Prismatic Vista is actually really good in enabling
light splashes. It's less useful in a deck with lots of heavy color requirements. It's not helping you much when you want to curve
Vendillion Clique into
Siege Rhino. It's really good in letting you splash a couple cards with single off-color pips in your base one or two color deck.
However, of course you're totally right in that all this is subject to personal preferences. For me, I'd rather want mono black be something that occurs regularly than blue abzan. For example, when a year ago or so I replaced
Time Wipe with
Hallowed Burial, I shortly after saw a
control deck getting drafted with that card in it. Maybe, if that slot would've been the Time Wipe still, the deck would came out as a Jeskai control deck. And work just as fine. But personally, I felt it was much
cooler and more
exciting to see that super controlling Boros deck than just another control deck with blue in it. And if the drafter had picked up a Time Wipe in pack one, they were locked into blue, theyprobably would've taken some counter spells and blue card draw. But as it was, they stayed out of blue long enough to have others go into it and they got there with taking
Wall of Omens and
Arc Lightning and
Boros Signet.
I agree with the first part of this for sure. My point with talking about Prismatic Vista was that it's a lot better at maintaining a mana base with mostly light pip costs (like
,
,
) as opposed to heavier costs (
,
,
). It's going to be difficult to curve
Vendillion Clique into
Siege Rhino consistently in any environment just because of how incompatible the costs are. However, it is far easier to curve a
cost
Phyrexian Arena into a
cost
Siege Rhino in a shock/fetch world than in a
Prismatic Vista world. You would need to be able to set up a very specific combination of basics to do this with vistas every game, whereas a single fetchland grabbing a
Godless Shrine could solve the problem a little more consistently. However, Vistas are just as good at helping a deck curve a
cost
Dismissive Pyromancer into a
Faith of the Devoted as a fetch/shock mana base because the pip costs are so much less stringent– even if you draw 2 mountains and a vista, you can always have your black source on time. This does scale up to light splashes as well– you can definitely cast a
Siege Rhino off of a single swamp tutored off of a Vista. However, you're unlikely to be able to splash a
Bring to Light as the
only blue card in the deck if you're trying to build a basic-heavy mana base with
Prismatic Vistas. Shock/Fetch doesn't let you play whatever you want with little downside, it just opens up more mana–intensive strategies to skilled drafters. On the flip side, Vistas are helpful for keeping the number of basics in a secondary color down in mono-color-oriented decks. A Cube with a vista-based mana structure is going to be better at helping decks with strict early-game requirements for a single color of mana. A deck with 5 prismatic vistas and a single mountain could conceivably always follow up a
Gifted Aetherborn with a
Professional Face-Breaker thanks to vistas. The same couldn't be said about curving a
Necropotence into a
Queen Marchesa, which requires a dual land at some point along the process.
In your
Time Wipe example, I don't necessarily think that replacing wipe with
Hallowed Burial is what enabled the Boros control deck. The deck probably already existed in the environment beforehand– someone just would have needed to use one of their Vistas to grab up a single island to enable the casting of the Wipe. It definitely requires more creativity and planning than just playing the good White control card in a W/R control deck, but I don't think having to splash for the powerful effect is inherently less exciting than being able to do it in-house with just two colors. After all, if a deck is only playing blue for a single five-drop game-ending spell, that's not really just another blue control deck. I certainly don't think having a fetchable
Breeding Pool in a deck to make a single
Bring to Light work is the same thing as a fully committal section with multiple blue spells. I think the same applies to the time-wipe scenario.
You're right. But I'd argue that you'd have to have the free vintage manabases to have Priest be as low in commitment as the Wurm. Even when fixing is so good, drafters will probably be more likely to stick with black and red after picking the Priest, because they probably never feel certain that they can get all the fixing they want. So with the Wurm, they might end up in a sweet Temur madness deck that's the best thing in their seat, and maybe would've been possible as well with the Priest splashing black, but humans won't know that from their draft seat.
I agree completely and actually do it in a similar fashion. I try to have the few gold cards I run be very exciting and in the upper end of my power band when possible, to reward the commitment. That being said, power outliers will pull people towards their synergistic decks whether they are gold, mono colored or colorless, so that doesn't really impact my stance
If you add a bunch of above-rate gold cards, of course people will play them. All I'm saying is: If you'd replace that above-rate powerful gold card supporting theme X with a monocolored card that's just as powerful and synergistic, that would probably bring more advantages than disadvantage for the draft experience.
