat some more along the way.
I’ve been thinking on this more and more, and testing lists more and more, and yet… I still can’t find something I need Green for, aside from the rules of the format.
So here’s the homework. The ten best Green cards that don’t fix mana. My current list?
Loxodon Hierarch
Thornscape Battlemage
Mystic Snake
Giant Solifuge
Armadillo Cloak
Seal of Primordium
Life From The Loam
Eternal Witness
Mirari’s Wake
Putrefy
Pernicious Deed is a myth, or it’d be on this list too. I haven’t had any experience with the Deed, but every time I’ve either played with one of these cards, or had it played against me, it’s done something legitimately useful. Seal of Primordium, after all, tends to blow up my artifact mana.
So the question is, if this is the best… is it really worth biasing your manabase towards it? When you have such insane and powerful tools in blue and black as the transmute pools, the wizardcycler chain, or well, Arc Slogger?
With a grand total of three mono-Green cards in the running, I think it’s time that we, as Prismatic players, shelved the Green cards and stopped pretending they’re relevant as anything but filler. That gives you so much more room to put in good cards, cards you want. There are so many must-haves in this format, even in the common slot, knowing I don’t have to pack crap like Rampant Growth is an enormous relief.
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
Talen at dodo dot com dot au
Vote in the forums, damnit.
* Snark is expected. Even if you’re a well-informed internationally-minded American citizen, the statistics bear out that you’re a minority. Sorry!
** Feel free to try and engage me on the plural of this in the forums. It’s up there with shamans/shamen for "silly corner cases that people take too seriously."
*** Whose bright frigging idea was it to make coalition relic a rare?
**** Aphorism that remains true: If your Fellwar Stone doesn’t tap for all five colors, you’re winni