General Modal "Dual" Lands // Trilands

Chriskool

Chriskool

Now edited to maybe make some sense! {W/P}_{W/P}

I have been trying out tri lands from KTK and ALA as modal, ETBT duals, but my players don't intuitively view them the same.

What are the pros and cons to including (essentially) lands with this text in a cube (beyond the slowness associated with tapped lands):

"Enters the battlefield tapped. Choose one:

T: Add Z or X to your mana pool.

T: Add X or Y to your mana pool.

T: Add Y or Z to your mana pool.

T: Add X, Y or Z to your mana pool."

 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I... I don't get at all what you're trying to do there. Why would I ever choose anything besides that last option?
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I'm kind of having a hard time wrapping my head around how this would feel in the actual draft.

Does this result in me delaying fixing picks in the draft? Does this reduce fixing definition to the point where it just enables 5 color good stuff? It might be safer to narrow it down to a simple bifurcated selection.

That also seems to be a lot of text on one card, which might result in some complexity issues.

Edit: I'm presuming there is a missing value here.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
Onderzeeboot said:
Yeah, this seems prone to memory issues. Modal spells work best if they are immediate, or if the choices are few and far apart (see the Sieges). Why not try something like this. Doesn't that kinda achieve what you want to be doing as well.

Note to self: I should totally include these in my 3-color cube.

View attachment 301
Click to expand...


"bivouac counter"
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
Everytime I see that word, I force myself to say 'Biv-Whack' in my head. I have no idea if that is even how it is pronounced!

For all intents and purposes, the tri-lands are ETB Dual lands, that occasionally reward you by tapping for your splash. I think the problem is that people don't intuitively see them as that. I guess the main con to your proposal is that it is a hell of a lot of text. I am not sure why the tri-lands are hard to grok, maybe they need colour cues like dual lands have?
i.e.
CrumblingNecroVisualCue.png
 
CML

CML

Contributor
i looked up bivouac first when i encountered it here:

It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier's dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I was rapt in the vision?

if you look up words when you read them you will remember them and you will remember when and where you learned them too. i learned like 200 words from lolita
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
In Dutch the word "bivakkeren" (English: "to bivouac", apparently it's also a verb in English, that I didn't know!) is relatively common, as is "bivakmuts" (English: "balaclava" or "ski mask"), so I guess the word is less alien to us. I remember people on mtgs asking how the hack you should pronounce Frontier Bivouac, so I guess it really is an uncommon word in English.
 
Chriskool

Chriskool

Laz said:
For all intents and purposes, the tri-lands are ETB Dual lands, that occasionally reward you by tapping for your splash. I think the problem is that people don't intuitively see them as that. I guess the main con to your proposal is that it is a hell of a lot of text. I am not sure why the tri-lands are hard to grok, maybe they need colour cues like dual lands have?
Click to expand...

I think I failed to communicate a pain portion of my musing yesterday, but you have done so nicely- thanks!

FWIW, I wasn't recommending representing the functionality with a wall of text, but rather was curious on the implications of including them with the notion that they are predominantly dual- and not tri-lands. The post wasn't very well-thought before I pressed enter. :oops:

I thought that KTK would help lead drafters to thinking of tri-lands as duals with possibilities to end up in one of two colors to go with their primary color OR as a dual with a chance at a splash OR as part of a super-greedy manabase. So far, very few drafters think of them this way and generally complain about lack of fixing.

I wonder if the color decisions by WotC to go cold instead of a mix of the three important colors really does heavily ... tint the perception of drafters. (Ugh, puns.) Your mockup feels a bit more jarring to gaze upon (maybe a non-development portion of WotC like art direction would shoot this down), but my brain seems to parse its possibilities better. Would be interesting to see a study of Magic players (with background info on their gameplay and their education/employment/other hobbies) where each subject is shown a land and asked what type of decks they would include it in.

But lesson learned: I really shouldn't drink a few beers and then make a forum post. :confused: (I even used a verb instead of a conjunction in the OP...)
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Aaaaaah... So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you want your players to intuitively parse this:



as this:



if they're drafting {U}{B}, with the upside that it also splashes for {W}? But the problem is that your players are disregarding the option of using a tri-land to fix only two of that land's colors? And you think that part of the problem is that at three colors the border turns gold, thereby disconnecting the intuitive connection between a land's border color and the colors a player is drafting?
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Maybe something like the vivid lands would accomplish what you want?

