General Re-examining The Basic Land Box

Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
At one point my cube had triple fetch, shock and dual, and it felt akward going and getting basics so often. One of the things I love about fetches is that they're less locked into their color pair, since arid mesa is fine in UW for eg
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
How did you find it effected the number of 2 color decks, and did you like the 3 color decks?

How many fetchs would you say on average a deck ran, and would you feel better with a 3/2 ratio?
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, I don't know, I would almost rather give the shocks away for free and make them draft the fetches.

I think there's some potential here, but I also don't think that we've found an idea that "feels" right yet.
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
Jason Waddell said:
Yeah, I don't know, I would almost rather give the shocks away for free and make them draft the fetches.

I think there's some potential here, but I also don't think that we've found an idea that "feels" right yet.
Click to expand...


I thought about that too, but if I want to increase fetch density (and it sounds like I do, because as much as we rag on shuffling being shitty, fetches do a million good things), then I can't really give away the other good fixing for free and make you fight for the fetches, right? Besides which, I feel like the duals are the "harder" part of the fixing. If I can get them for free, I'm WAY more likely to throw in one because it magically give me 7 sources of my fourth color.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Chris Taylor said:
I didn't have it for long. Usually each draft deck had 3-4 fetches, 0-1 fetchables :(

usually 2 color, the odd 3rd color card on the splash.
Click to expand...

Hmmm thats at 450 though, no?

At 360 a 3:2 ratio of fetch:shock I think would give you something like 4 fetchs:1-2 shocks per deck, which seems to be about where you would want to be.

Utility lands than either come from the uld, if you do those, or you expand the land section out to 60.
 
Suicufnoc

Suicufnoc

Skrap said:
I thought about that too, but if I want to increase fetch density (and it sounds like I do, because as much as we rag on shuffling being shitty, fetches do a million good things), then I can't really give away the other good fixing for free and make you fight for the fetches, right? Besides which, I feel like the duals are the "harder" part of the fixing. If I can get them for free, I'm WAY more likely to throw in one because it magically give me 7 sources of my fourth color.
Click to expand...

Agreed, free fetchables would mean you could draft 3-4 fetches and run 3-5 color much easier
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Grillo_Parlante said:
Hmmm thats at 450 though, no?

At 360 a 3:2 ratio of fetch:shock I think would give you something like 4 fetchs:1-2 shocks per deck, which seems to be about where you would want to be.

Utility lands than either come from the uld, if you do those, or you expand the land section out to 60.
Click to expand...
My cube was 540 at the time, so this was 3:2, but I also had....filters I think?
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
Played some alpha test games with my buddy last night. Format was 1v1 "Team sealed" so 9 cube packs. We ended up only playing one deck against each other in a best of five. Lands were a set of abu duals and a set of shocks randomized throughout the 360. "Basic land box" lands were up to 4x of each fetch, 4x wasteland available during deckbuilding. Sideboarding rules were that only basics can be swapped in after decks are built.

I built an aggressive WBr tokens/sac deck. My opponent built BG pod. My (super loose) 16 land manabase was: scrubland, godless shrine, 2x marsh flats, 2x arid mesa, 2x bloodstained mire, 3x wasteland, mountain, 2x plains, 2x swamp which is probably misbuilt, but hey, we were drinking. His manabase was 1x bayou, 4 swamp, 4 forest, 4 verdant catacombs, 2 Gx fetches, 2 Bx fetches. I asked him afterwards why he didn't push his land further and he said his GB was solid as-is and he didn't really feel the need to splash anything weird and risk losing to wasteland.

Boring game reports behind the
Game 1 he kept a one-lander with a top and didn't get there. I punished his loose keep with double steppe lynx triple fetch, which felt a little filthy.

Game 2 I almost got to live the dream of animating Athreos, God of Passage off of an Obzedat, Ghost Council but drew my mountain and a wasteland for lands four and five and was unable to cast it. I killed him anyway with a pretty sweet play; I attacked in with something along the lines of a blade splicer token, dark confidant, 5/5 carrion feeder. He tried to trade his dark confidant for mine, I sacced my confidant to carrion feeder hoping that his confidant would kill him with 2+ dmg on the upkeep trigger, and it obliged.

