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LadyMapi

LadyMapi

The bigger question about a full cycle of Groves is... what do you do with them? They'd all be untapped duals that punish you for playing aggro, and there are a grand total of two other payoffs for villain gaining life:



Do you really want to fiddle with your entire format simply to enable one particular card?
 
Mown

Mown

I don't know if you can say they will "always be worse" when those fun synergies got a card banned in modern. They're also trilands for supporting colorless, which isn't as relevant any more, but would have been very significant for some decks before they got power-creeped.

Regardless, Velrun was just making a semantic remark that there's no Grove of the Burnwillows cycle to finish, because Grove isn't part of a lifegain-land cycle, it's just a singular card. It's like saying "I wish they would finish the Hard Evidence cycle", to which you'd probably reply along the lines of "What cycle are you talking about?". Finishing the Grove cycle would arguably imply making 5 enemy colored lands with novel game mechanics. Of course, it's very easy to understand what "finishing the Grove cycle" actually means, and not something worth starting an argument over.
 
alvoi

alvoi

Velrun said:
If this card was from a story-bound set with a beautiful art, I would be all over it.

But as is I personally don’t want it in my cube.

So many of the playtest cards are super cool
Click to expand...
Yeah, that card is probably my favourite from the playtest cards. Sadly they decided to do them in that really bad frame, and then they did Unfinity (which had non-interesting mechanics imho) in the usual card frame :(
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

I was really hoping that ONE would give us a black-border version of Noxious Bayou and friends. That would've lead to some really interesting tension in Limited, and would've resulted in Corrupted cards sometimes being worth drafting on their own.

But sadly WotC were cowards.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Yeah, you can’t have it etb untapped, because then it has no downsides 99% of the time. But you also can’t have it etb tapped, because then it’s just straight up garbage compared to even a Coastal Tower.
 
Velrun

Velrun

You actually can have it ETB tapped in a limited environment.

If the players need fixing enough, they would still use them.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
You actually can have it ETB tapped in a limited environment.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's quite obvious that it is literally possible to print the poison duals with an "enters the battlefield tapped" line. Similarly, you can literally have it etb untapped. That design even exists, though not in black-border Magic. It should also be obvious that my post literally makes no sense if you interpret it that way, so you may safely assume that I used can / can't liberally here.
 
Velrun

Velrun

We are both talking about power levels of the card and not literally.

Wizards could actually put them on tapped dual lands in this set. Since the set doesn’t have any dual lands outside the rare slot people would still pick them for their mana fixing. Tapped duals are not super bad in limited environments. And adding another downside (be it Poison) would have been interesting in ONE.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Fair, sorry for misinterpreting your post! I couldn't see a format where tapped poison duals would be a warranted downgrade to simple taplands, so I didn't even consider that interpretation :oops: I do think WotC has come far enough with their (un)common duals that we are never going to see the likes of Cloudcrest Lake again, nor anything strictly worse than a basic tapland. I think the current philosophy is to be slightly above simple tapland in power level when additional mana fixing is required in a format. For example, we've "recently" seen land cycles at common featuring Idyllic Beachfront, Skybridge Towers, Razortide Bridge, and Glacial Floodplain, all being slightly better than the tapland baseline of Coastal Tower (or Meandering River, depending on how far back your knowledge of non basics goes ;)) in some way or another. I can't imagine them going back to the days of Cloudcrest Lake and Pine Barrens.
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Desert-style cube where you have the Kamigawa exertlands in the basic land box and the actual cube gives you real lands? I like it.

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The poison lands just need to be something like...

Obnoxious Bayou
Land
~ enters the battlefield tapped unless you have 3 or more poison counters.
{T}: Add {B} or {G}, then gain a poison counter.

Flip-flop the condition as desired.
 
Velrun

Velrun

But Onde there are miles between a tapped dual land that gives you one poison counter per activation to Cloudcrest Lake.

People would both pick and play the tapped poison lands if they were in the current All Will be One Magic set because fixing is almost 0 in that set.

My whole point is that in a limited environment things doesn’t have to follow the same power level as they do in a non-limited environment. We see this all the time with cubes. Compare Ravnic’s cube to Blacksmithy as an example.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
People would both pick and play the tapped poison lands if they were in the current All Will be One Magic set because fixing is almost 0 in that set.
Click to expand...
I don't disagree with that particular point, I was just questioning what WotC would stand to gain by including additional drawbacks on taplands. Of course you take the bad fixing if there's no decent fixing available, but why wouldn't WotC include decent fixing?
 
Velrun

Velrun

I like that some limited formats have almost 0 fixing. And I like that some have a lot. Variety! :)

Most common lands are useless outside their own limited set so it doesn’t really matter what they do with them. They only have to think about making the set fun to draft.
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

You'd be legitimately surprised at how many common lands end up seeing play in Pauper, purely because most of them suck out of control.

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On a slightly different topic...

A cube where mana of one particular color is paid for by gaining poison counters instead of through spending mana is... intriguing. What does the design/play experience look like when each player is capped at spending nine of a given color of mana?

I envision it being a four color cube with gold cards sprinkled throughout. Oh, sure, the white section looks normal... but then there's a two-mana mono-white Vindicate that just asks you to let in a little bit of corruption. Or you have a normal blue section with a one-mana Growth Spiral peaking through and asking you for to let a bit of the beast spirit in...

You'd need something to give it a bit more bite, but the idea's kinda evocative.
 
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