Vivid Tundra
Land
~ ETB Tapped unless you pay 2 life.
T: Add {U} or {W}
T: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool. ~ deals 2 damage to you.

Adjust that second one as you want, I just don't like my lands having charge counters because my drafters will usually bundle them up with their other lands, so the counters get scattered or moved around
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Is this something that could be fixed just by changing frames and art? Give arcane sanctum a presentation that better suggests UB?
 
James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
I still don't get the problem. Is it what Submarine said? It seems really strange that a player in two colors doesn't understand that an on-color triland works for them.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Grillo_Parlante said:
Is this something that could be fixed just by changing frames and art? Give arcane sanctum a presentation that better suggests UB?
Click to expand...

Kinda? You miss out on people playing white black and splashing blue though, and I'm not sure there's a way for that to work well unless you literally have like "Choose 3 colors" on the land somewhere o_O

Maybe you just need to draft more with these people! :p


James Stevenson said:
I still don't get the problem. Is it what Submarine said? It seems really strange that a player in two colors doesn't understand that an on-color triland works for them.
Click to expand...
Eh, yes and no. We draft A LOT as cube owners, and we also think about drafting a lot. Someone who drafts occasionally is probably trying to keep their curve and number of playables in their head, stuff like this may get lost in the shuffle from time to time
 
Chriskool

Chriskool

Chris Taylor said:
Eh, yes and no. We draft A LOT as cube owners, and we also think about drafting a lot. Someone who drafts occasionally is probably trying to keep their curve and number of playables in their head, stuff like this may get lost in the shuffle from time to time
Click to expand...

I think this is the case! Also, a lot of "my" players seem to think of tri-lands as inferior color-fixing lands UNLESS they are playing all 3 colors. I would really love to know how many times a tri-land is passed when a player would've taken a ETBT dual in their color pair.

I am trying to draft more with everyone. :) But as most of y'all know, it's hard to get 5+ (or even 3+ sometimes) other people together!
 
T

Tanner K.

It might sound silly, but sometimes the best way to show your drafters something they're missing is just to do it. I play with a few good players and a lot of newbies. Most of them didn't understand the value of fetchlands and duals until I steamrolled a draft with 5-color no-basic-lands control. While we were talking about the games, I just made a point of emphasizing how I had multiple fetchlands that could get me all five colors of mana. Fetchlands are much, much higher picks now.

Put a couple tri-lands in your deck and just make a point of saying sometime during your match, "Yeah, I'm running this Arcane Sanctum in my UB control deck. It's not really a great dual land, but it gets the job done. Plus it gave me the option of splashing white, if I'd had some good cards for it." People will pick up on it fast enough.

Now if I could just fix the guy in my group who won't play less than 50 cards in his cube deck...
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Yeah, I'm still trying to get my newer players to even draft shocklands and fetches at all, period, so I can identify with the problem. It's not easy to train beginners into seeing that they need more than just a giant pile of sweet spells, and that they need to supplement that with fixing in order to cast said spells. I can see how trilands might trip up some folks who are still trying to understand that drafting lands is important.

For your specific problem, though, I think this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease. None of these solutions seem anywhere near as elegant as the wording on a Seaside Citadel. I think the fix is less in changing up the wording of the actual cards, and more in training your players to understand some of the deckbuilding and drafting fundamentals. Because if someone doesn't understand that Mystic Monastery fixes their Boros deck just fine, you may be needing to teach them some basic building blocks of Magic theory that goes beyond sharpie-over over your trilands.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Chris: MTGO Academy said:
I think this is the case! Also, a lot of "my" players seem to think of tri-lands as inferior color-fixing lands UNLESS they are playing all 3 colors. I would really love to know how many times a tri-land is passed when a player would've taken a ETBT dual in their color pair.

I am trying to draft more with everyone. :) But as most of y'all know, it's hard to get 5+ (or even 3+ sometimes) other people together!
Click to expand...

I will say I seriously doubt they think Arcane Sanctum is WORSE than dimir guildgate. It's just not filed in their brain under "Fixing for me" the same way dimir guildgate is.

How are they with the old Arid Mesa in GW concept? I somtimes have difficulty teaching my drafters about that one for much the same reasons I'm sure
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top