Game 3 he stabilized at low life by doing pod things, then he invented a new ultimate for flip lili where she reanimates avenger of zendikar followed by him playing a fetchland. Game 4 he mulled to five, I drank more whisky and did aggressive BW token stuff.
Our overall impression was that we need to keep an eye on landfall guys, but that generally speaking the games felt good and more nuanced as a result of the land. Obviously sealed deck isn't draft, so I can't draw any strong conclusions yet, but we're cautiously optimistic that this is a beneficial change for our environment. I'd like to see how more players react to the changes; in particular I'd like to expose some of my wilder players to it to see if they can break the format in some unexpected or gross way.
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
I've done a bunch more small-scale testing on this idea. Sadly I've yet to fire it off in a large draft, but I thought I'd share my updated findings. A handful of observations, some of which may be positive or negative depending on your outlook and your playgroup:
  1. It feels fun
  2. Landfall guys are definitely a lot better
  3. Decision density is dramatically increased
  4. Aggro got way way better (because people deal like 7 damage to themselves just trying to get their manabase set up)
  5. I have the distinct impression that I can screw up just by playing the wrong land turn 1 (or fetching at the wrong time, etc) which feels very much like the games of Legacy I've seen played
  6. It's both very possible and very enjoyable to play an incredibly consistent two color deck loaded up with 3-4 wastelands
  7. It's both very possible and very enjoyable to cast Cruel Ultimatum on turn 7 (assuming your opponent isn't pressuring your manabase)
  8. There is meaningful (and fun!) tension between the above two points, and while I think my metagame will eventually settle, it's really exciting in the mean time to see how people behave when presented with really powerful versions of the consistency vs greed options
  9. I suspect everyone I play with except for my very best drafter currently dramatically undervalues wasteland
  10. Adding these lands made a few things in my ULD look really stupid (I'm looking at you, Terramorphic Expanse)
  11. Freeing up 20 fetchland slots + 4 wasteland slots felt amazing when I got to play around adding things I never had room for (like Cruel and some ULD lands that were too strong for ULD)
  12. I added a third set of shocks but it might be too much
  13. Making the proxies suuuuuuuuuuucked.
  14. You definitely need colored dots on inner sleeves if you want to do this, especially if you're running powerful utility stuff like Gavony Township or whatever in your main cube. My current plan is Blue dots for Utility lands, Yellow for basics, Green for fetchs. It's nice and easy to be like "pull out anything with a colored dot" after a draft. Eliminates mistakes with newer players.
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
Jason expressed some curiosity a while back about how much it'd actually cost to do this with real cards, so I took some numbers from my last draft.

We had a 8 players and before the draft I intentionally hid all but 2 playsets of each fetch to see if that would be enough to support the draft. I told the players to let me know if I ran out of any lands. We ended up using 11 Marsh Flats. I didn't get totals for the other fetchlands, but 8 was sufficient for each of the other 9 types.

This leads me to conclude that to be completely safe, you'd need 3 playsets of each. But I suspect that in practice you could probably get away with 8-10 copies per fetch if you just had the rule with your players that cards would be divided evenly in the event of a run on any particular land.

Overall, I'm actually pretty pleased with this result. 80 fetches is definitely still a million fetches, but it's a lot more palatable of an answer than what I expected.
 
safra

safra

Aoret said:
Jason expressed some curiosity a while back about how much it'd actually cost to do this with real cards, so I took some numbers from my last draft.

We had a 8 players and before the draft I intentionally hid all but 2 playsets of each fetch to see if that would be enough to support the draft. I told the players to let me know if I ran out of any lands. We ended up using 11 Marsh Flats. I didn't get totals for the other fetchlands, but 8 was sufficient for each of the other 9 types.

This leads me to conclude that to be completely safe, you'd need 3 playsets of each. But I suspect that in practice you could probably get away with 8-10 copies per fetch if you just had the rule with your players that cards would be divided evenly in the event of a run on any particular land.

