So wanted to toss out an idea I don't think I've seen anywhere. Might be a bad idea but seems sort of interesting.
OK, so how many dual land cycles are there now? like 10? More than we can fit in cube anyway. That's all I know. This is especially problematic for smaller cubes. My 360 project right now has room for about 40 dual lands. But 4 cycles just forces me to make choices I'm unhappy with - either a bland setup or something convoluted with a million exceptions.
A lot of people have moved to a customizable setup. So theoretical scenario - Grull is aggressive in my cube, therefore I should favor lands that do not ETB tapped. That's an OK solution, but it winds up pigeonholing color combinations that I feel stifles creativity. Sticking with Grull as an example, I pushed aggro early on and it never really happened. And then GR Wildfire became a thing for awhile (totally not aggro) and faster lands were fine but it didn't really have to be setup that way and felt counterintuitive.
So a new idea... what about assigning a cycle to a specific color? You still can't run all 10 cycles - and you'd probably want to run the full set of shocks/fetches in many lists anyway. But the other stuff maybe we can split out in a more interesting way and less limiting way. Take creature lands as an example. Do people like running 10 of them? I've defended that for awhile actually, but there's fatigue that sets in when every deck plays those and you constantly have to design around their existence (a bit like the 5 swords situation). Were we better off when there were only 5 dual creature lands? I think we certainly were better off when only 2 swords existed.
My take at making color cycles... So each one is just 4 of the 10 lands basically.
BLUE - Bouncelands.
Blue decks like the CA and bounce is a blue thing. Super in flavor here. The easiest one to do.
GREEN - Creaturelands.
Another obvious one. Green does creatures. That's the color's thing. So they get creature lands. Bam.
WHITE - Filterlands.
It gets harder from here. Mainly this is a functional choice. White has so many damn WW cards and trying to splash another color makes that awkward in deck building. Filter lands I feel are solid for heavy white decks with splashes.
BLACK - Painlands
Life loss is a pretty solid black theme and it's also a really aggressive color (at least in my cubes it ends up that way). This feels like a good fit.
RED - Temples
I don't know. There are a decent number of red cards with Scry (second most by color according to gatherer - blue of course dominates). So it's not horribly misplaced. Red is aggressive so ETB tapped here might seem off, but at the same time I feel red is most often stereotyped as nothing but aggro. And it really should (and can be) more interesting than that.
Cool thing about this is you get 5 cycles that fit neatly into 20 cards, effectively taking 60% less space but still giving you variety and some flavor.
Thoughts?
OK, so how many dual land cycles are there now? like 10? More than we can fit in cube anyway. That's all I know. This is especially problematic for smaller cubes. My 360 project right now has room for about 40 dual lands. But 4 cycles just forces me to make choices I'm unhappy with - either a bland setup or something convoluted with a million exceptions.
A lot of people have moved to a customizable setup. So theoretical scenario - Grull is aggressive in my cube, therefore I should favor lands that do not ETB tapped. That's an OK solution, but it winds up pigeonholing color combinations that I feel stifles creativity. Sticking with Grull as an example, I pushed aggro early on and it never really happened. And then GR Wildfire became a thing for awhile (totally not aggro) and faster lands were fine but it didn't really have to be setup that way and felt counterintuitive.
So a new idea... what about assigning a cycle to a specific color? You still can't run all 10 cycles - and you'd probably want to run the full set of shocks/fetches in many lists anyway. But the other stuff maybe we can split out in a more interesting way and less limiting way. Take creature lands as an example. Do people like running 10 of them? I've defended that for awhile actually, but there's fatigue that sets in when every deck plays those and you constantly have to design around their existence (a bit like the 5 swords situation). Were we better off when there were only 5 dual creature lands? I think we certainly were better off when only 2 swords existed.
My take at making color cycles... So each one is just 4 of the 10 lands basically.
BLUE - Bouncelands.
Blue decks like the CA and bounce is a blue thing. Super in flavor here. The easiest one to do.
GREEN - Creaturelands.
Another obvious one. Green does creatures. That's the color's thing. So they get creature lands. Bam.
WHITE - Filterlands.
It gets harder from here. Mainly this is a functional choice. White has so many damn WW cards and trying to splash another color makes that awkward in deck building. Filter lands I feel are solid for heavy white decks with splashes.
BLACK - Painlands
Life loss is a pretty solid black theme and it's also a really aggressive color (at least in my cubes it ends up that way). This feels like a good fit.
RED - Temples
I don't know. There are a decent number of red cards with Scry (second most by color according to gatherer - blue of course dominates). So it's not horribly misplaced. Red is aggressive so ETB tapped here might seem off, but at the same time I feel red is most often stereotyped as nothing but aggro. And it really should (and can be) more interesting than that.
Cool thing about this is you get 5 cycles that fit neatly into 20 cards, effectively taking 60% less space but still giving you variety and some flavor.
Thoughts?
