The thing is that the gainlands literally have no downside in decks that don't care about villain's life total, plus it makes games go longer instead of shorter (like painlands). Even though Grove of the Burnwillows is a cute mirror of Karplusan Forest, I think it's a bad design for the game to have around.
I hope they finish the Noxious Bayou cycle soon
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
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.
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.: Add or , then gain a poison counter.
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?