I think this isn't necessarily the case and is more broadly a matter of taste.
In the case of
Bloodhall Preist and
Reckless Wurm, the two cards are of a very similar power level and one is not particularly more exciting than the other. Although the priest is easier to hardcast (2AB is cheaper than 3AA), the madness ability is more pip-intensive, which makes it harder to use in practice. However, I think there are a lot of situations where you can use a gold card to give players more interesting deckbuilding puzzles to solve than a mono-color counterpart.
For example, let's say I'm a designer building a Gruul Madness archetype as part of a broader Madness theme in my Cube. I could just play
Rummaging Goblin and be done with it– every Red Madness deck can play the Goblin, and while it's not great, it gives players additional redundancy for enabling madness. However, I could also play
Anje Falkenrath. Anje is a bit better than
Rummaging Goblin, but she's not so much better that her abilities offset her second color. However, she's a
lot cooler. If a Gruul player sees Anje in the draft, they're given an interesting Puzzle to solve: this card is a really strong enabler for their deck; how can they play it? It's not particularly committal if they take it –Anje only represents 1 pick out of 45– but it does give them the option to try and reach for a cooler deck than they might have had if the card was just a garden variety rummager. Depending on how the Cube is constructed, it does not necessarily need to be difficult to make Anje work. A simple
Farseek and
Smoldering Marsh could do the trick. The resulting GRb deck is going to be cooler than the canned Gruul madness deck we had previously– the splash transformed it from something forgettable into something memorable.
That's why narrower power bands also lead to less splashing. Of course all that's just a heuristic, Magic is far too complex to break it down to simple rules like that.
Honestly, I don't even think this is true as a heuristic. Splashing to me seems like a function of players wanting to try something novel rather than just trying to force something powerful.
For example, my Cube has a generally tight power band outside of the two
broken cantrips. Despite this, you still often see people playing three or more colors even when they don't really need to. For example, UR and WR players will often splash a third color to use
Mantis Rider in their deck. Rider isn't insane in a world with
Phoenix of Ash and
Fable of the Mirror Breaker, but it is a unique attacker capable of putting out more damage faster than these counterparts. It's harder to cast but not undoable given my Cube's mana requirement. Another example is RB-based
Unearth decks splashing White to live the dream with
Monastery Mentor and the expanding pool of
White Reanimation effects. These decks don't need White to win strictly speaking due to the presence of
Young Pyromancer and
Sedgemoor Witch, but being able to play White's expanded toolbox of spells, including
stellar removal,
toolboxing, and
protection, makes the risk of the splash worthwhile. And finally, yes,
bring to light is very good at grabbing
Siege Rhino if you're able to sneak a blue source into your Abzan deck. You're probably going to start losing games due to mana inconsistency if you start throwing in
other random blue cards, but getting to play a second Rhino is usually worth the risk.
I think the most important thing about decks in a smooth-band environment is deck coherence. As long as your deck is coherent, you can play as many or as few colors as you want and still be able to win. Five Color Goodstuff is consistently one of the worst decks in my Cube, despite the fact that at least one person always forces it, because the low-to-the-ground design of my Cube really encourages streamlined decks. Mono-Red, U/R Prowess, Esper Control, Abzan Midrange, Green Ramp, and so on are all able to outplay and outpunch a deck that is just a pile of the "best" cards in the environment. This is because the good cards in my Cube are powerful because of how they play with others instead of how they play in a vacuum. Sure,
Siege Rhino and
Expressive Iteration are better than
Polukranos, World Eater and
Anticipate. However, a deck that is trying to win by using both
Siege Rhino and Expressive Iteration together is usually going to lose to a deck that is using
Polukranos, World Eater or Anticipate in their intended roles.
Essentially, as your power band tightens, how many colors people play becomes dictated by how good they are at using the tools available to them in the Cube. It could be fewer colors or more colors, depending on what the environment can support. For example, good drafters in Kamigawa, Neon Dynasty, would often use the fixing in the set to play multicolor channel decks, despite the tight power band of the environment. Meanwhile, people drafting Throne of Eldraine would be more inclined to draft a very focused one or two-color strategy thanks to the worse fixing in the environment and the high power level of the
CCCC Hybrids and
Adamant cards.