Overall, I'm actually pretty pleased with this result. 80 fetches is definitely still a million fetches, but it's a lot more palatable of an answer than what I expected.
Click to expand...

Is everyone playing all their Wastelands? how many could you 'get away' with having available?
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
Wasteland numbers vary wildly. It seems like the consensus is that somewhere between 1 and 3 is correct. Last draft my girlfriend ran a BW deck with 4 wastelands and then stumbled on mana trying to cast CC spells and such. I actually ran 0 yesterday because I was two colors with a very important splash and I have a healthy fear of not being able to cast my spells. I also really really wanted to run our namesake because I had approx. 74 wizards in my deck.

I can take some numbers next time, but I suspect the number of wastelands necessary is probably not palatable if you care about using real wastelands. In practice, I don't see this as problematic. Paper players can proxy and MTGO players can use our gentleman's agreement strip mine rule.
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
Everything is capped at 4-of. But yes, 4 wastelands is available. In practice it isn't actually that great (as mentioned above) because you end up having trouble casting your own stuff. You're right though, it's powerful. I do have my eye on it and I'm willing to cap at 3 if it gets outta hand.
 
Face

Face

While not exactly the same as running the fetches, what do you guys think about a full box of Evolving Wilds? I would think that only fetching tapped basics puts an emphasis on tempo, dissuading people from running too many in the main. But like fetches, it would boost land-related archetypes and enable brainstorm shenanigans. Do you think experimenting with this has any worth?

Disclaimer: I'm a low-power environment fanboy.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Face said:
While not exactly the same as running the fetches, what do you guys think about a full box of Evolving Wilds? I would think that only fetching tapped basics puts an emphasis on tempo, dissuading people from running too many in the main. But like fetches, it would boost land-related archetypes and enable brainstorm shenanigans. Do you think experimenting with this has any worth?

Disclaimer: I'm a low-power environment fanboy.
Click to expand...

It's probably a much more reasonable suggestion in low power. However, Evolving Wilds favors slower archetypes far more than aggressive ones. It's amazing in Limited, where you're no curving out every turn, and I would think that this solution would cause balance shifts that would have to be accommodated for elsewhere.
 
Aoret

Aoret

Developer
I think it has legs in low power, and agree with Jason's point that you probably have to find a way to make aggro better if you do this.

Re: criticism of wasteland density, honestly people seem to have a hard time squeezing them in. I've only seen one person run four and she stumbled on mana. I think this density is much, much more broken in legacy than it is in cube. But again, it is something I've mentally flagged as dangerous and am watching it closely!

Another thing about my most recent 8 man that I think I neglected to mention is that I asked my most skilled player to try to break my format (specifically the fetches and wastelands aspect). The best he could do were a couple of loose splashes for basics and running things that cared about fetchlands (Knight of the Reliquary Titania, Protector of Argoth etc). He did well, but honestly didn't do anything I'd consider super degenerate despite pushing format abuse as far as he possibly could.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Aoret said:
I think it has legs in low power, and agree with Jason's point that you probably have to find a way to make aggro better if you do this.

Re: criticism of wasteland density, honestly people seem to have a hard time squeezing them in. I've only seen one person run four and she stumbled on mana. I think this density is much, much more broken in legacy than it is in cube. But again, it is something I've mentally flagged as dangerous and am watching it closely!

Another thing about my most recent 8 man that I think I neglected to mention is that I asked my most skilled player to try to break my format (specifically the fetches and wastelands aspect). The best he could do were a couple of loose splashes for basics and running things that cared about fetchlands (Knight of the Reliquary Titania, Protector of Argoth etc). He did well, but honestly didn't do anything I'd consider super degenerate despite pushing format abuse as far as he possibly could.
Click to expand...

Have they tried mono-red aggro with 4 Wastelands?
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
The more I think about this idea, the more I like it. The Fetchland / Wasteland gets far more interesting when you have on color fetches (Scalding Tarn in your {U}{R} deck), but it's pretty impractical from a "I need 10 playsets and each playset costs $200" point of view.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top